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Cherian on Sharma, 'Mughal Arcadia: Persian Literature in an Indian Court' H-Asia Cherian on Sharma, 'Mughal Arcadia: Persian Literature in an Indian Court' Review published on Wednesday, January 16, 2019 Sunil Sharma. Mughal Arcadia: Persian Literature in an Indian Court. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. 280 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-97585-9. Reviewed by Divya Cherian (Princeton University)Published on H-Asia (January, 2019) Commissioned by Sumit Guha (The University of Texas at Austin) Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=51825 Cultivating Paradise: Persian Literature and Mughal Kingship in the Seventeenth Century Mughal Arcadia is a groundbreaking contribution to early modern South Asian history and to the history of Persian literature. Sharma argues that for most of the seventeenth century, particularly in the reigns of Jahangir (r. 1605-27) and Shahjahan (r. 1628-58), the Mughal court fueled the production of a new type of literature in Persian that engaged with place—that is, with the actual locales in which the Mughal court was situated and not just the abstract, idealized ones of inherited Persian literary genres. In Shahjahan’s reign, as Mughal courtly elites and the poets they patronized traveled beyond urban centers, this topographical literature shifted from a focus on cities to an appreciation of the bucolic charms of the countryside. In the seventeenth century, Kashmir, which Akbar incorporated into the Mughal Empire in 1586, was the pastoral locale that came to hold a preeminent place both in the affective ties that bound the Mughal royal family to India, the unfamiliar land that had become their home and territory, and in their representation of their empire to a transregional Persophone audience. The rise of the new genre of place-centric poetry intersected with this new significance of Kashmir to create a body of literature that, Sharma argues, occupies a distinct niche in the history of Mughal literature. This literature, on Kashmir as paradise, served as an important building block in the construction of Mughal authority and of the cultural construction of both Mughal rule and the idea of Kashmir. At first, poets born and raised in Iran dominated the composition of Mughal literature, including this new direction in it. By Shahjahan’s reign, however, poets of Indian birth, including Hindus, also began to play a significant role in this literary field. This particular literary and affective moment passed by the last decades of the seventeenth century as Aurangzeb shifted his focus on expanding the empire southwards, in the Deccan, and as the flow of Iranian emigrés from Safavid lands ebbed due to changed historical circumstances. Mughal Arcadia joins a plethora of new books on the cultural history of the Mughal Empire (1526-1857), with some notable examples being those by Allison Busch, Rajeev Kinra, and Audrey Truschke.[1] It also is an important new perspective on the relationship between language and power more generally but on Persian language and Mughal authority in particular, following in the footsteps of Muzaffar Alam’s work in this area two decades ago.[2] As recent writing has made clear, Mughal literature extended beyond Persian into a range of other languages such as Hindi, Sanskrit, Turki, Citation: H-Net Reviews. Cherian on Sharma, 'Mughal Arcadia: Persian Literature in an Indian Court'. H-Asia. 01-16-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/22055/reviews/3578241/cherian-sharma-mughal-arcadia-persian-literature-indian-court Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Asia Urdu, and Arabic. Yet, Persian enjoyed a certain hegemony among these languages, being the language of high culture, administration, and politics in the Mughal period. Mughal Persian poetry consists of hundreds of thousands of verses and for a century or so it was widely read across the Persophone world, that is, from the Balkans to Bengal. Despite this, Mughal Persian literature has yet to receive the sustained scholarly attention that is commensurate to its vastness and significance. Mughal Arcadia draws attention to new areas of Persian literature that have either been quickly glossed over in general surveys or neglected due to an overwhelming focus on the ghazal (love lyric) in Mughal India. Further, while scholars have painted a vivid portrait of Iranians in Mughal India[3] or mentioned their dominance of Mughal literary production in Akbar’s reign,[4] few have closely studied the compositions they have left behind.Mughal Arcadia holds the lives and writings of a selection of individual poets, many of them Iranian emigrés, at the core of its argument. Jamaluddin Muhammad ‘Urfi of Shiraz, the Indian-born Faizi, Abul Barakat “Munir” of Lahore, Abu Talib Kalim of Hamadan (Shahjahan’s poet laureate, or malik al-shu’ara), and Sayyid Ali “Saidi” are some poets whose work is analyzed. The book thus moves attention away from the patrons of literary