I’ve long been interested in the Persianate world, and India was for a long time an important part of it (see this 2013 post); I just read Ramachandra Guha’s TLS review (archived) of Richard Eaton’s India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765, which has some good LH material:
The conventional view of Indian history divides it into three periods; ancient or “Hindu”, medieval or “Muslim”, and a modern or “British” period. In India in the Persianate Age, Richard Eaton challenges this interpretation by substituting religion with language. Eaton builds on the work of the Columbia scholar Sheldon Pollock, who coined the term “Sanskrit cosmopolis” to describe the political and cultural world of ancient India. In the first millennium of the Common Era, argues Pollock, it was the language of Sanskrit that brought together kingdoms and territories across a wide swathe of South and Southeast Asia; it was in Sanskrit that manuals of statecraft as well as epic poems and plays were written. Eaton now suggests that from about the eleventh century, a “Persianate” culture emerged in India, which sought sometimes to supplant the world of Sanskrit and sometimes to constructively engage with it. Persian was the new language of rule, and of administration, promoted by the Turk and Mongol warriors who came to control northern India in this period. Further, writes Eaton, “as with the Sanskrit texts, from the eleventh century onwards a large corpus of imaginative literature in Persian began to circulate widely through West, Central and South Asia”. […]
When Eaton does depart from politics and warfare, he turns to architecture and literature. He writes insightfully of how mosques and shrines built by ostensibly Muslim rulers incorporated elements from Buddhist, Jain, and especially Hindu architectural traditions. Mosques, forts and palaces all showed the fusion of Persianate and Sanskritic traditions and styles. This cultural fusion also emerges in Eaton’s treatment of the reign of the fifteenth- century Kashmiri king, Zain al-’Abidin, himself a Muslim, who yet loved listening to poems in praise of the Hindu god Krishna (while sailing a boat in a mountain lake), and who patronized the translation of Sanskrit classics into Persian (and vice versa).
One would have hoped for an extended treatment of the bhakti poets of medieval India, who wrote in the vernacular (Hindavi, Marathi, Gujarati, etc) – not in Sanskrit or in Persian – and whose work is notable both for beauty of language and for critiques of social hierarchy. There are now many excellent translations of these poets, whose verses and ideas live on in everyday life in South Asia, centuries after their deaths. While acknowledging their influence, as “poets popularly venerated as saints”, Eaton disposes of them and their oeuvres in a single sentence. He returns to one of them, Nanak, later in the narrative (while speaking of the religion this poet founded, Sikhism), but ignores the others. Nor does he mention the twelfth-century Kannada reformer Basava, who exercised a profound and lasting influence on social life, and whose epigraphs are still quoted in contemporary political discourse in southern India.
Basava was a radical egalitarian, who challenged the rigid hierarchies of the Hindu caste system. A verse attributed to him is translated by the scholar H. S. Shivaprakash as follows:
Earth is one and the same
For pariah street
And Shiva temple;
Water is one and the same
For washing shit and ritual cleaning;
All castes are one
For a man with self-knowledge …Eaton notes in passing the borrowings between practitioners of Persian and Sanksritic medical traditions. In fact this hybridity of cultural forms is even more strikingly present in Indian classical music, an art form that the author neglects. Instruments, compositions and singing styles designed and elaborated in medieval north India are widely in currency today. Whether discussing the sitar or the sarod, the khayal or the thumri, it is impossible to say where Hindu or Indian begins and where Muslim or Persian ends.
As ever, I deplore the flattening effect of nationalism (religious or otherwise) on both the complexity of culture and the histories that recount it, and I bless the historians who restore that complexity.
As emperor Jahangir famously didn’t say at the inauguration of Akbar’s tomb in Agra, “it may not be Isfahan or Herat, but we can make a good impersianation.”
Oy!
The rather hoity-toity word “Persianate” has turned up around these-here parts on at least one prior occasion: https://languagehat.com/naz/
Yes, it would be more demotic to say “of or pertaining to the areas and peoples for which Persian was a major language of culture.” Or perhaps it would be better to leave all such matters swathed in decent obscurity.
The word has actually turned here fairly often, e.g. 2011, 2016, 2020 (not to mention the link in the post above).
Persianate was created in the process of racialization.
That’s utterly ridiculous. The word refers to language, not “race.”
