Experiencing the Experience: Seydī ‘Alī Reis and the Indo-Muslim World

From the early days of the Empire to the mid-17th Century, the Indian Subcontinent was mostly unknown territory to Ottoman Turks. This assumption is reiterated in the earlier works (especially the Hind Edebiyatı of Cemil Meriç, who posited that the Ottoman intellectuals were not only indifferent to the Hindu tradition itself, but also to the greater Indo-Muslim world that flourished in the Moghul subcontinent. However, there are other accounts of Muslim India dating from this historical period, such as Seydi Ali Reis’ powerful memoir Mir’ātü’l-Memālik (The Mirror of Countries), which gives a completely different picture from that which Cemil Meriç would expect from an Ottoman intellectual. In Mir’ātü’l-Memālik, we do not see an ordinary admiral merely attempting to find his way out of northern India back to Istanbul, but rather a poet who participates in numerous poetry contests in Humayun’s Mughal court and wins them all. He pays homage to the great Indian and Chagatai masters of poetry and wins the heart of the Sultan himself with his charming and outspoken ghazals. Not only as a historical account but also as a literary text, Seydi Ali Reis’ book offers us something totally different from the cerebral approach to cultural learning taken by Cemil Meriç: rather than dealing with the experience as a separate and isolated phenomenon, Seydi Ali Reis chooses to live the experience by participating in it firsthand.