A Desire for Meaning: Ḳhān-i Ārzū's Philology and the Place of India in the Eighteenth-Century Persianate World

During the early-modern period, Persian was the language of the imperial court and a prestigious literary medium in South Asia. Not only did Persian connect the Subcontinent with intellectual and cultural trends across western and central Asia, but during the early-modern period, India--even compared with Iran--was arguably the world's main center for the patronage of Persian literature and scholarship. However, our understanding of the societal role of Indo-Persian (that is, Persian used in South Asia) is still hazy in part because the end of Persian as a language of power in India has been so historiographically over-determined. Colonial intellectuals and nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalists in Iran and India have claimed that by the eighteenth century Indo-Persian had become an artificial, ossified tradition in decline, symptomatic of a political system in decline, whose ineluctable destiny was to be replaced by supposedly more democratic and properly Indian languages like Hindi and Urdu. The present study seeks to nuance and in some cases to completely revise this declinist narrative through an examination of eighteenth-century primary sources. This dissertation traces the development of philology (the study of literary language, known in Persian under several names including 'ilm-i lughat) within the Indo-Persian tradition, concentrating on its social and political ramifications, and the modes by which Indo-Persian writers smoothed the way for the adoption of the vernacular in contexts formerly reserved for Persian. The eighteenth century is a hinge between the pre-modern and the colonial modern, and yet our understanding of the intellectual history of that century is much poorer than for the colonial period. The most prolific and arguably most influential Indo-Persian philologist of the early-modern period was Siraj al-Din 'Ali Khan (1687/8-1756), whose nom de plume was Arzu. Besides being a much-admired poet in Persian and Urdu, Arzu was a rigorous theoretician of language. Arzu's conception of language accounted for literary innovation and historical change, a project whose newness he acknowledges and which was necessary in the face of the tazah go'i [literally, "fresh speaking"] movement in Persian literature. Although later scholarship has tended to frame this debate in anachronistically nationalist terms (Iranians versus Indians), the primary sources complicate the picture. The present study draws an analogy to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in Europe to show that the contemporary concern had far less to do with geography than with the question of how to interpret innovative "fresh speaking" poetry (just as in Europe the concern had been over assessing the value of texts not modeled on the Classics). Arzu used historical reasoning to argue that as a cosmopolitan language Persian could not be the property of one nation and be subject to one narrow kind of interpretation. In doing so he carefully defined the differences in usage within the Persian cosmopolis, and concluded that Indo-Persian usage was within the norms of Persian usage generally, meaning that properly educated Indians had as much right as Iranian native speakers to innovate in Persian. An intervention offered by the present research is the recognition that Arzu's theories, which superficially seem to concern only Persian, apply to language more generally. A study of his work can therefore elucidate the mechanisms that allowed Urdu to gain acceptance in elite literary circles in northern India during his lifetime. An often-overlooked aspect of intellectual history, both in India and in the West, is that advances in vernacular literary culture have usually come about not through a repudiation of the classics and their language but rather through a sustained engagement with them by bilingual writers. By changing attitudes about rekhtah, a Persianized form of vernacular composition that would later be renamed and reconceptualized as Urdu, Arzu defined and systematized vernacular literary production. Furthermore, this study presents a challenge to the persistent misconception that Indians started writing Urdu because they were ashamed of their poor Persian

India in the Persian World of Letters

This study traces the development of philology (the analysis of literary language) in the Persian tradition in India, concentrating on its socio-political ramifications. The most influential Indo-Persian philologist of the eighteenth century was Sirāj al-Dīn ʿAlī Ḳhān (d. 1756), whose pen-name was Ārzū. Besides being a respected poet, Ārzū was a rigorous theoretician of language whose intellectual legacy was side-lined by colonialism. His conception of language accounted for literary innovation and historical change in part to theorize the tāzah-goʾī [literally, “fresh-speaking”] movement in Persian literary culture. Although later scholarship has tended to frame this debate in anachronistically nationalist terms (Iranian native speakers versus Indian imitators), the primary sources show that contemporary concerns had less to do with geography than with the question of how to assess innovative “fresh-speaking” poetry, a situation analogous to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in early modern Europe. Ārzū used historical reasoning to argue that as a cosmopolitan language Persian could not be the property of one nation or be subject to one narrow kind of interpretation. Ārzū also shaped attitudes about reḳhtah, the Persianized form of vernacular poetry that would later be renamed and reconceptualized as Urdu, helping the vernacular to gain acceptance in elite literary circles in northern India. This study puts to rest the persistent misconception that Indians started writing the vernacular because they were ashamed of their poor grasp of Persian at the twilight of the Mughal Empire

Why Did Shah Hatim's Collected Works Spawn a Child?

