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ABSTRACT
The short- lived and enigmatic fourteenth century Sultanate of Ma’bar in South India has had a controversial history. It was vilified in most contemporary and later Arabic and Persian sources as collection of cruel and depraved monarchs whose reigns were short, intolerant and brutish. Modern South Indian historians have built on these images and cast the sultanate as an unfortunate interregnum—a period of darkness and blight–for South Indian history that was only to be fully dispelled by the Vijayanagar Kampanna’s conquest of the region and his establishment of a governorship in Madurai toward the end of the fourteenth century. Yet these same Sultans have long been the center of local cultic traditions, and, like other Muslim elites of the region, appear regularly and prominently in the earliest written narratives of Malay and Sumatran history. Do these finds help us to re-asses the history and significance of the Madurai Sultans?
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Daud Ali is Associate Professor in the Department of South Asian Studies, and Department of History, at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author of Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India (Cambridge 2004), co-author (with Ronald Inden and Jonathan Walters) of Querying the Medieval: Texts and the History of Practice in South Asia (Oxford 2000), and edtior of several other volumes. He taught history for many years at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Dr Ali’s research has focused on mentalities and everyday practices in South and Southeast Asia before 1500. He has published essays on monastic discipline, mercantile networks, historical writing and inscriptions, but most extensively on the culture of aristocratic society in early medieval India.
REGISTRATION
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