The Kevserî Mecmûası is an eighteenth-century Turkish manuscript, which includes, in addition to a variety of music-related contents, a fairly large collection of notations. Given the scarcity of notational sources, it offers invaluable material for understanding the performance practice and compositional style of Ottoman music before the nineteenth century. Having studied a hitherto unknown microfilm copy of this manuscript, the original of which has remained up to now in a private library and closed to our access, the author aims in this article to introduce this source and discuss its potential contribution to the knowledge of Ottoman music. The article is organised roughly in two parts. First, it will present briefly the contents of the manuscript, integrating new evidence and clues about its date, author and purpose into existing knowledge. Second, it will focus on the collection of notations in the manuscript, and by comparing it with the earlier collections will argue that, contrary to the prevailing views expressed in the literature, no large-scale transformation in the style of Ottoman music took place in the early eighteenth century.

We are delighted to publish this collection of articles on the world of the Paramāra dynasty, edited by Dr Michael Willis FRAS of the British Museum. Between 2006–10 Dr Willis led an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project in collaboration with the Department of History at SOAS and the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff, entitled ‘The Indian Temple: Production, Place and Patronage’. This project examined how Indian temples were designed, built and patronised and explored the social and economic role played by temples in medieval India. The project formed the backdrop for the articles which are brought together in this special issue.

Philosophy, as an intellectual discipline emerging from Hellenism, had an ambiguous and disputed role in the theology and apologetics of Islam and continues to be contentious. In this article, I examine the arguments over the legitimacy of philosophy between the philosophical school of Mullā Ṣadrā (d. c. 1635), dominant in the present Shiʿi seminary in Iran, and its detractors in the maktab-i tafkīk who insist that knowledge of reality and the faith only derives from the teachings of the Shiʿi Imams and cannot be contaminated with Aristotelianism. After an introduction to this fideist school of separating religious and ‘foreign’ sciences, three questions are analysed. What is philosophy? How do we know God? How can we demonstrate the Qurʾanic doctrine of the resurrection of bodies? What emerges is a more radical challenge to uṣūlī rationalism than that posed previously from the Akhbāriyya and their insistence upon a ḥadīth-based jurisprudence.

Kalīlah wa Dimnah, a compendium of individual tales and short stories, is a very well-known Middle Eastern literary work. Although it can not match the popularity of the ‘One Thousand and One Nights’, it is nevertheless sufficiently well known to have attracted scholarly interest for decades. As a result, a considerable volume of scholarly writing has been produced regarding its origin and importance.

This article focuses on the origin of one story in the work, the trial of Dimnah. Since the Indian original is missing, accepted wisdom attributes the writing of this story to its first Arabic translator, Ibn al-Muqaffac. Although I do not challenge this view, I argue that there could be an Urtext in Middle Persian which was later rewritten by the famous translator. In what follows, this article provides evidence for this hypothesis from what at first glance might be considered a surprising perspective – Sasanian legal history.

Since the time of Edward Said and Talal Asad, if not before, we have known that the Western view of ‘the Orient’ – from the Near East to Japan – is an intellectual and cultural construct. In addition, the ‘Christian occident’ has been used, and is still used, as a politically charged term. Analogous to ‘Orientalism’, ‘Occidentalism’ has become the focus of considerable debate. The geopolitical consequences of this confrontation seem obvious and culminate in Samuel Huntington's thesis of a ‘Clash of Civilisations’ based on essentialised religious differences. But the concepts of ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ are not, and have never been, homogenous. Nor have they been formed, nor do they continue to evolve, without mutual interaction. The global interdependence we witness today – often labelled ‘globalisation’ – is nothing new and in actual fact has its origin in the formative phases of the major cultural and religious traditions.

South-central Alborz is a language transition zone bounded by Persian, Māzandarāni, Central Caspian and Tatic language groups. In the lofty valleys of this area, separated from Tehran by a mountain chain, rest villages with vanishing dialects that show various degrees of affinity with the neighbouring languages. The two dialects studied here, namely Velātruyi and Gachsari, belong to two different language groups, despite their geographical proximity on the upper Karaj valley. This study is founded on the texts collected by the late Ann Lambton in 1936, and conducts an areal, historical, and synchronic study of these dialects and attempts to provide an accurate translation of the texts, which are reproduced here together with glossaries.

