Cultural change is commonly assumed to be progressive, nevertheless it has neither an inherent politics nor an inevitable end result. As nationalism rises throughout the globe, many see ‘cultural change’ because the antidote to nationalist xenophobia. Such change was, the truth is, an integral a part of the emergence of nationwide literatures, cultures and identities in Iran and South Asia. Quite than leading to higher cosmopolitanism, Indo-Iranian change fostered trendy nationalism.
Right now, Persian is the nationwide language of Iran. Though it has a protracted historical past there, its nationwide standing and shut affiliation with the nation rely on occasions within the Nineteenth century. Because the Russian Empire swallowed up swathes of Iranian territory within the 1810s and ’20s, and the sclerotic Qajar dynasty ruling Iran proved incapable of resistance, Iranian nationalism emerged to problem each international imperialism and native despotism.
By the top of the Nineteenth century, Iranian intellectuals had been reworking Persian from the lingua franca of a centreless Persianate world spanning a lot of Asia into the language of nationwide id within the nation-state of Iran. Nationalist modernisers made reforming the Persian language a central mission, whether or not they had been democratic revolutionaries of the Constitutional Revolution (1905-11) or the authoritarian shahs of the Pahlavi dynasty (1925-79). Drawing on trendy literary histories of Persian written by each Iranians and Indians, they refashioned Persian right into a nationwide language, and Persian literature into nationwide heritage, positioning Iran because the proprietor of the Persianate custom.
The Persian language we all know right this moment was born out of interplay with Arabic and Islam. Its precursors parsig and dari – now recognized collectively as ‘Center Persian’ – had been utilized by Zoroastrian monks and by the Sasanians, the Iranian dynasty that fell to the Seventh-century Arab-Islamic conquest of Iran. Inside a few centuries after the rise of Islam, the Persian language took on a brand new id. It developed a brand new Arabic-derived script; giant quantities of Arabic loanwords; a literature closely indebted to Arabic kinds, metres and imagery; and a brand new title, farsi, additionally influenced by Arabic. (The phrase farsi displays, partly, the Arabic pronunciation of the sooner parsig.) Linguists name this Arabised type of the language ‘New Persian’. Within the ninth century, Muslim empires started patronising New Persian as a car for Islam, and unfold it to the Indian subcontinent.
Fashionable literary histories provided a special narrative of Persian. Twentieth-century Iranian nationalists sought to tell apart the Persian language from Arabic. For them, the language was a part of a steady Iranian civilisation stretching again to the Achaemenids (the dynasty that dominated c700-330 BCE), encompassing the ‘Previous Persian’ of the Achaemenid inscriptions, the ‘Center Persian’ of the Sasanian court docket (c225-650 CE), and the ‘New Persian’ that adopted the rise of Islam and endured to the current day. Iranian nationalists like the nice literary historian Muhammad-Taqi Bahar (1886-1951) emphasised the continuity of Persian over time, uninterrupted by Islam – and, by extension, Arabic – which they noticed as belonging to a definite civilisation.
Bahar’s civilisational paradigm, predicated on the notion of linguistic integrity and the affiliation of a folks with its language, got here from European philology. His efforts to point out Iranian continuity earlier than and after the rise of Islam had been a nationalist mission, formed by European Orientalism, particularly its new philological information of historical Iranian languages. These Nineteenth-century European philologists, and Bahar and lots of others who discovered from their work, grouped Persian with the Indo-European household of languages distinct from Semitic languages like Arabic. Quite than contemplating New Persian as a blended language with Arabic components, they constructed a story that emphasised the independence and continuity of Persian over the course of centuries. In doing so, they adopted a paradigm established by Nineteenth-century Germanic linguists whose scholarship categorized ‘Previous English’ (what had been referred to as the Anglo-Saxon language) and ‘Center English’ as precursors to trendy English.
Bahar and different Nineteenth-century Iranian nationalists weren’t the one ones within the historical past of the Persian language and literature. Indian Muslims had been additionally involved with the Persianate literary heritage. Persian had been a language of energy and studying in South Asia because the Eleventh century – they usually had as a lot of a declare to it as did Iranians.
The connection between Persian and an area language of South Asia that may later be known as Urdu mirrored the sooner relationship between Arabic and Persian. The weather that may represent Urdu’s id as a language had been largely borrowed from Persian. Chief amongst them is the Perso-Arabic script through which Urdu is written, versus the Devanagari script that may come to be related to Hindi. Urdu additionally has tens of hundreds of Persian loanwords, like dost (pal) and dil (coronary heart), together with Persian phrases of Arabic origin, like zarūrat (necessity). Furthermore, Urdu’s linguistic id was related to literature in Perso-Arabic kinds just like the ghazal, an amorous type of lyric poetry.
