People belonging to two different nations may have the same language. They may also be deadly enemies. This can happen by itself. Intellectuals or officials don't need to 'erase' anything or impose anything for this to be the case.
Mana Kia takes a different view. She writes in Aeon-
Being Persian
was never the same as speaking Persian. The Persian speaking Zoroastrian was treated as a pariah, persecuted and excluded from public life. On the other hand, a Gujarati speaking Parsi, could rely on support from the British Government and thus had to be treated decently.
Since Persian is probably the easiest language to pick up such that, within six months, you can read its best poets- like Hafiz and Sa'adi- it did function as a lingua franca over a large, but stupid and despotic, part of the world.
Persians became a great Imperial Nation a little after the Assyrians and before the Greeks. Being Persian is like being Greek, or Assyrian or Indian or Chinese or English. Sadly, Persia never developed a great literature though it had some nice enough poems after an Arabic pattern. Unlike Sanskrit, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic etc., Persia's indigenous scripture were stupid, disfigured by intolerance and fanaticism, and, as far as we know, had no literary, philosophical, or other merit. Consider the Khwaday-Namag, ancestral to the Shahnameh. Compared to the Mahabharata, it is stupid shit scarcely above the level of Kalhana. Still, while Persia was a great power, it had its own importance. Then Iran was eclipsed by Turan. I must admit, some Turkic origin intellectuals actually had brains and considered it no disgrace to use those brains. Perhaps, Persians were too well-bred to attempt any such thing. Alternatively, it may simply have been too dangerous to stand out in a place which lacked any concept of 'Rule of Law'.
To be Persian before nationalism was to belong to a generous, plural identity woven through language, kin and manners
in other words, 'to be Persian' would mean existing three or four thousand years ago before clans fused into tribes which fused into a Persian nation. The problem with Iranians is their tremendous self-conceit. Somehow, they have got it into their heads that they are an ethical and cultured people. They aren't. They are arrogant, ill-bred, and as stupid as fuck. Still, they do like money and nose jobs and bling. Let them make money while inflicting their barbarism only on each other and the rest of us will have no reason to complain.
At the end of the 19th century, under the looming shadow of European colonial encroachment, political and intellectual elites in Iran
had no money or power or, to be frank, much in the way of brains.
began to draw on nationalist forms of belonging as a way to unify the various ethnic and religious groups that lived within its territory.
If so, they failed spectacularly. Religion mattered and still matters. That's why nobody cares that the Supreme Leader is an Azeri. What makes him acceptable is that he is a Sayyad. Talk of Achaemenid splendour didn't help the Shah any. In any case, his ancestors originally spoke a Tabari/Gilaki type language.
When did Iran, in the modern sense, come into existence? The answer is that, under the Safavids, a Turkic Shiah 'Sufi' dynasty, the common and official name of Iran became amâlek-e Mahruse-ye Irân, which can be translated as 'Guarded domains of Iran'.
The nation was gaining ground at this time as the acceptable and legible idiom of collective political demands.
Nations which can kick ass are welcome to make 'collective political demands'. Those which can't- including America's 'First Nations'- are ignored.
As in most of Africa and Asia, nationalism was anticolonial, understood as a liberatory basis of solidarity to gain independence (or protect) from European colonial rule.
What was understood was that people who babbled about a 'liberatory basis of solidarity' were either crazy or useless.
Among its distinctive features is a conflation between land, a national(ised) language, and a people.
People who live in a particular territory tend to have a lingua franca. No fucking 'conflation' is involved. Still, only if the can solve collective action problems regarding defence will they become or remain a Nation State though, no doubt, a client of a Super-power can look like one.
But nationalism also sought to produce cultural homogeneity,
Some nationalists might do so. But the market for cultural goods does a better job. Indeed tribes turned into nations through trade and mimetic effects. On the other hand, it is true that the Safavids ensured ethnic Persians became almost exclusively Shia. But something similar was happening in Europe, where the King imposed his sect upon his subjects as the Established Church.
and so fostered ugly forms of subordination and violence against peoples who, amid new ideals of the nation, suddenly became linguistic and religious minorities.
Only if those minorities had first inflicted it or been protected by those who did. In any case, one can say that ugly and elderly men like me are subjected to 'subordination and violence' because, after Brexit (itself triggered by British ultra-nationalism) just because I belong to the minority of Queens of Engyland who are also the Chief Rabbi and the Romish Pope, I am kicked in the balls by pretty girls whom I accuse of stealing my patented booty shake.
