Writing Royal-Commissioned Tazkeras at Fath-ʿali Shāh's

Journal of persianate studies �0 (�0�7) ��9–�57 ASPS brill.com/jps The Politics of Poetics in Early Qajar Iran: Writing Royal-Commissioned Tazkeras at Fath-ʿAli Shāh’s Court Naofumi Abe University of Tokyo [email protected] Abstract The middle of the eighteenth century reportedly witnessed the emergence of the new literary movement in Persian poetry, called the “bāzgasht-e adabi,” or literary return, which rejected the seventeenth-century mainstream Indian or tāza-guʾi style. This literary movement recently merits increased attention from many scholars who are interested in wider Persianate cultures. This article explores the reception of this movement in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Iran and the role played by the Qajar royal court in it, mainly by the analysis of a specific sub-genre of tazkeras, called “royal-commissioned tazkeras,” which were produced from the reign of the second Qajar monarch Fath-ʿAli Shāh onward. A main focus will be on the reciprocal relationship between the court poets/literati and the shah, which presumably somehow affected our understanding of Persian literature today. Keywords Fath-ʿAli Shāh Qajar – court poets – tazkera – bāzgasht-e adabi – Āteshkada * This is a revised version of my Japanese article entitled “Kyūtei shijin to Fath-ʿAlī Shāh (Persian court poets and Fath-ʿAlī Shāh)” in N. Kondo, ed., Studies on Early Modern Islamic Dynasties: The State of the Art, Tokyo, 2015, pp. 329–59. I wish to express my gratitude to Houchang Chehabi, Sunil Sharma, and Jessica Nguy for reading the earlier versions of my article and insightful comments. Stephen G. Kuehler kindly answered my questions. This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP 16K16921. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��7 | doi �0.��63/�8747�67-��34�Downloaded3�� from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:14:46AM via free access 130 Abe Introduction Fath-ʿAli Shāh (r. 1797–1834), the second Qajar monarch, is famous for his patronage of Persian poets and literati at his court. Due to his defeats in the Russo- Iranian Wars, the subsequent loss of the Caucasian provinces, and particularly, his conservative attitude toward reforms have led historians to evaluate him negatively. However, it is an undisputable fact that thanks to his and his court- iers’ patronage, and the relative peace that characterized his reign, Persian literary activities were revitalized beginning in the early nineteenth century after a century of stagnation and turmoil following the fall of the Safavid capital Isfahan in 1722 (Āriyanpur, 14–15). Fath-ʿAli Shāh’s court was the most impor- tant center of cultural and literary activity in Iran, where a large number of literary works and historical texts were written and composed. These included court chronicles such as Khāvari’s Tārikh-e Zu al-Qarneyn and Homā’s Tārikh-e Jahān-ārā, universal history such as the Zinat al-tavārikh by Razi Tabrizi as well as literary works, for instance, Monsha ʾāt-e Qāʾem-Maqām, and Qāʾāni’s Ketāb-e parishān. The shah was a poet himself, using the pen-name “Khāqān.”1 A literary movement in Iran in the middle of the eighteenth-century was called bāzgasht-e adabi (literary return), since poets mostly imitated classical poetry and rejected the seventeenth-century mainstream literary style known as sabk-e hendi (Indian style) or tāza-guʾi (style of “fresh speaking”) (Hanaway, 58).2 Mir ʿAli “Moshtāq” (1689–1757) is viewed as the founder of this “literary return” movement (Hanaway, 59).3 Although this movement is consid- ered the precursor of “modern literature” in Iran, which is deeply influenced by modern European thought and ideas, its importance has not been ad- equately appreciated until recently.4 Some scholars have started reconsider- ing the “literary return” by studying a famous late eighteenth-century Iranian tazkera (anthology of poets),5 the Āteshkada (Fire temple) composed by 1 Several copies of Fath-ʿAli Shāh’s divān have survived and even two lithograph editions were published during the nineteenth century (Gol-Mohammadi, 118). 2 Recent scholars, such as Losensky, criticize the appellation of “Indian style” for the post sixteenth-century Persian poetry and prefer to call it the tāza-guʾi style or the fresh style (shiva-ye tāza) which is the contemporary appellation of this literary school (Losensky, 4). Regarding the recent debate on the connotation of “Indian style,” see Dudney. 3 Reportedly around his literary circle in Isfahan, famous poets, such as Āzar, Sabahi, Sahbā and Hātef, gathered. 4 Langarudi (48) points out that this literature has no specific characteristics but “to imitate the style of the classical Persian great poets.” 