South Asian Islamicate Futures and Pasts: Sources and Possibilities for Emic Literary Theory and Criticism

Building on the work of scholars such as Eaton and Ernst, recent scholarship in South Asian Islam has begun to call for the retrieval of insider and ‘emic’ perspectives from Indic texts and traditions (Nair 2020). This panel aims to carry this agenda further, reimagining non-modern objects of academic inquiry as sources of theory, hermeneutics, and philosophy. Attending to the creative and interpretive practices in historical texts allows us to study the Indic Islamicate on its own terms. Beginning in the thirteenth century Delhi Sultanate, Ilma's contribution takes Khusraw seriously as a theorist, reading him as a source of emic methods of evaluating Indo-Persian literary works. Raihan's work on the sixteenth century Konkanī figure al-Mahāʾimī invites us to reconfigure our concepts of reading and interpretive practice. Further South still, Mackenzie’s examination of vernacular hagiography, and emic historiography of religious syncretism, enriches our comprehension of cultural exchange. Turning toward the Mughal era, Aman's paper invites us to reconsider the motivations of Hindu-Muslim encounters, with an eye toward understanding the crucial role played by Indic and Islamicate philosophical systems in constructing a reading of the (religious) ‘other.’ Glistening like a pearl: Exploring Indo-Persian Literary Hermeneutics through Khusraw’s Dibāchāh.