9. “If There Is a Paradise on Earth, It Is Here”: Urban Ethnography in Indo-Persian Poetic and Historical Texts

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. Acknowledgments ix
4. Introduction 1
5. Part I Communication, Knowledge, and Power
6. 1. The Languages of Science in Early Modern India 19
7. 2. Bad Language and Good Language: Lexical Awareness in the Cultural Politics of Peninsular India, ca. 1300–1800 49
8. 3. A New Imperial Idiom in the Sixteenth Century: Krishnadevaraya and His Political Theory of Vijayanagara 69
9. Part II. Literary Consciousness, Practices, and Institutions in North India
10. 4. The Anxiety of Innovation: The Practice of Literary Science in the Hindi Rīti Tradition 115
11. Writing Devotion: The Dynamics of Textual Transmission in the Kavitāvalī of Tulsīdās 140
12. 6. The Teaching of Braj, Gujarati, and Bardic Poetry at the Court of Kutch: The Bhuj Brajbhāṣā Pāṭhśālā (1749–1948) 171
13. Part III. Inside the World of Indo-Persian Thought
14. 7. The Making of a Munshī 185
15. 8. Pages from the Book of Religions: Encountering Difference in Mughal India 210
16. 9. “If There Is a Paradise on Earth, It Is Here”: Urban Ethnography in Indo-Persian Poetic and Historical Texts 240
17. 10. Early Persianate Modernity 257
18. Part IV. Early Modernities of Tibetan Knowledge
19. 11. New Scholarship in Tibet, 1650–1700 291
20. 12. Experience, Empiricism, and the Fortunes of Authority: Tibetan Medicine and Buddhism on the Eve of Modernity 311
21. 13. Just Where on Jambudvīpa Are We? New Geographical Knowledge and Old Cosmological Schemes in Eighteenth-century Tibet 336
22. Contributors 365
23. Index 369