South Asian Muslim literary historians constructed a really totally different sort of historical past of Urdu than the Iranians had of Persian. Opposite to the Iranian story of continuity earlier than and after the approaching of Islam, South Asians emphasised rupture and hybridity as key to Urdu’s origins. In response to this telling, Urdu started with the arrival of Muslim empires within the Indian subcontinent within the Eleventh and twelfth centuries. Although the language had been utilized by folks of assorted religions, from the Nineteenth century onwards South Asians more and more noticed Urdu because the language of North Indian Muslims, in distinction to Hindi, related to Hindus. Quite than conceiving of their language by way of distinction from others, Indian Muslims embraced hybridity. Many nonetheless regard Urdu as inherently a mélange of languages: an Indic aspect (usually described as Hindi) in addition to Persian, Arabic and Turkish. The inclusion of Turkish in Urdu’s linguistic pedigree is particularly notable.
Iranian nationalists aligned themselves with the brand new Indo-European philology
The title of the language ‘urdu’ comes from a Turkic phrase for ‘camp’, and the English phrase ‘horde’ shares its Turkic etymology. Apart from this phrase, nonetheless, Turkic components in Urdu are few and much between. One examine discovered about 100 Turkic phrases, most of them obscure, out of 54,000 in a significant Urdu dictionary. For comparability, English has about as many loanwords from Japanese (like ‘tycoon’ and ‘tsunami’).
Claiming that Urdu was a combination that included Turkish allowed Indian Muslims to assert a family tree that related them, in a method, to the Ottoman Empire at a time when many Muslims longed for a robust caliphate to counter the weak spot they felt residing beneath British rule.
For contemporary Indian Muslims, treating ‘Arabic’ as a separate contributor to Urdu from ‘Persian’ was one other vital a part of giving Urdu a correct Muslim pedigree, a connection to ‘Muslim lands’ just like the Arab world. In actual fact, Urdu’s many Arabic loanwords had been borrowed by means of Persian, they usually nonetheless bore the traces of Persian pronunciation and spelling. Thus, phrases like zarūrat (necessity) – in the end from Arabic ḍarūra, however borrowed into Urdu from Persian zarūrat – got here to be conceived of as constituting the ‘Arabic aspect’ in Urdu. To make one other comparability with English, it is a little like insisting that the English phrase ‘ramen’ (from Japanese rāmen) ought to be thought of a Chinese language quite than Japanese loanword into English, because the Japanese phrase in the end derives from the Mandarin lāmiàn.
Simply as Indian Muslims had been claiming Turkish, Arabic and Persian because the Islamic progenitors of Urdu within the Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries, these similar languages had been being adopted as automobiles for secular nationalist initiatives within the nations the place they had been spoken. So these two historic narratives – Persian discreteness and Urdu hybridity – happened on the similar time and are contradictory, reflecting totally different relationships to Orientalist types of information about language.
Iranian nationalists aligned themselves with the brand new Indo-European philology, studying nationwide historical past by means of linguistics. So, just like the European linguists who established an evolutionary strategy to language, the Iranians emphasised continuity, on this case with the pre-Islamic interval and a linear improvement from Previous to Center to New Persian. British colonialism and Hindu nationalism made a story of putting up with linguistic historical past unavailable to Indian Muslims. The British recognized Sanskrit because the classical heritage of the Hindus, whereas they related Muslims with Arabic and Persian textual heritage that got here to the subcontinent from the Center East and Central Asia. As such, they located Hindi, and the Hindus, because the inheritors of Sanskrit, heirs to a permanent and indigenous ‘Aryan’ civilisation, and positioned Urdu-speaking Muslims as foreigners, outsiders to India.
As early because the 1850s, students proposed that the ancestors of the primary Sanskrit audio system had come to India from elsewhere. Extra not too long ago, genetic evidence has helped set up a scholarly consensus across the migration of this group from Central Asia to India. Nonetheless, the concept of ‘indigenous’ Hindus and ‘international’ Muslims proved rather more troublesome to dislodge. The notion of irreconcilable distinction between these Hindus and Muslims contributed to the 1947 partition of British India into the unbiased nations of India and Pakistan: the best mass migration in human historical past, leaving one million or extra lifeless and 15 million displaced.
The Iranian nationalists’ narrative of Persian indigeneity was equally ethnocentric. It grew to become the cornerstone of the Twentieth-century Pahlavi dynasty’s ideology, which marginalised Iran’s minorities such because the Arabs. Identification with ‘Aryanism’ stays frequent to today in Iran.
