A Journey to the End of Indo-Persian
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Chapter 8 The Antipodes of “Progress”: A Journey to the End of Indo-Persian Nile Green Siyahat ki gun hain na mard-e safar hain (We do not seize the advantages of travel, nor are we intrepid voyagers.) Hali, Mosaddas (1879) … Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt. (The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus (1922) ⸪ In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Indians effectively stopped producing Persian prose after over eight hundred years of using the language for literature, statecraft, and science.1 At the public level, the obvious turning point was Persian’s administrative replacement by the East India Company with English and the vernaculars between 1832 and 1837.2 As Tariq Rahman This essay is dedicated to the memory of Omar Khalidi with whom I had hoped to write a short book about travelers from his beloved Hyderabad. For archival and other assistance, I am grateful to Teresa Jones (Worcestershire History Centre), Alf Russell (Wolverhampton City Archives) and the staff of the Library of Birmingham and the Birmingham Pen Museum. I am also thankful to the custodians of the Salar Jung Library (particularly direc- tor A. Negender Reddy) and the Salar Jung Museum for their assistance during my previous research visits to Hyderabad. 1 For historical overviews of Indo-Persian, see T.N. Devare, A Short History of Persian Literature at the Bahmani, Adil Shahi and Qutb Shahi Courts (Poona: T.N. Devare, 1961); and Muhammad Abdul Ghani, History of Persian Language and Literature at the Mughal Court, 3 vols. (Allahabad: The Indian Press, 1929). 2 Tariq Rahman, “The Decline of Persian in British India,” South Asia 22, 1 (1999): 63–77. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004387287_010 The Antipodes of “Progress” 217 has explained, the rationale appears to have been “providing justice to people in their vernacular languages rather than a foreign language; appealing to the masses rather than only to the elite; and, through this … to symbolize the end of Muslim ascendancy.”3 Yet it took decades for these official decisions to fil- ter through to the private level by way of changes in education, publishing, and fashion. Moreover, Persian works continued to be produced at the Mughal court till 1858 (and in some princely states thereafter) while in Punjab in par- ticular Persian-based schools lingered until the 1890s.4 The vogue for Urdu verse was already ascendant over a century earlier, but between around 1860 and 1880 Persian prose was also eclipsed by Urdu. Part vernacular and part lingua franca, Urdu was strengthened through its ties to colonial government schools, reformist intellectuals and the massive new market for printed books.5 Nonetheless, certain niches remained for Persian in the subcontinent, whether among Iranian expatriates, cultured literary conservatives or Sufis (reformist Muslims preferring Urdu, Arabic or English). In the half century after the East India Company disestablished Persian, the most important of these niches was certain princely states, particularly Hyderabad State, where Persian re- mained the official language till 1884.6 Having been introduced to India by the Ghaznavids, raised to supremacy by the Mughals and retired by the East India Company and then finally by the Nizam of Hyderabad, Persian had by the 1880s all but reached the end of its history in India. In 1892, the missionary C.B. Ward wrote that Urdu was “spoken more or less everywhere” in Hyderabad State; by 1911 only 256 of its residents claimed to be able to speak and write Persian compared to 1,341,622 who claimed the same abilities in Urdu.7 It is perhaps ironic that three years later the prime minister responsible for replacing Persian with Urdu in Hyderabad, Mir La ʾeq ʿAli Khan Sir Salar Jang II 3 Ibid., 50. 4 Ibid., 52, 59. 5 On these factors in the rise of Urdu, Farina Mir, The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Ulrike Stark, An Empire of Books: The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India, 1858–1895 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007); and idem, “Politics, Public Issues and the Promotion of Urdu Literature: Avadh Akhbar, the First Urdu Daily in Northern India,” Annual of Urdu Studies 18, 1 (2003): 66–94. 6 Tariq Rahman, “Urdu in Hyderabad State,” Annual of Urdu Studies 23 (2008): 36–54; On the links of Persian literature with Hyderabadi elites, see M. Fathullah Khan, “The Nizams as Men of Letters,” Islamic Culture 12, no. 4 (1938): 460–461; and Nile Green, Indian Sufism since the Seventeenth Century: Saints, Books and Empires in the Muslim Deccan (London: Routledge, 2006), chapter 2. 7 C.B. Ward, History of Twelve Years’ Work in the Nizam’s Dominions, 1879–1891 (Bombay: Anglo- Vernacular Press, n.d.), 3; and Anonymous, Modern Hyderabad (Hyderabad: n.p., 1914?), 72 respectively..