I’ve posted a number of times about the Persianate world (e.g., 2013, 2018, 2021); for some reason I’m endlessly fascinated by it, and I now present Natalie DeVaull-Robichaud’s interview with Samuel Hodgkin, author of the new Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism. It’s introduced as follows:
Samuel Hodgkin was studying Central Asian history when his academic plans abruptly changed. In the process of learning Persian to read sources for nomad history, Hodgkin was immersed in Persianate poetry – an experience that turned out to be transformative. “The sense of direct encounter with other minds in distant times was such an exciting shock that I ended up getting completely absorbed in the poetry,” Hodgkin said. “When I went to grad school at Chicago, it was Persian poetry that I wanted to keep reading and thinking about.”
In Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism (Cambridge University Press), Hodgkin explains how Persianate poetry came to be a unifying artform for writers from Soviet Central Eurasia, South Asia, and the Middle East. The literature written under communism was profoundly influenced by classical Persianate poetics; in fact, classical Persianate poetry continued to impact non-European poets beyond the end of the Cold War. Hodgkin said that even today, Persian poetry shapes literature as well as popular culture in Russia, Central Eurasia, and the Middle East. But with a few exceptions (Hodgkin mentioned the Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet and the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz), these exciting leftist poets remain outside the Western canon of world literature, read outside their own languages only by area studies scholars. In writing Persianate Verse, Hodgkin explained that he hopes to “deprovincialize these poets I cared so much about by returning them to the big wide revolutionary world for which they wrote.”
Hodgkin is asked how Persianate poetry is viewed today (“In the West, where Persian poetry was massively popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its visibility has really receded. In Western China and in India, the persecution of Muslims has been disrupting the transmission of Persianate poetic traditions. But across much of Eurasia, the story is overwhelmingly one of continuity”), then about how the Persianate literary forms keep a shared sense of cultural heritage alive:
There are a few stages to the story. The generation of madrasa-trained writers and writer-activists come to these struggles not with some idea of the classical Persian heritage but with that being the rhetorical toolkit at their disposal; for them, poetry is an important language of exhortation and persuasion. Satire is a traditional Persianate poetic repertory, so when they want to make things happen, they write poetry for newspapers and incorporate poetry into their speeches.
Then in the 1920s and 30s, [there is a] reaction among a younger generation of proletarian writers and critics in the Soviet Union, Turkish nationalist writers in the Republic of Turkey, and modernizers in Iran and Afghanistan, who start to say: We need a fundamentally different relationship to language in which there’s really no place for the classical aesthetics that informed the previous generation. You can’t build a new world with this old, ornamental language. In Turkey, they start removing Persian and Arabic words from the language and replacing them with these folk or pseudo-folk Turkic words. (That started earlier, but this is when it got state backing.) In the Soviet Union, there’s an attempt to build an alternate literature for these communities out of oral genres. And what you see in the 1930s period of statist authoritarianism, all over Eurasia, is a kind of return to the classics as a heritage object for its prestige and for its aesthetics of hierarchy and contained difference. That is a peak of what we might think of as Persian neoclassicism. It’s a nightmare in terms of poetic ethics, and also for the most part a dead end artistically.
And then the third moment in this story is a kind of afterlife in which the Persian classics, classical Persian genres, and ways of being sociable through literature are brought back by writers who are brought together not by state institutions but by political affinity and shared aesthetic projects. And so you get lots of movies that quote Persian poetry and do fun, playful, strange things with it. You get poets who don’t write in classical genres but write with the classics in various ways.
There’s a good deal more; asked about how to start learning more about the Persianate classics, he says “Geoffrey Squires’s translations of Hafez and Franklin Lewis’s translations of Rumi are a great place to start. There’s still not nearly enough of the best Persianate poetry in translation in English.” Franklin Lewis has written Rumi – Past and Present, East and West, which I should really take a look at — I’m interested in Rumi but wary of all the terrible translations out there.
In the last few decades in India there have been various tensions between different religious and ethnocultural groups and certainly at least occasional flareups of mob violence where Muslims have been on the receiving end. But whether or not “persecution” is an appropriate label for that overall unfortunate situation, the mechanism by which that would somehow discourage or inhibit e.g. Urdu-language poets from writing Persianate-style poetry they were otherwise inclined to write is not at all obvious to me.
I am sure it is quite possible to write Persianate language poetry in Urdu in India. I would guess the difference is that today that poetry will have little chance of being published in books, magazines or journals catering to a wider audience and is also unlikely to reach a large Urdu/Hindu speaking audience through popular music, film or socisl media. Prior to 1949 even non-Muslim Hindu speakers still appreciated Persianate poetry, and certainly that was the case in a once heavily Urdu city like Delhi. Modern Hindu speakers in India presumably no longer see that style as part of their culture and are not very receptive to it.
