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Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan's Asar-ul-Sanadid: the construction of history in nineteenth-century India

In 1847, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-1898) published an Urdu text, listing and describing all notable monuments of Delhi entitled Asar-ul-Sanadid. His work so impressed British scholars in Delhi that he was invited to join the Asiatic Society and write a second, improved edition for translation into English. Unfortunately the translation was never written. Sir Sayyid was one of many local Indian scholars producing architectural and archaeological histories of the Subcontinent in the nineteenth-century. Yet their names are generally unknown, and their research lost in obscurity. Early twentieth-century western scholarship paid them little attention and an image formed which saw nineteenth-century historiography only serving an Orientalist vision of Indian art and archaeology. It is only in recent decades that this belief has been contested, and new studies have included a greater variety of sources. This thesis attempts to do the same by presenting translated portions of the Asar and analysing it within the context of its production; pre-colonial Indian histories and contemporary Indian and British scholarship in order to form a more complete picture of nineteenth century historical discourse in India.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/1419
Date27 May 2009
CreatorsQuraishi, Fatima
ContributorsWelch, Anthony
Source SetsUniversity of Victoria
LanguageEnglish, English
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
RightsAvailable to the World Wide Web

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