Book review: No clash of cultures in India during the Persianate age

Richard Eaton employs rich empirical detail to demonstrate that intellectual encounters between the Sanskrit and Persian worlds were not tied to any one religion and that the two were not hostile

India In The Persianate Age
1000-1765
Author: Richard M Eaton
Publisher: Allen Lane
Pages: 336
Price: Rs 999

It is a brave historian indeed who can write an account of what is conventionally called the medieval period of Indian history without a passing reference to Irfan Habib’s The Agrarian System of Mughal India  — which transformed the understanding of the period. Richard Eaton does this — and does so with great panache — because he has a thesis to argue and a rather important one at that.

Simply put, the argument is that this period saw a profoundly creative encounter