Between Sultanate and Mughal Book Culture

Abstract What made sultanate book culture distinctive in Hindustan before the mid-sixteenth century? How can we assess its legacy in Mughal contexts? While cultural histories of Hindustan that focus on power legitimation can obscure continuities between the sultanate past and Mughal present, a textured history of sultanate manuscripts emerges by focusing on inter- and transregional trends in Northern and Central India across the sultanate-Mughal divide in the history of the book. Bookmakers transcreated old genres and innovated new ones in Hindustan. A focus on the concept of “scribal knowledge” reveals how intelligent scribes moved between Arabic, Persian, and Hindavi languages. Although sultanate Sufi narratives were primarily the realm of oral performance, they left a lasting imprint in illustrated manuscripts and transformed how scribes wrote in the vernacular.