The first of three lectures in series called "Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness in Early Modern Eurasia," "Courtly Competition" will deal with how Muslim and non-Muslim states in South Asia dealt with one other as court-systems in a situation of mutual borrowing as well as intense competition, which sometimes became violent conflict.
It will treat the question of the court as a potentially 'secular' sphere, where the religious identities of participants were at times somewhat attenuated or rendered irrelevant, only to rise again to the surface periodically albeit in unexpected ways.