In the case of Iran, nationalists seized upon the Persian language
as opposed to Chinese. How strange!
as a crucial basis of national identity, one that could be shared across religious and sectarian lines. But at the turn of the 20th century, fewer than half of the population of Iran spoke Persian as a first language (or at all).
So what? In 1861, only 2.5 percent of the Italian population spoke standard Italian. But Italians could always make themselves understood to each other at least in contiguous areas- i.e. there was a Sprachbund.
Bound up in the spread of
any type of political authority
nationalism was not just repression of ethnic minorities (linguistic, as with Azeris, but also tied to other affiliations, as with the Sunni Kurds)
any type of authority would have to tackle opposition or insurrection. The 'liberal' reformist, Amir Kabir, slaughtered the Babis. But the young King, fearing a possible usurper, had him killed in 1852.
Repression and oppression and massacres occur not because of an 'ism' but because power can only be retained, in certain places, by such means.
and the repurposing of language as a basis of this necessary homogeneity,
This is mad. Back then, it was vast multi-ethnic empires, without any fucking homogeneity, which kicked ass. The trick was to use troops from one place to garrison a distant province.
The fact is, people converge to a common lingua franca because it solves a coordination problem. It often happens that those from the smallest linguistic communities commit the most wholeheartedly to that lingua franca and seek to raise its status.
but a whole transformation of how it was possible to know oneself, one’s collective, and one’s relationship to other selves and collectives through the modern conceptual systems that came with a nationalist frame.
Plenty of people are born in one country but emigrate to another country and become naturalized citizens. It is not the case that speaking the new nation's language 'transforms' them in any way.
Incidentally, no 'modern conceptual system' comes with a 'nationalist frame'. Any given nationalism will have archaic and modern and maybe even futuristic aspects. Equally it may appeal to economic or theological or chauvinistic concepts- indeed, it may simultaneously be egalitarian, mystical and utilitarian.
In order for Iran to repurpose Persian as the national language of its people,
its Government just needed to declare it was the official language of State. But, since this was already the case, there was no need to do so.
it had to efface a number of significant aspects of its history
How? Could it have changed the DNA of its people by magic? Did it have a Time Machine such that it could ensure its ancient monuments were built differently? Also, why stop at erasing history? Why not erase significant aspects of physics- like the law of gravity? Wouldn't that be cool?
and traditions shared with other countries.
It must be said it effaced the tradition of being as poor as shit more effectively than its neighbours to the East. But it remained a place from which smart people might want to flee for reasons which changed from time to time.
In the process, what it meant to be Persian changed profoundly.
No. The place remained a shithole till oil revenues took off. It must be said, Iranians are cultured, hardworking, enterprising and very good at STEM subjects. If the region were peaceful, they would be an affluent country with the usual problems of affluence- viz. shrinking birth-rate, immigration from poorer countries, 'culture wars' etc.
Before modern nationalism, which led to today’s Iran (before 1934, the country was called Persia in European languages), Persians had an entirely different relation to land, origin and belonging.
No. It was the same relationship. The problem was despotic and corrupt government and the possibly malign effect of Super-power influence.
Prenationalist Persians (possessors of the Persian language) belonged to many lands, religions, kingdoms, regions, in what is now Iran and far beyond it.
But they said they spoke 'zari' or called themselves 'hindi' or 'Tajik' etc. George Washington & Co spoke of themselves as American even before 1776. It simply isn't true that Persian poets born in India thought of themselves as Persian. On the other hand, they might be proud of their Turkish (and hence Hanafi) ancestry. Incidentally, the Safavids were Turks at a time when Ottomans wrote poetry in Persian. Nadir Shah tried to speak to the Grand Moghul in Turkish, but the latter could only speak Persian in the Indian manner.
This earlier form of belonging allowed for a kind of pluralism, one in which Persians spoke other languages, observed different religions, and were part of various states or empires.
Only if they were sojourners. Otherwise their kids would belong to the place where they settled. Incidentally, the 'Parsis' spoke Gujarati though they were proud of their Persian origin and ancestral religion.
Indeed, they accepted and even celebrated such overlapping multiplicity in language, religious affiliation and regional identification, which in more recent times has been the basis of so much conflict.
In recent times, no conflict is sparked by the fact that the Supreme Leader's dad was Azeri whereas his Mum is Persian. Equally, a British citizen of purely Persian or Indian or Nigerian descent is welcome to become Prime Minister.
