Dr. Sunil Sharma is Professor of Persian & Indian Literatures at Boston University's Department of World Languages & Literatures. He has authored a number of books and articles on a broad range of subjects from Indo-Persian literature, visual cultures, and travel writing.
Representations of women, both characters from classical Persian romances such as Laila and Shirin, and also actual individuals from various social contexts, formed an important aspect of literary texts and paintings from Persianate courts in the empires of Mughal India, Safavid Iran, and Ottoman Turkey. When it came to the Indian heroine, there was often a blurring of 'fictional' and 'realistic' modes of representation. Persian poets evinced a particular fascination for the Indian, specifically Hindu, woman who possessed the best qualities of a lover: faithfulness and beauty. She became a popular subject of representation in book paintings and narrative poems (masnavis). But in the latter half of the seventeenth century, the Indian woman had taken on a more ambivalent role, not just as a devoted lover but also a temptress and courtesan who posed a potential threat to the moral values of the Persian male. The limits of aesthetic representation of the Indian woman thus allows for comparative analysis across cultures and artistic forms.
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