India has never been isolated. Jutting into the heart of the Indian Ocean – the world’s oldest maritime zone – and connected to the Iranian plateau by several strategic mountain passes, the Indo-Gangetic plain and the great peninsula to its south have long been a major crossroads of transregional movement and exchange. Pathways leading to and across the subcontinent have carried a wide range of global flows, while migrating populations brought or took away diverse cultural traditions embracing statecraft, architecture, warfare, cuisine, religion and much more. Although some of these flows had very deep roots in time, they all moved with a quickening pace between the eleventh and eighteenth centuries, the period of this book’s concern.
As a subset of these transregional flows, Persian texts and Persian-speakers circulated through West, Central and South Asia from the eleventh century in expanding and increasingly dense networks. Artisans, mercenaries, Sufi shaikhs, slaves, poets, scholars, adventurers, diplomats, migrants, pilgrims and merchants all travelled along the maritime and overland routes that both undergirded and constituted the Persianate world. For most of these peoples, whatever their ethnic background or geographical origin, facility in Persian was an acquired skill. Yet even rudimentary acquaintance with the language exposed them to a stable canon of Persian texts, together with the sensibilities and norms of sociability they elaborated. In the present age, when South Asia has been absorbed in an Anglophone world, it is easy to forget India’s central place in an earlier, Persophone world. For centuries Persian had been the pre-eminent language of diplomatic discourse in India. Even before the Mughal age, Lodi rulers had employed members of Hindu scribal communities and issued bilingual revenue documents in Persian and Hindavi.1 During the Afghan interregnum that followed the Mughal conquest, Sher Shah appointed two writers (karkuns) for each district, one for Persian and one for Hindavi.2
The big breakthrough, however, came in 1582 when Akbar, with the apparent aim of promoting a political culture that would arch over the Mughal realm’s diverse religious and cultural communities, established Persian as the official language. It was to be used at every level of the Mughals’ bureaucracy, from the imperial capitals down to the most remote settlements in the rural hinterland.3 Within a few generations, India had become a major centre of the Persian-speaking or -reading world. An Italian who travelled through Gujarat in 1623 considered that in Mughal territories Persian was more commonly used than vernacular languages.4 By 1700 India was probably the world’s leading centre for the patronage of Persian literature and scholarship, with an estimated seven times more people literate in Persian than in Iran.5 For scribal castes that had traditionally served state bureaucracies such as the Kayasthas or Khatris, facility in Persian was a practical necessity. Gaining proficiency in it, moreover, was no more traumatic than acquiring English during the British Raj, since Persian, notwithstanding its extensive use in Sufi writings of all sorts, was not tied to liturgical or scriptural Islam, as was Arabic. Rather, in seventeenth-century north India it was viewed as an unproblematic, neutral language of everyday correspondence, literary expression and social mobility.6
Partially meeting the growing demand for a working knowledge of Persian was the system of schools, or madrasas, that Akbar had reformed.7 Village schools, or maktabs, also introduced India’s scribal castes to basic Persian literacy. From the age of four, children of the Kayastha caste were taught practical skills such as accounting (siyaqi), enabling them to tabulate rent rates and audit revenue accounts. Manning the lower tiers of the Mughal revenue machine, Kayasthas typically served as land registrars (qanungo) and village accountants (patwari), providing the institutional mortar of the whole governing edifice. Higher up in the system, Kayasthas served as news writers, revenue reporters, petition writers, surveyors or even court readers. In all these capacities, it was their facility in Persian that gave them not only employment in the Mughal bureaucracy but status in the larger Persianate world, for a maktab curriculum invariably included classics drawn from the Persian literary cannon, such as Sa‘di’s Gulistan or Firdausi’s Shahnama. In the process, Kayasthas gradually became acculturated to Persianate norms, adopting Persian pen names and attending musical rituals (qawwali) at Sufi shrines in centres like Allahabad or Lucknow.8
