ACKNOWLEDGMENTSDavid Lleyveld, Munis Faruqui, Jorge Flores, Kamran Asdar Ali, the
late Kumkum Chatterjee, Ramya Srinivasan, Iftikhar Dadi, Prachi
Deshpande, Avinoam Shalom, and Bodhisattava Kar. They each have
contributed to this book in their own way, and they each continue to
enlighten me. Thank you.
My gratitude to Farina Mir and Will Glover at Michigan, Michael
Weiss at Princeton, and Kris Manjapara and Ayesha Jalal at Tufts, who
invited me to their seminars and helped me clarify my ideas. I pre-
sented parts of this work at Columbia at the Literary Theory Univer-
sity Seminar and at the Faculty Seminar at MESAAS. I want to thank
Tim Mitchell and Bruce Robbins for their generosity and the audiences
for their engagement. I also presented portions of the book at the Zu-
kunftsphilologie workshop at Freie Universitat Berlin, at American
University at Cairo, and for conference panels at the Annual South
Asia Conference at Madison, the Association for Asian Studies Con-
ference, and the American Historical Association. Sunil Kumar pub-
lished my first article on Chachnama and has solidified my personal
standard for exacting research and clarity of ideas. I am indebted to
him for his encouragement and support. Ideas in Chapters 2 and 4
were explored in Indian Economic and Social History Review and
Medieval History f ournal. I thank the editors, the readers, and the
interlocutors.
Allison Busch, Partha Chatterjee, Elizabeth Blackmar, Marwa El
Shakry, Adam Kosto, Elisheva Carlebach, and Carol Gluck read the
draft manuscript and gave extensive feedback and corrections. Cynthia
Talbot's careful reading and comments were critical to both the man-
uscript and to me. •I am thankful for her generosity in person and in
her scholarship. Kavita Dada, Karuna Mantena, Teena Purohit, Dennis
Tenen, Eleanor Johnson, Mark Mazower, and Tamer El Leithy read
parts of the manuscript and engaged deeply with the work. Durba Mitra
thought and molded this book through countless conversations. She
read every line and this book bears the marks of that intellectual labor.
I owe her the same thought and care for her book. Her astute questions
pushed me to articulate my arguments clearly and forcefully. I am ex-
tremely grateful for their labor and attention.
Islam Dayeh, George Khalil, Schirin Amir-Moazzami, Regula For-
ster, Gudrun Kramer, Bettina Graf, Ingeborg Baldauf, Ulrike Freitag,