Previously, Persian had been a transregional lingua franca
it remains that. A smattering of Persian is helpful in Afghanistan and Tajikistan as well as Iran. Indeed, it would also enable one to get the gist of the sort of Urdu that was used by Pakistani Radio for News Broadcasts.
that co-existed with other languages across a shifting constellation of multilingual and multiconfessional empires and regional polities that characterised the eastern Islamic world.
This also characterizes the Edgware road. So what?
This older Persian signified no specific place or ethnicity.
Literary Persian didn't though the Persians themselves thought there was something barbaric about 'sabak-e-hindi'. The Supreme Leader rates Iqbal's ideology but confesses his Persian Divan is illiterate. Brits said the same thing about 'Babu' English.
New Persian, the language’s technical term, grew out of the interaction of the Arabic language with Middle Persian, following the Arab Islamic conquests of the Sassanian Empire in the 7th century.
In the 10th century, regional sultanates at the periphery of the Abbasid Empire (in today’s Iran and Central Asia) adopted Persian as a court language. The Mongol Ikhanids, who supplanted the Abbasids in modern-day Iran and Iraq, promoted Persian as a language of universal rule and cosmopolitan empire through a common set of texts, practices and ideas.
In other words, Turanians promoted a lingua franca which pre-existing Indo-Iranian speakers could easily get the thang of. What emerged was a language that was relatively easy to learn yet which had a great capacity for abstraction and lyricism.
The cultural impact was long-lasting.
No. It was fossilizing. Arabic had some worthwhile texts. But, after the Mongol invasion, that too ended. The Turks and the Iranian middle class looked to Europe- France in particular. Their own languages were productive only of stupidity or mystagogy. Sadly, French too was relatively shit. Incidentally, France isn't the only country where French is a native language. Belgium and Switzerland have a significant French speaking population as does Quebec.
From the 14th to the early 19th century,
i.e. the period when Western Europe rose and Islam declined..
Persian was the language of power, culture and learning across Central, South and West Asia, used for government, philosophy, Sufi literature, historical commemoration, storytelling, poetry and ethical literature. It was used by Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
With the result that they became stupid, indolent, and prey to cruel and corrupt despots.
A constant circulation of
stupid
people and
worthless
knowledge sustained this shared culture, a set of sensibilities most easily understood through its adab,
an Arabic word meaning good manners. Adab is the same for all Muslims. It is not 'Persianate'.
or its proper aesthetic and ethical forms.
i.e. sycophancy
Learned not born, being Persian marked someone who had received a particular basic education that imparted Persianate sensibilities, through which they understood and engaged with the world.
i.e. they understood whom to bribe. But if they didn't have the cash to pay the bribe, they had to turn to mendicancy or mystagogy or both.
Adab was the proper form by which something had meaning in the world, though what was proper to one context was relational and could be inappropriate to another.
Fuck off! Beating and killing was the proper form by which power was gained and retained. Sucking up to the guy with power could be done in Persian, though, the fellow might also insist you suck him off.
Still, it is good to know that Mana, despite her Vassar education, approves of the hijab- which after all is part of Islamic 'adab'.
Adab was central to the ontological being of any substance,
No. Power was. If you had it, you used it to squeeze money out of others. The problem was that the other guy might buy the right to kill and rob you before you killed and robbed him. No doubt, some suitably flowery letters might be exchanged in this context. But illiterate musclemen could always hire, but not necessarily pay, impecunious scholars to perform
whether as morals or meaning more generally. Its forms shaped practices of governance, social ethics and economic exchange.
All of which were shit compared to what was going on in Western Europe.
In spite of the disintegration and fragmentation of empires in Iran and India during the 18th century, Persianate culture (the language and its forms, which spread into other adjacent languages, such as Urdu or Turkish) was most widespread.
Because shittiness was widespread.
It was also a time when notions of belonging centring on shared Persian adab helped sustain societies in the absence of stable political rule,
What sustained society in India was British rule. Iran wasn't that lucky.
and were used by local elites to buttress new political claims.
No. A sycophant with adab might rise to a position where he could squeeze merchants, but a merchant could pay to get the sycophant's office and to squeeze and kill him. Money mattered because it got you mercenaries, not because it could buy you sycophantic poets.
Not all societies understood themselves the same, but they used the same terms in which to articulate their political claims, which could disagree or contest each other’s interpretations.
