Imagining Iran before Nationalism: Geocultural Meanings of Land in Azar's Atashkadeh

This article outlines geocultural meaning of land in a famous late 18th-century tazkirah (commemorative biographical compendium), Aza Begdili's Atashkadah. In doing so, it historicizes the meaning of Iran in the context of a broader Persianate world (including Central and South Asia) that is strikingly different from modern nationalism

Negotiating Women’s Rights: Activism, Class, and Modernization in Pahlavi Iran

Examines women's rights activism undertaken within the authoritarian Pahlavi state, which as been rendered invisible by both pro and anti-royalist historical narratives

Indian Friends, Iranian Selves, Persianate Modern

This article examines the figure of the Indian friend in late nineteenth-century Persian-language modernist writings, specically those by Fath ‘Alī Ākhūndzādah, Jamāl al-Dīn “al-Afghānī,” and writers published in the Calcutta newspaper Habl al-Matīn. These writings drew on older Persianate ideas of moral refinement and ethical behavior to put forth modern visions of self and collective association. This process posed a self that was Iranian but identifiable according to Persianate notions of collectivity, allowing for simultaneous broader affiliations with Muslims, Indians, and Asians. That the intimate friend involved in this process of Persianate self and collective constitution was Indian suggests the need to consider Iranian and Indian modernity as part of an interconnected process informed by the lingering memory of a shared Persianate past and new modes of engagement into the early twentieth century

Introduction: After the Persianate

An Introduction to the special section of articles in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East on connections between Iran and India in the 19th and 20th centuries

Moral Refinement and Manhood in Persian

Under pressures of looming European imperialism, Iran’s declining economic, social and political position was seen as the result of collective moral degradation. Justice as rule of law was seen as a necessary prerequisite for the restoration of moral refinement that would restore Iran’s place in the hierarchy of civilizations. A central emotion in this figuring was shame, linking individual moral abasement to the abrogation of political sovereignty. By the close of the nineteenth century, with the rise of mass politics and moveable type printing that enlarged the public sphere, emphasis had shifted to the centrality of individual moral refinement for the establishment of justice. Older Persianate ideas of civility, of moral refinement as idealized masculinity, were linked to the restoration of civilization. This linkage was made by extending the inviolability of masculine honor to the body politic

Lingering with Adab, before Rushing to Literature

This essay aims to stay awhile with the concept of adab (proper asthetic and ethical form) before rushing to the Euro-American concept and practice of literature, which has been the translation of adab common since the late nineteenth century. Against the broader histories of this translation, I focus on the older meaning of adab in early mod- ern Persian traditions and ask what it can show us about how texts come into being and gain meaning within its world. Texts were gifts, created and exchanged within various forms of companionship. Adab was textual form at once aesthetic and ethical. But it also had an important constitutive sociality, beyond the institutional, one unfamiliar to our contemporary understanding of literature. This lingering brings a presumed reading subject into view—a homo amicus, let us say—embedded in and concerned with social relationships. It also proposes that these generative relations provide cues for broadening our array of interpretive practices

Space, Sociality, and Sources of Pleasure: A Response to Sanjay Subrahmanyam

This response essay engages with the themes of space, sociality, and sources (of pleasure and of scholarship) in Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s article in this issue, “The Hidden Face of Surat.” I reflect on how the Persianate adab that was a dominant cultural form in this port city might cause us to mitigate our analytical concepts when approaching phenomena from different historical contexts. I propose historical inquiry as a form of translation, to look for ways of understanding difference and engaging across it that may or may not be the same as European cosmopolitanism

The Necessary Ornaments of Place: Similarity and Alterity in the Persianate Imaginary

This article analyzes representations of place in seventeenth-century texts to consider how early modern Persians made sense of the world. The Persian formulation of alterity stands in contrast to Edward Said’s formulation about Orientalism, by which Europe makes itself into the West. In early modern Persianate Asia, common representations of place appear in geographical and travel writing. These shared features, which I call ornaments, adorned both places that shared a learned Persian language, Muslim rule, and those beyond, in other parts of Asia and Africa. The presence or absence of these ornaments made the world intelligible for early modern Persians, creating categories of similarity and alterity that were partial, diffuse, and aporetic, defying the self-other distinctions of Orientalism. This form of knowledge about the self and the world then generated the possibility for encounters different from both modern colonial power and the nation-state

Accounting for Difference: A Comparative Look at the Autobiographical Travel Narratives of Hazin Lāhiji and 'Abd-al-Karim Kashmiri

This paper examines the mid-eighteenth century historical memoir of Mohammad Ali Hazin Lāhiji and the auto-biographical travel narrative of 'Abd al-Karim Kashmiri as a way to understand a shared tradition of cultural conceptions and textual borrowing, even in the midst of different attributions of historical meaning and valuations within that culture. Hazin often serves as an iconic figure, representative of the changing relationship between Iran and Hindustan in the eighteenth century. Reading Hazin's memoir in relation to Kashmiri's travels with Nadir Shah's army from Delhi to Iran on his way to hajj problematizes this dominant reading. Underneath diverging and sometimes conflicting claims in these texts, history is represented in a way that evinces similar ideas of home, country, and ideal political rule in the context of travel and exile

Adab as Literary Form and Social Conduct: Reading the Gulistan in Late Mughal India

This essay examines the role and meaning of Shaykh Mushrif al-Dīn “Saʻdī” Shīrāzī’s Gulistān in late Mughal India. As the prose primer for a Persian education, the Gulistān encompassed the double meaning of adab, as exemplar both of literary form and of proper conduct. I explore instances in which the original text is cited in the work of Sirāj al-Din ʻAli Khān Ārzū (1689-1756 CE), a scholar and poet, who also wrote a commentary on the text. I then explore the larger context of Ārzū’s life and work in the context of mid- eighteenth-century Delhi, to situate the stakes of social and literary adab in a time of political fragmentation and social upheaval. Patronized by high-ranking Mughal officials, Ārzū was engaged in a larger project of recouping the cultural prestige of the imperial capital as political power devolved to regional centers in the face of factional politics and external invasion. Such an analysis seeks to historicize particular readings of classical texts of Persianate education