In addition, from at least the fourteenth century versified bilingual wordbooks circulated throughout the Persian-speaking world. Known as nisabs, these simplified, rustic dictionaries interpreted words from an unfamiliar language to a familiar one. Prior to the mid sixteenth century such books had explained Hindavi terms for Persian-knowing immigrants to India.9 From the mid sixteenth century onwards, however, they had the opposite aim of interpreting Persian words for Hindavi-speakers. After Akbar had made Persian the sole language for all levels of the Mughal bureaucracy, such wordbooks proliferated, their numbers exploding in the eighteenth century. Many of them were intended for children of groups occupying the social space between the labouring and ruling classes, particularly scribal castes, with a view to socializing them into the Mughal world from a tender age. For such groups, nisabs provided an introduction to the language of power and an avenue to higher education, and hence to the vast horizons afforded by the financial, political and cultural cosmopolitanism of the Persianate world.10 In short, Persian in the Mughal period was not just a bureaucratic medium. Bilingual wordbooks served as guides for accessing courtly culture. It is not coincidental that the Persian word for ‘dictionary’, farhang, also means ‘good breeding’, ‘greatness’ or ‘education’.11 In eighteenth-century Bihar, Hindu and Muslim zamindars established madrasas where Hindu literati taught the language, and where students studied classic texts such as the poetry of Sa‘di.12 All descriptions of the educational attainments of Bengali aristocrats of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries emphasize their proficiency in Persian, which was even accorded the status of a shastra – that is, a formal intellectual discipline, and not just a practical medium to be used for keeping revenue accounts or composing government petitions.13
Whereas Persian–Hindavi word-books, madrasas and maktabs helped make Persian the language of ordinary governance across north India and the Deccan, the Mughal court had loftier aims. A ‘classical’ canon of Persian literature as we know it today had been consolidated and stabilized under Timurid patronage in centres such as late-fifteenth-century Herat, a city that both Babur and Humayun visited in the twilight of that city’s Timurid glory.14 Having begun their imperial career in India just as their Timurid kin had ended theirs in Central Asia, the Mughals therefore inherited a Persian literary past that was already coherent, systematized and available.15 The Mughal court then not only lavishly patronized that canon, but endeavoured to place India at the centre of the wider Persophone world. It was to this end that Akbar commissioned the compilation of a comprehensive Persian dictionary, the Farhang-i Jahangiri, so called because it was completed in 1606 during Jahangir’s reign. The compilers of this work of some 9,000 entries consulted forty-four dictionaries in the course of its making, thereby seeking to consolidate all previous lexicographical efforts and embrace the entirety of the Persian language.
Contemporary accounts of the Mughal court suggest how its cosmopolitan atmosphere overlapped with the Persianate world. Chandar Bhan Brahman (d. c.1666/70), who enjoyed a long career as imperial secretary for Jahangir, Shah Jahan and ‘Alamgir, described one of Shah Jahan’s assemblies as including:
Tajiks, Kurds, Georgians, Tatars, Russians, Ethiopians, Circassians and various others from the lands of Rum, Egypt, Syria, ‘Iraq, Arabia, ‘Ajam, Persia, Gilan, Mazandaran, Khurasan, Transoxiana, the Qipchaq steppes, Turkistan, Georgia and Kurdistan, each in their respective places.
So too with the various communities of Hindustan, from among the masters of excellence and perfection, and men of the sword and the pen, such as sayyids of pure ancestry, martial shaikh-zadas, Afghan tribes [alusat] like the Lodis, Rohillas, Khweshgis, Yusufza’is and others, not to mention various classes of Rajputs, Ranjas, Rajas, Raos, and Rais, among them the Rathors, Sisodias, Kachwahas, Hadas, Kurus, Chauhans, Jhalas, Chandrawats, Jaduns, Tonwars, Baghelas, Baiswaras, Gujars, Pawars [Paramaras], Bhadauriyas, Singhis, Bundelas, Shagarwals, and other attendees from the rest of India.16
Inasmuch as all the sites mentioned were centres of Persianate cultural production, Chandar Bhan Brahman was implicitly aligning the court’s geographical reach with that of the Persianate world, while placing the Mughal court in its conceptual centre.17 Many Rajputs certainly saw themselves as sharing in that world. The Manacharita, a vernacular biography written in 1585, falsely credits the Rajput mansabdar Man Singh with Mughal victories far beyond India, including in Kirghizstan, Samarqand, Merv, Khurasan, Hormuz, Baghdad, Isfahan and Tabriz.18 In the author’s fertile imagination, the territorial extent of the Mughal empire overlapped much of the Persianate world, and in this reading it was a Rajput general who had brought it about.