Everybody understood that a bunch of Turkomans led by a Nadir Shah or even a Qajar eunuch, could kill and loot and establish a dynasty. Qajari Persian preferred Arabic loan words to Persian expressions precisely because education available to warlike tribes was more theological than literary. There were other such variations at different times. Nader Shah only learned Persian later in life. But, it was his military prowess which mattered, not his 'adab' or lack of it.
To understand what markers of belonging, such as place and origin, meant for these Persians, we must start with adab’s aporetic logic.
Aporetic logic creates confusion. It can't be used to 'understand' anything.
Aporetic distinctions are interpermeable, which in the case of Persian allowed for overlapping understandings of self and collectives, rather than the mutually exclusive distinctions that structure modern empirical truth.
In other words, you could use it to utter stupid lies.
Although empiricism was one basis of understanding place and origin, other modes of defining place were as important.
Lying. You could say 'the proof that I am a cat is that I am a dog who is living happily on the moon.'
These included features that signified ethically and aesthetically, such as monumental architecture or virtuous friendships, other geographical schema such as the climate system, and stories associated with place that ranged the gamut from realistic to fantastical (though not understood in these stark terms). Since empirical proximity and connections were not the definitive factor in creating familiarity with a place, distance and difference did not necessarily create incoherence and alterity.
Which is why the fact that you are a cat proves you live on the moon saying woof woof. Moreover you are everybody in their aspect as lunar canines.
Persians understood the meaning of places relationally, and different meanings were invoked according to context.
Persians were ruled by non-Persians or else by Persians who were shit at ruling. The Sasanians had been the last native dynasty.
There were several levels of place, from homelands to larger regions (Iran was one such name), in between which lay smaller regions and political kingdoms. The most common geographical unit of place was the smaller region (Kashmir or Mazandaran),
Kashmir was part of India. Mazandaran was part of Persia.
or its main urban centres. By contrast, homelands were small places, usually cities or towns. Homelands could also be multiple, accrued by forebears and in the course of life. The same placename could mean different things, based on relational context. Hindustan (today, ‘India’ in Persian) could refer to a number of scales of region: the whole subcontinent, the kingdom ruled by the Timurids (which did not include the southernmost reaches of the subcontinent) or else the smaller region of Hindustan (the central Indo-Gangetic plain of north India). When speaking of relations between rulers, the kingdom was invoked. When speaking of transregional movement, larger placenames, such as Turan (roughly, today’s Central Asia), were used.
So what? This was also true of other languages. When Trump speaks of shithole countries we know what he means.
Use of placenames also depended on a speaker’s location and audience. No Persian coming from Safavid-ruled Iran identified himself as ‘from Iran’ unless he had left that region and, crucially, spoke as part of a discussion about larger regions or polities.
So what? When people ask you where you are from you don't reply 'planet earth'.
The Safavid kingdom was more often referenced by the names of its two largest provinces, ‘Iraq (Persian Iraq, today’s west central Iran) and Khurasan (in today’s eastern Iran and Afghanistan). Similarly, a Persian in Hindustan could speak of a homeland as Aurangabad (a city in the central Deccan region). If he described movement between smaller regions, he spoke of travel to Hindustan from Lahore, which was understood to be a city outside the smaller region of Hindustan. These forms of expression were learned and shared across Persianate Asia, providing a powerful basis for mutual comprehension across regions and political boundaries.
Language is a powerful basis for mutual comprehension. Persian is a language. Thus whatever is true of English is also true of Persian. Some English speakers are 'native speakers'. Others are 'cultured speakers'. Yet others are cats who are dogs who live on the moon.
Transregionally circulating descriptions and stories created meanings of place based on associations that produced a morally imbued sense of familiarity and proximity often more significant than empirical geographical contiguity. Descriptions of environment, ethical social relations and practices of kingship that denoted just rule were among the features that made places recognisable in Persianate terms. Widely known mythical and historical narratives also endowed places with significance.
Because that's how language works.
In the early 17th century, after the Timurids conquered the smaller region of Kashmir and incorporated it into their north Indian-based empire, they represented it as paradisiacal. With its lush greenery and temperate climate,
In summer. It is very cold in winter.
further adorned by gardens and pavilions, Kashmir became a synecdoche for the whole of the empire.
No it didn't. One spoke of Agra or Delhi as the seat of the Great Moghul- who was Turkic not Persian. True, at a later point Persian origin Shias challenged Hanafi hegemony. But that didn't end well.