I was having my little joke. Based on the similarity of derivaional methods.
As indicted in that earlier thread, I prefer the even more obscure “Persicate,” I think just on aesthetic grounds. Or let’s just pile up the suffixation to get cooler and cooler-sounding results: Persian < Persianate < Persianatic < Persianatical < Persianaticalistic etc.
We can try Rus model: White Pers, Little Pers, Great Pers.
персь “a breast”
I was having my little joke.
Oops, sorry — that one went right by me!
India is Latin America 1000 years after the Spanish Conquest.
Of course, the Muslim Conquistadores in India weren’t as successful – only 35% of South Asian population is Muslim (while the Spanish Inquisition managed to eradicate native Indian religions almost completely in much less time).
And we switch to languages, the comparison is even worse – former Spanish America speaks Spanish, former Muslim India doesn’t speak Persian.
Though Persian (and Arabic via Persian) did contribute a lot of vocabulary to local languages.
As I remember, the governmental language of pre-Islamic Persian empires was Aramaic.
Thanks so much for this! I’d not heard of the book, and if anything can make learning of a must-read book even better, it’s discovering that I have enough Kobo Super Points to get it for the excellent price of 0.00!
That is indeed excellent!
Previously on LH: When the Persian court spoke Turkish and the Turkish court spoke Persian.
(racialization) “The artwork, predominantly paintings, were portrayed in order to instill prejudice in the Western populations through sexualizing and manipulating images. … Attempts to portray these cultures as strange, foreign and exotic through Orientalism led to intolerance towards the Arab and Asian communities in Europe and the United States.”
🙁
https://www.amazon.fr/Turko-Persia-Historical-Perspective-Robert-Canfield/dp/0521522919
Or, if for some obscure reason you don’t use French Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Turko-Persia-Historical-Perspective-American-Research/dp/0521522919
An unfortunate goof in Canfield’s introduction: “The Abbasid caliphate at its nadir was the climax of Persianate panopoly”; he means, of course, “zenith,” not “nadir.” (And both words are Arabic, for heaven’s sake!)
And climax. “Апофеоз конца достиг своего апогея.” from a piece (a play?) that my friends composed when they were about 15.
Polyakov invented a hybrid – apofegei (mix of apotheosis and apogee).
Very popular, I think I even used it a couple of times.
Wow. I did not realize that! I thought about it as a hybrid of figet’, apoth- and likely -gee from apogee too.
A colloquialism crossed with parts of learned words.
But I did not notice that it can be obtained by crossing the two learned words.
Now I see one more reading: a pofig-ei
Of the Achaemenids, yes (though the actual bureaucracy was in Elamite…). Of the Parthians, I have no idea. Of the Sas(s)anids, no – but they misunderstood the Achaemenid situation that they were trying to copy, and wrote in Persian with Aramaic words used as logograms for Persian content words! It was the most wrong-headed writing system this side of Tangut.
I think of the Tangut writing system as a virtuoso climax, zenith, apogee and apotheosis of writing systems, sort of like Finnegans Wake.
Oh yes. Especially the “apogee” part, though: lifted off the Earth into higher spheres.
” former Muslim India doesn’t speak Persian.
Though Persian (and Arabic via Persian) did contribute a lot of vocabulary to local languages.”
It did remain the prestige language until around the middle of C19 though – esteemed poets who opted to write in Urdu were upbraided for downgrading. Since Partition, Persian has been the number 1 go to language in Pakistan’s “Urdu ain’t Hindi” re-sourcing campaign, as Sanskrit is for Hindutva’s equivalent “Hindi ain’t Urdu” campaign. And while they may not SPEAK Persian as their L1, Pakistanis today could be said to WRITE in it, since nastaliq was a Persian modification of the Arabic script.
I once had an entertaining discussion about this with an Arab friend who was born and raised in Persia. In my utterly unqualified and 1000% subjective opinion, nastaliq is the most beautiful script there is, although I can’t read a single letter of it (so glad rekhta.org puts Urdu poetry up in devanagari!) I was raving to my friend about the beauty of nastaliq, and she said “well yes, but naksh can be beautiful too.” She’s right of course, but I do love the softer fluidity of nastaliq and the addition of the diagonal slant.
Which brings me back to the word “Persianate”. To me Urdu nastaliq is a good example of something that can be so described: Not Persian, but inextricably and inescapably of and from Persia. I’ll invoke the Humpty Dumpty defence if challenged on my use of the apparently problematic descriptor.
