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On Equal Terms: The Equivocal Origins of an Early Mughal Indo-Persian Vocabulary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2014

WALTER N. HAKALA
WALTER N. HAKALA*
Affiliation:
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, walterha@buffalo.edu
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Abstract

The Qaṣīdah dar Luġhāt-i Hindī (‘A Qaṣīdah on Hindī Terms’), composed in the early sixteenth century, is an unusual example of the niṣāb genre of multilingual vocabularies in verse, providing Persian glosses for various terms drawn from a language the text labels Hindī. The author of the vocabulary, Yūsuf Ḳhurāsānī ‘Yūsufī’, was a physician who followed the first Mughal-Timurid emperor, Bābur, from Afghanistan to India. This paper examines the content and the arrangement of Yūsufī's vocabulary, paying particular attention to the means through which ‘Yūsufī’ was able to assert semantic equivalences between lexical terms and the materials with which they correspond. It concludes by contrasting the Hindi to Persian glossing directionality of this work with the Persian to Hindi directionality prevailing in later examples of the niṣāb genre, arguing that the Qaṣīdah reflects a period when practitioners of the Persianate yūnānī system of medical knowledge engaged with Indic counterparts in dynamic and especially fruitful ways.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , April 2015, pp. 209 - 227
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2014 

Introduction

The subject of this paper, the Qaṣīdah dar Luġhāt-i Hindī (‘A Qaṣīdah on Hindī Terms’, or, more loosely, ‘An Ode on the Hindi Language’), is a vocabulary comprising synonymous and nearly synonymous Hindi and Persian terms arranged in 44 verses all sharing a single end-rhyme. Housed in the Nuruosmaniye collection in Istanbul, it comprises one and a half folios within a bound codex.Footnote 1 Composed in the first half of the sixteenth century, it is an artifact—as much as New World silver, gunpowder and pathogens—of the rapid expansion in the flow of technologies, people, and commodities during what has been called (albeit not without some controversy) Early Modernity. Its particular poetic arrangement formally corresponds with the qaṣīdah, a genre whose origins may be traced back to pre-Islamic Arabia, though the didactic content of this work corresponds more closely with the niṣāb genre of versified vocabularies, the first example of which was composed in Central Asia in the early thirteenth century. The qaṣīdah's outstanding feature is its monorhyme: the difficulty in composing verse with a single rhyme made this genre especially suited for what might be termed ‘professional poetry’—satires and panegyrics composed by poets for particular financial ends.Footnote 2

At some point in the first decades of the sixteenth century, the author of the Qaṣīdah dar Luġhāt-i Hindī, a physician by the name of Yūsuf bin Muḥammad Yūsuf Ḳhurāsānī (hereafter referred by his nom de plume ‘Yūsufī’), left Herat and settled in what was then the largest and most important city in northern India, Agra.Footnote 3 His father had served as a physician in the court of Ṣulṯān Ḥusain Bayqarā, the great-great-grandson of Tīmur. During the nearly forty-year reign of Ṣulṯān Bayqarā, Herat had become the most important centre of artistic patronage and production in the Persian-speaking world. So widespread was the appreciation of Persian literature in Herat that contemporary authors of tażkirahs (‘biographical anthologies’ of poets), whose work contributed to the consolidation of the Persian literary tradition as a recognisable canon of classical poets, noted with some distaste the contributions of working-class dye-makers, sweet-sellers, candle-makers, and hawkers of roasted chickpeas to poetic recitals that had hitherto remained largely the domain of socio-economic elites.Footnote 4

In the year 1504, the young prince Ẕahīr al-dīn Muḥammad Bābur, descended on his father's side from Tīmur and on his mother's from Chingīz Ḳhān, somewhat precociously claimed for himself the title pādshāh, or ‘king’.Footnote 5 He did so only after having been chased away by the Uzbeks from his ancestral appanage in the Ferghana valley of present-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Crossing the Hindu Kush mountains, he gathered additional supporters and was able to seize control of the then-provincial city of Kabul. In late 1506, Bābur spent three weeks visiting his aging relative, Sultān Bayqarā in Herat, and was awed by the gatherings, or majlises, of poets and musicians held in that city.Footnote 6 Clearly impressed with the erudition of the Herati elite, Bābur attempted to recreate this society at his own courts. With Bayqarā's death a few weeks later, Bābur would spend the next two decades bringing together, under a new Timurid-Mughal regime, territory that had been briefly subjugated a century earlier by Tīmur.Footnote 7 He spent the last five years of his life consolidating his power in the region surrounding his new capital in Agra.

Faḳhrī Sultān Muḥammad of Herat describes ‘Yūsufī’ in his Laṯāʾif-nāmah (c. AH 927/ 1520 AD) as “an affable, world-withdrawn, and well regarded man” (mard-i ḳhẉush-ḳhulq o jahān-gashtah o ṣǒḥbat-didah) who had authored three collections (dīwān) of ġhazals.Footnote 8 According to the Akbar-nāmah of Abū al-Faẓl, “Maulānā Yūsufī the physician” was “among the illustrious men, courtiers and companions” who followed Bābur from Central Asia to the new Mughal court in India.Footnote 9 Despite being one of the only near-contemporary sources to mention him, Abū al-Faẓl tells us little else about ‘Yūsufī’ except that “He was sent for from Ḳhurāsān. . .[and] was distinguished for good qualities, for dexterity as an operator and for assiduity”.Footnote 10 In 1533–4, some three years after Bābur's death, an author who calls himself Maulānā ‘Yūsufī’ prepared a collection of belles-lettres, the Badāʾiʿ al-Inshāʾ (‘The Wonders of Letter-Writing’), for his son and other students.Footnote 11 Several scholars have surmised that he may be the same ‘Yūsufī’ who compiled the Riyāẓ al-Adẉiyah, or ‘Gardens of Remedies’ in 1539 and dedicated it to the Mughal Emperor Humāyūn.Footnote 12 This attribution seems plausible insofar as its author would seem to share the preoccupation of the Qaṣīdah dar Luġhāt-i Hindī in giving “the Hindi synonyms of every profession and medicine”.Footnote 13 We know that ‘Yūsufī’'s earliest recorded work, a text written in Herat called the Risalah-i Maʾkūl o Mashrūb (‘Treatise on [Items] Eaten and Drunk’), dates back some thirty-seven years earlier to 1501–2,Footnote 14 and another text, the Jāmiʿ al-Fawāʾid or ‘Collection of Benefits’, to 1503–4 (though one manuscript is dated in Herat to 1512).Footnote 15 While ‘Yūsufī’ may have remained in the employ of Bābur this entire time, Maria Subtelny, the noted scholar of Timurid literature, also remarks that ‘Yūsufī’ had been associated with the court of the Ṣulṯān Bayqarā in Herat.Footnote 16 She may, however, have conflated our ‘Yūsufī’ with his father, also a widely admired physician, and, incidentally, a fellow lexicographer whose work also focussed on medical terminology.Footnote 17

The younger ‘Yūsufī’'s Qaṣīdah dar Luġhāt-i Hindī opens with the following verse, providing insights into the intended audience of this text and its function among that group:

Footnote 18

nām-i har ćīzī bahindī bishinau az man ay pisar |1|

ḳhāṣṣah nām-i har dawāʾī nafʿ bardārī magar

Listen, oh son, to the names of all things in Hindi

But particularly, take profit from the names of each remedy

The language of this opening verse is Persian. The author exhorts his audience to listen to the names of all things in Hindi, but emphasises that these terms will only provide profit when attached to the Persian terms that would have been more familiar to the physician from Herat. While the formula ‘oh son’ is common enough in Persian didactic poetry, the preponderance of medical terms—body parts, medicinal herbs and diseases—suggests that this work may have actually been addressed to a boy who would have followed ‘Yūsufī’'s footsteps in becoming a physician; perhaps it was the same one for whom he prepared his collection of model letters in 1533–4 or another—either younger or older. In verse 42 near the end of the manuscript, this audience is exhorted, again in Persian, to remember this poem in its entirety for “your shining discernment” (ray-i tū roshan):

Footnote 19

meh buwad bārān akas bashad samā bizhlī ast barq |42|

yād gīr īn jumlah ay rāy-i tū roshan ćūn qamar

meh [for megh] will be ‘rain’; may akas [for ākās] be ‘sky’; bizhlī is ‘lightning’

Remember this all, oh [may] your discernment [be] shining as the moon

The attribution of this qaṣīdah to Yūsuf bin Muḥammad bin Yūsuf Ḳhurāsānī stems from the penultimate verse (43), in which the author makes reference, as is traditionally done in the concluding verses, to a taḳhalluṣ or ‘nom de plume’—here as ‘Yūsufī’:

yūsufī bahr-at darīn abyāt kardast anćih żikr |43|

kar gunī az bar turā har dam rasid nafʿī digar

‘Yūsufī’ has done such żikr (‘remembrance, mention, glorification of God’) for your benefit in these verses

[That] if you learn them by heart, with each breath further advantage will come to you

Could ‘Yūsufī’ have compiled this work prior to his arrival in India? As discussed above, it is apparent that ‘Yūsufī’ had prepared other medical treatises as early as 1501/2, several years before Bābur's brief three-week sojourn in Herat when the peripatetic prince may first have been introduced to ‘Yūsufī’ or his father. The presence of a large population of Indians in Central Asia, including those involved in the long-distance trade of horses,Footnote 20 as potential linguistic ‘informants’ or even as potential patrons, makes a Herati (i.e., pre-conquest, pre-Indian, and Mughal-Timurid) origin for this work a distinct possibility. While its prosodic and metapragmatic elements situate this poem squarely within the Persian literary tradition, one cannot discount entirely that this text could be useful for those whose interest in yūnānī medicine was carried out through Indic languages.Footnote 21 The verse form of this text would have facilitated oral recitation and memorisation, potentially obviating some of the difficulties Indian elites may have faced in accessing the text in its Arabic-script written form.