This characterisation, as the exemplar of paradise on Earth, became a defining feature of Kashmir broadly, as part of universal Persianate knowledge, whether one had been to Kashmir, or affiliated with the Timurid Empire or not. The specificity of Kashmir’s paradise-like qualities did not preclude the same in other places. It was part of a broader universal idiom of Persianate imperial power that marked certain places similarly, through homology.
In the mid-18th century, when ‘Abd al-Karīm
who joined Nadir Shah's service
, a minor Timurid functionary based in Delhi but born in Kashmir, wrote about his travels through Iran, he used this universally known feature of Kashmir to create connections with Mazandaran, a smaller region on the southern rim of the Caspian Sea. The kind of parallel he draws between Kashmir and Mazandaran allows a view into the kinds of affiliations possible in a world of competing imperial polities where aporia allowed for multiplicity and connection in self-definition.
No it doesn't. The guy returned to Delhi. India was less chaotic than Persia.
He begins his account describing Mazandaran’s inaccessibility, due to its dense forests. Inclined to spend summers in the region, the Safavid Shah Abbas (who reigned 1588-1629) built roads through the forest and inns along them, ‘so that it would not be necessary for a tent, because of the fact that rainfall becomes quite heavy there, as is the case in Bengal.’ This is local knowledge made familiar to ‘Abd al-Karīm’s implied Hindustani Persian audience – the previous state of the passage through Mazandaran, the changes wrought by the previous Safavid rulers, and information about the climate, which he likens for his audience to Bengal, where many of his immediate readers in Delhi would not have been to either but would know as a place of heavy rainfall.
Delhi has heavy rainfall during the monsoon. So does Bengal. Assam has much heavier rainfall.
He also uses the script according to which the Timurids related to Kashmir to explain the Safavid relationship to their own paradisiacal land. ‘Abd al-Karīm marks Mazandaran’s similitude with Kashmir by noting that, just as the Timurid emperors Jahangir and Shahjahan would often go with their entourages to Kashmir, likewise the Safavid Shah Abbas I would go to Mazandaran ‘with some of his intimates and attendants for feasting and enjoyment’.
Turkic despots like partying in places which don't get too hot in summer. So what?
The two places are framed not just by their similar natural beauty, but also because they both act as a paradise-like destination for the contemporaneous kings of two Persianate dynasties who held them in special regard as places to pass summers.
The problem with Persia is that guys with swords were always itching to rob you and send you to paradise.
That a Timurid functionary could recognise and articulate this kind of imperial place-making among Safavids speaks to transregionally legible and shared political practices.
Nope. It points to the fact sycophants attach themselves to conquering armies.
‘Abd al-Karīm’s view of similitude extends to Mazandaran’s people; he claims that ‘the people of Iran tell strange tales with regard to the inhabitants of Mazandaran … about their simple-ness.’ These tales ‘in truth have no basis’. Regardless, ‘in Hindustan they call Kashmir “heavenly” and in Iran they call Mazandaran “paradise-like” and, because of these paradise-like-nesses, the people of both domains [Iran and Hindustan] subject the poor Kashmiris and Mazandaranis to much abuse.’ Kashmir and Mazandaran are not the same, but their domains are synonymous with the paradise of heaven. Accordingly, the relationships of their inhabitants vis-à-vis the rest of their respective empires and their domains’ significance for its imperial rulers is also homologous.
This is nonsense. Kashmir is fucking horrible in winter. Go there for a summer holiday by all means. Don't stick around to watch the locals starve during the '40 days of death' when the snow piles up at their threshold.
Such sympathies are remarkable given that ‘Abd al-Karīm’s travels are on the heels of the Iranian ruler, Nadir Shah Afshar’s humiliating invasion of Timurid India.
Karim was able to ingratiate himself with the conquerors. Perhaps he hoped to gain a nice estate from Nadir. But even if he did so, he would be killed by those who coveted it. That's why he returned to Delhi.
Even more so are the parallels he draws between his Kashmiri homeland and the envied and abused people of Mazandaran. It articulates a way of relating based on geographical and political homology, rather than homogeneity. Homology and similitude also allowed for multiple affiliations, some of which might seem mutually exclusive of each other now. ‘Abd al-Karīm speaks as a universal Persian,
No. He was a servant of a conqueror of Persia. But that dynasty did not last long.
also simultaneously a Hindi speaker, a Timurid imperial servant, and a local Kashmiri empathising with Mazandaranis’ plight in Iran. This multiplicity made it so that being Persian did not just mean being from a place called Persia (or, Iran).
