South-central Alborz is a language transition zone bounded by Persian, Māzandarāni, Central Caspian and Tatic language groups. In the lofty valleys of this area, separated from Tehran by a mountain chain, rest villages with vanishing dialects that show various degrees of affinity with the neighbouring languages. The two dialects studied here, namely Velātruyi and Gachsari, belong to two different language groups, despite their geographical proximity on the upper Karaj valley. This study is founded on the texts collected by the late Ann Lambton in 1936, and conducts an areal, historical, and synchronic study of these dialects and attempts to provide an accurate translation of the texts, which are reproduced here together with glossaries.

This article identifies three Khotanese fragments in the British Library – IOL Khot 25/4, IOL Khot 147/5 (H. 147 NS 106) and Khot missing frags. 3 – as Agrapradīpadhāraṇī, Mahāvaipulya-buddha-Avataṃsaka-sūtra-acintya-visaya-pradesa and Hastikakṣyā, since their parallels have been found in the Chinese canon. The first identification adds one more dhāraṇī text to the current Khotanese Buddhist corpus. The second identification provides a better understanding of the Buddhist connection between Khotan and Central China. The Chinese version was translated by a Khotanese monk named Devendraprajña. The second identification indicates that the text Hastikakṣyā has a Khotanese translation, in addition to a Sanskrit version and two Chinese translations. In sum, this article sheds new light on Buddhist literature in Khotanese and its connection with Buddhist literature in Chinese.

This article provides new perspectives in interpreting the sartorial codes present in Orientalist portraits of European subjects. Art historians have traditionally implicated these works in the European imperialist project of appropriating, manipulating, and gaining mastery over the Orient. More recently, as part of a wider effort to challenge conventional portrayals of colonial encounters in purely confrontational, monolithic terms, portraits of Europeans in exotic dress have been seen as visual proof that certain Europeans may have ‘crossed-over’ or ‘gone-native’. This article advances a third perspective. Analysing several portraits of Europeans with Indian connections during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it demonstrates the importance of analysing portraiture as an act of public performance. It shows that, in many cases, the performance of both artist and sitter alike were not intended for the colonial population, but for the spectators of colonialism situated ‘back home’ in Europe. Applying this new analytical approach to such an important and extensive genre of sources has far reaching implications both within the field of art history as well as within the broader domains of colonial history and contemporary East–West cultural studies. The interpretation of Western portrayals of the Orient – both visual and literary, both historical and contemporary – as active participants in an imperialist ideology must not eclipse the other, potentially less-charged, varied, and complex motivations of their participants.

The autumnal Durgā Pūjā, the ten-lunar-day worship of the goddess Durgā, also known as Caṇḍī or Caṇḍīkā, is one of the most important festivals in East India and Nepal. Throughout villages and cities in Bengal, Orissa, Assam and the Kathmandu Valley the occasion is marked by pomp and circumstance. In Bengal especially, this worship is a reflection of a culture that has given goddesses a privileged position over male deities from at least the time of the Pālas.2 However, despite the availability of material from the eighteenth century to the present day, the worship of the goddess prior to the colonial presence still remains to a great extent terra incognita. Sanskrit paddhatis (ritual manuals) from the medieval era are among the few records available from Bengal that shed light on the pedagogical and performative context of the rite. The purpose of this article is to provide a synchronic sketch of the medieval ceremony based on the influential and widely cited medieval manual, the Durgāpūjātattva (“The truth concerning the rite of Durgā”, henceforth DPT) of Raghunandana Bhaṭṭācārya (1520–1575 ce)3 supported by parallel accounts of the rite contained in related literature. The sketch will be used as a broad framework to illustrate the manner in which the ceremony was performed or could have been performed in Bengal during the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries ce.

The dialogism of the Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), that is, the study of cultural interaction and the acknowledgment of the value or at least of the objective existence of other cultures, corresponds to one of the most significant aspects of Renaissance Humanism.1 In his turn, the Franco-Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorov (born 1939) has stressed the Humanists’ quest for “cultural relativism”, as exemplified by Amerigo Vespucci, who sought to evaluate the arrival of Europeans from the standpoint of American Indians, in total contrast to the monological approach of Christopher Columbus.2 The emphasis was on a two-way process. Similar attitudes to those of Vespucci can be found in Thomas More's Utopia, in Michel de Montaigne's celebrated essay on the cannibals he encountered in Rouen, and in the Fides, religio moresque aethiopum of Damião de Góis (to mention but three prominent cases). Finally, it was the Palestinian-American literary theorist and cultural critic Edward Said (1935–2003) who throughout Orientalism (New York, 1978) propounded the widely accepted (though often hotly debated) theory that westerners’ analyses of eastern cultures were (and are) predominantly condescending, racist and imperialistic.

The Kevserî Mecmûası is an eighteenth-century Turkish manuscript, which includes, in addition to a variety of music-related contents, a fairly large collection of notations. Given the scarcity of notational sources, it offers invaluable material for understanding the performance practice and compositional style of Ottoman music before the nineteenth century. Having studied a hitherto unknown microfilm copy of this manuscript, the original of which has remained up to now in a private library and closed to our access, the author aims in this article to introduce this source and discuss its potential contribution to the knowledge of Ottoman music. The article is organised roughly in two parts. First, it will present briefly the contents of the manuscript, integrating new evidence and clues about its date, author and purpose into existing knowledge. Second, it will focus on the collection of notations in the manuscript, and by comparing it with the earlier collections will argue that, contrary to the prevailing views expressed in the literature, no large-scale transformation in the style of Ottoman music took place in the early eighteenth century.