This article identifies three Khotanese fragments in the British Library – IOL Khot 25/4, IOL Khot 147/5 (H. 147 NS 106) and Khot missing frags. 3 – as Agrapradīpadhāraṇī, Mahāvaipulya-buddha-Avataṃsaka-sūtra-acintya-visaya-pradesa and Hastikakṣyā, since their parallels have been found in the Chinese canon. The first identification adds one more dhāraṇī text to the current Khotanese Buddhist corpus. The second identification provides a better understanding of the Buddhist connection between Khotan and Central China. The Chinese version was translated by a Khotanese monk named Devendraprajña. The second identification indicates that the text Hastikakṣyā has a Khotanese translation, in addition to a Sanskrit version and two Chinese translations. In sum, this article sheds new light on Buddhist literature in Khotanese and its connection with Buddhist literature in Chinese.

One may conclude from the lull in publications on the Gāthic Ahuna Vairiia that a satisfactory understanding of the stanza is at hand. This is, however, not the case. The last substantial treatment of the stanza is from Humbach (1991 II) in his 1991 two-volume edition of the Old Avestan texts. Somewhat less extensive is the discussion we find in Kellens’ and Pirart's monumental three-volume edition and study of the Old Avestan texts (1991). In 1975, Insler published a detailed article on the Ahuna Vairiia. The late 1950s saw the appearance of four studies of the stanza by distinguished Avesta scholars: Benveniste, Humbach, Duchesne-Guillemin and Hinz. As for the number of translations there are, it virtually equals the number of scholars in the field. The source of the difficulties is the syntax of the stanza. The disagreements are due for the most part to the scholar's analysis of syntactic units. Thus the variety of translations may be reduced to a few basic types.

This collection of essays focuses on the history, literary culture and legacy of the Paramāra dynasty. Ruling from central India, with collateral branches of the family at Candrāvatī, Vāgaḍa, Bhinmāl and Jālor, the Paramāras constituted an important force in the Indian medieval world. They flourished between the tenth and twelfth centuries and throughout their history entertained high political ambitions. In particular Vākpati Muñja (circa 973–95) and Bhoja (circa 1000–55) undertook military campaigns that sought to establish the Paramāras as a paramount power in India. Although frustrated in these aims, they are remembered nonetheless as a great dynasty, representative if not paradigmatic of the vibrant civilisation of the late medieval age.

Colonial scholars and administrators in the latter half of the nineteenth century were the first to subject South Asia to modern historicist scrutiny. Using coins, inscriptions, and chronicles, they determined the dates and identities of numerous kings and dynasties within an apparently scrupulous empiricist framework. From the 1930s, with the widespread rise of nationalist sentiment, South Asian scholars began to write about their own past. The particular configurations of colonial and early nationalist historiography of South Asia have proved immensely consequential for subsequent generations of historians. Not only did this historiography value certain types of evidence, particularly Indic language epigraphy, Persian chronicles, and archaeology (while at the same time devaluing others like literature and religious texts), it set some of the enduring thematic and topical parameters which have shaped the course of the field. The initial focus was on the careers and personalities of rulers or the genius of races as the key causative forces in history, but eventually dynastic history became the dominant mode of writing about the past.

This article provides new perspectives in interpreting the sartorial codes present in Orientalist portraits of European subjects. Art historians have traditionally implicated these works in the European imperialist project of appropriating, manipulating, and gaining mastery over the Orient. More recently, as part of a wider effort to challenge conventional portrayals of colonial encounters in purely confrontational, monolithic terms, portraits of Europeans in exotic dress have been seen as visual proof that certain Europeans may have ‘crossed-over’ or ‘gone-native’. This article advances a third perspective. Analysing several portraits of Europeans with Indian connections during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it demonstrates the importance of analysing portraiture as an act of public performance. It shows that, in many cases, the performance of both artist and sitter alike were not intended for the colonial population, but for the spectators of colonialism situated ‘back home’ in Europe. Applying this new analytical approach to such an important and extensive genre of sources has far reaching implications both within the field of art history as well as within the broader domains of colonial history and contemporary East–West cultural studies. The interpretation of Western portrayals of the Orient – both visual and literary, both historical and contemporary – as active participants in an imperialist ideology must not eclipse the other, potentially less-charged, varied, and complex motivations of their participants.