Which it was safer to run the fuck away from. The plain fact is, since the time of the Safavids, people not born in 'the guarded domain of Iran' were not Iranian just as Fredrick the Great, who wrote poetry in French, was not a Frenchman.
If being Persian was not about origin in a particular place, neither was it about ‘ethnicity’.
Yes it was. A Circassian or Armenian or Ethiopian or Indian who spoke Persian and did business was not a fucking Persian. The Shirley brothers- who helped Shah Abbas- were English, not Persian. Indeed, Shah Abbas was able to gain immunity from Qizlbashi factionalism, and the intrigue of Georgians and various Turkoman tribes, by bringing in slave-soldiers from elsewhere.
Origin was important, though it was differently comprised from our own, which is largely articulated through the Christian-specific idiom of blood, now universalised as modern.
There is no 'Christian-specific idiom of blood' though, in America, there was a 'one-drop' rule. But no such thing obtained in England.
For premodern Persians, origin was part of a broader understanding of a person’s moral substance and ethical embodiment.
Back then, most people thought 'moral substance' was not closely linked to being the son of a whore. It must be said, Shia Islam is rather progressive in that respect.
A set of lineages comprised origin, establishing affiliations beyond those inherited with birth that seem illusory to us (not ‘real’ kinship), but were quite meaningful for Persians and significantly constitutive of understandings of self, family and broader social collectives.
There were religious sodalities which could be militarised and slave soldiers could develop esprit de corps and display obedience- at least in the short to medium term.
They included natal lineages, but also those of learning, service, aesthetics, occupation and devotion, which articulated the basis of possible affiliations (or their lack) to social collectives.
Sadly, those affiliations wouldn't keep you safe from your own brother if you had something he wanted. Sufi lineages are supposed to be free of this sort of murderous rivalry. However, there will always be the suspicion that when a Sufi leader is killed, it wasn't the Salafis who did the deed- though they make take credit.
These genealogies laid the basis for kinships that brought people together in ways that modern parochial categories of family, nation, ethnicity, gender and even religion do not accurately explain.
If Iran had had the 'rule of law', it would have flourished because its people were industrious and enterprising. At the time when England helped Iran drive the Portuguese out of Hormuz, British broad-cloth was being traded for Persian silk. The British textile industry developed significantly over subsequent centuries. In Iran, political unrest and weak rulers who were unable to protect and maintain royal workshops. Adab, or literary culture and a gentlemanly civic life are not possible if there is little difference between a bandit chief and the Governor of the Province.
Place was almost always part of origin, inflecting its more significant lineages, but did not give meaning to origin alone. There were many ways to be Persian,
the best way was to be Tabatabai- i.e. descended from the Prophet on both the maternal and paternal side.
and one need not be Muslim
but Jews and Zoroastrians were 'najis' and beyond the pale
or born in an Iranian city to be a master of its adab
donkeys born in Iranian cities were not considered cultured. Who knew?
and all that it implied morally, though one had to be able to inhabit its forms.
Nope. If you could get your interlocutor killed, you were praised as the ultimate incarnation of akhlaq and adab and mercy and generosity.
One important factor constituting what proper form looked like was occupational position, articulated through lineages of birth, learning and service. If one was a scribe, one had to behave in a certain way to certain kinds of people to show oneself as ethical.
Clerks have to behave like clerks. Donkey drivers have to behave like donkey drivers. But this was true all over the world.
In 18th-century India, for instance, a Persian
or an Indian or an Armenian or a
could declare himself as from more than one place, a devoted student/disciple of a learned Sufi scholar (along with other Muslim students), a scribe in Hyderabadi state administration, and from a Hindu natal lineage defined primarily through its mastery of Persianate adab.
No. A Persian could not say he was a Kayastha, Khattri or Brahmin though he was welcome to boast that his mother was an untouchable sweeper. Equally, Kayasthas or Brahmins who wrote in Persian, never said they were Persian because those fuckers are 'mleccha'. The ancestor of the Nehru's who first settled in Delhi was a Kaula Brahmin and his descendants remained Kaula Brahmins even if they intermarried with Zoroastrians or Italians. Sir Robert Shirley was not Persian though he died there. His remains were disinterred and sent to Rome where his widow had become a nun.
