Takes a broad look at mercantile networks that developed between consuls and others trading in the Mediterranean with a particular focus on the problem of self-interest faced by merchant-consuls.

The Introduction opens with an attempt to explain the rift that has developed between German history and German-Jewish history since the early attempts at writing academic history, during the early nineteenth century. This happened despite the fact that the two historiographies developed in parallel from the beginning, chronologically and methodically, and continued to exist well into the post-Second World War years, both in Germany and elsewhere. Social history in Germany and in the United States was eventually crucial for changing this paradigm, and the post-modern turn increased our interest in the history of minorities. Finally, gender history helped not only in adding previously neglected sectors of society into the grand narrative, but also in changing this narrative altogether. Now it could be seen from different perspectives, and in our case it is indeed being seen through Jewish eyes.

This chapter studies global histories that consider aspects of the material world. It exposes the – often tacit – assumptions that guide these global material histories and holds them up for careful inspection. Its particular interest is in the grounds on which global material historians associate matter and material culture with a specific scale, context or level of observation: with world-making, the global scale and ‘connectivity’, but also with the concrete, the ‘micro’ and the intimate. In that context, the chapter discusses a wide range of themes, from the risk of fetishising material things – as in, reverencing them for properties, including ‘global’ ones, merely projected onto them – to the inevitability of canvassing some forms of materiality on a global scale: the pollution of air, for instance, or, for the post–Cold War era, the issue of resource shortages. The chapter argues that, like any form of historical writing, global material histories are under the influence of their practitioners’ own times’ socioreligious texture, global imaginary and discursive habits; mindful of the telos and conceptions that pervade their work, they will be better prepared to see the world of matter and material culture in all its changeability, elusiveness and polysemy.

In recreating women's literary spaces, the tazkiras not only mention the poets of their time but also refer, in interesting details, to the life stories and lyrical compositions of women poets from the historical and imagined pasts. In the process of commemorating them, these texts portray them as exemplars in terms of their literary skills and aesthetic qualities for the littérateurs of their generation. As commemorative texts, both BN and TN memorialize their literary precursors, but, in the process of doing so, they remind us of the historical presence of an inclusive literary space in which were ensconced memories of lyrics allegedly composed by women. The poets from the multiple pasts claimed an undying existence, an enduring and ever-inspiring presence, in the literary public sphere. It should be emphasized here that even as these tazkiras are exclusively concerned with women poets, the literary community they seek to reproduce and represent is not gender-specific; the community of women poets, writing and reciting poems in Persian and Urdu, did not constitute an exclusive social group, but were seen as a crucial component of the larger Persianate literary culture. In fact, the overwhelming interest of Ranj and Nadir in publishing their compendia was to draw the attention of the reader to the significance of women literati in shaping the norms of aesthetics and appropriate expression in art and literature.

Tazkiras as Commemorative Exercises: Memorializing Women and Their Words

In the last several decades, there have been quite a few insightful studies on the tradition of biographical commemoration in the Persianate world, and scholars have looked at the complex ways through which remembrance – repeated and constructed – served to structure a moral community, and circulating within networks of communication, reinforced ethical norms and appropriate practices. It is for this reason that some scholars have described the tazkiras as ‘memorative communications’ wherein memories were restructured by forms of communication and vice versa. The appropriate ethical norms and behaviour, and aesthetic tastes and expression constituted the Persianate adāb (singular: adab), which were reiterated and reformulated in and through the remembrance of the lives and work of exceptional persons.

During his regular Thursday visits to the Sufi tomb of the saint Shah Chokha, Ram Singh, a schoolteacher of the Baniya caste from the town of Punahana, never forgot to donate money to Tablighi Jamaat volunteers. He believed that visiting a Sufi dargāh and providing funds for Islamic education and mosque renovation were acts of service to God. Ram Singh lived close to the Laldas temple in Punahana (Figure 5.1). He or a member of his family visited the temple daily, either in the morning or evening. Ram Singh openly regarded Laldas as a Muslim, saying, hamāre bābā musalmān the par hamen unki pahcān se koi lenā denā nahī (our saint was Muslim, but we do not have any problem with his identity).

In 2015, the new temple of Laldas was built on the premises of an Arya Samaj school. The school building also served as a regional centre for the Arya Samaj. An open courtyard was located in front of the temple. Visitors arrived daily and waited in the courtyard while the Brahmin head priest, made the required arrangements for Laldas's morning and evening prayers. Most of the devotees were shopkeepers in the nearby central market in Punahana and came to the temple for quick prayers to the saint. This market was dominated by Hindus, particularly the Baniyas who owned shops for selling items of daily use. On the outer circle of this market, which separated Punahana from Nakanpur (a very old Meo village that is today part of the Punahana town municipality), there were shops for selling garments, mobiles, and vegetable and fruits, among other items. These shops were predominantly owned by Muslims.

The town was also home to considerable populations of Hindu ‘low castes’ such as Valmikis, Jatavs, Sainis (Malis), Nais and Punjabi immigrants from Pakistan. The everyday dynamics of social life in this town were significantly influenced by the presence of these communities. The demographic numbers of Hindus and Muslims were almost nearly the same, but the region had a Muslim majority. Hindus and Muslims interacted with one another, but there was a sense of insecurity among the Hindus, especially the Baniyas, due to the Muslim majority in the area. Hindu caste communities built strong networks with right-wing organisations such as the RSS, the Bajrang Dal and the Arya Samaj in response to their minority status, anticipating potential conflicts in the future.