All of that is to point out that trendy nationalist narratives about language departed radically from how Iranians and Indians had for hundreds of years earlier than conceived of language, of themselves, and of their relationship to Persian. From about 900 to 1900, Persian had been a cosmopolitan lingua franca, a typical idiom of studying and statecraft throughout a lot of the jap Islamic world, from the Balkans to China. Inflexible hierarchies, amongst them age, gender, social standing and sophistication, stratified Persianate societies. They had been cosmopolitan, nonetheless, within the sense that ethnicity and language didn’t type the premise of hierarchies; there have been no particular privileges reserved for native Persian audio system. Certainly, earlier than the Nineteenth century, no such idea of ‘native speaker’ or ‘mom tongue’ existed, and having a Persian training was rather more important than talking Persian at house. There had been no geographic core or centre to the Persianate world. If something, it could possibly be argued that its coronary heart lay in India, the place varied dynasties just like the Mughals patronised the language, outpacing even Iran in Persian literary manufacturing.
They shared area in shrines and seminaries, and labored and socialised in the identical circles
Like Russian imperialism in Iran, British colonial rule in India precipitated deep social and political change. Earlier than the Nineteenth century, nobody considered Persian or Urdu as solely related to any explicit non secular group. However British colonial rule introduced with it the affiliation between a folks and a language and helped set up Urdu because the language of Muslim patrimony in northern India. Initially, the British East India Firm had continued the centuries-long follow of patronising Persian, however within the 1830s the logic of contemporary nationalism more and more tied Persian to Iran, disqualifying it as a ‘native’ language for northern India. After the failed anticolonial revolt of 1857, the British feared they’d misplaced contact with ‘odd’ Indians. This bolstered the shift away from British rule by means of the written Persian custom, coming to favour as an alternative languages they deemed ‘vernacular’, grounded in on a regular basis life in India, resembling Urdu.
Such staggering losses of energy and territory to European empires within the Nineteenth century provoked a lot soul-searching amongst Muslim intellectuals in Iran and India. Just a few embraced partial or whole Westernisation, seeing the Persianate custom as lifeless weight stopping them from surviving the onslaught of European energy. The Iranian Sayyid Hasan Taqizadah (1878-1970), for instance, known as for abandoning Persian’s Arabic-based script in favour of the Latin alphabet. Different modernisers, just like the Indian Muslim scholar Shibli Nuʿmani (1857-1914), took a extra nuanced place. They believed that custom needed to be reformed to be able to survive the situations of modernity, however that they may additionally draw on that heritage as a useful resource within the strategy of modernisation. This type of middle-ground strategy prevailed in Iran and India, the place intellectuals sought to develop trendy, nationwide cultures.
Importantly, Iranian and Indian reformers shared each a Persianate literary custom and the situation of colonial subjugation. Collectively, this contemporary expertise of colonialism and a literary heritage in frequent supplied the premise for a shared Indo-Iranian mission of modernisation. Muslim intellectuals – and their work and concepts – circulated between Iran and India within the first half of the Twentieth century, constructing on enduring cosmopolitan networks of Persianate change. Urdu-speaking intellectuals in northern India had been usually literate in Persian and had been attuned to developments in Iran. Key works had been translated from Urdu to Persian and vice versa. The transmission of information between the 2 languages was not solely literary. Iranians and Indians travelled between the 2 nations, aided by new applied sciences just like the steamship, and bodily infrastructure like drivable roads connecting the nations. They shared area in shrines and seminaries, and labored and socialised in the identical circles. Multilingual travellers acted as vernacular translators, spreading concepts discovered throughout these worldwide encounters to different interlocutors.
Composing literary historical past was a key mission for reconciling modernity with custom, a strategy to handle the contradictions between the previous works of literature and tradition which they revered as nationwide heritage and the brand new values held by modernisers. Amorous poetry posed one such contradiction. Homoerotic and generally bawdy poetry made up a lot of the classical Persian canon. Beloved poetic masters like Rumi and Saʿdi wrote ghazals and different poems celebrating, in frank, unabashed lyrical type the love of younger males. However Indian Muslim reformers, influenced by a sort of ersatz Victorianism exported by the British to India, valued chastity and disparaged homoeroticism.
In his Urdu-language historical past of Persian poetry, Nuʿmani pathologised homoerotic practices, discussing them as a illness to be recognized and handled. This new literary prudery was shared by Iranians as effectively. Bahar, for instance, knew no Urdu, however discovered of developments in South Asian Muslim thought (just like the work of Nuʿmani) by means of conversations with mates like Daʿi al-Islam Isfahani (an Iranian who knew Urdu) and ʿAbd al-Hamid ʿIrfani (an Indian-cum-Pakistani who knew Persian). In his literary historical past, Bahar gave a really related, pathologising account of the origins of homoeroticism to Nuʿmani’s. General, when coping with lascivious poetry, Iranian and Indian literary historians shared constantly puritan conventions.
