1 / Iranian Culture and South Asia, 1500-1900

1 / Iranian Culture and South Asia, 1500-1900 JUAN R . I. COLE This chapter treats the Persian cultural influences on India and interac tions between India and Iran in the centuriesfrom 1500 to 1900. It sur veys the placeof the Persianlanguag e in Indian government, chancery practice, and imperial decrees,and the manner in which state adoption of it created a very large classof Persian-speakingbureaucrats, scribes, translators, and other intellectualsin the subcontinent. It is argued that in theM ughalperiod perhaps seven times as many readersof Persianlived in India as in Iran. The chapterlooks at Indo-Persiantravel writing, works on comparative religion,and the impact of religiousgroups with strong ties to Persian-speakingIran, whether TwelverShi 'is or the much smaller Isma ' iii and Zoroastrian communities. It pays special attention to the Shi'i-ruled kingdoms that were ,common in India in the early modern period. ran had, in the period 1500 - 1900, an enormous amount of int eraction with South Asia ( comprising the present-day countries of Pakistan, India, I Bangladesh, and southern Afghanistan) . Qazvin, Isfahan, and then Tehran served in important ways as cultural and poHtical trendsetter s for Muslim (and some Hindu ) courts and scholars in the subcontinent. The centrality of the Persian language to chancery and bureaucratic practice in South Asia con tributed to the creation of a large Persophone population who could trans mit Iranian cultural achievements in poetry, philosophy, theology , mysticism, art, travel accounts, technology, ethics, statecraft, and many other fields from one area to the other. Indian writing on these subjects also circu lated in man uscript in Iran in the early modern period, to an extent that is difficult to appre ciate now that national bound aries have solidified and national languages (Urdu, Hindi, and Bengali) have been adopted and standardized. The cadre of Persophone bureaucrats and scholars in the subcontinent, which includ ed large number s of Hindus as well as Muslims, acted as a vast audience for Iran ian ideas;but more than that they participated in a far-flung ecumene of Per sian culture, with both local and cosmopol itan trad itions and imp act. 15 16 JUAN R. L COLE In addition, the establishment of the Safavid dynasty in Iran from 1501 and the conversion of a majority of those who lived on the Iranian plateau to Shi'ism over the succeeding two centuries constituted among the more important religious developments in early modern Islam. It is comparable in significance to the conversion to Islam of the inhabitan ts of western Pun jab, of eastern Bengal, and of the islands that became Indonesia, which occurred in the saine period. Iran was, geographically speaking, a large coun try, more than three times the size of modern France, but it had a tiny pop ulation, at four to five million, compared to most of its powerful neighbors. (The Indian subcontinent in 1600 had an estimated population of 120 mil lion.) Iran was nevertheless a relatively wealthy and influential state, able to fend off the Ottomans, the Uzbeks, and the Mughals and even sometim es to grow at their expense. Its Qizilbash tribal army, later supplemented by Geor gian slave soldiers, and its lucrative silk trade lent it importance in world affairs. Along with tribal armies and silk, however, it was a font of the Persian lan guage, Sufi mysticism, philosophy, minority religions such as Isma 'ilism and Zoroastrian ism, and, with the Safavid conquest, Shi' i Islam . Iran, like most of the Muslim world, had been a major ity Sunn i society until the Safavids made Shi'ism the state religion and promoted it for most of the succeeding two centuries. Nearly simultaneous ly with the rise of the Safavids in Iran, the Mughal dynasty was established in No1th India. 1 Its founder, Babur, was a descen dent of Timur Lang from the Ferghana Valley in Central Asia, Chaghatay speaking (a Turkic language), and a strict Sunni Muslim .. Ironically, his empire became Persian-speaking and came to have an ecumenical mixture of Sun nis, Shi'is, and Hindus in its elite. Let us begin, then, with language, and ask how Persian attained its position in Mughal India. Muzaffar Alam has writ ten a fine and thorough consideration of the subject, to which the following four paragraphs are primarily indebted. 