Emma J Flatt’s first monograph The Courts of the Deccan Sultanates – Living Well in the Persian Cosmopolis gives the royal formations of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries the attention they deserve. Based on her doctorate at SOAS (2009) it offers an in-depth historical study of the court in the medieval and early modern Deccan. Flatt employs the notion of the court as a valuable lens to connect political culture, ethical codes, as well as practices and norms of bodily and intellectual refinement. Individuals take centre-stage at Flatt’s courts, but she carefully places them in their networks and zooms in on the historical moments in which they feature prominently. Looking beyond the orbit of the ruler, Flatt casts people who often simultaneously operated as merchants, scholars, royal advisors, and thus allows them to play their part as active historical protagonists. They join the sociabilities that made the courts of the Deccan a convivial and fiercely competitive place. Gulbarga, Bidar, Ahmadnagar, Bijapur and Golkonda thereby emerge as far more than centres of political power: they are spaces where shared intellectual, bodily and social practices performed courtly culture in concert. These courts were sites where the social fabric of the Persianate world was spun, cosmopolitan culture moulded and friendships made.

Flatt’s monograph offers a thoroughly researched, complementary perspective to recent scholarship on the political history of the early modern Deccan and to the field of court cultures more widely. She provides yet another elaboration of the notion of the “Persian Cosmopolis” to make sense of the human migrations, intellectual exchanges and cultural flows as they came together in the construct of the court and linked Persianate communities of western, central and south Asia. Previously, Roy Fischel’s Local states in an imperial world had set the scene for a political history that pays attention to the Deccan as a diverse linguistic space, ruled by competing communities of “Deccanis” and “Foreigners” (the latter often hailing from Iran), whose historically constructed identities superimposed another layer of cultural belonging.1 The politics of negotiating a varied reservoir of cultural identities necessarily transcended the court as space of interaction. In a similar vein, Keelan Overton’s recent edited volume on Iran and the Deccan emphasises the elite migration between these regions as a major aspect of the Deccan’s political trajectory.2 Flatt manages to amalgamate the intellectual, bodily and social aspects of transregional courtly service in a study of court culture. She develops a refreshing interpretation of what constituted the cosmopolitan courts in the Deccan and thereby elaborates on Albrecht Fuess’ and Jan-Peter Hartung’s collaborative work on the Court Cultures in the Muslim World.3 It could also offer a starting point for a comparison with a concurrent Mamluk court culture in Egypt and Syria, recently put forward by Christian Mauder.4

The book is organised into two parts, which contain three chapters each, dealing with (I) Courtly Society and (II) Courtly Skills, respectively. Flatt’s first chapter offers a nuanced reading of what she calls “courtly disposition” (p. 33) honed through “cosmopolitan” learning mainly in a translocal Persian canon, aimed at providing specific skills that could serve the protagonist on many courtly stages, and a holistic understanding of the interplay between “mind, body and soul” as an interdependent “medico-philosophical” unit (p. 31). The second chapter fills the “performative sociability” of the Deccani courts with “networks, patrons and friends” by looking at several highly instructive case studies. Firstly, there is Maḥmūd Gavan, courtier and vizier of the Bahmanis until the courtly intrigue, which led to his fall from grace and execution in 1481. He becomes the archetypal “peripatetic courtier” through whom Flatt manages to historicise the fifteenth century travel culture and especially, how the flows of travellers and knowledge between western Asia and the subcontinent shaped court culture in the Deccan. Secondly, she investigates the networks of Gavan’s secretary, Abd al-Karim b. Muhammad Nimidihi (c. 1439–1496), who also supported translation projects of Arabic books for the royal library. Patronage and friendship led to complex “webs of acquaintances” and power dynamics which populated the courtly majālis(sg. majlis, “assembly”, “sitting”, “social gathering”). Friendships were key in substantiating and expanding networks.