Yeah, I don’t think the point was that it’s impossible to do it but that “the transmission of Persianate poetic traditions” has been disrupted — i.e., not officially taught and widely available, so that it could continue as a model.
What Vanya suggests seems quite plausible but the use of “persecution” to describe it is imho bonkers. Does Hodgkin view the Mughal-era subjugation of the Indian population to Persianate conquerors and imperial overlords (with cultural prestige thereby predictably given to Persianate literary genres) as having been the natural order of things, such that any subsequent deviation from it is suspect?
Presumably if the more territorially extensive British India had not been partitioned at independence, all manner of things would have ended up differently, perhaps including cultural/literary things. But which factions were agitating for partition?
Do you really want to maintain that the government of India has not been persecuting Muslims of late?
I suppose (ignoring Kashmir) you could maintain that they have merely been actively encouraging anti-Muslim bigotry in pursuit of their ethnonationalist project.
Citing the treatment of Hindus under the Mughals as evidence that Muslims are not currently being persecuted is hardly a cogent argument.
Certainly we’re not talking about anything on the scale of the Chinese attempt to erase Uygur identity altogether. But so what? Is it not really “persecution” if it falls short of attemped genocide?
the use of “persecution” to describe it is imho bonkers.
Have you read any news out of India for the last decade or so?
Decreased interest in Persianate styles of poetry could certainly coincide with persecution but is not itself persecution and does not require persecution as a causal explanation. Did the decrease Vanya describes occur slowly and steadily after Partition or all of a sudden only after the BJP started winning elections?
Treatment of indigenous Indian religions was generally a lot worse under the Dehli Sultanate than under the Moghal Empire that succeeded it.
I took a look at Franklin Lewis’s translation of Rumi on GBooks. It seems to be the style of poetic translation that aims for perfect fidelity of content, with no attempt to reproduce rhyme or meter. I personally find that style too dry for enjoyment.
Me too. The only real use for a translation like that is as a crib when you’re trying to read the original.
(Say what you will about FitzGerald as a translator, at least the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is an actual poem.)
Ezra Pound’s translations (or whatever they are) of Propertius (a poet I actually can read in the original) are brilliant. I don’t think they’d be much use as a crib, mind …
Without claiming any expertise in the history of Urdu poetry, I don’t think it’s hard to imagine a causal link with, shall we say, discrimination against Muslims. If talking “proper” Urdu merely means you get seen as a backwards, fanatical enemy of the nation, that’s already a disincentive to putting in the not inconsiderable effort required to learn that particular register. If it means a slightly increased risk of being boycotted or lynched, all the more so. I suspect that school curriculum choices have more to do with it, but those are influenced by the same ideologies… It’s all connected.
Exactly.
One problem is that we don’t really have good empirical sense of the facts or the timeline. Vanya’s account is, I imagine, a plausible educated guess but nothing more. The emergence of a self-conscious elite/standardized “Hindi” suitable for literary use that explicitly contrasts with Urdu dates to the second half of the 19th century, and its accompanying rhetoric could easily lead to a long slow decline in the reading of “Urdu” texts (even if transliterated) by Hindi speakers who could understand them perfectly well – or could have understood them with a bit of early exposure to the relevant literary register.
Even before Lameen’s comment I was thinking that a history of what poetry (by style, epoch, author, etc.) was taught in Indian schools and the history of curriculum changes in that regard would be instructive. How much “local-language” poetry is or isn’t taught in English-medium-of-instruction schools, which I take it are often sought out by the most ambitious students (and where such students might be exposed to vernacular literary traditions if not in school), is another wildcard. It wouldn’t surprise me if the takeover of the Education Ministry in such-and-such state in 199? by a more Hindutva-oriented administration led to curriculum change that suddenly excluded from the syllabi a lot of Persianate poetry that had survived until then. But it also wouldn’t surprise me if Persianate poetry had been on the decline everywhere except Urdu-medium-of-instruction schools for many decades previously under supposedly secular Congress rule.
You would think this might have been offset to some extent by a new flourishing of Persianate poetry in West Pakistan, where Urdu enthusiasts had managed to get hold of a whole new nation-state’s educational system and could and did exalt the status of Urdu over the local languages. Did that happen?
A history of curriculum changes as affecting Persianate-style poetry in any of the Turkic-speaking Central Asian lands as they went through Soviet times (with many shifts along the way in minority-language and minority-culture policy) and then independence would likewise be interesting.
