This article looks at the interesting cases of deployment of some fine samples of Persian poetry in a highly ornate sixteenth-century court-chronicle, Akbarnama of Abu’l Fazl. Intellectual companion and minister of the formidable early modern Indian ruler of the Mughal dynasty, Jalal-ud-Din Muhammad Akbar, Abu’l Fazl frequently interspersed his prose text with verses from medieval Persian masters and also of his elder brother Abu’l Faiz Faizi. The poetical compositions elucidate and sum up what Abu’l Fazl articulated in his detailed and complex narrative. The article especially presents Persian couplets which refer to such important themes and issues as the need to speak out against political turmoil, justification of violence in suppressing revolts, value of loyalty and faithfulness towards the ruler, and celebration of magnificence and grandeur attached to the Mughal rule in India. The somewhat aggressive articulation of Mughal power under Akbar sometimes reduces it to something like a state-sponsored and powerful political propaganda. Yet the intellectual and political value of the mammoth project cannot be ignored. Samples of fine Persian poetry add to the literary excellence, charm and affect.
This essay takes up an eventful moment that occurred in 1740 in the port city of Pondich & eacute;ry, located on the southeast coast of India. In a battle between the Arcot kingdom and the Marathas, when the Nawab of Arcot was killed, the latter's wife fled to Pondich & eacute;ry seeking protection from the allied French governor, Beno & icirc;t Dumas. Studying an eye-witness account alongside other reports on, or references to, this incident and its context written contemporaneously and in later centuries, this essay shows how historians through the ages have distorted France's position in eighteenth-century India. By presenting Governor Dumas implicitly as the quintessential French honn & ecirc;te homme, a prominent European trope from the seventeenth century prolonged in French nationalistic discourse since that time, many accounts conflate French and British positions in India, overstate France's footing in pre-colonial India, and/or elide the strong, syncretic Indo-Persian culture that linked India to a non-European world. Such factors can exert what I want to call an 'archival effect' on scholarly use of materials documenting French presence in India, which, paradoxically, haunt versions of Indian nationalism today.