Structure of the Qaṣīdah

As indicated above, the Qaṣīdah dar Luġhāt-i Hindī would seem to share little in common with the classical Arabic qaṣīdah except in its conformity with that genre's requirement of maintaining a single monorhyme throughout. The triliteral semitic root of the term, or q-ṣ-d, corresponds intensionally with a constellation of meanings that revolve around ‘intention’, ‘purpose’, and ‘object’, implying the value of a qaṣīdah as a means of obtaining some end, be it through praise, satire or didactically imparted information. The final verses of a qaṣīdah often insinuate the aim of the poem, through a suggestion of the liberality of the present patron or, in the case of invective verse, a reminder that the poet may seek out more generous future benefactors. In this regard, the final verse (44) continues where the above-quoted penultimate verse leaves off, with a pious prayer from the Divine for protection from loss (ẓarar):

az ẓarar dārad madāmat dar panāh ḳhẉēshtan |44|

ānkih dar ʿālam bataqdīrash buwad nafʿ wa ẓarar

One has, in your perpetual protection (lit. ‘shade’) of the self from loss,

That which in the world, through His Divine decree, is advantage and loss

As Michael Glünz reminds us, “The presentation of a qasida, either in oral recitation or in written form, signifies an entering into a domain of power whose source is God Himself or one of his representatives in the created world, such as the Prophet, an imam, a saint, the ruler, or Divine Wisdom”.Footnote 22 The benefactor to whom a qaṣīdah is dedicated may therefore be human or divine, and it would appear from the shifting deixis of the verse—your protection (madām-at), His Divine degree (bataqdīr-ash)—that the author wishes to credit both in his concluding verse. Unfortunately, we have little with which to identify ‘Yūsufī’'s human protector. Moreover, though the term for ‘Divine decree’ (taqdīr) would imply an Islamic worldview, the concept is not unique to Islam with the term serving as a calque for a more general notion of ‘divine fate’ (taqdīr-i ḳhūdā) used in Persian translations of Sanskrit works during the reign of Akbar.Footnote 23

The second verse of the qaṣīdah alludes to a theme that is frequently treated in the introductions to Islamicate texts, namely the transcendent quality of speech (suḳhun) and its value—incumbent upon the poet—in expressing gratitude to the Creator:

bŏl takallum bashad wa bŏl kar bĕgo yaʿnī suḳhun |2|

shukr farmāyad turā ankas kih goyad shukr kar

bŏl [for bol] is ‘speech’, and bŏl kar is ‘speak’, that is to say ‘discourse’

[For] one to thank you is that which they call shukr kar

Suḳhun (‘speech’ or ‘discourse’) may be interpreted as an oblique reference to the prophesy of Muḥammad,Footnote 24 and the imperative bŏl kar-bĕgo pairing a calque to the Arabic command kun (‘be’), “the sacred word which set the world into motion in the Quranic narrative of creation”.Footnote 25 The verse as a whole may perhaps be taken as corresponding to one or more of the ajzā-yi tarkībī (or ‘required compositional elements’) typical of narrative and didactic poetry in many Islamic literary traditions in which

. . .the ḥamd is written first. Then the naʿt-i rasūl [‘encomium for the prophet Muhammad’]; after this, under the title madḥ-i farmān-i rawāʾe waqt, praise is made of a contemporary king, minister, or grandee, followed occasionally by the inclusion of taʿrīf-i suḳhun in which poet praises and commends the importance and art of his own language. In addition, occasionally, the poet describes his family, his place of birth, his family history, etc. It is for this reason that this section carries so much [historical] importance. . .Sometimes, the reason for the penning of the maṡnawī is described under the title of sabab-i taṣnīf.Footnote 26

As this passage from an Urdu textbook on poetic genres makes clear, these ‘elements’ are more typical of the narrative maṡnawī than the qaṣīdah, which, in its classical form, possesses a different set of macrostructural ajzā-yi tarkībī.Footnote 27

The third verse quickly shifts from this reflexive discourse on language to more obviously medical matters, namely parts of the human body, a topic that the author explores in a 6-verse setFootnote 28 beginning

jīb o kan amad [for āmad] zabān o gosh wa d’ārī {/dhārī} rīsh dān |3|

mūć rā mīḳhẉān burūt wa kānah {/anah} kūr wa bahrah {/baḥr} kar

jīb and kan are ‘tongue’ and ‘ear’, and know dārī [for dāṛhī ] [as] ‘beard’

Call ‘moustache’ mūć [for mūćhFootnote 29 ] and kānah [kānā, ‘blind in one eye’] is ‘blind’, and bahrah [for bahrā], ‘deaf’

The author takes significant metrical liberties in his placement of Indic terms, often adding a short vowel sound (mutaḥarrik) to an otherwise quiescent (sākin) final consonant (e.g., the fifth verse's lexical pair kāl post is pronounced kā-la post to scan = - =, turning kāl into what is called watad-i mafrūq) and pronouncing long vowels as though they were short (e.g., the fourth verse's angūlī is scanned angulī = - =):

kāl {/khāl} post wa bezah {/pazh} maġhz wa ustuḳhẉān goyad hād |5|

angūlī {/angulī} angusht bāshad angūtah angusht-i nar

kāl [for khāl], ‘skin’; and bezah [for bhejā Footnote 30 ], ‘brain’; and [one] calls ‘bone’ hād [for haḍḍī or hāṛ]

angūlī [for angulī], shall be ‘finger’; angūtah [for angūthā], ‘thumb’

What I am calling liberties may actually represent more phonetically accurate renderings of these terms as they were spoken at the time, illustrating the challenge faced by copyists in recording unfamiliar Indic terms orthographically in the Arabic script.

Ḥāfiẕ Maḥmūd Sherānī, who reproduced 21 verses of the poem in a 1933 article (see note 44 below) and again in several later works, did not include verse 8 (below), no doubt due to its scatological and sexual content:Footnote 31

mūt baul wa hagnah ġhāʾiṯ gand maqʿad bur qabul |8|

and ḳhuṣyah bāl mūʾī wa jang rān laurah żakar

mūt, ‘urine’, and hagnah, ‘stool’, gand [for gāṅḍ], ‘anus’, bur, ‘vulva’

and [for aṇḍ], ‘testicle’, bāl, ‘hair’, and jang [for jāṅgh], ‘thigh’, laurah [for lauṛā], ‘penis’

The final verse of the set includes a curious pairing of a more general Indic superordinate term for ‘stomach’, ajrī, with the Persian ashkaṁbah, a hyponym that translates in English as the ‘omasum’—the third stomach of a cow (also known as the ‘manifold’ or ‘manyfold’):

piṅdrī sāq-ast wa piperī {/phiphaṛ} shush tillī amad [for āmad] supurz |9|

rūdah rā atrī hamī dān ajrī ashkaṁbah shumar

piṅdrī [for piṅḍlī] is ‘calf of the leg’ and piperī [for phephṛā], ‘lungs’, tillī comes as ‘spleen’

Know ‘intestines’ are the same as atrī [for aṅṭrī], reckon ajrī [for adhauṛī? or ojh?] as the ‘third stomach of a cow’

From verse 10, however, whatever plan had been laid out for the arrangement of the poem appears to fall by the wayside as the author proceeds, in verse 10, to discuss various farm animals (‘sheep’, ‘he-goat’, ‘camel’, etc.), then various foods in verses 11–14 (‘meat’, ‘bread’, ‘fenugreek’, etc.), some luxurious commodities in verses 15–16 (‘silk’, ‘collyrium’, ‘aloeswood’, ‘pearl’, etc.), some qualities and quantities in verse 17 (‘little’, ‘many’, ‘bad’, good’), and weaving and travel in verse 19 (‘warp’, ‘spider's web’, ‘travel provisions,’ ‘travel’). From verse 20, series of shiʿrs or distichs devoted to medicinal plant products are punctuated with verses on insects (27), fruits and vegetables (29–31), milk products/fire (32), grains/robbery (33), metals/foods (37), grains (39), home/parental relationships (40), times of day/sun and moon (41), and weather (42), before finishing with the concluding verses (43 and 44) reproduced above.