The recent unearthing of this thirteenth century collection of notes pertaining to the political history of the early Ilkhanate has thrown some light on events and attitudes of that time. Though the manuscript was actually penned by Quṭb al-Dīn Shīrāzī of the Rasadkhana in Maragha, it is not certain that he was the author of the work. Rather than comprising one continuous narrative of events, the manuscript is a collection of notes and observations, occasionally detailed but other times very sketchy. However stamped with the seal of the Raba’ al-Rashidi there is evidence that this text was used selectively as a source for Rashīd al-Din's Jama’-ye Tavarikh. What is particularly interesting is that some of the events that are quoted in Rashid al-Dīn's chronicles are only partially reported and it is obvious that for whatever reasons parts of “Shīrāzī's” accounts are omitted in the re-telling.

This article first briefly examines the textual structure of the Sakka Saṃyutta of the Pāli Saṃyutta-nikāya in conjunction with two other versions preserved in Chinese translation in Taishō vol. 2, nos 99 and 100. Then it compares the main teachings contained in the three versions. These three versions of this collection on the subject of Śakra, ruler of the gods, represent three different early Buddhist schools within the Sthavira branch. This comparative study of these three different versions focuses on some shared images of Śakra and on disagreements of some teachings presented in the three versions. It reveals similarities and significant differences in structure and doctrinal content, thus advancing the historical/critical study of early Buddhist doctrine in this area.

This article considers British agitation against East India Company rule in India via an examination of the Aborigines Protection Society and the British India Society. Founded by humanitarians and moral reformers in the 1830s, these organisations placed India within a wide transnational context, which stretched from Britain's settler and plantation colonies to Liberia and the United States. However, in the wake of slave emancipation, British campaigners struggled to reconcile their universal understanding of humanity with their equally strong confidence in the benefits of ‘British civilisation’. Their nebulous and changeable programmes for reform failed to convince Britain's politicians and public that the challenges of free trade could be met by the exclusive use of free labour, or that all imperial subjects possessed equal rights. A fuller appreciation of these campaigns reveals the contradictions and occlusions inherent in mid-nineteenth century humanitarianism, and underscores the importance of a more geographically integrated approach to the history of opposition to Britain's empire.

The opening essay in this special issue by Daud Ali surveys the historiography of the medieval and touches on some of the key problems of interpretation and periodisation in Indian history. However, Ali's paper does not address the Paramāras of central India and their part in building a strong kingdom in the heart of the country for several centuries. Because an introduction to the dynasty's history is essential for situating the articles that follow, this paper will survey the leading role played by the Paramāras in the history of India over the four hundred years of their political existence. This paper also provides an opportunity to contextualise the three Royal Asiatic Society copper-plates of the Paramāra dynasty now kept in the British Museum; they are illustrated in the pages that follow (Figs 1–3).

In the course of a field-survey of Paramāra sites in 2008–09, I was exploring locations with historic inscriptions, temples, memorial stones and medieval water systems. Of particular interest were places with antique statuary of Hanumān because he was a protector of the fields and thus played a role in agricultural production. Udaypur, a key Paramāra site with the well-known Śiva temple built by Udayāditya, naturally formed part of the study. When enquiries about Hanumān were made at Udaypur, local residents urged us to visit Muratpur, a village about 5 kilometres directly south. We set out in that direction, making a series of discoveries along the way. The various memorial pillars, ruins and other remains cannot be recorded here in detail. Perhaps the most startling discovery (more correctly a re-discovery) was a colossal figure of dancing Śiva, more that 2 metres high. The figure lies on its back and, to judge from the chisel marks on it, was never finished (Fig. 1). This joins the catalogue of monumental but unfinished work by the Paramāras. The temple of Bhojpur is the most famous example, but in this special issue attention has been drawn by O. P. Mishra to the fact that the Bijamaṇḍal at Vidiśā was also left unfinished by Naravarman.

