There is much to admire in Arthur Dudney's study of the influential Indian Muslim litterateur Siraj al-Din ʿAli Khan-i Arzu (1688–1756). The book demonstrates a rare combination of meticulous erudition and a clear, engaging prose style. There is no other full-length study of Arzu in English, and the few works on the subject in Persian and Urdu are not comparable in depth or rigor. Dudney has considered all of Arzu's known works (no small feat, especially as most are unpublished and several of the manuscripts are badly copied and in poor condition). Moreover, as the book's subtitle suggests, he recreates Arzu's social and intellectual milieu, tracing his networks of patronage, tutelage, and friendship, including luminaries like Arzu's teacher, the towering Indo-Persian poet Mirza ʿAbd al-Qadir Bidil.

Arzu's work ranged widely, from lexicography to poetry and from literary criticism to the study of language. Dudney deals with all of Arzu's major works, with each chapter loosely organized around a text or genre (for example, chapter 4 reads Arzu's dictionaries together and situates them in the larger context of Persian lexicography). In addition to critical readings of individual texts, Dudney offers a larger narrative about Arzu's oeuvre, tracing out Arzu's thought as it develops across his life's work. Here I focus my attention on Dudney's overarching argument about Arzu's view of poetic and linguistic authority, a subject central to academic debates in recent years over Persian in India, Safavid-Mughal poetics, and the nature of the Persianate world.

Whether in dictionaries or critical treatises, Arzu was concerned with how new literary and linguistic usages fit into a longer tradition. This expansion of tradition to accommodate new intellectual developments without epistemic rupture from the past, Dudney contends, is emblematic of early modern knowledge production not only in India, but in Europe as well. Dominant narratives have tended to read the controversy over the tāza-gūʾī or “fresh-speaking” poetic movement anachronistically, as a nationalist dispute between Iranians like Hazin Lahiji—who criticized the movement—and Arzu, seen as defending his Indian “compatriots” against Iranian chauvinism. Dudney reveals the heart of the matter to be instead a debate over literary conservatism. He analogizes it to the “quarrel of the ancients and the moderns” in Renaissance Europe, a case of early modern Indian and European societies experiencing similar conditions and independently coming to similar conclusions. For Hazin, poetic authority is vested in the works of the ancients, whereas Arzu sees authority as grounded in precedent (sanad, more literally “warrant”). In the latter view, such authority is not eternally fixed in an unchanging canon; today's moderns are tomorrow's ancients. As such, contemporary master poets with the requisite training can coin innovative usages that become part of an ever-evolving standard. This relates to Arzu's understanding of language itself. Authority depends not on essential characteristics, like being what today we would call a “native speaker” of Persian, but on mastery of the literary language through training. This is as true of Iranians as it is of Indians and others across the Persianate cosmopolis.

One of the book's central concerns is to cut through modern conceptual baggage, like the nationalist logic that binds language closely to land and nation, to understand Arzu and his eighteenth-century Indo-Persian milieu on its own terms. Perhaps above all, Dudney demonstrates the confidence and vibrancy of the Indo-Persian literary milieu prior to the nineteenth-century idea of Indo-Persian as inauthentic and inferior to Iranian Persian. Far from deferring to Iranians as authorities on Persian, Arzu offered corrections to Iranian poets like Zahid ʿAli Khan Sakha and, more famously, Hazin Lahiji.

Dudney criticizes the “decline model” of scholarship which has claimed that the crisis of poetic authority and the trend of vernacularization were due to Mughal political instability and, consequently, a supposed lack of ability to properly fund high culture. As he points out, Indo-Persian literary debates (such as that between Arzu and Hazin) are treated as evidence of decline, whereas their European equivalents are narrativized as early participants in the making of modernity. Instead, he argues that Arzu's theories about language and aesthetics are not limited to Persian and indeed helped guide the growth of vernacular literature, particularly in the language that would later come to be called Urdu. Such comparisons between Western and Persianate traditions, which Dudney deftly weaves throughout the monograph, are not about taking Europe as a starting point and identifying parallels elsewhere, but rather aim to undercut European claims to uniqueness. Indeed, he does not treat the two as necessarily parallel, highlighting how vernacularization had different trajectories in India and Europe. Yet although Dudney is careful not to force the comparison, adumbrating both convergences and divergences between early modern India and Europe, his caution occasionally gives way to claims about “global” early modernity advanced on the basis of such comparisons.

