Editors’ Note

Our December 2017 issue opens with a series of meditations on dwelling. The six essays in this section draw on ethnographic and historical cases from South Africa, China, India, Malaysia, and Zimbabwe to invite reflections on the meaning of dwelling in the face of vulnerability, movement, precarity, and relations of power.

Joel Lee’s essay also focuses on the built environment and addresses the mutual entailments of caste and sense perception. Lee builds on ethnographic research on Dalit communities in Uttar Pradesh to explore how rural labor and urban sanitation infrastructure are governed by the visual, aural, olfactory, and gustatory order of caste. The sensuous entailments of a caste-based organization of space, as well as their social, psychological, and biochemical effects on inhabitants, are the focus of this essay.

A section on Iranians in South Asia, “Circulation and Language,” illuminates the multivocality and the spatial expanse of the early Persianate world of ideas and histories. Subah Dayal’s article examines a literary circuit of poets and chroniclers in the Deccan (south India) region. Her reading of literature in Persian and the courtly vernacular illustrates the links among Safavid Iran, Mughal Hindustan, and the Deccan, showing how linguistic polyphony and ethnography formed the basis of allyship and enmity in an uncertain period of conquest. Jane Mikkelson uses a close reading of three Persian lyric poems to show how poets constructed metaphors of space, exile, home, and place. The rich lyrical landscapes that make up these works reveal dynamic understandings of style, spatiality, and geography in the early modern Persianate world.

Arthur Dudney’s essay on Iranian émigré poets who contributed to the development of Persianate culture in Mughal South Asia reveals the linguistic cosmopolitanism of Indian Persian and questions the notion of an “authentic” Persian mother culture. Iranian émigré storytellers possessed cultural capital gained through a variety of strategies. Pasha M. Khan describes how such performers and producers of romance (qissah/dāstān) raised the worth of the genre by showcasing it as linguistically exemplary, cultivating new forms of patronage and drawing on political themes. Migration from Iran also influenced state building and political culture in the Durrani Empire. Sajjad Nejatie focuses on the role of Iranian émigrés in extending and consolidating Durrani authority in early modern Indo Khurasan and the legacy of this influence in its contemporary counterpart, Afghanistan.

The essay by Michelle Campos on citizenship in the Ottoman Empire recalls essays in previous issues of the journal that have been concerned with the transformation of imperial citizenship at the turn of the twentieth century. Campos puts the Ottoman case in dialogue with those of the Qing, Russian, Hapsburg, and Qajar empires to show how these new projects encompassed institutional reform, intellectual and civil society engagement in an imperial public sphere, and the development of notions and practices of imperial belonging, patriotism, and political participation.

Finally, this issue’s Kitabkhana responds to Keith Watenpaugh’s Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism (2016), which provides an alternative history of humanitarianism grounded in responses to social suffering in the Middle East. Contributors engage with Watenpaugh’s arguments about the links between empire and humanitarianism, as well as its implications for writing a global history of the human.