The Niṣāb Genre of Versified Vocabularies

A tradition of identifying Persian equivalents for medical terminology drawn from other languages can be traced back to the thirteenth century, if not earlier: Abu Bakr bin ʿAlī bin ʿUṡmān al-Kāshānī's Persian translation in 1214 AD of the eleventh-century Arabic-language Kitāb al-Saidalah fī al-Ṯibb “provides equivalent names for most of the herbs and minerals in Arabic, Greek, Syriac, Jurjani, Khvarazmi, Persian, Hindi and Sindhi”.Footnote 32 Similarly, in his use of generic conventions, the author of the Qaṣīdah would have had several texts available as models. The niṣāb genre of multilingual vocabularies in verse, common to the literatures of Persian, Urdu, Panjabi, Pashto and Arabic, among other South Asian languages, belongs within an important tradition whose origins may be traced back in Sanskrit lexicography to the Gupta period, if not earlier.Footnote 33 The earliest known example of this genre in Persian, completed in AH 617 (1220/21 AD)Footnote 34 in Farāh (located in what is now southern Afghanistan), was a text that provided Persian equivalents to Arabic terms. The arrangement of this work, entitled Niṣāb al-Ṣibyān, suggests its purpose in teaching children not just the fundamentals of Arabic, but the basics of composition in Persian. A full 44 of the 200 total verses are devoted to descriptions of different Arabic and Persian meters.

In his prose introduction to the work, the author, Abū Naṣar Farāhī, writes that “because this work in total comes to two hundred verses, I have named it the niṣāb al-ṣibyān”.Footnote 35 Niṣāb, in the sense that Farāhī is employing it, is a legal term signifying ‘minimum taxable wealth’. In Sharīʿat law, that minimum wealth was established as 200 silver dirhams, and so, in naming his work after a legal term that denotes the “minimum taxable wealth for/of children”, Farāhī is suggesting that by memorising this vocabulary, the student will have acquired the means to both cultural and material wealth.Footnote 36 In other words, mastery of the information contained within this work suggests passing from one level of cultural competence into another. Later versified vocabularies produced in this style are also known as niṣābs.

The only work of this genre with Indic equivalents to Persian terms that has been dated prior to Yūsufī's Qaṣīdah is the so-called Ḳhāliq Bārī, a versified vocabulary of synonymous terms from Arabic, Persian and a language that the text calls hindawī. This text was likely written in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries by Amīr ‘Ḳhusrau’ of Delhi, who, besides being considered the greatest Indian poet of the classical Persian canon, is viewed by many in India today as the father of Hindi literature. Doubts about the authorship of this work have persisted, especially in the wake of evidence that Ḥāfiẕ Maḥmūd Sherānī brought to light in the second preface to his 1944 critical edition of the work.Footnote 37 More recent scholarship has reaffirmed the likelihood that a core of the text had taken written form within a dozen years of ‘Ḳhusrau’'s death in 1325.Footnote 38 In the verse preface of the Allāh Ḳhudāʾi, an Arabic-Persian-Hindawī niṣāb produced in the style of the Ḳhāliq Bārī during the reign of Emperor Shāh Jahān (r. 1628–58), its author, ‘Tajallī’, evokes the spirit of Amir Ḳhusrau, requesting assistance in the composition of his work.Footnote 39 If, as Sherānī held, the Ḳhāliq Bārī was actually composed in 1622–3 by a Ẓiyāʾ al-dīn Ḳhusrau of Gwalior, it would be surprising if within a few decades of its completion this same work began to be attributed to the earlier, if admittedly more famous, Amīr ‘Ḳhusrau’ of Delhi. More recently, several scholars have pointed out other significant inconsistencies in the manuscript evidence employed by Sherānī in his claims of an early seventeenth-century provenance for the work.Footnote 40

Amīr ‘Ḳhusrau’'s verses, like those written by Farāhī at least half a century earlier, follow a varying rhythm and rhyme scheme, in this case one that corresponds with the maṡnawī Footnote 41 genre of Persian poetry. A maṡnawī, in its broadest formal sense, denotes any poem with one or more regular meters and distichs whose end-rhymes vary from verse to verse, as in aa, bb, cc, dd, etc. Due to the comparatively less stringent prosodic structure of the maṡnawī form, the length of these niṣābs was potentially limitless.Footnote 42 Due to the very open-endedness of the format of the Ḳhāliq Bārī, and the famous name of ‘Ḳhusrau’ associated with it, it must have been very tempting for schoolboys and established poets alike to add their own verses, like graffiti, to this linguistic monument. Many have found compelling Sherānī's argument that so poorly crafted a work as the Ḳhāliq Bārī—which in its numerous manuscript recensions is disorganised, both linguistically and in terms of its larger macrostructure—could not have been compiled by a poet of Amīr ‘Ḳhusrau’'s stature.Footnote 43 The text uses both Hindi and Persian as glossing languages, and while Arabic, Persian and Hindi terms are often equated, one or more are often excluded, with pairs of synonyms from a single language often provided without a gloss from a second language. In terms of macrostructure, there is no logical movement from one theme to another, and the manuscript evidence demonstrates this disorganisation with inconsistent lineation and idiosyncratic interpolations.

In contrast, the Qaṣīdah dar Luġhāt-i Hindī, due to its adherence to a strict and unchanging monorhyme (words ending with -ar, e.g., bar, matar) and single meter, weighs in at a mere 44 verses. Due to the combination of the monorhyme requirement, the overall concision of the text, and the paucity of manuscript copies, the written record of Qaṣīdah dar Luġhāt-i Hindī differs markedly from the Ḳhāliq Bārī insofar as there appears to be little variation between the Istanbul manuscript and the copy consulted by Ḥāfiẕ Maḥmūd Sherānī for the 21 verses that he reproduced in a 1933 journal article.Footnote 44

Indeed, many took it upon themselves to try and improve upon ‘Ḳhusrau’'s vocabulary. A few decades after ‘Yūsufī’ produced his Qaṣīdah, in the latter half of the sixteenth century, a Hindu of the kāyasth caste composed a work known as the Ajay Ćand Nāmah (AH 960/1552–3 AD).Footnote 45 The novelty of this niṣāb is that it arranges its 375 distich verses into chapters named for the rooms of a palace. There is an eerie similarity between the mnemonic devices deployed in this work and the technique, dating to Greek antiquity, of building “memory palaces”.Footnote 46 Children committing this work to memory could do so by depositing verses into different imaginary rooms, and then, in recounting it, wander back through the palace to retrieve them. ‘Yūsufī’'s Qaṣīdah dar Luġhāt-i Hindī, however, remained something of an anomaly. Niṣābs prepared in the decades following the compilation of ‘Yūsufī’'s vocabulary would jettison the monorhyme of the qaṣīdah form, reverting to the looser structure of the maṡnawī. With few exceptions, many would also follow the example of the Ḳhāliq Bārī by employing a variable mixture of Hindi and Persian as the glossing metalanguage, suggesting that the text was designed for those more familiar Hindī/Hindawī as a spoken language and written Persian as the target language.

Modes of Glossing

Reproduced below is an example of a typical verse from the qaṣīdah, one that demonstrates the degree to which this text was able to accommodate both Persian and Hindi speakers:

  1. 1)

  2. 2a) ankH ćashmP wa nākH bīnīP baunH abrūP hotH labP |4|

  3. 2b) dandH dandānH gādahH gardanP kūttahH zānūP mūndH sarP

  4. 3a) ank [for āṅkh], ‘eye’; and nāk, ‘nose’; baun [for bhauṅ], ‘eyebrow’; and hot [for hoṅṭ], ‘lip’

  5. 3b) dand [for dāṅt], ‘tooth’; gādah [for gaḍā—>galā], ‘neck’; kūttah [for kuṭṭa, or, possibly, guṭṭha], ‘knee’; mūṅd [for mūṅḍ/mūṇḍ], ‘head’

There are several items that need to be explained to make sense of the ‘translation’ that follows the Roman transcription of the text above. The text of the verse (1) here appears first in Arabic script (as it does in the manuscript), and then, in the two lines that follow (2a and 2b), I have transcribed the two hemistichs—two of which comprise a single verse—into the Roman alphabet. Subscript Roman letters indicate the etymological origin of the terms being employed: H for “Hindi”, P for “Persian”, and A for “Arabic”.Footnote 47 In this particular shiʿr, or ‘verse’, “Hindi” terms are followed serially by synonymous or partially synonymous terms of Perso-Arabic origin. The final two lines (3a and 3b) depict an attempt to render the Perso-Arabic terms and the Persian auxiliary “metalanguage” of the verse's two hemistichs in English. Since the orthographic representation of the Hindi-origin terms in the Qaṣīdah varies dramatically from present-day conventions, modern variants of the Hindi terms have been indicated in brackets.Footnote 48

A close examination of the transcribed (2a-b) and translated (3a-b) text reveals that this particular verse contains a total of eight assertions of semantic equivalence. In other lexicographical works in the niṣāb genre, as is the case of the Qaṣīdah dar Luġhāt-i Hindī, the means by which equivalence is asserted is by association of terms to a list of synonyms or (as is more usually the case) near-synonyms. To return to the verse at hand, in examining the first assertion of semantic equivalence, it will be seen that there is no explicit metalanguage to indicate the direction of glossing:

  • ankH ćashmP

The term ank is a representation of the orthographically more common āṅkh ( ), a Hindi term meaning ‘eye’. Ćashm is its Persian equivalent. While there is no glossing operator between the following pair of equated pairs—the Hindi nāk and the Persian bīnī, both meaning ‘nose’—the Persian conjunction wa/o (‘and’) separates the first pair from the second as part of the glossing metalanguage:

  • wa nākH bīnīP

These two statements exemplify the two broad types of equivalence—explicit and implicit—that one finds in multilingual vocabularies. Explicit glossing operations employ a metalanguage of either Hindi or Persian, or both: the Persian conjunction wa (as in wa nākH bīnīP ) reappears in this capacity throughout the text. On other occasions, as in the first hemistich of verse 5, the metalanguage takes the form of a verbal command: wa ustuḳhẉānP goyad hādH (‘and [one] calls ustuḳhẉān [‘bone’] hād [‘bone’, for haḍḍī or hāṛ]’). Implicit glossing operations, by way of contrast, do not employ metalinguistic glossing operators. Equivalence here is implied through the juxtaposition of terms, as in ankH [‘eye’] ćashmP [‘eye’]. This is the form of glossing that occurs in each of the four equivalences in the second hemistich of verse 4:

  1. 2b) dandH dandānH gādahH gardanP kuttahH zānūP mūndH sarP

  2. 3b) dand [for dāṅt], ‘tooth’; gādah [for gaḍā—>galā], ‘neck’; kūttah [for kuṭṭa or, possibly, guṭṭha], ‘knee’; mūṅd [for mūṅḍ/mūṇḍ], ‘head’

Since the original text lacks any obvious punctuation marks, semicolons have been added to the translated text in order to separate visually sets of implicitly equated pairs.

It is on the basis of Persian as the exclusive glossing metalanguage of this text that I have made what must appear as a great assumption in the English presentation of this material. Verse 21 illustrates the range of methods through which a semantic equivalence may be explicitly asserted through the use of Persian as a glossing metalanguage:

bolH murrA wa tīkrīH zāgP?-ast wa kastūrīH-ast mushkP 21

qusṯA o sumbulA an [for ān] yikī kūt amad [for āmad] wa īn-ast jar

bol [‘gum-myrrh’], ‘myrrh’; tīkrī [for tikŕī] is ‘hog-weed’ [zāg->sāg?]; kastūrī is ‘musk’

‘Costus arabicus’ and ‘spikenard’: those are one, coming as kūt [for kuṭ Footnote 49 ], and this is the root

The Persian enclitic form of the copula (-ast following zāg) is used for the second and third pairings in the first hemistich, while the explanatory phrases “those are one” (ān yikī) and “and this is the root” (wa īn-ast jar) clarify subtler semantic distinctions among the terms, in this case, the hyponymic relationship of the Hindi term (kūt) to its Persian equivalents. The assumption of this verse as with others is that the more familiar language for the reader (or audience) would have been Persian. The Persian terms, however, I have treated as carrying meaning transparently, that is to say, as capable of accommodating translation into English with little in the way of semantic loss. Stated another way, the Hindi terms seem far more noteworthy and unusual—for the medieval and modern reader alike—than the Persian ones. The Persian of many verses would be as familiar to any child or adult on the streets of Tehran or Herat today as they would have been 500 years ago.

There is frequent overlap in lexical content between the Qaṣīdah dar Luġhāt-i Hindī and verses attributed to the Ḳhāliq Bārī, in particular, those related to foods, medicinal plants and parts of the body. A treatise written near the beginning of ‘Yusufī’'s career, the Jāmiʿ al-Fawāʾid (1503–4 or 1512), is notable for its early discussion of chancre, or the initial lesion of syphilis,Footnote 50 a disease that like other, more celebrated, indices of modernity is generally surmised to have quickly spread from the New World to the Old.Footnote 51 The Persian term ātishak (‘fire’ + diminutive suffix -ak), which centuries later would come to denote ‘syphilis’, refers in the pre-Columbian Ḳhāliq Bārī to something quite different:

Footnote 52

kirm-i shabtāb ast kīṛā ćamkanān

nīz goyand ātishak īnham bědān

‘Firefly’ (lit. ‘night-shining’ worm) is kīṛā ćamkanān (‘shining worm’)

Know they also call them ātishak

Unlike syphilis, it would seem that the New World capsicum did not infect the cuisines of South and Central Asia with quite the same rapidity. As might be expected of a pre-Columbian work, ‘Ḳhusrau’ makes no mention of it when he enumerates two types of ‘pepper’—the long and the round varieties native to South Asia—in verse 146 of the Ḳhāliq Bārī (according to the Sherānī published text):

hindawī pīpal buwad filfil-i darāz

mirć rā goyand filfil-i gird bāz

The Hindawī pīpal should be the ‘long pepper’ (‘Piper longum’)

While they also call mirć the ‘round pepper’

Like its fourteenth-century antecedent, the New World fruit is also conspicuously absent from the Qaṣīdah, with verses 15 and 23 instead glossing the two Old World varieties of filfil—the ‘long’ (filfil-i darāz or dār filfil) and ‘round’:

resam {/resham} abresham buwad kālah siyah ujlah safed| 15 |

surmah kājal mirać {/mirć} filfil saʿd motah ʿūd agar

jauz-i buwā jayifar amad [for āmad] koh chotī ḥasb-i nīl | 23 |

gund ṣamaġh wa dār filfil bī-bīl wa pāttar ḥajar

resam will be ‘silk’; kālah [for kālā], ‘black’, ujlah [for ujlā] ‘white’

‘collyrium’, kājal; mirać, ‘pepper’; ‘coco-grass’, motah [for mothā]; ‘aloes-wood’, agar

‘nutmeg’ comes as jayifar [for jāʾe-phal]; ‘mountain’, ćotī [for ćoṭī, ‘summit, peak’], conforming to nīl

gund [for goṅd], ‘gum’; ‘long pepper’, bī-bīl [for pīpal]; and pāttar [for pathar], ‘stone’

The Arabic-Persian filfil, like its cognate the English ‘pepper’, has presently come to denote the fruit of each of the three plants—this despite being derived etymologically from the more specific Sanskrit pippalī, denoting the Piper longum alone. The sixteenth-century decline in European interest in the long pepper came at the expense of the American Capsicum annuum, and may be explained in part by the comparatively greater difficulty in transporting the mould-prone fruit of the long pepper over great distances. The American Capsicum, however, could be dried for long-term storage and even grown in the warmer parts of Europe.Footnote 53

The likelihood that this text was prepared specifically by and for those involved with the medical profession would indicate that the process of linguistic assessment—the realignment of semantic references by participants in interactive frameworksFootnote 54 —was carried out in the process of compiling the lexicographic work itself. In multiple instances throughout, the author of this text, in his efforts to identify Perso-Arabic equivalents for the medically useful plants of India, seeks to assert functional analogues rather than precise genetic homologues. In verse 26, the author is unable to find an exact equivalent for the red and black seeds of the Abrus precatorius:

sahgunH o asgun-ćihH bāshad bahmanA Footnote 55 -i surḳhP o safedP |26|

sahgun (for kūṅć Footnote 56 or gūṅćFootnote 57 ) and asgun-ćih (for ghuṅgći Footnote 58 ) shall be the red and white bahman

His solution is creative, if medically rather questionable: he chooses to equate the Hindi terms with a Central Asian tuber, the Centaurea behen, which would seem to share with the Indian seeds only the quality of appearing in both red and white varieties. The Qaṣīdah dar Luġhāt-i Hindī, like other translated treatises and bilingual lexicographic works of that time, was typical of the apparatus deployed by occupationally and socially coherent professional groups in the medieval and early modern periods to disseminate skill sets across ethnic gulfs—be they in the form of linguistic, confessional or other religio-political solidarities.Footnote 59

Conclusions

In the sixteenth century, a shift in language policy appears to have taken place in northern India with the extension of Persian into all levels of the Mughal bureaucracy there through reforms enacted in the latter half of the sixteenth century by Ṭoḍar Mal, the finance minister who served Bābur's grandson, Akbar. These reforms, however, had their origin in the years prior to Akbar's coronation, in the final period of Humāyūn's reign. In one of the most famous events in Mughal history, Humāyūn was forced in 1540 at the Battle of Kanauj, by resurgent Afghan forces united under Shēr Shāh Sūr, to flee his capital Agra, and, after further defeats, to seek refuge in Safavid Iran where he remained almost fifteen years. With Safavid support, he was able in 1555 to retake his Afghan provinces and his previous northern Indian territories, bringing with him not only a new elite comprised of his Persian backers, but also a thoroughly Persianised administrative apparatus. While “Persian does not appear to have been prominent at the courts of the early Mughals”, the large number of Iranians that accompanied Humāyūn helped displace not only Turkish as the language of the Mughal elite—with Persian becoming “first language of the king and the Mughal court”—but also Hindi as the language of local record keeping.Footnote 60