Which brings me back to the word “Persianate”. To me Urdu nastaliq is a good example of something that can be so described: Not Persian, but inextricably and inescapably of and from Persia.
Yes, a good example.
It was the most wrong-headed writing system this side of Tangut.
Not helped by a large fraction of the letters having conflated with each other. I’m not actually entirely convinced that Tangut was worse, though it was certainly quite wrong-headed.
(IIRC their neighbor Khitan actually went in a very right-headed direction, somewhat reminiscent of later Korean.)
Overall, of course, using foreign logograms to represent words in another language is a very known situation (typical in scripts of the Sumerian family, and represented today by Japanese); the weirdness of Pahlavi in particular was that they used phonetically-spelled foreign words as logograms, as opposed to borrowing signs that were logograms in the first place.
AFAIK Linear B is the usual go-to example of a spectacularly bad choice of writing system. Not sure if it can be correctly described as “wrong-headed”, though.
“substituting religion with language”? The reviewer means either “replacing religion with language” or “substituting language for religion”.
“substituting religion with language”? The reviewer means either “replacing religion with language” or “substituting language for religion”.
The reviewer has an Indian name, a quick google search for results from India shows “substitute with” used in the way you find objectionable is quite common in Indian English. If Indian English is basis of the reviewer’s own English idiolect, their use of that construction would be natural for them, perhaps.
Linear B wasn’t a choice, it’s almost unmodified Linear A – actually, isn’t the /o/ series an innovation… anyway, Linear A was pretty clearly the only writing system known to the, well, originators of Linear B.
the weirdness of Pahlavi in particular was that they used phonetically-spelled foreign words as logograms, as opposed to borrowing signs that were logograms in the first place
Heterograms and my evil trap.
When LH posted it, my friend met a girl named Nazanin. She (they: she and her brother) did not speak Russian, my friend said. “Or rather she did, but I faced a langauge barrier”. This was one more reason why my freind was so excited. She shared a recording and well, Nazanin did not speak Russian, she was trying to use her Russian vocabulary. I thought she is from Caucasus (she looks so), but my freind prefers to think of her and her brother as Tajiks. Like: wow, I now know rare, exotic Tajiks! It is self-irony: Tajiks are the most common speakers of foreign langauges in Moscow.
I just realized that my freind was right. The girl introduced herself as nOzanin.
Thanks so much for pointing me to this book! I’m only 20% done and already I’ve learned the likely origin of the name “Hindu Kush” for that mountain range, read of the first recorded use of the word from which English gets “thug”, and been sadly amused by the currency and relevance of a passage describing attitudes in the 14th Century:
“an early manifestation of the sort of north Indian, or, more precisely, Punjabi chauvinism towards the Bengal delta that would be echoed in the aftermath of the Mughal conquest of the region in the late sixteenth century.”
All in all, a real winner, thanks!
My pleasure!
I wonder what the most successful Farsi export item has been. agar/اگر?
“India in the Persianate Age” has now answered for me a question I’d never thought of asking, and it nicely links this thread with the Z/J issue in the “conjun” thread. Even though I’d long known of course that the Taj Mahal was built FOR Mumtaz Mhal, I hadn’t realised that its name might be considered to include a reference TO her name.
Eaton writes “Work on building the Taj Mahal, a corruption of the queen’s name Mumtaz Mahal”.
“Corruption” seemed too strong a word to me, since تاج محل “Taj Mahal” makes perfect sense in Persian according to Wiki, and the Hindi Wikipedia’s translation of the Persian renders it even more so for me. Eaton’s comment prompted me to google her name in devanagari and I found that मुमताज महल , Mumtaj Mahal, returns 20 times as many hits as “मुमताज़ महल”, Mumtaz Mahal, so I’m left wondering if it’s just a happy coincidence or whether the name by which it’s now known was originally simply her name contracted.
I was also interested to note that this recitation of Sahir Ludhianvi’s brilliant scathing takedown of that white elephant – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U39H_fVeBK8 – gives the lyrics in devanagari, but includes a running glossary that translates the Urdu vocabulary not into Sanskritic Hindi but into English. It was nice to know thateven L1 devanagari readers might find English less alien than rebadged Sanskrit.