Most importantly, Flatt manages to integrate the objects and material culture that equipped those “performative arenas” (p. 111) into her study of textual sources. The third chapter in this section delivers one of her strongest arguments. Flatt argues for the merging of court culture with the world of long-distance trade, which produced the dual-process of “mercantilisation” and “courtisation”. Case studies of powerful horse traders, kingmakers, bankers and viziers highlight the nexus of court and marketplace. The commercialisation of state power also becomes manifest in the emergence of the courtly title malik al-tujjār (King of merchants) first held by the abovementioned vizier and scholar, Mahmud Gavan. According to Flatt, “trade became a means to succeed at court” – an argument that substantially elaborates on Subrahmanyam’s article “Iranians abroad” (1992)5 – a process, which left its lexicographical traces in the sources of the period. She successfully brings together the power of objects and their economic value with their performative potential, as material agents that shape courtly sociabilities. In sum, this captures Flatt’s big argument about the entanglement of politics, commerce, knowledge and bodily practices that we encounter in the court culture of the early modern Deccan, from the Bahmanis to the successor sultanates, and how this shaped forms of patronage, transregional connections, the transmission of knowledge and the trajectory of adventurous courtiers.

The second part fills the Deccani court culture with detailed studies of its crucial constituents. The first chapter (4) in the section on Courtly Skills dives deep into the world of scribal competence and what it meant to be a “true munshi”, the language choices that opened up new conversations between “Persian” and “Arabic” and how they shaped the professional world. Of particular importance is Flatt’s analysis of Mahmud Gavan’s Manāẓīr al-inshāʾ, a normative treatise on the art of letter writing (epistolography) that complemented his compendium Riyāḍ al-inshāʾ, a collection of letters sent out by Gavan to attract scholars, poets and administrators to the Bahmani court. On the basis of a close contextual reading Flatt proposes the emergence of an “Arabicised” Persian as one of Gavan’s political strategies to overcome factional strife between Persianate and local groups at the court. This “language choice” is the ultimate expression of a cosmopolitan court culture. Furthermore, writing was not only a scholarly profession, but also a pathway to physical fine-tuning. The following chapter disentangles the complex world of the “esoteric sciences” concerned with “magic, divination and astrology” (p. 212) and how they co-constituted court culture. The final chapter in this section (6) grapples with the early modern world of martial arts and integrates it squarely into the courtly ethical habitus.

Concluding remarks end the study, followed by an index. 16 figures make some of the discussed courtly objects and material culture tangible and four maps help the reader to navigate the early modern Deccan and the Persianate world.

Flatt manages to navigate a highly fragmented source-base, revisits previously studied sources and makes sense of normative texts, such as the Bijapuri Nujūm al-'Ulūm, in their historical context. Still, there are two aspects, which could have been developed further in this study. Firstly, it would have been crucial to explore how and to what extent the royal courts of the Deccan managed to shape the larger political dispensation of the sultanates. What was the political reach of these courts and how did they command social and cultural resources beyond its elite sociabilities? Secondly, while Flatt pays close attention to historical detail and pursues a thematic over a chronological study, her historical perspective does not sufficiently engage with questions of diachronic change. How (or to what extent) did the court culture of the Deccan sultanates change from the Bahmanis to their successor states? At the same time, manuscript collections in different research institutions in Hyderabad might offer additional sources to the study of scribal skills from a material, textual and historical perspective, by incorporating those protagonists – and their written artefacts – who perpetuated or reworked the ideals of the courtly scribes. Nevertheless, this is a fascinating study of early modern Deccani court culture, which will be of interest to students of South Asia and the early modern world.

Notes:
1 Roy S. Fischel, Local States in an Imperial World. Identity, Society and Politics in the Early Modern Deccan, Edinburgh 2020.
2 Keelan Overton (ed.), Iran and the Deccan. Persianate Art, Culture, and Talent in Circulation, 1400–1700, Bloomington 2020.
3 Albrecht Fuess / Jan-Peter Hartung (eds.), Court Cultures in the Muslim World: Seventh to Nineteenth Centuries, London / New York 2011.
4 Christian Mauder, In the Sultan’s Salon. Learning, Religion, and Rulership at the Mamluk Court of Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 1501–1516) (2 vols.), Leiden 2021.
5 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Iranians Abroad, Intra-Asian Elite Migration and Early Modern State Formation, in: The Journal of Asian Studies 51,2 (1992), pp. 340–63.