At the top of the Nineteenth century and the primary a number of many years of the Twentieth, Persian literary historical past emerged out of scholarly change between Iranians (Bahar, for instance) and Indian Muslims (Nuʿmani, for instance) writing in Persian and Urdu. Intellectuals in each nations drew on the identical Persian literary custom – and on one another – in looking for native fashions for contemporary writing. For instance, they took up an Eleventh-century Persian epic poem, Abu al-Qasim Firdawsi’s Shahnamah or ‘Ebook of Kings’, as a supply for a contemporary historic methodology. Contemplating the Shahnamah to be historical past was nothing new, however what they meant by ‘historical past’ was novel. Indian and Iranian modernisers praised the Shahnamah for its historic accuracy and precision – new historiographic values that differed from premodern historians’ emphasis on rhetoric and elegance. The historians of Firdawsi’s time had been much less involved with the details of historical past themselves than with the ethical that means to be fabricated from that data.
Literary historians noticed their job as narrating the story of a folks, the historical past of a nation, by means of the historical past of its literature, which they understood because the recorded historical past of the language. As such, writing literary historical past was a nationalist endeavour. Fashionable literary historians made use of different medieval sources in the direction of this finish, transforming conventional biographical anthologies of poets into linear narratives of the event of Persian poetry.
The anthologies (tazkirah) handled every poet individually by means of independently bounded entries. However modernisers sought to supply a narrative of nationwide progress by means of the historical past of language and literature. Whereas the tazkirahs remained their main sources of data, they structured their trendy literary histories with a brand new sense of linear, progressive time. This made it potential to deal with all of Persian literature – together with materials in pre-Islamic languages like Center Persian – as a single, steady entire. This, too, was a collaborative endeavour. Nuʿmani’s Urdu-language Poetry of the Persians was one of many first texts to pioneer a mannequin of literary historical past by introducing Orientalist philology, a linear sense of time, and trendy historiographic methodology to the standard tazkirah format. It could go on to affect Iranian litterateurs resembling Bahar, in addition to European Orientalists like E G Browne.
Tradition is an empty vessel that may be hooked up to every kind of political initiatives
There was an incredible irony to this cosmopolitan change between Iranians and Indians, nonetheless. The literary histories it produced helped to consolidate a nationalist logic that related Persian language and literature virtually solely with Iran. Iranians, taking up a contemporary nationwide id, laid declare to Persian as their patrimony. Indian Muslims additionally conceived of Persian as a part of their heritage, but Iran took centre-stage even in Indian accounts of Persian literature. That is ironic, contemplating how India produced extra Persian literature than did Iran at some factors in historical past. Whilst Urdu grew to become a car for the Persianate custom in India, Indian Muslims didn’t problem the nationalist logic linking Persian to Iran. As an alternative, many embraced it, even tying Indian Muslims’ linguistic id to Iran and elsewhere within the Center East. In so doing, they wound up writing themselves out of the historical past of Persian literature – and out of belonging to India.
Iranians’ and Indian Muslims’ totally different relationships to European philology clarify why the 2 conceived of their languages in such opposite methods. This divergence reveals the historic contingency of the 2 narratives. It was not inevitable that Iranian nationalism would undertake the philological mannequin of linguistic continuity, which is made clear by comparability with Indian Muslims’ conception of Urdu as a blended language.
This historical past results in a number of conclusions.
First, what seems right this moment as nationwide tradition – distinctive and discretely bounded – is the product of change with others from past the borders of the nation-state. That is definitely true of contemporary Iran. Nationalism, and what I name ‘Persianate modernity’, is the veneer that hides the very situations of cosmopolitan cooperation and change that generated nationwide tradition within the first place. This means one thing about tradition: it has no inherent politics, no predetermined trajectory.
Tradition is an empty vessel that may be hooked up to every kind of political initiatives. Cross-cultural change equally can serve reactionary ends simply in addition to progressive ones. On the flip of the Twentieth century, change between Iranians and Indians served to alienate Indians from the historical past of Persian literature. Extra not too long ago, the concept of Indian Muslims’ cosmopolitan origins has marked them as outsiders to India – a story adopted by India’s prime minister Narendra Modi and different Hindu nationalists to assist marginalise and disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Indian Muslims.
Neither is ‘indigeneity’ inherently progressive, a reality additionally illustrated by India’s Hindu nationalists. They now describe themselves as an indigenous inhabitants besieged by Muslim allochthones, ie international intruders. Certainly, we discover the language of indigeneity taken up by ethno-nationalists elsewhere within the modern world – from the European Proper, claiming to defend its indigenous tradition towards international refugees, to Jewish supremacists in Israel, who insist on their very own indigenous roots within the land.
The options to the ills of nationalism, due to this fact, can’t be present in abstractions like tradition or distinctions like ‘indigenous’ vs ‘settler’. Quite than forging connections based mostly on a shared previous, we should think about collectively a shared future.
