The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shahjahan : Art, Architecture, Politics, Law and Literature/ Editors: Ebba Koch; Ali Anooshahr; Jyotindra Jain; Naman P. Ahuja

• The first multi-disciplinary analysis of Shah Jahan and his predecessor Jahangir, this collection of essays focuses on one of the least studied periods of Mughal history, the reign of Shah Jahan • Through subaltern court writing, art, architecture, accounts of foreign traders and poetry, the authors reconstruct the court of the Mughal emperor, whose influence extended even to 19th-century Afghanistan The reign of Shah Jahan (1628-58) is widely regarded as the golden age of the Mughal empire, yet it is one of the least studied periods of Mughal history. In this volume, 14 eminent scholars with varied historical interests - political, social, economic, legal, cultural, literary and art-historical - present for the first time a multi-disciplinary analysis of Shah Jahan and his predecessor Jahangir (r. 1605- 27). Corinne Lefèvre, Anna Kollatz, Ali Anooshahr, Munis Faruqui and Mehreen Chida-Razvi study the various ways in which the events of the transition between the two reigns found textual expression in Jahangir's and Shah Jahan's historiography, in subaltern courtly writing, and in art and architecture. Harit Joshi and Stephan Popp throw light on the emperor's ceremonial interaction with his subjects and Roman Siebertz enumerates the bureaucratic hurdles which foreign visitors had to face when seeking trade concessions from the court. Sunil Sharma analyzes the new developments in Persian poetry under Shah Jahan's patronage and Chander Shekhar identifies the Mughal variant of the literary genre of prefaces. Ebba Koch derives from the changing ownership of palaces and gardens insights about the property rights of the Mughal nobility and imperial escheat practices. Susan Stronge discusses floral and figural tile revetments as a new form of architectural decoration and JP Losty sheds light on the changes in artistic patronage and taste that transformed Jahangiri painting into Shahjahani. RD McChesney shows how Shah Jahan's reign cast such a long shadow that it even reached the late 19th- and early 20th-century rulers of Afghanistan.

English