One of the celebrated Urdu poets of the eighteenth century was Shah Hatim (1699-1783), who is regarded as particularly influential because he abandoned the prevailing style of Urdu composition, which freely mixed indigenous Sanskrit-derived words with Persian and Arabic ones, in favor of a style in which the technical vocabulary was purely Perso-Arabic. Uniquely in the annals of Urdu literary history, Shah Hatim changed his mind about his diction after publishing his Collected Works [dīvān] and so prepared a new dīvān, entitled Dīvānzādah, or Child of the Collected Works, to reflect his new sensibilities. Many Persian and Urdu poets published multiple dīvāns, but none are so radically different from one another as Shah Hatim's. This paper examines the Dīvānzādah's preface, which is beguilingly short and simple at just two printed pages, and considers the larger context of Shah Hatim's aesthetic choices. I will argue that his desire to Persianize Urdu is a reflection of a sociolinguistic landscape in which vernacular literatures were becoming more assertive but Persian remained a high prestige language which was perceived as capable of elevating vernacular composition. Although Indian literatures had drawn on Persian tropes and vocabulary for centuries, what appears to be new in the mid-eighteenth century is a sense that Persian could be a vehicle by which vernacular literature could be made more respectable. Shah Hatim provides us with perhaps the only self-reflective prose on Urdu composition from the eighteenth century, and it is a window on how the torch of literary production was passed from the classical language, Persian, to the vernacular, Urdu

NEGOTIATING LANGUAGES: URDU, HINDI, AND THE DEFINITION OF MODERN SOUTH ASIA

“Mindlessly thumbing the lexicon” was my Latin teacher’s expression for being insufficiently prepared for class. (That was at the end of the twentieth century, though it might as well have been the eighteenth.) Once we had a grasp of all but the most abstruse grammar rules, knowing Latin meant knowing the definitions of words even though, except at exam time, there was always a dictionary available to mindlessly thumb. Dictionaries, like the disintegrating paperback Collins Latin Dictionary I used in those days, are ubiquitous and generally treated with a kind of reverence otherwise accorded only to scripture. Dictionaries are of course not sacred texts—no God would be so vengeful as to communicate with His chosen people lexicographically—and yet they are unfairly neglected as objects of academic study. Like other texts, dictionaries should be placed within a historical context and interpreted

After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Ghazals and Other Poems

Pity Christopher Marlowe, who had the misfortune of being born in the same year as William Shakespeare. While every teenager in the English-speaking world is compelled to read several of Shakespeare’s plays, Marlowe is just a name, a “not-Shakespeare,” to nearly everyone except English literature majors. In late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Delhi, the poet whose fame crowds out the others was Amīr Khusraw (1253‒1325). Writing three centuries later, the historian ʿAbdul Qādir Badāʾūnī compared Khusraw to the morning sun and his contemporaries to stars who faded in his brilliance. The brightest of these, the Marlowe to Khusraw’s Shakespeare, was Ḥasan Sijzī Dihlavī (1254‒c. 1330). In fact, the two men were close friends and fellow disciples of the Chishti Sufi saint Ḥażrat Niẓāmuddīn Awliyā (1238‒1325)

Bibliography for Delhi: Pages from a Forgotten History

This is the bibliography for my book Delhi: Pages from a Forgotten History. About the book: The megacity that is today’s Delhi is built upon thick layers of history. For a millennium, Delhi has been at the crossroads of trade, culture, and politics. The stories of its buildings and great historical personalities have been told many times, but this book approaches the past of India’s capital through its literary culture. Over the centuries writing and discussing literature was not just a leisure activity, but how educated people related to one another, a tool for practicing politics and building communities. By focussing on writers and thinkers, we meet a colourful cast of characters only glancingly mentioned in political histories. Many Delhiites today are surprised to learn that the language of their city’s cultural heyday was Persian. Despite first being brought to India by invaders, it eventually became an authentically Indian language used in both administration and literature. Although it was cultivated by an elite, it was also a widely available language of aspiration and opportunity, like English today. It connected India to the wider world, and the Indian Subcontinent, particularly Delhi, was once a place where talented poets and scholars from the whole Persian cultural world—from Turkey to western China—came to make their fortunes. The fact that Persian is effectively a dead language in India today is a barrier for understanding the past, but this book shows that it is much more familiar than we might have thought. The last glimmers of the living culture of Persian in India are fading, but it has a rich afterlife