In his biographical compendium of Muslim and Hindu Persian poets, Gul-i Ra’nā (1768), ‘Lachmī Nara’in’ describes himself as ‘pennamed Shafīq, Aurangābādī, who, from the beginning of eternity, has his excellency Āzād Bilgrāmī’s
a sound enough Arabic scholar and religious authority
brand of servitude on his forehead.’
i.e. he just met the dude, who had political influence, and was currying favour with his acolytes.
He introduces his various names before distinguishing himself as literally marked by his teacher. Shafiq’s relationship with his teacher, Sayyid Ghulam ‘Ali Azad Bilgrami, is a lineage of knowledge, part of his origin.
No. It was mere puffery. The dude clearly sympathized with his co-religionists- the Marathas. Shivaji, in particular, was his hero. Anyway, by then, everybody knew Persian poetry was shit. The Europeans were smart. Still, if you could make money living a parasitical, sycophantic, existence, why not do so? Invest in the Hundis of John Company and try to get your family to Company territory.
Later, in his autobiography, before any mention of his own birth, he narrates his origins as ‘the Kathrī Kapūr people’ in Lahore.
They traded in Central Asia- indeed, they got as far as Muscovy.
Shafiq recounts how his grandfather, Bhavānī Dās, accompanied the Timurid emperor ‘Ālamgīr (who reigned 1658-1707) to the Deccan,
The Safavids had defeated the Moghuls and taken Kandahar. Aurangazeb gave up on it. Anyway, it had lost its strategic or commercial importance. The future lay with the littoral upon which the Europeans were establishing trading posts.
entering into his service as a scribe. Shafiq’s father, Rā’ī Mansā Rām, was also trained in the scribal arts, by his father and maternal grandfather. (His scribal occupation and its lineage are as important as his Hindu-specific natal one.) From the time Nizam al-Mulk Asaf Jah ruled Hyderabad as a regional state (1724-48) in a rapidly decentralising Timurid Empire, Mansā Rām became the deputy administrator of all six districts of the Deccan, a position he held for more than 40 years. This position was enhanced when he gained further rank in the Hyderabadi administration (under Navvab Samsām al-Dawlah), through the recommendation of Āzād Bilgrāmī, later Shafiq’s own teacher and mentor. He concludes this description of his father by noting that ‘he incorporated service to the dervishes with service to the nobles’. And that ‘he always observed the manner of conferring the kindness of favours, and my father accomplished both forms of dignified service according to all the necessary customs (ā’īn).’
By then, Indian Persian was unintelligible to Persians. They also thought 'sabak-e-hindi' poetry was shit. But they were producing nothing of value themselves. Still, India and China were benefitting from a positive monetary shock associated with the export of American silver.
Shafiq’s origins are in terms of what we would call caste (not a term he uses) and paternal ancestry, alongside and intertwined with lineages of teachers and patrons. His origins and their names, Khatri Kapuri (and its sub-designation, Mathur), Lahori and Awrangabadi, imperial and paternal, come together to make him a Hindu, a Timurid administrator, and a Persian man of letters.
Nope. He was a Mathur (i.e. from Mathura) Khatri who, nowadays, would be a Chartered Accountant or CFO or Doctor or Software engineer.
Prominent in this story is his father’s mastery of the adab (as ethics)
that is akhlaq-o-daib. Adab means literary culture.
appropriate to his social location in imperial administrative service, a product of many other relationships. Rā’ī Mansā Rām’s perfect enactment of the expected customs of conduct toward all kinds of people – from the masters of the unseen world (dervishes) to those of this manifest world (nobles) – indicate the wholistic basis of Shafiq’s own learned potential as a master of adab.
No. He is simply saying that he has good connections. His descendant might say, on Linkedin, that he went to Doon School and then attended the LSE and qualified as a Chartered Accountant with PWC. After working with Morgan Stanley, he took an MBA from Stanford and is currently CFO of a VC fund.
Shafiq’s account of his origins is typical in its primary emphasis on genealogies and in the specifics of his occupation.
Because clerical workers of the period went in for belles-lettres as a way of self-advertisement. It was like posting essays on Linkedin.
Amid these origins, place appears but does not determinatively constitute origin.
The opposite is the case. These guys, if prominent enough, took their natal place as their surname- e.g. Bilgrami from Bilgram or Mathur from Mathura.
Rather, place was almost always bound up in other kinds of lineages and almost never singularly given.