Related only by the general topic of shifting language power in post-colonial situations, I had been meaning to mention this interesting wire story from last month reporting a recent notable decline in Francophone power and hegemony in Senegal, even though Francophone cultural dominance had seemed pretty stable for the first few generations after independence. (It also briefly mentions some shifts in official language policy by new regimes in Mali and Burkina Faso that have an anti-Paris orientation, but doesn’t really give enough factual detail to know what is really happening versus not happening on the ground in those countries.)
https://apnews.com/article/senegal-francophonie-french-wolof-de364cda29f5ead569ab76f1bcba56d3
On literal fidelity: The only real use for a translation like that is as a crib when you’re trying to read the original.
Which is an important use, though.
Then there’s the style with no rhyme or meter but changes for reasons I can’t see, e.g., Robert Bly. And the one with opportunistic rhyme and meter, which I understand better.
One participant in the poetry workshop I belong to just told me that the rhyme and meter of one of my translations were distracting. I’m sure there are many other readers like her, and I wonder whether she’d have had the same problem with the original.
Which is an important use, though.
Indeed, and since I can make my way through Persian poetry with enough help, it’s of great use to me.
Hindutva types may or may not take solace from learning that Professor Hodgkin does not appear to be an enthusiast for Islam (much less the Delhi Sultanate) but merely an enthusiast for Communism. (His office address suggests that the Comp Lit department may be the current colonial overlord of the third-floor territory where the Linguistics faculty had their offices back in the Eighties although that building may have been so reworked that it’s not really the same space.)
https://complit.yale.edu/people/samuel-hodgkin
@JWB:
Both Senegal and Burkina have a single African language which is known to a majority of the population, so it’s more feasible than in some cases.
I doubt whether the millions of minority language speakers would be quite so thrilled. The colonial languages have the great advantage of being neutral between local ethnic groups.
I’ve seen northern Ghanaians intimate that they were far from pleased to have southerners speak Twi to them (rather than English) on the assumption that they would understand it – even when they did.
Blaise Compaoré, longtime autocrat of Burkina Faso (ousted in 2014) belongs to the Mande-speaking Bisa group. I have no doubt that he can speak Mooré if called upon to do so, but I doubt if he would have been keen to see it officially replace French.
And the Eyadémas, hereditary dictators of Togo, are Kabiye. They would be unlikely to feel that Ewe, the largest Togo language, was a suitable choice for national language …
In a perfectly rational world, Nigerian Pidgin (a creole, despite the name) would be the obvious choice for national official language. Never going to happen …
@David E.: yes, I appreciate the neutrality argument for the former colonial languages, and AFAIK West Africa lacks a widespread traditional mutual-L2 trade language like Swahili or Bahasa Indonesia which is non-Western but perceived as ethnically-neutral. (Like maybe Hausa is used for that purpose in some places but it’s also the L1 of a large ethnic group.)
Wikipedia suggests that West Africa also lacks significant French-lexifier creoles, even though those are common in the Caribbean and elsewhere and English-lexifier and Portuguese-lexifier creoles are healthy in West Africa. What’s up with that historically, if it is indeed true? As you suggest for Nigeria, a sufficiently robust creole could be ethnically neutral while also contrasting nicely with the former colonial language in anything approaching its standard variety.
And of course back in India we have the very same issue, with Tamil-speakers and others being very negative about attempts to elevate Hindi at the expense of English as a national common L2.
Yes; Hausa must be the nearest thing, and is nowadays the L1 of all kinds of people from very different backgrounds, including many Christians. But it still carries a whole lot of cultural baggage of its own, including a very definite association with Islam.
I get the impression that the Muslim link is much less salient with Swahili, despite the fact that the Swahili-as-such are one of those peoples who think of themselves pretty much as Muslim by definition.
True about the absence of French-lexifier creoles. I think that it’s more the fact that ths English-lexifier creoles arose from a very specific set of historical circumstances to do with the Atlantic slave trade and the return of ex-slaves to West Africa.
There are Portuguese-lexifier creoles around there, though. I suppose part of it is that the French were mostly relative latecomers and weren’t so involved with slaving. They were more into la gloire and inland conquests.
(There was an exchange in the UK parliament in which it was pointed out to a government minister that the French dominions in West Africa were more extensive than the British, to which the minister replied that the French territory predominantly consisted of, in agricultural terms, “very light land.”)
How widespread is Wolof in Senegal?
Very. Most people can speak it (and a pretty high proportion are L1 speakers.)
