This book is the result of a conference held at the University of California, Irvine, covering the contacts between Iran and India from antiquity to the modern period.

This book is based on a conference at UC Irvine. The work surveys contacts and connected histories between the Iranian Plateau and the Indian Subcontinent.

This book is based on a conference at UC Irvine. The work surveys contacts and connected histories between the Iranian Plateau and the Indian Subcontinent.

From the image offered by the Babylonian Talmud, Jewish elites were deeply embedded within the Sasanian Empire (224-651 CE). The Talmud is replete with stories and discussions that feature Sasanian kings, Zoroastrian magi, fire temples, imperial administrators, Sasanian laws, Persian customs, and more quotidian details of Jewish life. Yet, in the scholarly literature on the Babylonian Talmud and the Jews of Babylonia , the Sasanian Empire has served as a backdrop to a decidedly parochial Jewish story, having little if any direct impact on Babylonian Jewish life and especially the rabbis. Babylonian Jews and Sasanian Imperialism in Late Antiquity advances a radically different understanding of Babylonian Jewish history and Sasanian rule. Building upon recent scholarship, Simcha Gross portrays a more immanent model of Sasanian rule, within and against which Jews invariably positioned and defined themselves. Babylonian Jews realized their traditions, teachings, and social position within the political, social, religious, and cultural conditions generated by Sasanian rule.

Integrating forgotten tales of literary communities across Iran, Afghanistan and South Asia - at a time when Islamic empires were fracturing and new state formations were emerging - this book offers a more global understanding of Persian literary culture in the 18th and 19th centuries. It challenges the manner in which Iranian nationalism has infilitrated Persian literary history writing and recovers the multi-regional breadth and vibrancy of a global lingua franca connecting peoples and places across Islamic Eurasia. Focusing on 3 case studies (18th-century Isfahan, a small court in South India and the literary climate of the Anglo-Afghan war), it reveals the literary and cultural ties that bound this world together as well as some of the trends that broke it apart.

India’s Economic Corridor Initiatives highlights key aspects of current discourses on India’s initiative of the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) and Chabahar, and their geo-economic significance. INSTC was founded by India, Russia, and Iran, and the Chabahar port in Iran provides a major prospective conduit for India's interchange and commerce with West Central Asia while maintaining a strategic distance from Pakistan's entry route. This book analyses the drastic changes in the equation of international relations in general, and more particularly between India and Eurasian countries. Contributors from Iran, Central Asia, Russia, Armenia and Europe provide a wide spectrum of opinion and analysis on the subject. The chapters claim that these corridors provide an alternative to the BRI and can play a pivotal role in de-escalating tensions through negotiations. A new addition to the debate on contemporary dynamics in Eurasia and India, this book will be of interest to researchers studying economic corridors, transnational and trans-regional economic relationships, security studies, regional and area studies, international relations and Indo-Iran-Russia relations.

At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Persian is one of the great lingua francas of world history. Yet despite its recognition as a shared language across the Islamic world and beyond, its scope, impact, and mechanisms remain underexplored. A world historical inquiry into pre-modern cosmopolitanism, The Persianate World traces the reach and limits of Persian as a Eurasian language in a comprehensive survey of its geographical, literary, and social frontiers. From Siberia to Southeast Asia, and between London and Beijing, this book shows how Persian gained, maintained, and finally surrendered its status to imperial and vernacular competitors. Fourteen essays trace Persian’s interactions with Bengali, Chinese, Turkic, Punjabi, and other languages to identify the forces that extended “Persographia,” the domain of written Persian. Spanning the ages expansion and contraction, The Persianate World offers a critical survey of both the supports and constraints of one of history’s key languages of global exchange.