This paper builds on a growing Indian Ocean historiography to explore political entanglements between Mecca and Medina with the Mughal imperial dispensation and its scholarly Muslim communities. As Michael Pearson noted in his Pilgrimage to Mecca. The Indian Experience, 1500-1800, Mughal Emperors and other South Asian sultans sent courtiers, family members, scholars, and professionals on the hajj and ‘into exile’ to Mecca over the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. While recent scholarship on South Asia by Ronit Ricci (2019) has explored Lanka/Ceylon as a place of ‘banishment and belonging’ practices of exiling political protagonists remain largely unexplored in the context of the early modern western Indian Ocean. I will study the practice of exiling scholarly and professional elites from the Mughal court to Mecca and Medina and how this positioned scholarly communities in the holy cities vis-à-vis the Mughal court in political, religious and intellectual networks.

In particular, I want to start exploring ‘exile in Mecca’ as a political practice, how and to what end early modern South Asian rulers performed it, and what effects this had on Mecca and courtly politics in the subcontinent. Persian chronicles composed at those courts offer us one perspective on this practice. Arabic chronicles and collective biographies penned in the Hijaz and the subcontinent provide another view. Anecdotal evidence from biographical dictionaries of the period suggests that scholars, for example, often chose Mecca as a place of refuge when relationships with their patrons declined or turned sour. Sending courtiers on hajj to Mecca was probably also an offer that a Muslim servant could not easily refuse. However, it is not clear so far what meaning this practice had in the period, how it affected the scholarly community at the court, and what those exiles got up to in Mecca.

The Bahāristān-i Shāhī (completed in 1614) is a Persian provincial history of Kashmir whose description covers the period from the formation of the valley of Kashmir down to the reign of the fourth Mughal Emperor Jahāngīr (d. 1627). This Persian chronicle has been utilized as a primary source in the study of Kashmir’s history thanks to its rich information of the two Muslim dynasties of Kashmir, the Shāhmīrids (1339–1561) and the Chakids (1561–86). Nevertheless, many aspects of this historical text itself remain shrouded in mystery. First, neither the name of the author of the Bahāristān-i Shāhī nor the person to whom this chronicle was dedicated is known. The current speaker has clarified the following points through previous research: (1) The anonymous author of the Bahāristān-i Shāhī relies on the account in the Jāmi‘ al-Tawārīkh by Rashīd al-Dīn (d. 1318), the famous Persian world history of the Ilkhanid period, for his description of ancient Kashmiri history. (2) The accounts from the mid-12th century onwards rely on the Rājataraṅgiṇīs, the Sanskrit historical epics of Kashmir by Jonarāja (d. 1459), Śrīvara (d. after 1505), Prājyabhaṭṭa (d. after 1513), and Śuka (d. after 1538). The first Rājataraṅgiṇī by Kalhaṇa (d. 1155), the most famous work among the Rājataraṅgiṇīs, is not referenced. (3) The Rājataraṅgiṇīs were translated from Sanskrit into Persian in 1589 by order of the third Mughal emperor Akbar (d. 1605), and many Mughal Persianate chroniclers rely on this translation in writing Kashmir’s history. However, the author of the Bahāristān-i Shāhī does not refer to this Akbar court translation. He probably referred to a Sanskrit manuscript of the Rājataraṅgiṇīs directly. In this presentation, the speaker will introduce the remaining mysteries surrounding the formation process and sources of the Bahāristān-i Shāhī, i.e., the sources the anonymous author could have consulted when writing this Persian chronicle and his writing environment. Furthermore, the speaker will discuss how he obtained information about Kashmiri history from the Rājataraṅgiṇīs and reflected it in his own historical writing, along with his translation strategy.