By way of contrast, Shēr Shāh Sūr and his son Islām Shāh, who ruled northern India as the first and second Suri dynasts during Humāyūn's 15-year period of exile, appointed Persian and Hindi clerks in pairs, one each to every parganah, or barony, and to every platoon of 50 troops.Footnote 61 The supposed rusticity of Afghans in India was almost proverbial by the time that Bābur encountered them on the battlefield in India.Footnote 62 While it appears as though some provisions had been made by Ibrāhīm Lodī's predecessor, Sikandar Lodī (r. 1488–1517), to train Hindus to read and write in Persian for the purpose of administering the Lodī government,Footnote 63 Bābur complained of the lack of Persian learning among the Afghan elite of the ancien régime: “These Hindustan [sic] people”, he writes, “especially the Afghans, are amazingly devoid of sense and wisdom and far off the path of tactics and strategy”.Footnote 64 Bābur was compelled to use a translator to communicate in Hindi with the intransigent Lodī governor of Lahore, Daulat Ḳhān, who was captured by Bābur's forces in Punjab early in 1526.Footnote 65 In April of that year, just a few days before the battle of Panipat, Bābur expressed his sympathy for his anxious troops, writing

They cannot be blamed, however, for being afraid, even if God was on their side. They had travelled for two or three months from their homeland, and had had to deal with an unfamiliar people whose language we did not know and who did not know ours.Footnote 66

Stephen Dale attributes the success of Babūr in imagining and establishing a Mughal empire in South Asia to a combination of parochialism among the ousted Indo-Afghan elite, and the Persian cosmopolitanism of the incoming Mughal regime. It was not merely Bābur's claim of double royalty, but also his “membership in a larger cultural and political world than the Afghāns inhabited, that left a Tīmūrid-Mughul rather than an Afghan state ruling Hindūstān for the next two centuries”.Footnote 67 Muzaffar Alam has emphasised the role that Persian-language lexicographical works compiled in India have played in assisting their readers to acquire competencies in the language, noting that “This trend picked up during the Lodi period, by which time many Hindus had begun to learn Persian in order to enter state service”.Footnote 68 Once Akbar required that records be kept exclusively in Persian through all levels of the bureaucracy, versified multilingual niṣāb vocabularies began to appear in response to the growth in demand for pedagogical materials. Recently Rajeev Kinra has characterised Persian philological scholarship in the early Mughal period as having taken a “scientific turn”: projects undertaken at the behest of the Mughal Emperor Akbar included large-scale Sanskrit-Persian translations and a magisterial Persian dictionary, the Farhang-i Jahāngīri (1608), containing, at Akbar's explicit request, “all the authentic Persian words, archaic usages, and idiomatic expressions”.Footnote 69 While the handful of niṣābs that survive from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—the Qaṣīdah dar Luġhat-i Hindī (early 16th century), Ajay Ćand Nāmah (1552–3), Allāh Ḳhudāʾī (c. 1628–1658), Faraḥ-i Ṣibyān (“Joy of Children”, 1647–1648),Footnote 70 and Ṣamad Bārī (late seventeenth-century)Footnote 71 —cannot be directly attributed to imperial patronage, they do represent smaller-scale and more broadly accessible contributions to the same South Asian Persian-language tradition of philology and pedagogy. Indeed, with the decline in fortunes of the house of Tīmur, the number of niṣābs authored in South Asia ballooned, becoming a multitude by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote 72

Much of especially the lower levels of administration (e.g., the office of qānūngo) had been staffed by Hindus, particularly of the Kāyasth and Khatrī castes,Footnote 73 whose children acquired Persian in madrasahs.Footnote 74 From the variety of languages used to gloss the Persian terminology, it is apparent that the niṣāb genre was being employed for the education of a diverse population in Persian, reproducing the spectrum of north Indian languages.Footnote 75 As part of the primary educational curriculum, especially in smaller sub-imperial centres like Sikandarabad (near modern-day Aligarh) and Hansi (sites where niṣābs had been composed and taught in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), these texts became a means of social advancement. They offered the children of intermediate groups—those between the labouring and ruling classes—with an introduction to the language of command and an avenue to higher education, and hence to the vast horizons afforded by the financial, political and cultural cosmopolitanism of the Persianate world. It is telling that the Persian-derived farhang, which, along with the Arabic luġhat (pl. luġhāt Footnote 76 ), is the most typical term used in Urdu today to denote what is known in English as a standard comprehensive dictionary, has also come in modern Iran to signify ‘culture’ in the sense of a ‘civilisation’ and ‘education’.Footnote 77 As containers for culture and authority, lexicographic works like dictionaries, glossaries and word lists are able to convey their contents to users scattered over great distances, physical or otherwise.

In Mughal India, as in thirteenth-century Afghanistan, niṣābs were deployed to train children to speak one language, typically a classical language enjoying social prestige extended beyond a particular region, through a second, spoken language, familiar to a child from their experiences within the household. For Abū Naṣar Farāhī, who authored the Niṣāb al-Ṣibyān in 1220—prior to the Mongol invasions of Central and Western Asia—Arabic retained its ritual function but had long been losing ground to Persian as political power ebbed from the Abbasid capital in Baghdad. For Akbar in the latter half of the sixteenth century, the choice of Persian as language of his court and administration linked his Mughal empire linguistically with its neighbours and greatest rivals, the Safavids. But in the period between, Afghan rulers with somewhat more circumscribed ambitions found that retaining the Hindi language, both for administrative purposes and through their patronage of sufi romance narratives, to be more expedient (and, potentially, comprehensible) in their efforts to rule the vast and varied South Asian cultural landscape. The directionality in the transfer of knowledge represented in the Qaṣīdah dar Luġhāt-i Hindī is, like the Niṣāb al-Ṣibyān and unlike the Ḳhāliq Bārī, quite clearly marked. And despite its exclusive use of Persian as a glossing or ‘target’ language for Indic terms, the text demonstrates that there was room here for both respect and practicality in the engagement of a Persianate yūnānī system of knowledge with its Indic counterpart. The niṣāb genre in particular continued to enjoy popularity well into the colonial period, and South Asian libraries (as well as the British Library in London) contain hundreds of lithographed vocabularies in verse, some even that purport to teach children English vocabulary through an Indian vernacular.Footnote 78

The question remains about how the Qaṣīdah dar Luġhāt-i Hindī came to survive in a manuscript library in faraway Istanbul. Based on handwriting alone, which in this case lacks the standardisation of Hindi orthography that came with the spread of print and lithography, it was likely copied prior to the nineteenth century.Footnote 79 It is clear from the way that the copyist, if not the author, wrote out the Hindi vocabulary that he was unfamiliar with seeing Hindi written on the page, and moreover, in his misspelling of common terms like bijlī, meaning ‘lightning’, as bizhlī (see the discussion of verse 42 above), that he possessed uneven familiarity with Hindi as a spoken language.Footnote 80 This is quite unlike the dozens of manuscript copies of ‘Ḳhusrau’'s Ḳhāliq Bārī, which demonstrate a great deal of variance in their orthographic representation of Hindi terms, most of which, however, are explained by its preservation as an oral document for hundreds of years prior to its having been recorded in various places and in different centuries as a written text.

Indeed, that this text is preserved in Turkey begins to answer the archival question of why copies of the Qaṣīdah dar Luġhāt-i Hindī are so rarely found in South Asia:Footnote 81 nestled as it is between medical treatises probably by the same author, its preservation in written form is likely a result of its proximity to other texts whose usefulness was as universal as the human body itself. To use the language of immigration studies in the context of the early sixteenth century, political instability following the death of Bayqarā drew émigrés away from Central Asia; the opportunities for Persian speakers to participate in the Mughal military and administration also provided important incentives. A text that explains Hindi terms to a Persian speaker—in other words, with a dominantly expressed Hindi-to-Persian glossing directionality—would be of greatest value to recent immigrants from Persian-speaking areas. This text was displaced in the course of the following century by lengthier, more comprehensive niṣābs that deployed a mixed glossing metalanguage of Persian and Hindi, better serving the needs of diverse South Asian populations seeking to gain proficiency in Persian letters. In Ottoman Turkey, however, it is conceivable that this text was preserved as a linguistic curiosity, the Hindi linguistic fragments of which were accessible through Persian, a language that served for nearly a thousand years as an international link language. That questions remain regarding the Herati or Indian provenance of the Qaṣīdah dar Luġhāt-i Hindī is emblematic of the great cultural mobility that was characteristic of the period—be they cultures of disease, doctors or dictionaries.Footnote 82

Footnotes

1 I was able to access this manuscript (Nuruosmaniye MS 0003495, folios 86b-87b), listed under the title Kaside der Luğat-ı Hindi, in a digital photographic reproduction made available by the Süleymaniye Kütüphanesı. In transcribing the original text, I have reproduced the Arabic-script orthography that appears in the manuscript (for further details, see note 18 below). In representing Hindi and Persian in the Roman script I have adapted with some modifications the system used by Platts, John T. in A Dictionary of Urdū, Classical Hindī, and English (London, 1884), pp. vi–vii . No modifications, however, are made to transliterations contained in English translations of Urdu or Persian texts quoted from other sources. I have followed the Indian pronunciation of Persian texts. In sum, I have striven to remain faithful, first, to the orthography of original texts, and, second, to pronunciation (hence my occasional use of ĕ for i and ŏ for u, following Platts). Unless otherwise indicated, years are given as Anno Domini (AD) and dates are written according to the Gregorian calendar.

