"The Curious Case of Carnatic: The Last Nawab of Arcot (d. 1855) and Persian Literary Culture", The Indian Economic and Social History Review (53.4), 2016 (original) (raw)
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India in the Persian World of Letters
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Persian literary culture was experiencing a transformation: A poetics that explicitly valued newness, the “tāzah-goʾī” or “Fresh Speech,” threatened the traditional system of literary authority (sanad). To address this disconnect, Ārzū reiterated the importance of tradition as a unifying factor across the Persian world of letters while also systematizing the expertise of living poets. This chapter argues against the common but anachronistic interpretation of the tāzah-goʾī debate as a contest between Iranian and Indian aesthetics. It analyzes Ārzū’s influential disagreements with the long-dead Abū al-Barakāt Munīr Lahorī (1610–44) and with his contemporary Shaiḳh Muḥammad ʿAlī Ḥazīn Lāhījī (1692–1766). In Ārzū’s framing, Munīr and Ḥazīn both stood for a literary purism that valorized the works of the pre-tāzah-goʾī poets, but their claims to be the present-day guardians of this earlier poetic style were undercut by their inconsistency.
Iranian Studies, 2022
Persianate pasts die hard. Despite the birth of nation-states, advent of colonialism, rise of national literatures, and emergence of new global technologies, the Persianate connections defining the texts, idioms, and vocabularies that bound together large swaths of Islamic Eurasia throughout the early-modern period continued to shape and inflect cultural and literary production in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries established the high-water mark of Persianate transregionalism, then the following two centuries were defined not so much by the undoing of this world in toto, but by its redeployment, reimagining, and regeneration in new cultural guises and (trans)national contexts. Exchanges across borders and languages helped to articulate new meanings for Persian texts. Educational practices in British India and journalistic ones in Central Asia provided venues for Persianate norms to be preserved, contested, and consecrated. The internationalism of the Soviet East created a new avenue for dynamic conversations about the nature of Persianate heritage and traditions. While new national practices and political ecologies were taking shape across Afghanistan, the Caucasus, Iran, and Central and South Asia, refashionings of Persianate pasts persisted. It is an exploration of such refashionings and the people who participated in them that form the contents of this special issue.
Iranian Studies
Persianate pasts die hard. Despite the birth of nation-states, advent of colonialism, rise of national literatures, and emergence of new global technologies, the Persianate connections defining the texts, idioms, and vocabularies that bound together large swaths of Islamic Eurasia throughout the early-modern period continued to shape and inflect cultural and literary production in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries established the high-water mark of Persianate transregionalism, then the following two centuries were defined not so much by the undoing of this world in toto, but by its redeployment, reimagining, and regeneration in new cultural guises and (trans)national contexts. Exchanges across borders and languages helped to articulate new meanings for Persian texts. Educational practices in British India and journalistic ones in Central Asia provided venues for Persianate norms to be preserved, contested, and consecrated. The inte...
Iran, 2021
Until now, the textual history of the poetry transmitted in Persian literary anthologies has solely been the concern of editors preparing works for print publication. This article contends that an investigation of variance is also of relevance for writing the cultural history of how anthologists encountered, manipulated, and published poems in the manuscript age. While a shortage of independent textual witnesses makes it difficult to undertake this kind of study for the earliest periods of Persian literary history, such research can be conducted for later eras, including the eleventh/seventeenth century, the time-frame covered by the biographical anthology of Muhammad Tahir Nasrabadi (d. ca. 1110/1698). In order to sample the degree of variance present in Nasrabadi's anthology, his recensions of the verse of twenty poets are compared here with the available manuscript copies of the same twenty poets' collected works. Instead of judging Nasrabadi's accuracy in reproducing each fragment, I evaluate what variance can tell us about paths of textual transmission between Mughal North India, the Deccan Sultanates, and Safavid Iran. The evidence presented here reinforces the supposition that anthologies are fundamentally shaped by the social networks out of which they arise. *****Link to 50 free copies of the publisher's version***** https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/NNQVAP7JNVT8X473HR26/full?target=10.1080/05786967.2021.1911762