THE TALK
Was India split between Muslim North and Hindu South?
It is often said that, between the 14th and 17th centuries, the Deccan was split between a “Muslim” north and a “Hindu” south – the former represented by sultanates such as Bijapur and Golkonda, and the latter by the Vijayanagara empire.
This talk will challenge that notion by suggesting how states on both sides of the Krishna River drew on a common fund of architectural, military, literary, and coinage traditions. While they all looked back to their common roots in the empire of the Kalyana Chalukyas (10th to 12th c.), they also all looked out to a cosmopolitan and prestigious world informed by Persian language and literature.
Dr Eaton is a specialist in the history of India of this period and his talk promises to be illuminating.
Dr RICHARD EATON
Dr Richard Eaton is a renowned historian specialising in the history of premodern and modern South Asia and world history, He is Professor at University of Arizona.
He was the winner of the 2016 Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Prize for Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India’s Deccan Plateau, 1300-1600, co-authored with Phillip B. Wagoner, judged the best of twenty-two books in the field of South Asian studies (any discipline) published in 2014 and submitted to the award’s sponsor, the Association of Asian Studies.
He was winner of the 2015 John F. Richards Prize for Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India’s Deccan Plateau, 1300-1600, co-authored with Phillip B. Wagoner, judged the best of thirty books in the field of South Asian history published in 2014 and submitted to the award’s sponsor, the American Historical Association.
He is co-winner of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences Book Award, University of Arizona for The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204 1760 judged among the best books written by college faculty that year.
He is also winner of three film awards in 2002: U.S. International Film and Video Festival, an AXIEM Award, and an AURORA platinum Best of Show award for "Through the Looking Glass," a one-hour film on European contact with Asia that was aired on Public Television, for which I wrote the intellectual content.
He is winner of the 1994 Albert Hourani Book Award for The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204 1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), judged the best of sixty eight books in the field of Middle Eastern Studies published in 1993 and submitted to the award’s sponsor, the Middle East Studies Association of North America.
He was declared “liberal India’s favourite Western scholar” in the headline in the Hindustan Times of New Delhi. He was listed among the nine all time historians of India whose biographies were included in The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, edited by Kelly Boyd (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999 [1:338 39]), and the first non-Indian historian of India mentioned since Abu Rayhan al Biruni (d. 1050), who lived a thousand years ago.
