The present article seeks to discuss the prevailing ideas and practices of frontier among the Mughals. Concurrently, it considers the ways in which the Portuguese Asian Empire perceived this expanding imperial space. The Mughal emperors engaged in a strong universalistic discourse, which ultimately pointed towards the idea of an infinite Timurid India. To be sure, the Portuguese were hit by this imperial rhetoric, but they rested on intriguing mechanisms of self-legitimacy, like arguing that the Northern white neighbors of the Estado da Índia were newcomers and actually foreigners in India. Additionally, The Portuguese understood the striking difference between Mughal imperial rhetoric and the actual frontier turbulence on the ground and, since the early years of Mughal rule, they sought to identify spaces of demarcation in Gujarat, Bengal and the Deccan.

This article seeks to trace the profile of the governors (mutasaddis) of the main port-cities (especially Surat and, to a lesser extent, Cambay) of the Mughal province of Gujarat in the first half of the seventeenth century. My research on the careers of individual mutasaddis – based mainly (but not exclusively) on existent Portuguese materials – allows us to better understand the social world of those occupying key positions in the ‘waterfront’ of the Mughal Empire and its dealings extensively with the European powers (Portuguese, Dutch and English). Hence, the analysis of the professional and personal trajectories of the Indian Muslim doctor Muqarrab Khan and the Persian Mir Musa Mu'izzul Mulk presented here demonstrate how far business, politics and cultural patronage were often entangled in the career of a Mughal mutasaddi of Gujarat.

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This essay explores the problem of imposture in the Mughal empire, through the case of Sultan Dawar Bakhsh, or Bulaqi, who ruled brie y in the late 1620s. Though of cial Mughal histories had it that he was executed in January 1628 along with several other princes, various persons claiming his identity surfaced, rst in India and then in Iran. We examine the views of Mughal, Portuguese, Iranian and other sources on these claimants, and also explore what forms of proof were sought by different early modern agents in order to satisfy themselves of the identity of a returning prince.Cette contribution examine le probl me de lÕimposture dans lÕEmpire moghol en tudiant le cas du Sultan Dawar Bakhsh ou Bulaqi, qui a r gn pendant quelques mois en 1627-28. Selon les chroniques mogholes de lÕ poque, Bulaqi aurait t ex cut en janvier 1628 avec plusieurs autres princes. Mais lÕon sait que pendant la d cennie suivante, plusieurs personnages se sont manifest s, tout dÕabord en Inde et ensuite en Iran, pr tendant tre le sultan disparu. En croisant les informations fournies par les textes et des documents dÕarchives assez vari s, en provenance de lÕEtat portugais des Indes, de lÕEmpire moghol et de lÕEtat safavide, lÕanalyse suit pas ˆ pas le parcours de ce Martin Guerre moghol pour appr cier les preuves apport es sur son identit .

The Book of Imaginary Beings, by the celebrated Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, appeared in 1969. This was the English translation of the revised and expanded second edition of an anthology of fantastical stories he had published two years before in association with Margarita Guerrero (El Libro de los seres imaginarios). According to the author, it was a “handbook of the strange creatures conceived through time and space by the human imagination,” a topic that was known to fascinate him. In fact, the success of Borges' work shows that such creatures appeared to hold as great a fascination for contemporary society as they had held over other societies many centuries before. Perhaps this brief evocation of Borges' interest in imaginary beings from other times and from all cultures—even if fantasies certainly do not hold an identical value in each historical period and the same significance in every culture—may help to demonstrate how mistaken it is to think that such ‘aberrations’ and ‘anomalies’ have entirely faded as ‘modernity’ has emerged. However, Borges did make it clear that the beings he was dealing with—whether the Indian elephant-headed god Ganesha or the monstrous Kujatha—were ‘imaginary,’ and he took care to distinguish them from other, let us say, ‘real’ entities. Such a clear demarcation has not always been feasible, and it is precisely the changing status of the ‘strange and marvelous’ that lies at the center of this essay.