2 Jacobi, Renate, “The Origins of the Qasida Form”, in Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa, (ed.) Sperl, Stefan and Shackle, Christopher (Leiden, 1995), p. 21 . For a critical and somewhat controversial evaluation of the role of monorhyme on the development of Arabic poetry, see Lyons, M. C. and Cachia, P., “The Effect of Monorhyme on Arabic Poetic Production”, Journal of Arabic Literature, I (1970), pp. 3–13 . Historians of Arabic and Persian lexicography have argued that the arrangement of terms by final letter (or ‘rhyme order’) in many early comprehensive dictionaries of the Arabic and Persian traditions served a useful function for poets needing to identify rhyme words in the composition of qaṣīdahs. Haywood, John A., Arabic Lexicography: Its History, and its Place in the General History of Lexicography (Leiden, 1965), p. 71 ; Baevskii, Solomon I., Early Persian Lexicography: Farhangs of the Eleventh to the Fifteenth Centuries, trans. Perry, John R. (Honolulu, 2007), pp. x, 174.

3 Brief outlines of ‘Yūsufī’'s contributions may be found in Verma, R. L., ‘The Growth of Greco-Arabian Medicine in Medieval India’, Indian Journal of History of Science, V (1970), pp. 355 ; E. Berthels, ‘Mawlanā Yūsufī’, in E.J. Brill's First Encyclopaedia of Islam, VIII (Ṭāʾif-Zūrḳhāna), (ed.) M. Th. Houtsma, et al. (Leiden, 1987), pp. 1179–1180; Bosworth, C.E. and Berthels, E., ‘Yūsufī’, in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Edition, XI (W-Z), (ed.) Bearman, Peri (Leiden, 2002), p. 362 ; Siddiqi, Tazimuddin, “Unani Medicine in India”, Indian Journal of History of Science, XVI, no. 1 (1981), p. 23 . A slightly more detailed biographical description of ‘Yūsufī’ (in Farsi) appears in Ḥabībī, ʿAbdul Ḥayy, ‘Ḥakīm Yūsufī Haravī Ṯabīb o Munshī Darbār-i Bābur o Humāyūn’, Aryana, VII, no. 3 (1948), pp. 1–4 . A comprehensive catalogue of MSS attributed to ‘Yūsufī’ appears in Storey, C. A., Persian Literature: A Bio-Bibliographical Survey (London, 1971), ii, pp. 235–240 . The best overview in English of the life of ‘Yūsufī’ may be found in Azmi, Altaf Ahmad, ‘Unani Medicine during Babur's Reign’, Studies in History of Medicine and Science, XIX, no. 1/2 (2003), pp. 3–9 . Neither of the these last two works, however, include the Qaṣīdah dar Luġhāt-i Hindī among their extensive lists of works by ‘Yūsufī’.

4 For a discussion of the social spread of poetic composition in Persian during the Timurid-Turkmen period, especially in Herat, see Losensky, Paul E., Welcoming Fighānī: Imitation and Poetic Individuality in the Safavid-Mughal Ghazal (Costa Mesa, 1998), p. 142 . Compare with Maria Eva Subtelny, The Poetic Circle at the Court of the Timurid, Sultan Husain Baiqara, and its Political Significance (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1979), pp. 28, 32, 37–8, 77–8, 92.

5 Dale, Stephen Frederic, “Steppe Humanism: The Autobiographical Writings of Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur, 1483–1530”, International Journal of Middle East Studies, XXII, no. 1 (1990), p. 52 ; Khan, Iqtidar Alam, “State in the Mughal India: Re-Examining the Myths of a Counter-Vision”, Social Scientist, XXIX, no. 1/2 (2001), pp. 20–21 .

6 See Babur, The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor, trans. Thackston, W. M. (New York, 2002), pp. 214–217 .

7 See, for example, Bābur's description of a letter he sent to Ṣulṯān Ibrāhīm in which he “laid claim to the territories that had belonged to the Turk” (i.e., Tīmur) in Ibid., p. 274.

8 Storey, Persian Literature, ii, p. 235.

9 al-Faẓl, Abū, The Akbarnama of Abu’l Fazl, trans. Beveridge, H. (Calcutta, 2000), i, p. 280 .

10 Footnote Ibid ., pp. 280–281.

11 Sachau, Eduard and Ethé, Hermann, Catalogue of the Persian, Turkish, Hindûstânî, and Pushtû Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library (Oxford, 1889), i, p. 836 ; Storey, C. A., Persian Literature (Oxford, 1990), iii, p. 270 . For the dispersion of this text, see also Tauer, Felix, “Persian Learned Literature from its Beginnings up to the End of the 18th Century”, in History of Iranian Literature, (ed.) Rypka, Jan and Jahn, Karl (Dordrecht, Holland, 1968), p. 434 ; Rajeev Kumar Kinra, Secretary-Poets in Mughal India and the Ethos of Persian: The Case of Chandar Bhan Brahman (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2008), pp. 58–60. A recent bibliography gives 1543 as the year of his death, see Munzavī, Aḥmad (ed.), Fihrist-i Nusḳhahʾhā-yi Ḳhuṯūṯ-i Fārsī (Tehran, 1969), p. 265 . This date, however, is not supported by any contemporary source. See Azmi, “Unani Medicine”, p. 15 n.26.

12 Elgood, Cyril, A Medical History of Persia and the Eastern Caliphate from the Earliest Times until the Year A.D. 1932 (Cambridge, 1951), pp. 378–379 ; Verma, “The Growth of Greco-Arabian Medicine in Medieval India”, p. 355; Storey, Persian Literature, ii, p. 235; Siddiqi, “Unani Medicine in India”, p. 23.

13 Maḥmūd Sherānī, Ḥāfiẕ, ‘Dībācah-i Awwal [‘First Preface’]’, in Ḥifẕ al-Lisān (Maʿrūf Bĕnām-i Ḳhāliq Bārī), (ed.) Sherānī, Ḥāfiẕ Maḥmūd (Delhi, 1944), p. 8 .

14 Ḥabībī, ‘Ḥakīm Yūsufī’, p. 3.

15 On the dates of the latter, see Ethé, Hermann, Catalogue of Persian Manuscripts in the Library of the India Office (Oxford, 1937), ii, p. 1261 . On both, see Ḥāfiẕ Maḥmūd Sherānī, ‘First Preface’, p. 7. Sherānī, however, gives a later date for the Jāmiʿ al-Fawāʾid, corresponding with the MS described in Sachau and Ethé, Catalogue, i, p. 960. This is the date accepted by Ḥabībī, ‘Ḥakīm Yūsufī’, p. 3. Ḥabībī also gives Herat as the provenance. For dates and MSS of both works, see also Storey, Persian Literature, ii, pp. 237–239.

16 Subtelny, Maria Eva, ‘Persian Manuscripts in the Libraries of McGill University: Brief Union Catalogue (review)’, University of Toronto Quarterly, LXXVI, no. 1 (2007), p. 341 .

17 On his father's Jawāhir al-Luġhat (‘Jewels of Words’), an Arabic-Persian medical dictionary, see Sachau and Ethé, Catalogue, i, p. 959.

18 I follow the orthography of the original manuscript here. The text lacks the retroflex diacritics that come to be de rigueur in the nineteenth century. It also maintains the earlier practice of not differentiating between ك kāf and the Persian-Indic gāf (with an additional diacritical bar). The verse is composed in meter ramal musamman maḥżūf with fifteen syllables per miṣraʿ (hemistich), represented paradigmatically as fāʿalātūn fāʿalātūn fāʿalātūn fāʿalā or = - = = / = - = = / = - = = / = - =).

19 A fascinating example of voiced palato-alveolar fricative ʒ ( ) orthographically replacing a voiced palato-alveolar affricate, .

20 See, for example, Gommans, Jos J. L., The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire, c.1710–1780 (Leiden, 1995), pp. 16–21, 68–103; Levi, Scott Cameron, The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and its Trade, 1550–1900 (Leiden, 2002), pp. 54–60 .

21 This bidirectional transfer of knowledge has been ably documented by Fabrizio Speziale, who, comparing the Mughal period with the an earlier Abbasid époque of great translation projects, remarks that “grâce à la contribution d’auteurs non-musulmans. . .[l]’adaptation en persan du savoir médical indien accomplie en Inde eut certes, une portée plus grande et plus durable”. For examples of original and translated scientific works in Persian commissioned by non-Muslims, see ‘Les Traités Persans sur Les Sciences Indiennes: Médecine, Zoologie, Alchimie’, in Muslim Cultures in the Indo-Iranian World during the Early-Modern and Modern Periods (Paris, 2010), p. 407.

22 Michael Glünz, “Poetic Tradition and Social Change: The Persian Qasida in Post-Mongol Iran”, in Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa, (ed.) Sperl and Shackle, pp. 183–203.