The autumnal Durgā Pūjā, the ten-lunar-day worship of the goddess Durgā, also known as Caṇḍī or Caṇḍīkā, is one of the most important festivals in East India and Nepal. Throughout villages and cities in Bengal, Orissa, Assam and the Kathmandu Valley the occasion is marked by pomp and circumstance. In Bengal especially, this worship is a reflection of a culture that has given goddesses a privileged position over male deities from at least the time of the Pālas.2 However, despite the availability of material from the eighteenth century to the present day, the worship of the goddess prior to the colonial presence still remains to a great extent terra incognita. Sanskrit paddhatis (ritual manuals) from the medieval era are among the few records available from Bengal that shed light on the pedagogical and performative context of the rite. The purpose of this article is to provide a synchronic sketch of the medieval ceremony based on the influential and widely cited medieval manual, the Durgāpūjātattva (“The truth concerning the rite of Durgā”, henceforth DPT) of Raghunandana Bhaṭṭācārya (1520–1575 ce)3 supported by parallel accounts of the rite contained in related literature. The sketch will be used as a broad framework to illustrate the manner in which the ceremony was performed or could have been performed in Bengal during the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries ce.

This article establishes that the first museum in China was not the Zhendan Museum in Shanghai, founded by the French Jesuit Pierre Marie Heude (1836–1902) in 1868, but the “British Museum in China”, founded in 1829 by three supercargoes of the English East India Company, in Macao, a Portuguese enclave in the Pearl River Delta since c.1577. My research, based on Portuguese, British and American sources, allows us to better understand the context in which the founders of the museum interacted and lived in Macao, how their research and field-work was important for academic British institutions such as the British Museum in London and how the British Museum of Macao was founded and became the first (western-styled) museum in China.

The dialogism of the Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), that is, the study of cultural interaction and the acknowledgment of the value or at least of the objective existence of other cultures, corresponds to one of the most significant aspects of Renaissance Humanism.1 In his turn, the Franco-Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorov (born 1939) has stressed the Humanists’ quest for “cultural relativism”, as exemplified by Amerigo Vespucci, who sought to evaluate the arrival of Europeans from the standpoint of American Indians, in total contrast to the monological approach of Christopher Columbus.2 The emphasis was on a two-way process. Similar attitudes to those of Vespucci can be found in Thomas More's Utopia, in Michel de Montaigne's celebrated essay on the cannibals he encountered in Rouen, and in the Fides, religio moresque aethiopum of Damião de Góis (to mention but three prominent cases). Finally, it was the Palestinian-American literary theorist and cultural critic Edward Said (1935–2003) who throughout Orientalism (New York, 1978) propounded the widely accepted (though often hotly debated) theory that westerners’ analyses of eastern cultures were (and are) predominantly condescending, racist and imperialistic.

The Samarāṅganasūtradhāra is an encyclopedic work, attributed by tradition to King Bhoja of the Paramāra dynasty. It collects a vast number of subjects under the general heading of vāstu, a term that refers to a dwelling or dwelling place and, by inclusion, comes to treat the many activities connected with dwellings and construction sites. Although probably incomplete in the available manuscripts, the size of the Samarāṅganasūtradhāra remains impressive: including the ‘interpolated section’ it runs for almost 7,500 Sanskrit verses. The various portions resemble, in turn, a Purāṇa, a treatise on architecture, a disquisition into dramaturgic detail and much more. Bhoja's work can be classified as belonging to the ‘northern’ Vāstu tradition; the text presents itself as such, by tracing its own origin to the divine architect Viśvakarman rather than Maya, as a southern text would do. Nevertheless, the Samarāṅganasūtradhāra contains an extensive treatment of southern temple types.