Texts, Tombs, and Community Formation:

Rethinking the Sultanate in Fifteenth-century Gujarat

A talk by Jyoti Gulati Balachandran , PhD
(Associate Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University)

In this talk Jyoti Gulati Balachandran revisits the rise and consolidation of the Gujarat Sultanate in the context of the long fifteenth century, a period marked by significant political reconfigurations and socio-cultural dynamism in South Asia. By examining the historical accounts of state and community formation in Gujarat as recorded in court chronicles and Sufi texts in the fifteenth century, Balachandran highlights Gujarat’s often overlooked connections with the historical and narrative processes that had shaped the experience of many urban Muslim communities in north India and the Deccan. These processes included the expansion of Sufi residences (and shrines) as well as the production of a variety of Persian Sufi texts. A state-centered approach that locates the history of the Muslim community solely in the chronicles produced at the court of the Gujarat Sultanate thus obscures how certain Sufis had been central to the making of a new political dispensation in fifteenth-century Gujarat.

About the Speaker

Jyoti Gulati Balachandran is Associate Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University and currently an American Institute of Indian Studies Senior Fellow in Ahmedabad. Her research focuses on social and cultural histories of Muslim communities in Gujarat and the western Indian Ocean in the medieval and early modern period (c. 1200-1800). She is the author of Narrative Pasts: The Making of a Muslim Community in Gujarat, c. 1400-1650, published by Oxford University Press in 2020. Narrative Pasts, a finalist for the 2022 British Association for South Asian Studies Book Prize, reconstructs the literary, social, and historical world of Sufi preceptors, disciples and descendants who shaped the textual articulations of the Muslim past and of the region of Gujarat from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. Her current research centers around Muslim scholarly networks between Gujarat and the Arabian Peninsula in the sixteenth century.

Open for all

Date: 23 October, 2024 (Wednesday)

Time: 6 pm to 7:15 pm (Tea will be served from 5:25 pm to 5:50 pm)

Venue: Lecture Hall, L D Museum

For ages: 18 and above

For registration, please contact:

Call: 079-26306883 | WhatsApp: +91-9408536883

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