23 As in the 1582 Persian translation of the Mahābhārata. See Truschke, Audrey, “The Mughal Book of War: A Persian Translation of the Sanskrit Mahabharata”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, XXXI, no. 2 (2011), p. 518 .

24 Cf. Talattof's extensive overview of modes in which the term suḳhun is applied in classical Persian poetry, particularly ‘Niẕāmī’'s meditations upon the “Beginnings” and “Virtues of suḳhun” in his Maḳhzan-i Asrār (c. 1176–8 AD). Talattof, Kamran, “Nizāmī Ganjavi, the Wordsmith: The Concept of sakhun in Classical Persian Poetry”, in A Key to the Treasure of the Hakīm: Artistic and Humanistic Aspects of Nizāmī Ganjavī's Khamsa, (ed.) Bürgel, Johann-Christoph and von Ruymbeke, Christine (Leiden, 2011), pp. 227–229 .

25 See Manjhan Shaṯṯārī Rājgīrī Manjhan, Mīr Sayyid, Madhumālāti: An Indian Sufi Romance, trans. Behl, Aditya, et al. (Oxford, 2000), pp. xxx, 244.

26 Zamānī, Mahnūr, “Maṡnawī, Taʿāruf Irtiqāʾ aur Tadrīs”, in Urdū Aṣnāf kī Tadrīs, (ed) Koul, Omkār and Sirāj, Masʿūd (New Delhi, 2003), p. 50 .

27 For a concise overview of the different macrostructural divisions attributed to the classical Arabic qaṣīdah, but with specific reference to the qaṣīdah in Urdu, see Hussein, Ali, “Classical and Modern Approaches in Dividing the Old Arabic Poem”, Journal of Arabic Literature, XXXV, no. 3 (2004), pp. 297–328 . What must be the definitive account of macrostructural form in the qaṣīdah appears in Julie Meisami, Scott, Structure and Meaning in Medieval Arabic and Persian Poetry: Orient Pearls (London; New York, 2003), pp. 55–110 .

28 Variations from Sherānī's printed text (see note 44 below) appear enclosed in braces.

29 Though orthographically represented as (tʃ), it is pronounced with aspiration (tʃʰ) and scanned as if written mū-ca.

30 (z, voiced alveolar fricative) orthographically represents voiced postalveolar affricate (j).

31 Shērānī, Ḥāfiẕ Maḥmūd, ‘Baććoṅ ke Taʿlīmī Niṣāb’, in Maqālāt-i Ḥāfiẕ Maḥmūd Shīrānī, (ed.) Shīrānī, Maẕhar Maḥmūd, viii (Lahore, 1985), p. 25 .

32 Alam, Muzaffar, ‘The Culture and Politics of Persian in Precolonial Hindustan’, in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, (ed.) Pollock, Sheldon I. (Berkeley, 2003), p. 142 .

33 The standard references for this history remain Vogel, Claus, Indian Lexicography (Wiesbaden, 1979), and Patkar, Madhukar Mangesh, History of Sanskrit Lexicography (New Delhi, 1981) On the Amarakośa (c. 6th-10th century), the most famous Sanskrit antecedent to the niṣāb genre, see, e.g., Sinha, Amera, Cośha, or Dictionary of the Sanscrit Language, trans. Colebrooke, H. T. (Serampoor, 1808). Recent scholarship has examined ways in which the arrangement of the text assists with recall, thus enabling this document to be preserved through oral transmission for so many centuries: see Nair, Sivaja and Kulkarni, Amba, The Knowledge Structure in Amarakośa (Berlin and Heidelberg, 2010).

34 Ṣafdar Āh, Amīr Ḳhusrau baḥaiṡiyat-i Hindī Shāʿir (n.p., 1966), p. 66.

35 Badruddīn Farāhī, Abū Naṣar Muḥammad, Niṣāb al-Ṣibyān (Tehran, 1923), p. 3 .

36 The poor (faqīr) in Islamic law are quite literally “those who do not own a niṣāb of property, or who own a niṣāb of unproductive property, which is entirely destined for the satisfaction of first necessities, or of debts”. See Aghnides, Nicolas P., Mohammedan Theories of Finance (New York, 1916), p. 440 .

37 Ḥāfiẕ Maḥmūd Sherānī, ‘Dībāćah-i Duvum [‘Second Preface’]’, in Ḥifẕ al-Lisān (Maʿrūf Bĕnām-i Ḳhāliq Bārī), (ed.) Sherānī, Ḥāfiẕ Maḥmūd (Delhi, 1944).

38 See Āh, Amīr Ḳhusrau, p. 81.

39 Tajallī, Allāh Ḳhudāʾī (Lucknow, 1875), p. 3 .

40 Ḥusain, Mumtāz, Amīr Ḳhusrau Dihlavī: Ḥayāt aur Shāʿirī (Karachi, 1975), p. 363 ; Amīr Ḳhusrau Dihlavī Amīr Ḳhusrau kā Hindawī Kalām: maʿ nusḳhahah-yi Barlin, Żaḳhīrah-yi Ishpringar (Chicago/Delhi, 1987), pp. 129–131. See also Walter N. Hakala, “The Authorial Problem in the Ḵẖāliq Bārī of ‘Ḵẖusrau’”, forthcoming in Indian Economic & Social History Review LI, no. 4 (2014).

41 For the development in the Urdu literary tradition of a specific association of the maṡnawī form with romantic topoi, see Jain, Gian Chand, Maṡnawī Shamālī Hind Meṅ(Alīgaṛh, 1969); Suvorova, Masnavi: A Study of Urdu Romance, trans. Faruqi, M. Osama (Karachi, 2000); Zamānī, ‘Maṡnawī, Taʿāruf Artaqāʾ aur Tadrīs’.

42 Due to the great variation in the manuscript evidence, it is impossible to state the precise number of verses that comprise the Ḳhāliq Bārī. Sherānī, in his faulty 1944 edition of the Ḳhāliq Bārī, presents some 235 verses. Others have proposed the work to be a condensation of a much larger work of several thousand verses, a claim that the manuscript evidence and the generic conventions already mentioned do not support. See, for example, Khusro, Amīr, Khālik Bārī, trans. Sharmā, Shrirām (Vārāńasī, 1964), pp. 1–2 .

43 Sherānī, ‘First Preface’, pp. 28–29.

44 This article was later reprinted in Sherānī's collected works as ‘Baććon ke Taʿlīmī Nisāb’, pp. 24–6. While Sherānī does not identify the source from which he was copying, it is likely the same Qaṣīdah dar Luġhat-i Hindī, MS 4466/1416/5 (listed as catalogue #2134), in Rasāʾil-i Yūsufī, a collection of treatises by ‘Yūsufī’ copied out in 1835–6 and preserved in the Sherānī Collection in Lahore. For details, see Ḥusain, Muḥammad Bashīr (ed.), Fihrist-i Maḳhṯūṯāt-i Sherānī (Lahore, 1969), p. 394 .

45 Ḥaqq, ʿAbdul, Qadīm Urdū (Karachi, 1961), p. 199 . For the full edited text of this work, see Aḥmad, Nażīr, ‘Ajay Ćand Nāmah’, in Maqālāt-i Nażīr (New Delhi, 2002), pp. 121–157 . I am grateful to Prof. Mohaiyuddin G. Bombaywala, Director of the Dargah Hazrat Pir Muhammad Shah Library in Ahmedabad, for sharing with me his personal facsimile copy of the Bhopal MS upon which Aḥmad's text was based.

46 The classic work on this remains Frances Yates, Amelia, The Art of Memory (Chicago, 1966).

47 In some versified vocabularies, especially those copied or lithographed in the nineteenth century, these markers had been added to the original text as an aid to the reader. They do not appear in this particular manuscript, and have been added by me in the Roman-letter transcription.

48 Throughout this verse the final quiescent (sākin) consonant of hindawī terms become movent (mutaḥarrik) to conform with the meter: e.g., ank [= modern āṅḳh] is pronounced ān-ka and nāk as nā-ka.

49 s.m. The root of the Costus speciosus or Arabicus (it is used medicinally)”. See Platts, Dictionary of Urdū, p. 813.

50 Serjeant, R. B., ‘Notices on the ‘Frankish Chancre’ (Syphilis) in Yemen, Egypt, and Persia’, Journal of Semitic Studies, X, no. 2 (1965), pp. 241–252 ; Verma, ‘The Growth of Greco-Arabian Medicine in Medieval India’, p. 355.

51 For a masterful survey of the literature surrounding the debates regarding the New World origins of syphilis, consult Baker, Brenda J., et al., “The Origin and Antiquity of Syphilis: Paleopathological Diagnosis and Interpretation [and Comments and Reply]”, Current Anthropology, XXIX, no. 5 (1988), pp. 703–737 . DNA sequencing carried out since 1998 has differentiated the Treponema pallidum subspecies responsible for venereal syphilis from other related treponematoses, adding weight to the so-called “Columbian thesis”. See Harper, Kristin N., et al., “On the Origin of the Treponematoses: A Phylogenetic Approach’, Public Library of Science Neglected Tropical Diseases, II, no. 1 (2008), p. e148 .

