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Abstract
This dissertation asks why a group of primarily Muslim scholars connected to the court of Ibrahim ʿAdil Shah II—a king who famously crafted a political persona around the word nawras—adopted a Sanskrit word with a long history in Indian aesthetic theory as the keyword for their intellectual projects. Previously viewed as singularly promoted by Ibrahim, the related concepts of nawras and rasa were theorized, commented on, and translated by Persian, Dakani, and Sanskrit authors in Bijapur and its surroundings. These scholars (local and Hindustani Muslims; Hindus; and migrants from Iran) interpreted this term in different ways while also engaging closely with each other across languages, genres, and social communities. This dissertation is interested in what discussions of rasa in the Deccan reveal about cultural interactions in early modernity and overlaps between literary practices, consumption practices, and forms of sensory experience—visual art, literary aesthetics, music, and gustatory taste—which modern disciplinary divisions have placed in separate spheres. The dissertation argues that in contrast to parallel projects of translating, interpreting, and taxonomizing Indic knowledge that took place at the Mughal court, Deccani scholars’ engagements with the analytic of rasa stemmed not from a political motive, but from understandings of the term as spanning literary connoisseurship and sensory experience. Rasa’s application to aesthetics and consumption practices aligned with views of artistic appreciation and creation as having real and concrete effects on the body and emotions, widespread in the early modern Persianate world. Reading and engaging with mobile forms of knowledge in Persian (as well as Indic theories of aesthetics), socially and ethnically diverse writers in the Deccan collectively crafted a theory of “new taste.” Their shared project—emerging in a space peripheral to the early modern empires, yet central to multiple overlapping networks—reveals the limitations of dividing identities in the Deccan into the familiar categories of Hindu/Muslim, local/foreign, or vernacular/cosmopolitan. The dissertation aims to provide a model for understanding forms of cross-linguistic, cross-cultural engagement and theories of art and the senses that emerged outside the early modern empire.