Imperial representation and ceremonial played a crucial role at the Mughal court. The daily audiences in particular, but also festivities of all kinds served to display the ruler’s legitimacy and also fostered relations between him and the different elites of his empire. The project considers the role of the court and especially of the ruler as an institution with specific public functions and investigates the ideological and power-political significance of ceremonial and celebrations.

During the time of Islamic sovereignty, numerous Persian works on India’s culture were produced on the Indian subcontinent. Some were translations, others were texts written in Persian. It was a complex process lasting several centuries; both the extent to which knowledge was converted, assimilated and Persianized and the motivation for adopting it were subject to change and varied from region to region. The Perso-Indica project records all the Persian works on Indian culture in a database. The aim is not only to document them, but also to analyze the process of translation and adaptation of each single text in order to gain a better understanding of the cross-cultural interaction on the subcontinent.

In contrast to Part I, Part II will concentrate on learning to read original texts. The so-called artificial texts, written by the authors for the textbook lessons, will increasingly be supplemented or replaced by original texts in different language registers. We intend to use newspaper articles, encyclopedia entries, Internet sources, advertising texts, forms, modern literature and maybe radio reports etc. The special features of premodern texts will also be discussed to introduce students to the important task of reading classical literature.