52 Ḳhusrau, Ẓiyāʾal-dīn, Ḥifẕ al-Lisān (ma‘rūf bĕnām-i Ḳhāliq Bārī), trans. Sherānī, Ḥāfiẕ Maḥmūd (Delhi, 1944), p. 87 .

53 Hyman, Mary and Hyman, Philip, “Long Pepper: A Short History”, Petits Propos Culinaires, vi (1980), pp. 50–52 ; Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556–1707 (New Delhi, 1999), pp. 51–52; Wright, Clifford A., “The Medieval Spice Trade and the Diffusion of the Chile”, Gastronomica, VII, no. 2 (2007), pp. 35–43 . Cultivated as far from the equator as 30˚ N (versus the 12˚ N limit for black pepper), the Piper longum continues to be available in South Asia, however, and it is now known as much for its medicinal qualities as for its culinary contributions. See Crawfurd, John, “On the History and Migration of Cultivated Plants Used as Condiments”, Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London, VI (1868), pp. 188–190 .

54 For more on assessments, see Goodwin, M.H. and Goodwin, Charles, “Assessments and the Construction of Context”, in Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, (ed.) Goodwin, Charles and Duranti, Alessandro (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 147–189 .

55 “A bahman, The root of a plant resembling a large radish; it is crooked, red and white, and is used medicinally”. Francis Joseph Steingass, A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary, including the Arabic words and phrases to be met with in Persian literature (London, 1892), p. 212. “Centaurea Behen, Linn. Compositæ. Dr G Watt in his dictionary of the ‘Economic Products of India’ gives this as the plant from which is obtained the root bahman, or buhman safed, the white bahman root, and that the plant is a native of the Euphrates valley; Boissier gives Bunge as his authority for the plant, as also from the hills of Khorasan, J. E. T. Aitchison, “Notes to Assist in a Further Knowledge of the Products of Western Afghanistan and of North-Eastern Persia”, Transactions of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh (1891), p. 36. Elsewhere in this same work, the following definition appears: “Buhman, bahman a medicine imported into India from Cabul, Centaurea Behen; intelligent, acute, adroit” (p. 29).

56 “H s.m. A small red and black seed used by goldsmiths as a weight, Abrus precatorius (syn. ghuṅgćī)”. Platts, Dictionary of Urdū, p. 865.

57 “H s.f. The seed of Abrus precatorius (syn. ghūṅgćī)”. Ibid., p. 926.

58 “H s.f. The small red and black seed of Abrus precatorius (syn. ratī or rattī, q.v.)”. Ibid., p. 937.

59 Speziale has gone so far as to characterise Mughal-era physicians involved with the dissemination of Indian systems of medicine in Persian as a “movement”. See “The Circulation of Ayurvedic Knowledge in Indo-Persian Medical Literature” (Paper presented at the Ayurveda in Post-Classical and Pre-Colonial India, Leiden, 2009), p. 5. The coherence of this group comes into sharp relief in the course of later debates during the colonial period about the applicability the label yūnānī (‘Ionian’, with its implied pre-Islamic origins) to their occupation, as summarised by Speziale in “Linguistic Strategies of de-Islamisation and Colonial Science: Indo-Muslim Physicians and the Yûnânî Denomination”, International Institute for Asian Studies Newsletter, XXXVII (2005), p. 18.

60 Alam, ‘The Culture and Politics of Persian in Precolonial Hindustan’, pp. 158, 160, 162.

61 Mushtaqui, Shaikh Rizq Ullah, Waqiʿat-e-Mushtaqui of Shaikh Rizq Ullah Mushtaqui: A Source of Information on the Life and Conditions in the Pre-Mughal India, trans. Siddīquī, Iqtidār Ḥusain (New Delhi, 1993), pp. 139, 201.

62 Siddīquī, Iqtidār Ḥusain, “The Afghans and Their Emergence in India as Ruling Elite during the Delhi Sultanate Period”, Central Asiatic Journal, XXVI (1982), pp. 250–253 . See especially the quotations from Āmir Ḳhusrau and ʿIsāmī on p. 253, n. 47.

63 Alam, Muzaffar, citing evidence by the chronicler Firishtah, in “The Mughals, the Sufi Shaikhs and the Formation of the Akbari Dispensation”, Modern Asian Studies, XLIII, no. 1 (2009), p. 138 .

64 Babur, Baburnama, p. 275.

65 Footnote Ibid ., p. 317.

66 Footnote Ibid ., pp. 323–324.

67 Dale, Stephen Frederic, The Garden of the Eight Paradises: Bābur and the Culture of Empire in Central Asia, Afghanistan and India (1483–1530) (Leiden, 2004), p. 461 .

68 Alam, “The Culture and Politics of Persian in Precolonial Hindustan”, p.149.

69 Kinra, Rajeev, ‘This Noble Science: Indo-Persian Comparative Philology, c. 1000–1800 CE’, in South Asian Texts in History: Critical Engagements with Seldon Pollock, (ed.) Bronner, Yigal, et al. (Ann Arbor, 2011), p. 370 .

70 By Shaiḳh Asḥaq Lāhorī, completed around AH 1057. Tajallī, Allāh Ḳhudāʾī; Āh, Amīr Ḳhusrau, p. 72.

71 By ʿAbdul Wāsiʿ ‘Hāṅsawī’ during the reign of Aurangzeb. See Fārsī Nāmah, Wāḥid Bārī, Ṣamad Bārī, and Allāh Bārī (Lahore, 1845); Āh, Amīr Ḳhusrau, p. 72.

72 For extensive—if incomplete and occasionally inaccurate—lists, compare Sherānī, ‘First Preface’, pp. 26–7, and Āh, Amīr Ḳhusrau, pp. 71–2.

73 Habib, Agrarian System of Mughal India, p. 331. See also his discussion of the role of the qānūngo in maintaining an archive on “revenue receipts, area statistics, local revenue rates, and practices and cultures of the pargana” (pp. 332–335).

74 Saiyid ʿAbdullāh, Adabiyāt-i Farsī meṅ Hindūʾoṅ kā Ḥiṣṣah [The Role of Hindus in Persian Literature] (n.p., 1967), pp. 233–4; Alam, Muzaffar, The Languages of Political Islam: India, 1200–1800 (Chicago, 2004), p. 129 . The vast number of works penned by Hindus in Persian, beginning in the sixteenth century, supports Muzaffar Alam's assertion that “Hindus—Kayasthas and Khatris in particular—joined madrasas in large numbers to acquire excellence in Persian language and literature, which now promised good careers in imperial service”, in his ‘The Pursuit of Persian: Language in Mughal Politics’, Modern Asian Studies, XXXII, no. 2 (1998), p. 326.

75 Examples of Punjabi-Persian niṣābs include Razzāq Bārī (AH 1071 [1660–1 AD]) by ‘Ismāʿīl’ and Īzid Bārī (AH 1105 [1693–4 AD]) by Khatr Mal Pasar Sā Mal Dās. See Ṣafdar Āh, Amīr Ḳhusrau, p. 72. Compare with Sherānī, ‘First Preface’, p. 46. For a comprehensive overview of Persian-Sanskrit vocabularies, see Audrey Truschke, “Defining the Other: An Intellectual History of Sanskrit Lexicons and Grammars of Persian”, Journal of Indian Philosophy XL, no. 6 (2012), pp. 635–668.

76 The extended meanings of luġhat as ‘dictionary’ and ‘language’ derive from its primary signification as ‘something spoken’, i.e. a ‘vocable’ or ‘word’.

77 Ahmadi, Wali, Modern Persian Literature in Afghanistan: Anomalous Visions of History and Form (London, 2008), p. 45 .

78 See, for example, Mishra, Pandit Braj Vallabh, An English-Hindi Vocabulary in Verse (Calcutta, 1902); Khan, Ahmed-uddin, The East and West Khaliq Baree (Moradabad, 1906).

79 I was not able to consult the rest of the codex, and so could not determine if the colophon is extant or whether it provides a date of completion.

80 In addition to his difficulty in graphically indicating unfamiliar Indic consonants, e.g., retroflex, aspiration, the author frequently represents vowel length in ways that would be unrecognisable to modern readers.

81 Other collections of ‘Yūsufī’'s treatises are preserved at the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, the Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library in Patna, and elsewhere, but the catalogues do not mention the Qaṣīdah dar Luġhāt-i Hindī among their contents. See Ivanow, Wladimir, Concise Descriptive Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the Collection of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (Calcutta, 1924), pp. 719–720 ; Ḥusain, Fihrist, ii, p. 494; Storey, Persian Literature, ii, pp. 35–240. Fabrizio Speziale mentions another manuscript copy of the work at the Library of the University of Teheran (MS 2569/3, ff. 22v-24r). See “Les Traités Persans sur Les Sciences Indiennes: Médecine, Zoologie, Alchimie”, p. 413; “The Circulation of Ayurvedic Knowledge in Indo-Persian Medical Literature”.

82 The author gratefully acknowledges James Bono, Jerold Frakes, Rebecca French, Aaron Hughes, Mark Nathan, Erik Seeman, Ramya Sreenivasan, and the anonymous referees of this journal for their comments and corrections.

Ibid
Ibid
Ibid