Unless you were the ruler of the place. The Nawab of Pataudi, to his chums at Baliol, was simply 'Pataudi' just as the Duke of Dorset, to his chums at Eton, was 'Dorset'.
As my example shows, Persianate adab allowed non-Muslims who could master its forms to register as ethical selves.
Not if they were Zoroastrians or Jews. Few Hindus settled in Iran at that time. As 'kaffirs', their lives were in danger. Christians who could kick ass- Circassians, Georgians, English dudes- had to be respected otherwise they might kill you.
This was a self that emerged through affiliations and identifications with social collectives, based on a variety of lineages, some of which were based on commonalities recognisable to us (religion, region, parentage) and others that simultaneously united across divisions in terms archaically unfamiliar (discipleship, learning, service, occupation and aesthetics). Being Muslim was recommended, but ultimately optional, whereas possession of adab (however partial) was not.
Utterly false. Being a Sayyad Shia with impeccable adab would not keep you safe for even a second if you had stuff which the local officials wanted to rob you off.
Relations we now recognise as biological were important,
Previously, people did not recognize that baby was biologically related to Mummy.
but they were incorporated into broader lineages that challenge current analytic uses of ethnicity or nationality as the definitive or even relevant means by which people understood themselves.
Current 'analytic uses' of ethnicity are DNA based. Nationality is a legal concept. Rishi Sunak or Vivek Ramaswamy are British and American Nationals respectively even if their DNA is wholly Indian.
Lineages formed connective chains that could be overlaid and combined.
Or invented. The Durranis claim Brahmin descent as well as descent from the Prophet, Joseph in the Bible not to mention the Imperial Caesars and the ancient Iranian monarchy.
Persianate belonging was thus multiple, based on a kinship that linked places, learning, family, service and social collectives.
This could be said of any type of oikeiosis. Rish Sunak had Britishate belonging because his parents were naturalized Brits. He also had British Auntys and Uncles and Teachers and school friends and a highly British cat which said 'miaow' in a manner reminiscent of the late great Queen Victoria.
Across both political and parochial lines, these supple lineages were central to the constitution of selves,
They were irrelevant. Money mattered. Not getting killed mattered. Lineages did not matter because the Rule of Law was shit.
and of their relations to one another and their collectives. Moreover, the aporia that structured adab
Adab was based on being a glib and honey-tongued sycophant. There was no rhetorical doubt or 'Liar's paradox' type of self-reference and thus no 'aporia'. Adab was merely a type of paideia. It was a structured course of study.
allowed for multiplicity of affiliation, plurality of sometimes overlapping identifications.
Everything does that. Making miaow miaow noises allows for multiplicity of affiliations and other such shite.
Colonial modernity and its nationalist responses did not completely change the terrain of place and origin.
It changed nothing. Trade and technology change stuff. So does killing lots of people.
New logics organised belonging,
This cretin wouldn't know logic if it bit her in the leg. Still, having studied worthless shite at Ivy League, she has to play the 'poor me, I'm Persian and don't have a dick. That's why I am as stupid as shit. Could you please give me affirmative action on the grounds that I am a victim of horrendous epistemic self-abuse?'
but old meanings and their multiple possibilities remained. In 2008, an old man who welcomed me in the Yazd bazaar called Yazd a mamlakat,
a country. Yazd had been a Zorastrian stronghold.
a relational use of the word for a region or domain. I had come from Tehran and, in his usage, Tehran and Yazd were both regions in their own right, as part of the larger domain (mamlakat) of Iran.
There is a noticeable difference in accent
I wondered how the aporetic ease with which the two levels of mamlakat existed might serve as a foundation for a sense of belonging that could accommodate differences such as regional affiliations in ways non-threatening to the Iranian state (or, most pressingly, to states in the subcontinent).
Why did this silly bint wonder any such thing? She was educated in America which has dual Sovereignty. This does not mean a Texan isn't also a patriotic American.
Perhaps the continued existence of aporetic Persianate forms is a hopeful perspective from which we might see possible futures anew.
It clearly isn't. This silly woman's book came out 4 years ago. It is now clearer than ever that what matters in that part of the world is who is better at killing rivals for power. I suppose Persian 'adab' could have had the useful qualities of English or French literary culture as opening the door for a cosmopolitan type of civil society which can focus on making life better for everybody through innovations in Science, Technology, Industry and Commerce. Arabic may have such a role- more particularly as UAE and Saudi embrace modernity. But Persian literature turned to shit long ago and shit it remains to this day.
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