Report on the historical details of a number of neglected storytellers in Iran and South Asia from the 16th to 17th centuries CE, including Zain al-‘Ābidīn Takaltū Khān, ‘Ināyat Allāh Darbār Khān, Fusūnī Yazdī, Mīr Muḥammad Hāshim, Iskandar Qiṣṣah-khẉān, Ḥājī Qiṣṣah-khẉān Hamadānī, Niẓām Shīrāzī, Mīr Qiṣṣah, Muḥammad…[Read more]

Describes the storytelling techniques of the 17th-century storyteller (qissah-khwan) ‘Abd al-Nabi Fakhr al-Zamani Qazwini in South Asia and discusses the truth/falsehood binary in the context of the qissah/dastan genre.

Translation of Mīrzā Asad Allāh Ḳhān Ġhālib’s 1866 Urdu preface to the dāstān Bostān-i Ḳhayāl.

ویتمن ایرانی: فراتر از پذیرش ادبی ــ که به پذیرش والت ویتمن، شاعر نامدار آمریکایی، در یک دورۀ تقریباً صد ساله در ایران معاصر می‌پردازد ــ دارای نُه فصل، مقدمه، مؤخره و ضمیمه است. کتابِ حاضر تحقیقی بینارشته‌ای است: از سویی ادبیات تطبیقی (پذیرش ادبی، تأثیرپژوهی و تصویرشناسی) و نقد ادبی (تاریخ‌گرایی نو)، و از سوی دیگر مطالعات ترجمه (ترجمه و ای…[Read more]

This study explores the changing relationship of communities in Colonial and Post-colonial Urdu Literature. It attempts to map out the communal space in the symbolic world of literature given to the Christians over a century by Urdu fiction writers. In colonial India, the missionary activities especially for female education evoked different…[Read more]

This article investigates several discussions of “chemistry,” understood as an analysts’ category referring to theories and practices dealing with the structure and transformation of matter. By reading these texts (a treatise defending kīmiyāʾ by al-Fārābī, the famous passage from Ibn Sīnā’s Shifāʾ on transmutation, Ibn Taymiyyah’s fatwā…[Read more]

Colonial predicament made the life and its understanding complex in the Subcontinent. To represent this complexity, Urdu writers found the polyphonic genre, i.e. the novel helpful. They used different techniques of characterization to narrate the social hierarchy of characters. The novel also provided the space for them to attract the people with…[Read more]

The term “alchemy,” born out of early modern professional polemics among chemists, is problematic as a historical category. The present article shifts away from asking what pre-modern alchemy “really” was, to asking how medieval scholars writing in Greek and Arabic thought about the practice of treating and combining naturally occurring substan…[Read more]

This article explores the connection between the development of new literary genres in Urdu and colonial authority. British Colonial authorities tried to develop a system of scrutiny for local literatures. To limit the ‘vernacular’ literatures within the ‘suggested’ traits, colonial administration used its local subordinates in disseminating the…[Read more]

All around the community in the Macarthur region are cultural artefacts that are representations of the settler-colonial narrative of the Cowpastures, which was variously a colonial frontier, a government reserve, and a formal region.
Today, the material culture of the Cowpastures is hidden in plain sight and appears to have been ‘forgotten’ by…[Read more]

The Narellan Heritage Walking Tour is an interesting and informative way to observe and learn about the history and heritage of this Cowpastures village.
First published in 2010 by photographers Kylie and Peter Lyons.

The Cairo Genizah is famous as a source of manuscripts for the study of the medieval Mediterranean world, especially Jewish communities during the High Middle Ages. However, among the hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern manuscript fragments in Genizah collections are more than 12,000 moveable-type printed items, most of which come from Europe.…[Read more]

The Cairo Genizah is famous as a source of manuscripts for the study of the medieval Mediterranean world, especially Jewish communities during the High Middle Ages. However, among the hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern manuscript fragments in Genizah collections are more than 12,000 moveable-type printed items, most of which come from Europe.…[Read more]

This paper contributes to a project called Camdens Worldwide to mark the 400th anniversary of the death of the Elizabethan historian/antiquarian William Camden. It is a worldwide project to mark places called Camden conducted by the Camden History Society in the UK.
The establishment of Camden, New South Wales, the town in 1840, was a private…[Read more]

This paper compares psychostasia and/or kerostasia concepts from Indo-European, Semitic and adjacent cultures, and relates them to Cognitive Metaphor Theory. In the context of metaphysical weighing, the religions of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome all associated lightness with goodness and/or a favourable outcome; Hinduism does likewise. The…[Read more]

The article takes account of the colonial archives and analyses the strategies of colonizers, which brought about not only the new forms of knowledge in India but also restructured the society and statecraft here. I argue that the colonial administration developed the public instruction department to impart a new character to the natives and used…[Read more]

The Burragorang Valley is one of those lost places that people fondly remember from the past. A place of imagination and dreaming where former residents fondly re-tell stories from their youth. These places create potent memories and nostalgia for many people and continue to be places of interest. They are localities of myths and legends and…[Read more]

In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, when a new style of Persian poetry was developing in the Persianate world, several erudite literary critics appeared in India, whose meticulous critiques of Persian poetry was unprecedented in the long history of Persian literature. A close study of the works produced by these critics reveals their vast…[Read more]

The story of European settlement in the Cowpastures is intimately connected to the story of the convicts and their masters. This story has not been told, and there is little understanding of the role of the convicts in the Cowpastures district before 1840. Who were they? What did they do? Did they stay in the district?