Turkish History and Culture in India: Identity, Art, and Transregional Connections.

• Author: Kucuk, Teoman Kenn

Edited by A.C.S. Peacock and Richard Piran McClary

Leiden: Brill, $120, 418 Pages, ISBN: 9789004433267

History is and always has been a malleable affair: whether in examination and criticism or erasure and revisionism, the past is rarely ever set in stone, even in a single moment. And even where some degree of consensus exists as to the flow and causality of history, each period is populated with many invisible histories -phenomena that were either less impactful than elements of the mainstream narratives, or those that are in one way or another "inconvenient" to remember. Some are simply lost to the sands of time.

Turkish History and Culture in India, edited by A.C.S. Peacock and Richard Piran Mc-

Clary attempts to shed light on such lateral histories. Although the presence and influence of Turkish dynasties and communities in South Asia for hundreds of years are undeniable, many elements of it have been overlooked in both popular and scholarly history. As Maya Petrovich points out in chapter IV, historical developments that loom large can overshadow other connections, pushing historians to only consider events as teleologically contributing to some conclusion; in the case of India and much of Asia, this was the crumbling of old empires under European dominance (pp. 116-119). Moreover, modern nationalist projects in India have vacillated between vilification (1) and erasure (2) of South Asia's Muslim and Turkish past. In such a context, remembering this history is vital.

Turkish History and Culture in India is not a concentrated effort to demonstrate the importance of Turks in the history of South Asia, but rather an eclectic collection of different perspectives, brought together to reveal the multifaceted nature of and ample opportunities for research in the history of Turks and South Asia. Accordingly, the volume is divided into two sections: the first covers chronicles, state culture, and military engagements with a focus on political history; the second focuses on material culture, literature, architecture, and more, thus adding social and art history to the mix. Both sections contribute to the overall project of examining the lives and works of Turks in India, and the connections between South Asia and the Turko-Persian world at large.

This global outlook is perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the volume. It shines forth in chapters such as Shailendra Bhandare's "Transregional Connections: The 'Lion and Sun' Motif." Bhandare traces...