2 He argues that the predominance of Persian at the Mughal court was not a foregone conclusion, saying that other Turkic conquerors, such as the Ottomans and the Uzbeks, gave it a less prominent place than did the Mughals in India. Although Persian had a long history among Indian Muslims as a language of government, religion, and the chronicling of history by the time of the Mughal conquest, its position was not unassailable. An occasional bureaucratic use of Hindavi, the local North Indian dialect infused with Persian vocabulary, was seen in the Afghan Lodi state just prior to the Mughal advent. While Alam's caution against our taking this development as "natura l" is useful, I do not entirely agree that the adoption of Persian by the Mughal state was as contingent and dependent on a few elite decision-makers as he suggests. There had been a long tradi- Iranian Culture and South Asia, 1500-1900 17 tion of Turko-Mongol rulers in Cent ral Asia who had retained the Persian scribal class (dabirs) to perform bureaucratic work and adopted Persian as the court language. Iran itself und er Mongol, Timurid, and Safavid rule fit this description. Whatever the attitud e of th e Uzbeks to Persian, it remai ned strong as the spoken language in cities like Bukhara and Samarqand and played a role in polite letters and as a chancery language. As late as the nine teenth century, the archives of the Emirat e of Bukhara were kept in Persian despite the Turkic origins of the ruling family. There is a sense, then, in which the Mughals in supp orting Persian were doing nothing unusual for post-Timurid states in the region; it is the Ottom ans in the far west who inn ovated, by doin g record-keeping in Ottoman Turki sh. Moreover, the Sanskrit-derived dialects of Nor th Indi a were not stan dardized and so lacked utility for imperia l purp oses. Alam quotes Amir .Khus rau as saying in the fourt eenth century that "Persian parlance enjoyed uniformity of idiom throughout the length of four thou sand parasangs, unlike the Hinda vi tongue, which had no settled idiom and varied after every hun dred miles and with every group of people." 3 Without governme ntal sup port to homogenize such a set of local dialects, they remained diverse, lacking the advantage of a scribal Persian that had been honed to its purpose over centuries. Two other factors seem to me impo rtant, though they are not emphasized by Alam. A large -preexisting Persophone scribal establishmen t existed in Indi a, on whose talents th e Mughals could draw immediately with out having to train thousands of Indians in Chaghatay Turkish ( anyway not a language of burea ucracy even in Central Asia). Second, Persian, as an Indo European language , was close .in gramma r and vocabulary to the Nort h Indian dialects and so could be learned more easily by the scribes of Lahore, Delhi, and Agra than could an Altaic language like Turkish . The Mughal emperor Akbar made Persian the official language of court and bur eaucracy by decree, as Alam explains. Imp erial edict s were issued in that language, as were local and provincial documents regarding land tenure and government appoint1nents . Akbar strove to attract intellectuals and administrators from Iran. He also ordered Persian taught in Quran schools, and urged that much less time be spent teaching the Arabic alpha bet as opposed to the substance of the Persian language . He contracted with Iranian educat ional admini strators in Shiraz, in particular, to come to head up a strin g of madrasas or secondary schools, not all of them exclusively Muslim. At some points, Mughal rul ers and lexicograp hers launched "purification campaig ns" to purge Persian of Indi an words or local usages and speUings, and occasional attemp ts were made to update usage to mir ror that in contemporary Iran, rathe r than that in the medieval classics. Large 18 JUAN R. I. COLE nmubers of Hindus from the Kayasth and Khatri castes (which specialized in scribal and bureaucratic work) flocked to Persian tutors or, where pos sible, to schools so as to receive training in Persian for subsequent bureau cratic work as account ants, clerks, and corresponding secretaries. 4 These Hindu castes soon produced fine Persian prose stylists and poets, and their epistolary handbooks became models for all government letter writers. As outsiders to the language, they also were prolific in producing grammars and lexicons, as were local Ind ian Muslims. Alam insists that Persian became the language of choice not only for the MughaJ nobility but for a sizeable middle stratum throughout the empire that included Muslims, Hin dus, bureaucrats, educa tionists, and merchants. The Persian language and sensibility of a travel account like that of Anand Ram Mukhlis in the mid eighteenth century point to the emergence of a Persophone world-civiliza tion in the early modern world that did not exclude by virtue of religion or regional origin.5 It is impossible to know exactly how many Persophone intel lectuals existed in the subcontinent at any partjcular time in the pre modern period. But the subcontinent's popu lation in 1700 was aro und 170 1nillion, and at that time probably about ten percent of these were Mus lims.

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