production—the royal family and the most powerful nobles—to the actual poets engaged in the production of these cultural artifacts. The history of Persian literature in South Asia is a long one, with Punjab being drawn into the Persianate sphere under the influence of the Ghaznavid court in the eleventh century, an efflorescence of Persian literature further east in the Delhi region in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, fueled by Mongol invasions of the Iranian plateau, under the Delhi sultanate. From the sixteenth century, the sultanates in the Deccan were a major draw to Iranians seeking fame and fortune abroad. In his first chapter, Sharma shows that from the latter half of the sixteenth century, north India once again began to draw Iranians in large numbers, due to unfavorable conditions in Iran and the prestige enjoyed by Persian and Iranians in Akbar’s reign (r. 1556 -1605). Here, Sharma handles Iranian attitudes toward India with nuance, pointing to a range of responses—from celebration to dislike—that may have been felt even by the same individual at different points in time. Iranian emigres and Indian poets alike drew upon older Persian literary tropes such as that of Hind-i jigarkhvar (liver-eating India), of Hindi as a twisted language (kajmaj zabani), and of the darkness of India (kishvar-i zulmat) or the “black” Hindu contrasting with the light of Iran or the light-skinned Iranian, although the latter binary (darkness/light) could also be turned on its head to present India as the better place of the two. At the same time, other pre-seventeenth-century Persianate representations of India could be in a laudatory vein, as paradise and a refuge (primarily due to the dissemination and canonization of Amir Khusrau’s poetry), or as a land of marvels and magic. Sharma shows that the Indian environment and Mughal patronage reshaped Persian literature far beyond South Asia. Akbar’s reign laid the foundation for a shift in the center of gravity of Persian literary production, as many contemporaries observed, away from the language’s homeland to India. The Mughal court sponsored a self-consciously fresh style, ortaza gui, in Persian composition, the vogue for which soon spread across the Persophone world. Texts and verses composed in India were in demand by audiences in seventeenth-century Safavid Iran, Ottoman lands, and Central Asia. Even as older literary representations of India as a land of marvels or as a paradise and refuge framed the initial approach of Mughal kings and courtly elites to India, more textured, observation- based writing about the land and its people began to emerge as India became home. In the second chapter of Mughal Arcadia, Sharma traces the rise of writing about actual locales, places, and people Citation: H-Net Reviews. Cherian on Sharma, 'Mughal Arcadia: Persian Literature in an Indian Court'. H-Asia. 01-16-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/22055/reviews/3578241/cherian-sharma-mughal-arcadia-persian-literature-indian-court Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Asia in India, based on firsthand experience. He shows how the geography and topography of the Kashmir valley, with its cool climes, verdant valleys, and scenic terrain, lent itself to its special place in Mughal self-presentation as a microcosm of their empire. For Iranian emigres, whether Sufis or poets, Kashmir came to be seen as “Little Iran” iran-i( saghir) due to its climate and terrain resembling such Iranian regions as Mazandaran and Gilan. Many Iranian poets settled down in Kashmir and, fittingly, Shahjahan’s Iranian-origin poet laureate died there. This is explored further in the third chapter, in which Sharma spells out how the Mughals, particularly under Jahangir and his Iranian-origin empress, Nur Jahan, saw Kashmir as an “actualization of what was celebrated in Persian garden poetry. If it took a leap of imagination to conjure up a Persian garden in other lovely spots, being in Kashmir did not require any such effort. The whole place was one big garden” (p. 83). In the reigns of Jahangir and Shahjahan, the Mughals set about ornamenting this beautiful landscape with ordered gardens and pavilions. In the fourth chapter, which is the most central to the book’s argument, Sharma shows how existing genres within topographical poetry came together and extended to include the countryside in Shahjahan’s reign. The pre-Islamic Persian ideal of the king as gardener continued to be influential in Persianate societies. In Shahjahan’s kingly self-representation, the propagation of the image of Kashmir as a paradisiacal garden flourishing in his care was then a metaphor, in the hands of court propagandists, for his tending to the garden that was his empire. These compositions, as Sharma skillfully shows, were part of the wider body of painting, architecture, and literature that Shahjahan commissioned to represent his authority to both his subjects as well as to Persophone audiences beyond his domain.
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