In this chapter, we look at, with a focus on two sisters, both courtesans – Zuhra and Mushtari – the meaning of and constraints on the participation of women entertainers in the literary sphere. We hear them ‘speak’ and from their speech-acts explore their construction of selfhood, articulation of subjectivities, and resistance to dominant social and literary norms. At the same time, we make an effort to unravel the anxieties that their literary talents evoked in the sociocultural spaces, and the reasons for their immense popularity in social memory. We also ask how their agency in the cultural domain was represented in the literary sphere, in particular the biographical compendia of the time.

The Courtesans as Models of Literary Emulation: The Pre-eminence of the Sisters in Cultural Spaces

Why these sisters? My reason for choosing them is because their literary acumen was widely accepted, and critics often measured the compositions of other women poets against the depth and range of their poems. The sisters had, it seems, set the standards that other poets were expected to aspire to and emulate. Nazakat, ‘an endearing public performer’ (mahbūba-i bāzārī) based in Bombay, wrote a couplet and a ghazal as an accompaniment to (and in the same meter as) one of the poems of Mushtari; comparing her effort with the literary skills of the two sisters, Nadir found her endeavour no more than ‘meaningless verbosity’ (tūl-i fazūl), and decided not to include the ghazal in his tazkira. Ranj was blunt, and saw her attempt to imitate Mushtari as ridiculous. He says:

In the case of another courtesan by the same name, Nazakat, Ranj expressed his appreciation of her poetry by comparing her with Mushtari (and Sardar). This courtesan, based in Jaipur, could, says Ranj, get the likes of Mushtari envious. Clearly then, in matters of literary expression and aesthetics, Mushtari, and her sister, Zuhra, were held out as models against whom other poets were assessed, and their compositions evaluated.

I offer an overview and analysis of charitable giving in Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Saudi Arabia, and explore its linkages to politics. I study giving at home and abroad, by governments, non-governmental organizations, ruling elites, and private actors, and doctrinally connected giving. I examine how these entities give, to whom they give and why they give as they do. I highlight several key findings: First, in three of the four countries, the most active and best endowed foundations have been created by (members of) ruling families or prominent politico-religious associations; second, private giving tends to concentrate on family, tribe, ethnic community; third, religious precepts are routinely modified to appease a particular social category; fourth, with few exceptions, migrant workers are excluded from access to charity. These findings suggest that charitable giving, while intrinsic to the practice of Islam, may be instrumentalized to advance secular interests: 1) gather information about society, 2) assert relationships of authority and control, 3) shore up allegiance (to a ruler and/or an ideology), 4) consolidate a definition of community.

Reading the biographical compendia of women poets written in the nineteenth century, we cannot but appreciate the impressive presence of women in the literary field. However, this impression fades away when we look at the more popular literary biographies, anthologies, critical literature, and instruction manuals; in the dominant literary strands, indeed women poets are scarce, if not totally absent. The nineteenth century was the period in which the figure of a woman poet evoked moral anxieties, resulting from the reformist zeal to keep women away from eros and love, and other emotions associated with Persianate poetry. Elite women should, for sure, be educated but only in the subjects that helped them efficiently manage their domestic spaces; there were, as we see in several reformist texts, detailed discussions on what women should and should not read, and among the books that they were instructed to shun were romantic tales and works of poetry. Commendably, the women's tazkiras contest these assumptions, and make available to the interested readers an archive of women's voices, and draw our attention to the ever-present but barely recognized contribution of women poets to the shaping of the literary culture in early modern Hindustan.

It is not without basis to argue that women's lyrical compositions represented a marginalized and incongruent literary culture, but doing so would be banal and simplistic and, above all, quite ahistorical. Women poets were present in poetic assemblies (mushā‘ira) organized by aristocrats and rich patrons; and in the salons of the courtesans, young men learnt the niceties of language, and men of letters experimented with new forms of thought and expression. In our study of women littérateurs here, we have seen that their lyrics, despite their creative depths and fresh signifying practices, were firmly obedient to the literary adāb, or the norms of aesthetics and expression. Their interventions in the literary field served to enrich and deepen the field, even as they continually challenged and contested its dominant assumptions. It is for this reason that I described their compositions, in one of the earlier chapters, as situated within the realm of what Foucault terms as ‘subjugated knowledges’, reflecting a cultural practice that was ‘masked’ by the power-language ensemble of relations but still conversed with the dominant literary and aesthetic norms and values in an aporetic relationship where women's speech both reinforced and challenged them.

Chapter 9 suggests how Hinduism and Confucianism may be understood in relation to the construct of transcendentalism in order to set up a discussion of India and China in the final chapter. (Unearthly Powers had largely taken Christianity, Islam and Buddhism as the main examples of transcendentalist traditions.) This involves a consideration of distinct forms that the Axial Age took in both regions and the religious and philosophical traditions that emerged from them. The diverse traditions coming under the umbrellas of Hinduism and Confucianism represent very substantial continuity with the immanentist pre-Axial past, especially in a fundamental emphasis on the role of ritual action. However, they also incorporated Axial elements, particularly an emphasis on liberation/salvation in the case of Hinduism and ethical rectitude in the case of Confucianism. Confucianism remains the most awkward fit within the mould of transcendentalism because of the absence of a soteriological imperative.