Persianate pasts die hard. Despite the birth of nation-states, advent of colonialism, rise of national literatures, and emergence of new global technologies, the Persianate connections defining the texts, idioms, and vocabularies that bound together large swaths of Islamic Eurasia throughout the early-modern period continued to shape and inflect cultural and literary production in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries established the high-water mark of Persianate transregionalism, then the following two centuries were defined not so much by the undoing of this world in toto, but by its redeployment, reimagining, and regeneration in new cultural guises and (trans)national contexts. Exchanges across borders and languages helped to articulate new meanings for Persian texts. Educational practices in British India and journalistic ones in Central Asia provided venues for Persianate norms to be preserved, contested, and consecrated. The internationalism of the Soviet East created a new avenue for dynamic conversations about the nature of Persianate heritage and traditions. While new national practices and political ecologies were taking shape across Afghanistan, the Caucasus, Iran, and Central and South Asia, refashionings of Persianate pasts persisted. It is an exploration of such refashionings and the people who participated in them that form the contents of this special issue.
Conceptualizations of the Persianate world continue to generate vigorous discussion. The term is utilized broadly to refer to modes of sociability, textual genres, circulation, reception, and ethical and aesthetic norms that formed the connective tissue of a transregional premodern cosmopolis. There also exists in the field a more restrictive understanding: the Persianate as an analytic category only concerns the generative interplay between the Persian language and Chaghatai, Urdu, Punjabi, Pashto, and many others. While the articles of this special issue focus on the Persian language alone—and thus more closely cohere to an understanding of the Persianate as a transregional cosmopolis—the presence of other languages, such as Pashto, Uzbek, Russian, and Urdu, resonate in the articles’ backgrounds. It is a stark reminder of the ways in which the bounded nature of Persian as a national language in the twentieth century was necessarily generated through contact with these others.
It is little surprise that the endurance of Persianate norms should remain an overlooked phenomenon in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Persianate turn in Iranian Studies and other related fields is still relatively new, and its methodological parameters and value continue to be explored, debated, and refined.Footnote 2 These debates are rightly focused on premodern periods. Even recent monographs employing a Persianate paradigm to address transregional phenomena up to the mid-nineteenth century, several of which are reviewed in the pages of this special issue, do so by discussing the Persianate world on its own terms, that is, preceding the emergence of the nation-state and invested in the world still defined by the Ottomans (c. 1299–1922), Timurids (1370–1857), and Safavids (1501–1722).Footnote 3 But what of the worlds that succeed them? As Kaveh Hemmat noted in a recent essay in Iranian Studies,
when we pass from historiography of the early modern world to that of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the nation state of Iran seems to simply appear in place of the gunpowder empires or Persian cosmopolis. We may instead ask how the Persianate world functioned as a context or matrix within which the Iranian nation state was generated—as we would say of the global enlightenment and the modern nation-state system.Footnote 4
Part of the problem stems from the reality that Persianate political structures, modes of sociability, and hegemonic cultural forms were indeed threatened, and in many cases superseded, by the political, social, and cultural order of nation-states. This fact has made it difficult to avoid teleological narratives that see the former's replacement by the latter as unfolding in an ineluctable and linear fashion. As Mana Kia and Afshin Marashi noted in an essay entitled “After the Persianate,” “the conventional, spatial and temporal partitions that have prevented critical transregional and transtemporal historical readings of the Persianate are products of intellectual genealogies rooted in mid-twentieth-century area studies paradigms, as well as the self-referential political ontologies of emergent nation-states.”Footnote 5 Thus far, what has most captivated scholars in Iranian and Persian Studies has been the formation of the nation-state and its attendant features as a process that constricts phenomena into nationally prescribed cantons of territory, language, ethnicity, and literature. Analyses have typically placed an overwhelming emphasis on how “post-Persianate” societies relied on engagement with Western models and concepts to redefine themselves in national terms over the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Such a determinative framework, reliant on the apotheosis of the nation-state on the one hand, and East-West engagements on the other, overlooks the crucial role and enduring resonances of Persianate heritage and traditions outliving the environments in which they first took shape.
By “Persianate heritage and traditions,” we are referring primarily to the texts and textual practices that connected peoples and places across the Persianate cosmopolis by way of embedded literary and cultural structures, found in the classification of poets in the biographical anthology (tazkirah) genre, conventions of the lyric (ghazal), courtly patronage for litterateurs, the organization and construction of poetic societies (mushāʿirah), and social relationships and bonds (student-teacher, patron-client, etc.).Footnote 6 It was these conventions and structures, among others, that established and guided literary authority, production, and circulation in pre-modern times.Footnote 7 But by the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, while Persianate literary and cultural production continued to engage intellectuals, scholars, and poets on a cross-regional basis, the structures guiding its authority and the mediums shaping its dissemination and reception began to radically change.
New mediums, made possible in part by emergent global technologies and contact with Europe, became major sites of lively discussions about the nature, place, and value of Persianate heritage and traditions. Periodicals, literary histories, encyclopedias, radio, tape cassettes, anthologies, and educational textbooks all served as nodes for social networks, civic associations, and scholarly circles to define the relevance and marketability of Persianate pasts in the modern world. The outcomes of these discussions would diverge based on the particularities of newly formed local imaginaries and take on the characteristics and flavor of new national, regional, and international configurations: a Persianate past as debated in a Tashkent journal compared to one appearing in an Afghan encyclopedia would not mirror one another precisely.