According to Dudney, questions of authority and authenticity also are central to Arzu's linguistic study Musmir. Modeled after al-Suyuti's Arabic treatise al-Muzhir, from which Arzu drew conceptual categories and linguistic theory, one of the topics Arzu addressed in Musmir was the issue of foreign loanwords. For Arzu, there is no reason that Indic loans should make Indo-Persian inauthentic. After all, standard Persian has incorporated a plethora of loans from Arabic and other languages into its lexicon. Even the Arabic of the Qur'an features loanwords from Middle Persian, Geʿez, Syriac, and other languages—a topic also taken up by al-Suyuti. Dudney's argument would only have been strengthened had he considered al-Suyuti's other works, such as his study of Arabicized words in the Qur'an, Kitab al-Muhadhdhab fima Waqaʿa fi al-Qurʾan min al-Muʿarrab. In this work, al-Suyuti cites the views of others that “the few non-Arabic words [in the Qur'an] do not change the fact that it is Arabic, just as a Persian qaṣīda does not become Arabic by virtue of having an Arabic word in it.”Footnote ¹

Musmir also traces affinities between languages like Persian and Sanskrit. Arzu discusses these connections in terms of direct borrowing, for example, tafrīs, or the process by which foreign vocabulary is incorporated into Persian; ittifāq (convergent, coincidental development); and tavāfuq (correspondence), in which Arzu seems to approach—but does not fully grasp—the common roots of Sanskrit and Persian, an idea he developed across his earlier works as well. Arzu's concept of tavāfuq has led other scholars to describe him as a precursor to (or even a progenitor of) modern historical linguistics. Some have even speculated that Sir William Jones plagiarized his discovery of the Indo-European family of languages (elucidated in his “Third Anniversary Discourse”) from Arzu. But Dudney convincingly challenges this idea, arguing instead that this is one of many parallel developments between early modern India and Europe. He painstakingly recreates what Jones could have known and what texts he could have accessed, showing how Jones's discovery built on European precedents and demonstrating that Jones was either wholly unaware of Arzu, or possibly learned of Arzu's work only two years after his own “Third Anniversary Discourse.” This is illustrative of Dudney's careful scholarly rigor: even in a book celebrating Arzu as an “inflection point in Indian intellectual history” (13), he is critical of those who inflate Arzu's importance beyond what can be sustained by evidence.

By the same token, just as Arzu's Musmir “represents arguably the most sophisticated early modern theory of language in Persian” (54), Dudney is careful to distinguish Musmir from modern linguistics as such. Arzu saw language as dynamic and ever-changing, and understood that Persian had transformed over time, from “ancient Persian” (he could not distinguish between what would be recognized today as Old Persian and Middle Persian) to the New Persian of his day. Crucially to Dudney's argument, Arzu also differentiated between local, spoken dialects of Persian and its cosmopolitan literary register. Because the latter is transregional and universal (and—crucially—not a variety “natively” spoken by anyone), all Persian poets are held to the same standard, supporting the book's thesis about the cosmopolitan nature of Persian. However, Arzu's perspective was not universally accepted even in his own time. It was prescriptive, expressing an ideal of how authority should function, rather than a descriptive view of how things actually worked.

Contemporary book reviews tend to resemble encomia more than criticism. It is therefore with regret that I found very little to criticize in this erudite study. The index is paltry, and there are some infelicities in transliteration, but even there Dudney is to be commended for maintaining the classical Indo-Persian vowel system rather than subjecting it to the inadequate IJMES or Iranian Studies transliteration systems. On that note, the remark that “the collapse of the [majhūl] vowels probably started in the seventeenth century” (xvi) must be corrected; the process began much earlier, likely as early as the thirteenth century, with the majhūl-maʿrūf distinction fully collapsed in Western dialects by the sixteenth.Footnote ² Dudney helpfully provides the original text (in transliteration) for many quotes in the book, although this also reveals some errors. For example, dar dafaʿ-i burūdat (170n90) is mistransliterated (it should be dafʿ although pronounced dafaʿ in colloquial Urdu) and, more importantly, it is mistranslated as “during the cold period” (it should be “for warding off the cold”). Although there are other such errors, they do not detract from the overall excellence of the work. India in the Persian World of Letters is a remarkable work of scholarship: a comprehensive monograph on Arzu, a valuable contribution to scholarly debates on the Persian cosmopolis, and an engaging intellectual history of eighteenth-century India. As such, it deserves to be widely read.