:Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400–1800

Abstract

At first glance, the book under review may seem focused exclusively on the particular genre of travel literature known in Farsi or New Persian as Safar nāme. Yet, this erudite and engaging collaboration between Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam provides not just translations from Persian of accounts on travels with accompanying commentaries but also a series of chapters in which the proverbial wonders and sporadic vexations that awaited pre-modern travelers are made accessible within the context of a world then changing under the expansion of empires. In many ways, the book under review is a masterful travelogue of travelogues, becoming part of the literary tradition it examines while linking not just Iranians and Indians but also Europeans who were venturing along the well-worn pathways and wind-swept waterways of West and South Asia. The book comprises eight chapters, a handful of maps, scattered illustrations, a bibliography of sources and scholarly studies, and an index. The maps and illustrations give glimpses into the occasionally surreal but often mundane facets of long-distance travel. The maps illuminate the details of this book through their specificity but would have benefited from one that presented the major overland and maritime routes connecting Iran and the Indian subcontinent. Occasionally the travel narratives of Westerners, especially those by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, are used as foils (pp. 82–91, 342–351, 352–357). A few observations can be made on some of the more interesting details raised in the book.

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