Twi/Fante will get you understood by a clear majority of Ghanaians. But with millions of exceptions …
In the 1990, at least four out five of the patients coming to the hospital in Bawku could not communicate in either Twi or English at all (Hausa and Mooré were the most useful languages after Kusaal.) I expect things have changed since, but, I suspect, not enormously.
Similarly, Mooré and Dyula between them cover a lot of the Burkinabe. But I used to work regularly in large areas in Burkina where most people understood neither of them (and not French, either.)
Farther south in Africa there are a few nation-states where the local population overwhelmingly has the same L1 and/or the ethnic minorities generally understand the majority L1 as an L2, e.g., Botswana, Lesotho, and The Kingdom Formerly Known As Swaziland. But I don’t know how that affects the dynamics of what domains the erstwhile colonial language (English) does and doesn’t get used in.
There’s nowhere really like that in West Africa, though it’s a cline rather than an either/or thing, of course.
Senegal and Ghana are pretty near one end of the distribution for West Africa, but still nothing like Botswana.
I think this partly reflects the methodology and history of the European invasions: establish yourself on the coast for slaving, trading and resource extraction for a while, and much later, you begin to panic about other Europeans getting there before you and push directly inland as fast and as far as you can. (It accounts for the odd shape of many of these countries …)
Northern Nigeria is about as close culturally to the south as Iran is to Scotland. The wonder is that the Federation has ever functioned at all, rather than that it is so dysfunctional and has had a brutal civil war. Europeans have never managed to do as much at home.
Nigeria has held together in large part because the Biafran rebellion was eventually crushed sufficiently thoroughly and brutally as to disincentivize any other efforts along those lines. And most of the Western powers were quite supportive of the crushing for motives of their own, of which the least unsavory is probably the quite rational fear that the boundaries the colonial powers left behind were so arbitrary that any successful attempt to revise even one of them would lead to attempts to revise all of them.
Actually, Gowon’s policy of rebuilding the devastated region after the Biafra war was pretty significant too.
Europeans like Africa to fit nicely into the categories they have preassigned, I find.
One of the more fascinating niche political enthusiasms/fantasies floating around in early 2017 was that the incoming Pres. Trump, being an anti-status-quo guy and breaker of norms, might change the map of Africa by giving official U.S. diplomatic recognition to the de-facto-independent Somaliland (the formerly British-colony bit of incoherent/dysfunctional Somalia). It didn’t happen. Which I personally thought was a shame because an old college friend of mine who had become a U.S. Foreign Service officer quite possibly had the best resume of anyone the State Department had to be the first U.S. Ambassador there (having in his previous career served in war-torn Mogadishu and in Ethiopia and in Djibouti on two separate occasions …). This assuming, of course, that the Somaliland posting would not be one reserved for a major political donor rather than a career Foreign Service type …
The same fellow also was posted for a while in Madagascar, which is another monolingual example although I for one don’t accept that that’s really part of “Africa” in any sense beyond the taxonomizer’s need to assign all islands to *some* continent. (It’s not-really-African in a pretty sui generis way – quite different from the ways in which e.g. Mauritius and the Seychelles and Cape Verde are not-really-African but instead far-flung parts of the Caribbean.)
Like Somalia, Rwanda is pretty much monolingual too …
From which, I suppose, we can draw the unsurprising conclusion that brutal conflict is not in fact occasioned by linguistic differences. Sorry, Dr Zamenhof …
On a less depressing note, but proving the same point: Switzerland has been smugly multilingual for quite a while now ..
(Cue the Lone Ranger …)
“Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.” – Attr. D. Adams.
In Mali, French is no longer the “official language” – but it is still the official “working language”. Meanwhile, some 65% of the population is illiterate – presumably in any language, though censuses often don’t even bother to count literacy in languages other than French.
You would think this might have been offset to some extent by a new flourishing of Persianate poetry in West Pakistan
Not really comparable. For a start, Pakistan’s new government was interested in promoting Urdu, not Persian, much less “the Persianate” in general. In West Pakistan, the Persianate was already an omnipresent background; in Bengal, not so much. (I came across a handy chapter on just that a few weeks back.) One might have imagined this leading to a rise in Urdu Persianate poetry, but there were far more Urdu L1 speakers in India even after Partition than in Bengal at any period, and Bengali is a great deal more different from Urdu than Panjabi is. (Are there any great Urdu poets whose first language was Pashtun or Sindhi, I wonder?) The core centres of Urdu high culture were places like Delhi and Lucknow; its decline in its heartland is more remarkable than its failure to gain ground in areas where it was hardly present to begin with.
Aargh, realised too late to edit that I somehow misread “West” as “East” above, making my comment rather irrelevant. In West Pakistan, Urdu poetry is of course doing just fine.