Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 28 (2020): 459-464 Book Review Emma J. Flatt, The Courts of the Deccan Sultanates: Living Well in the Persian Cosmopolis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), xix + 318 pp. ISBN 978-1-108-48193-9. Price: £75.00 (cloth). Meia Walravens University of Antwerp (meia.walravens@uantwerpen.be) E mma J. Flatt’s The Courts of the Deccan Sultanates is a convincing and expertly written study of courtly culture in the Bahmani sultanate (1347–1528) and its fve successor sultan- ates, Bijapur (ca. 1490–1686), Ahmadnagar (ca. 1490–1636), Berar (ca. 1490–1574), Bidar (ca. 1492–1619), and Golkonda (ca. 1501–1687). The members of the courtly societies of these Indo-Islamic states had roots in (most prominently) north India, Iran, and Central Asia, and they had adopted Persian as the language of the 1. E.g., Jean Aubin, “De Kûhbanân à Bidar: La famille Niʿmatullahī,” Studia Iranica 20, no. 2 (1991): 233–261; Simonetta Casci, “Cultural Mobility in the Deccan: The Afaqis’ Long Journey,” Deccan Studies 7, no. 2 (2014): 5–23; Richard M. Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761: Eight Indian Lives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 59–77; Muḥsin Maʿṣūmī, “ʿAnāṣir-i qawmī-yi tashkīl dihanda-yi jāmiʿa-yi Dakan dar dawra-yi Bahmanīyān va chigūnagī-yi taʿāmul-i ānhā bā yakdīgar,” Majalla-yi ʿilmī-pizhūhishī-yi dānishkada-yi adabiyāt va ʿulūm-i insānī-yi dānishgāh-i Iṣfahān 2, no. 53 (1387 Sh./2008): 81–91; Muhammad Suleman Siddiqi, “Ethnic Change in the Bahmanid Society at Bidar: A.D. 1422–1538,” Islamic Culture 60, no. 3 (1986): 61–80; idem, “The Pro-Afaqi Policy of Ahmad Shah Wali Bahmani: Its Impact and Consequences,” Deccan Studies 11, no. 2 (2013): 25–48; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Iranians Abroad: Intra-Asian Elite Migration and Early Modern State Formation,” Journal of Asian Studies 51, no. 2 (1992): 340–363. court and administration. Scholarship in the feld shows a long-standing interest in studying these elite migrants to the Deccan. 1 Prompted by the observation that courtiers moved as easily between the Deccan’s courts as they did to them, Flatt now aims to elucidate what practices and ideas allowed their easy integration and their high degree of mobility. As such, the book also fts within a growing body of scholarly literature that pays attention to the topic of mobility—not only of people, © 2020 Meia Walravens. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source.