This densely informative and inspiring book engages two scholarly discourses: namely, the visual histories of the regions broadly known as South Asia (India, Pakistan, eastern Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka) and the Islamic world (mainly referring to the eastern Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Arabia, and Iran). By moving between these major bodies of knowledge, Finbarr B. Flood demonstrates in a more than usually compelling way that academic specialties are artificial constructs designed by and for the convenience of modern scholars; such specialties are often inadequate to the challenge of treating the fluidly mobile people and things that are, ultimately, the actual subjects/objects of study. This and other theoretical engagements in Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter help catapult South Asian and Islamic visual cultures (particularly their historical manifestations) onto a more mainstream—though not yet canonical—stage, thus also rendering them more accessible to other practitioners of art history. Indeed, this book makes valuable contributions as much in its analyses of purportedly “medieval” objects and buildings from South Asia as it does in the larger questions with which it leaves the reader.

Highlighting the disciplinary need for his research, in the book’s introduction Flood characterizes his period of analysis, the eighth through thirteenth centuries of South Asia’s past, as “enigmatic and obscure” (2) due to greater scholarly focus on the Mughal dynasty (1526–1858). While this historiographical tendency is rightly pointed out, it has been addressed before, and an engagement here with previous discussions would have been welcome. Yet it is true that the tenth- through twelfth-century Ghaznavid and Ghurid campaigns into northern India have been the most intrusive upon present-day public imaginations of the region’s past, especially with regard to religious interactions. In fact, partisan politicians have cited the supposedly violent and disruptive foundations of a succession of Islamic states east of the Indus beginning in the 1190s and onward as the precursors to the very Partition (1947) that resulted in a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan. Such a strong co-option of the past casts an inescapable pall for the scholar investigating it. But Flood reminds his readers that South Asia is no exception: all (art) history writing takes place in the present, with the scholar acting as translator from her or his own subjectivity. Thus, the use of current—or “etic”—analytical methods such as object-as-text and concomitant translation theories is justifiable (14).

Chapters 1 and 2 examine visual histories and cultural conventions in the northwestern and northern areas of the subcontinent, spanning Sindh through Kashmir to the eastern fringes of Tibet. The region of Sindh was a primary “transregional nexus before 1000” (19), attracting Umayyad-sponsored expansion of political Islam into South Asia by the end of the early eighth century. (Muslim groups and individuals are evidenced earlier along the subcontinent’s western coasts and Sri Lanka by the mid-seventh century, following pre-Islamic patterns of trade and travel.) Analysis of Sindh’s cultural life during the early Islamic centuries reveals unpredictable sartorial, ceremonial, and numismatic conventions among the ruling elites and their subjects: While the inhabitants of Mansura and Multan preferred Iraqi fashions, the amirs of both Islamic states fashioned their clothing and ceremonial along Rashtrakuta (eighth–tenth centuries) or more generally Indic practices. Indeed, by the mid-ninth century Multan and Mansura were striking coins to Indian rather than Iraqi standards. Moreover, the incorporation of zoomorphic (if not outright anthropomorphic) elements in the iconographies of Multan and Mansura complicates the modern characterization of Islam as steadfastly iconoclastic.

In what is from a modern point of view an equally unpredictable inversion of cultural conventions, the Buddhist elites of western Tibet-eastern Kashmir evidently adopted Turko-Islamic modes of dress. Flood’s analysis of wall paintings dating between 1150 and 1220 in monastic and temple contexts at Alchi, Ladakh (north-central Jammu and Kashmir), reveals that the region’s elite donned the tailored midcalf-length tunic or qaba’ with pseudo-calligraphic armbands—both well known in the Islamic world—at least in convivial and perhaps also in ceremonial settings. The Sindh and Kashmir examples of “cultural cross-dressing” (the title of chapter 2) reveal the very different cosmopolitanisms operating in these contiguous areas, bringing into vivid focus the pre-modern interactions among global regions and the creation of life-worlds with far-reaching visual and other cultural vocabularies. They also help to explain the inverted commas around “Hindu” and “Muslim” in the subtitle of the book, throwing into high relief the unavoidable admixture of modernity into examinations of the past: The things, manners, and even words that we in the present day rigidly define as or exclusively associate with the rubrics of Hindu and Muslim possessed ever-differing valences in pre-modern periods—differences that require the translationist intervention of the scholar.