5 The tazkera or anthology of poets is classified into two groups. One is the general tazkera, or tazkera-ye ʿāmm, which focuses on all Persian poets. The other is the particular tazkera, Journal of persianateDownloaded studies from 10 Brill.com09/30/2021 (2017) 129–157 01:14:46AM via free access The Politics of Poetics in Early Qajar Iran 131 Lotf-ʿAli Beg “Āzar.”6 Matthew Smith has discussed how Mohammad-Taqi Bahār, the twentieth-century Iranian poet known as malek al-shoʿarāʾ, imposed his nationalistic view of Persian literature in the evaluation of the “literary return.”7 Scholars, in analyzing the textual logic and structure of the Āteshkada and its placement in the context of Persian literary history, have examined the changes in the wider Persianate world caused by political divisions and a sort of “proto-nationalism.”8 However, very limited research has been done on the early nineteenth-century tazkeras composed under the influence of the Āteshkada. Anna Vanzan’s essay on Akhtar Gorji’s Tazkera-ye Anjoman-ārā9 is prob- ably the only research primarily on early nineteenth-century tazkera literature, tazkera-ye khāss, which deals with, for example, contemporary poets or poets of a specific region. As for the early tazkera literature and the cultural background in the Timurid period, see Subtelny. Kondo examines the chain of literary tradition of tazkera-writing up to the seventeenth century. See Kondo 2009; for tazkera-writing in the eighteenth century, see Kondo 2011. 6 The Āteshkada is a general tazkera completed in 1779, which consists of an introduction, anthology of kings and princes who composed Persian poetry (Chapter One), poets of former ages or classical poets, motaqaddemin (Chapter Two), contemporary poets, moʿāserin (Chapter Three), and the author’s autobiography as the epilogue. While the order of Chapter Two is based on a geographical division, Chapter Three is in alphabetical order. I will hereaf- ter refer to the author of this work as Āzar. Apart from the Bombay lithographed editions, the text of the Āteshkada was published by Sādāt-e Nāseri and Mohaddeth. The former published the first part from 1957 to 1961 and the latter published the second half of the text in 1999. 7 Focusing on the fact that the concept of the “literary return” was widely propagandized through tazkeras such as the Āteshkada, Smith (204–5) argues that Bahār combined his attention to the formation of a national literature with his inclination toward classical Persian poetry, and then regarded this literary movement as the direct ancestor of modern Persian literature (Smith, 208). Very recently, Schwarz explores this issue, by examining the popularity of the India-born famous poet Bidel, the primary model of the Indian/tāza-guʾi style, in Afghanistan, Central, and South Asia (see idem). 8 Sharma examines the dissolution of the Persianate world and its influence on literature (see idem). Kia, analyzing the geographic information in the Āteshkada, discusses the early modern Iranian perception of others (see idem). 9 The text of the Anjoman-ārā was published twice. One was edited by Khayyāmpur, entitled Tazkera-ye Akhtar. The other is a facsimile version of the manuscript from the Iranian Diet Library (Ketābkhāna-ye Majles-e Showrā-ye Eslāmi). The former edited text is based on an- other manuscript and has great variations from the latter. I base my analysis mainly on the Khayyāmpur edition (Gorji 1964). In some cases, the facsimile version (Gorji 1986) will be also examined. Journal of persianate studies 10 (2017) 129–157 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 01:14:46AM via free access 132 Abe other than the aforementioned study by Smith (205–6).10 She points to early nineteenth-century Iranian poets and literati as the shah’s panegyrists who created replicas of early classical poetic works, in comparison with the eighteenth-century innovative predecessors (Vanzan, 48).11 Vanzan tends to negatively evaluate the court patronage of poets in terms of the literary devel- opments, asserting the value of the Anjoman-ārā, a non-commissioned work, as a source of literary life in the nineteenth century, vis-à-vis the Anjoman-e Khāqān (see below) (ibid., 49–50). However, the cultural continuity from the second half of the eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century, and the role of the Qajar court in it, remain less examined.12 This article explores the reciprocal relationship between the court poets and the second Qajar monarch Fath-ʿAli Shāh, which was established due to various reasons. It is based on the analysis of the tazkeras and other literary sources,13 my main focus being “royal-commissioned” tazkeras, by which I mean those that were commissioned by Fath-ʿAli Shāh himself or by other powerful princes rather than just presented to them.14 From the reign of Fath-ʿAli Shāh, at least twenty two tazkeras have come down to us,15 among which seven were “royal-commissioned.” Of these, three were written by Qajar princes,16 while 10 Smith indicates that the Āteshkada was widely read and imitated both in its contemporary age and even today (Smith, 205).

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