American author's book considers Iran and the Deccan cultural ties

IBNA- The book, 'Iran and the Deccan: Persianate Art, Culture, and Talent in ‎Circulation, 1400–1700' (2020) by American researcher and Author Keelan Overton has ‎been published by Indiana University Press. ‎

In 468 pages, ‘Iran and the Deccan’ describes how Iranian elites such as authors, poets, literati and even officials received scholarships from India, went to the Deccan region and settled in Golconda (present-day Andhra Pradesh), due to convenient condition provided for them. Iran’s Cultural Attaché to India reported in a Persian press release.  
 
The Koh-i-Noor (Mountain of light), one of the largest cut diamonds in the world is originated from there. It weighs 105.6 carats (21.12 g) and now is part of the British Crown Jewels on public display.
 
In the early 1400s, Iranian elites began migrating to the Deccan plateau of southern India. Lured to the region for many reasons, these poets, traders, statesmen, and artists of all kinds left an indelible mark on the Islamic sultanates that ruled the Deccan until the late seventeenth century.
 
The result was the creation of a robust transregional Persianate network linking such distant cities as Bidar and Shiraz, Bijapur and Isfahan, and Golconda and Mashhad.
 
‘Iran and the Deccan’ explores the circulation of art, culture, and talent between Iran and the Deccan over a three-hundred-year period. Its interdisciplinary contributions consider the factors that prompted migration, the physical and intellectual poles of connectivity between the two regions, and processes of adaptation and response.
 
Placing the Deccan at the center of Indo-Persian and early modern global history, ‘Iran and the Deccan’ reveals how mobility, liminality, and cultural translation nuance the traditional methods and boundaries of the humanities.
 
Keelan Overton is a historian of art and architecture specializing in the eastern Islamic world from Greater Iran to South Asia. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles (2011) and her MA from Williams College (2004).
 
She is the author of ‘Book Culture, Royal Libraries, and Persianate Painting in Bijapur, circa 1580–1630’ (Muqarnas, 2016) and ‘Filming, Photographing and Purveying in 'the New Iran:' The Legacy of Stephen H. Nyman, ca. 1937–42’ (in Arthur Upham Pope and A New Survey of Persian Art, 2016).