Chapters 3 through 5 focus on the “Ghurid Interlude” (ca. 1150–1210), though the length of the analysis would belie a characterization of the Ghurid campaigns and territorial consolidation throughout the Indus Valley and east of the Indus as only an interlude. Chapter 6 and the conclusion provide a dénouement to the overall work with a glimpse at the aftermath of Ghurid ascendancy; the death of the preeminent Ghurid ghulam Qutb al-Din Aibek (d. 1210); the architectural patronage of his successor, Iltutmish (r. 1210–36); and the conclusion’s last salutary reminder to the reader that modernity is the inevitable filter through which we view the past.

Flood offers a “multi-media” experience of the shifting self-representation of the Ghurid sultans as their fortunes ascended. Again using several sources of evidence such as architecture, coinage, and manuscript illumination, he describes the changing legal-theological affiliations of the Ghurid dynasts as they acquired extra-regional recognition, with an imperium spanning Khorasan through northern India at its height. This imperium also required area-specific negotiations such as differing coin standards and building practices east and west of the Indus, as well as the continuing, ambiguous relationship with iconism that was evidenced in ninth-century Sindh, perhaps reinforced during the last decades of the twelfth century by the two-way migration of artisans between northern India and Afghanistan. Relying on homology as an explanatory metaphor, Flood posits parallels between Indic and Ghurid praxes of state formation, such as the samanta-iqta system of territorial control (112ff.), and calculated “looting” and display of appropriated objects (131ff.). In a twist of historiographical irony, the Ghurids—viewed by the public and earlier scholarship alike as iconoclasts par excellence—acquire a softer appearance when compared with Iltutmish’s “ratcheting up of sectarian rhetoric” (241).

The great mass of data marshaled for this project on “medieval” South Asia leaves room only for larger questions (rather than criticisms)—a result that can be considered yet another contribution of the work. Among these is the issue of the present (or modernity) as the unshakable companion of the scholar. The integration rather than denial of the present in historical analysis certainly affords benefits, such as the use of non-indigenous and non-synchronous (but convenient) theoretical approaches (e.g., those of Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, Alfred Gell, etc.), and the ability to draw connections between historical events or processes in hindsight.

As with any approach, however, there are disadvantages. The bold incorporation of the present into historical analysis makes the answers to some questions less obvious. It would have been useful, for example, to get a more thorough explanation of why the work focuses on the eighth through thirteenth centuries—a period that could be further differentiated due to the many rich and varied state and cultural formations throughout the Indian subcontinent. Without a clear reason for the focus on five centuries rather than shorter spans of time, the book in some ways renders monolithic (to use the author’s term) five hundred years of South Asia’s “Islamic” history.

The presentist perspective (as I term it) can also lead to a certain private logic, begging the question of why some theoretical methods are chosen over others. The text’s selections of theoretical references remain unexplained beyond the introduction’s reminder that “our own narrative (re)constructions of historical events must of necessity be in our (etic) terms, since they are being offered not to the participants but to our contemporaries and successors” (14). Such a preemptive statement seems to obviate the issue rather than grapple with it. Without clear reasoning for the use of some methodologies and not others, moreover, Flood essentially reinforces a received canon of theoretical frameworks that are privileged above the many others in existence, both in the present and the past.

Finally, the presentist perspective may also risk superficiality. Homologies or ‘“fortuitous convergences”’ (246) such as the parallels between “Indic” and “Islamic” (using the author’s distinctions) territorial administration systems (112ff.), or the inscription of Afghani and Indian buildings with auspicious numbers (157ff), is, of course, extremely valuable. It is quite possible, however, that these parallels are visible only in hindsight, and were not perceived in their own time. Thus, the positing of homologies can be deemed only the beginning of scholarly analysis and not its end, for their hows, whys, and sometimes whos still remain to be elucidated.

Precisely because Objects of Translation raises these larger questions, it can be considered an important contribution not only to two scholarly discourses but also to the very process of art-historical inquiry; Flood’s study is one that will be cited for some time into the future.