But despite these divergences, the processes and trajectories undertaken across the Persianate sphere of memorializing and engaging aspects of a shared transregional past were not entirely discordant. The need to formalize a classical canon, historicize national literatures, systematize aesthetics, and cultivate poetic authorities according to local circumstances and national desiderata became paramount undertakings for actors invested in Persian cultural and literary production in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In fact, in many instances, intellectuals from Tehran to Kabul to Dushanbe forged methodologies that were mutually intelligible.Footnote 8 As the contributions in this special issue make clear, from the Caucasus to South Asia, Persianate pasts were being reassigned in endeavors that proved every bit as consequential and pressing as contending with new European intellectual currents and political entanglements.
The first four articles in this special issue focus on the last decades of the nineteenth and earliest decades of the twentieth centuries. In “From Persianate Cosmopolis to Persianate Modernity,” Alexander Jabbari analyzes how early twentieth-century Afghan and Iranian scholars mediated the scholarly authority of the towering figure of Shibli Nuʿmani (d. 1914) through translation from Urdu to Persian in order to produce literary histories anchored in their local contexts. In “Soviet Persian Anthologies,” Samuel Hodgkin shows how Soviet Eastern literary anthologies of the interwar period balanced the drive to delimit the Persianate tradition along national lines against the unique opportunities that tradition presented for Eastern internationalism. In “The ‘Guide to Knowledge,’” Thomas Loy also takes aim at developments in Soviet Central Asia by addressing the brief yet generative period of Tajik literary production in the 1920s and 1930s, when the notion of good poetry was being hotly debated, contested, and shaped in the pages of the Persian-language periodical Rahbar-i Dānish.
In “Disciplining Persian Literature in Twentieth-century Afghanistan,” Aria Fani analyzes the politically fraught and discursively unstable process by which Afghan scholars systematized Persian aesthetics and literary style into a new informational medium, the encyclopedia, in the 1940s and 1950s. The last article turns its attention to the latter half of the twentieth century. In “Soundwaves of Dissent: Resistance Through Persianate Cultural Production in Afghanistan,” Mejgan Massoumi explores how the emergence of radio and sound recording technology in the 1960s and 1970s helped to project Persianate poetic authority and express dissent amid changing social and political dynamics.
The “Sources Uncovered” section offers critical considerations of empirical evidence that has remained marginal to the field of Persian and Iranian Studies or has otherwise been poorly understood. In “Marche Triomphale: A Forgotten Musical Tract in Qajar-European Encounters,” Mohsen Mohammadi reassesses the history of European-style military bands in Iran through the discovery and analysis of a unique archival source. In “Persian Studies in India and the Colonial Universities, 1857–1947,” Gregory Maxwell Bruce sheds light on the pedagogical role of Persian in twentieth-century India. Bruce's uncovering of curricula related to the teaching of Persian in colonial India should dismiss any doubt about the afterlife of this language well into the twentieth century in South Asia. In “Forlorn Arabs and Flying Americans: National Identity in the Early Childhood Curriculum of Postrevolutionary Iran, 1979–2009,” Shervin Malekzadeh's close engagement with educational materials of the Islamic Republic of Iran reveals that traces of a Persianate civilizational ethos do not feature in representations of Iranian culture, history, and identity in the instruction of primary school students; instead the main focus of these materials is to define Iran's place in the world vis-à-vis Arabs and Westerners. In spite of the fact that only a lingering presence of the Persianate remains in the Islamic Republic's primary school curricula, studies of this nature remain crucial to investigating the venues, conditions, and timeframes during which the Persianate evaporates from view.
Finally, Claire Roosien's “Not By Archives Alone”—an archival report from Russia and Uzbekistan—reminds us that so much of Persianate literary history has yet to be investigated, debated, and written. In her afterword, Rebecca Gould critically reflects on the relevance of the Persianate as a category of analysis in an era of emerging and intersecting nationalisms. She calls on the field to “redefine the Persian in light of the Persianate, inscribing a plurality of identities and even languages into the term itself, and returning to the original meaning of the term.”
To think beyond the diffusionist model of West-led modernization and the totalizing framework of the nation-state, we must also refrain from reifying or centralizing the Persianate by attending to its contestations and diverse instantiations.Footnote 9 Aijaz Ahmad, reflecting on Indian nationalists’ adoption of Said's Orientalism, wrote that a historicist accounting of “the relationship between the Brahminical and the Islamic High textualities, the Orientalist knowledges of these textualities, and their modern reproductions in Western as well as non-Western countries” would require “the most incisive of operations, the most delicate of dialectics, to disaggregate these densities.”Footnote 10 The articles in this special issue each undertake this task with attention to the specific convergences involved in their particular case studies, and the result is not only a series of conclusions with national, regional, or transregional significance, but also a repertory of methods. The case of Persian language and literature is a crucial one for the cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in accordance with Ahmad's suggestion, we hope that our examination of this case suggests some ways to work through other such inquiries with incisiveness and delicacy.