In the end, what sustained this universe was the circulation of people along established transregional networks that connected key centres of Persianate cultural production. The moral authority underpinning this universe derived from a canon of classical texts that circulated along those same networks, providing peoples of diverse ethnic or religious backgrounds with a common point of reference. The texts comprising this canon were never fixed. Chandar Bhan Brahman compiled his own list of texts that he considered fundamental for shaping a well-rounded, cultured person, and which he recommended for his own son to study and absorb.19 Yet some literary genres remained constant over time, including advice literature, poetry of all sorts (epic, lyric, mystical), biographies, histories, treatises, narratives, even proverbs. Certain authors regularly appeared in the canon, such as Firdausi, Sa‘di, Nizami, Amir Khusrau, Tusi and Jami.20 Taught in madrasas and other educational outlets at both elite and non-elite levels, works by these writers were read, reread, memorized, recited and quoted so often and so widely that to varying degrees their readers or listeners internalized their values and sentiments.21
Owing to the extent of Persian literacy among India’s non-elite classes, considerable Persian vocabulary penetrated India’s vernacular languages, even as those languages were attaining their own status as literary vehicles. It is telling that, shortly after his coronation in 1674, Shivaji commissioned the compilation of a Persian–Sanskrit glossary, the Rajavyavaharakośa, intended to help government administrators find Sanskrit equivalents for Persian lexical items already in common use among Marathi-speaking clerks, accountants and revenue officials.22 The very attempt to purge the spoken language of Persian vocabulary indicates the degree to which the western Deccan had become absorbed into the Persianate world during the previous several centuries.23 Persian vocabulary even entered Indian religious thought, with the Sikh tradition absorbing such key lexical items as hukm (‘grace of God’), langar (‘communal meal’), khalsa (‘community of sworn initiates’) and the term by which Guru Nanak referred to himself – tabl-i baz, or ‘herald’.24 Persian literary culture also entered Indian thought streams via translations, commentaries and adaptations of canonical works in India’s vernacular languages. The Tamil ‘tellings’ of the popular text The Book of One Thousand Questions (Ayira Macala) claimed Persian origins traceable to sixteenth-century south India.25 Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries Persian romance narratives, especially Nizami’s Layli va Majnun and Jami’s Yusuf va Zulaykha, enjoyed numerous translations in vernacular languages.26 In this way values and sensibilities embedded in works of the Persian canon were absorbed by Indian populations having no facility in the Persian language.
The case of Burma’s Arakan coastal region illustrates this process. Between the mid fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries the region’s Buddhist kings, seeking to integrate themselves with a maritime world saturated with Persian culture, adopted Persian royal titles and issued coins in the Perso-Arabic script, as well as those of Sanskrit and Arakanese. By the mid seventeenth century Arakanese was used as the language of the ruling elite, Sanskrit that of the court’s Brahmins, Pali that of the Buddhist canon, Bengali that of the kingdom’s sizeable Muslim population (the ancestors of today’s Rohingya community) and Persian that of administration and diplomacy. Connecting the Buddhist court with the Persianized maritime world beyond Arakan were literati such as the poet-translator Alaol (fl. 1651–71), one of thousands of Bengalis whom Arakanese pirates had seized from lower Bengal, enslaved and taken to labour at the Arakanese capital of Mrauk-U. With the help of powerful patrons, Alaol rose in courtly circles and adapted such Persian classics as Nizami’s Haft Paykar and Sikandar-nama to vernacular Bengali, thereby conveying a high, transregional Persianate tradition into a local idiom.27 Whereas the poet had got to Arakan via established slave routes, Persian literary motifs reached Arakan via commercial routes that crossed the Bay of Bengal. Whenever a Persian literary theme or motif was adopted in Dakani – the dialect of Hindavi spoken in the Qutb Shahi sultanate of Golconda – that same motif would appear several years later in Bengali texts composed in Arakan by Alaol or other poets.28 In this way, routes of literary transmission were mapped on existing migration corridors and commercial networks.