UC Berkeley

This dissertation analyzes the writing of the first Afghan histories, which took place across regions between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Although Perso-Arabic authors had long identified groups of people as “Afghan,” those who belonged to this community did not write about themselves until a specific historical context. This context, I argue, was the interface between the emerging Mughal Empire (r. 1526-1857) and the Afghan-led Lodi (r. 1451-1526) sultanates of Delhi, “the capital of all Hindustan” in the mid-sixteenth century. In light of this conflict, the Afghans who called the Indian subcontinent home felt an urgency to define what it meant to be an Afghan and how their membership in this community related to their future in this space. They considered their possibilities through a series of historical texts written in multiple literary genres, each of which attested to the Afghans’ remarkable political and spiritual role in the history of Islamicate South Asia. Although the arrival of the Mughals strongly determined the shape of Afghan claims to power and authority in India, this dissertation demonstrates the vast and varied discursive worlds that Afghans drew upon to imagine the historical significance of their community in the world. Engaging with the repositories of wisdom embedded in the classics of Persian prose and poetry, the discourses of Sufi sainthood, and Islamic historiography, the authors of the Afghan past demonstrated their familiarity with a cosmopolitan world of ideas that in turn shaped the contours of Afghan identity. Through their engagement with these resources, the writers of these texts imagined how “the Afghan way” made them ideal leaders in the diverse and distant contexts in which they might find themselves. By the end of the eighteenth century, Afghans emerged with a clearly articulated sense of identity inspired by their historical movement and animated with a desire to perpetuate that mobility in the future.