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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 March 2022
This article examines how Zeyā al-Din Barani may have imagined that contemporary audiences would consume his Tārikh-e Firuz Shāhi. Would it only be read visually or also read aloud (directed at the ear rather than the eye), and thus be received aurally, or would it even be performed in front of a larger audience? The plot and protagonists of Barani's story on Moʿezz al-Din Keyqobād present a tragedy that develops around a sultan doomed to fail. An examination of the set-up of Barani's narrative reveals that it contains numerous textual devices that would enable a storyteller to perform the story, using the text as a kind of tumār. As tragedies are written for the stage, not the study, these features of the text indicate that matters of orality, which are crucial for many genres of premodern Persianate courtly literature, are also relevant to the Tārikh-e Firuz Shāhi.
My thoughts on the role of text consumption in understanding premodern Persianate historiography started to take form during an Wissenschaftsfonds FWF (Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung) Lise Meitner Fellowship at the University of Vienna. This paper was first presented at the international symposium “Islamicate Historiography of India” at the Université de Lausanne, Section de langues et civilisations slaves et de l’Asie du Sud. I thank Ali Anooshahr, Blain Auer, Roy Fischel, Emma O’Loughlin Bérat, Sholeh Quinn, and Florian Saalfeld, as well as the reviewers and editors of Iranian Studies for their valuable comments. I am grateful for the financial support of Collaborative Research Center 1167 “Macht and Herrschaft: Premodern Configurations in a Transcultural Perspective.”