The frontier is a space of natural contradiction. It is as much defined by expansion and fluidity as contraction and demarcation. But amidst this messiness, it is also a place of encounter and contact. It is this last facet of the frontier that frames The City and the Wilderness: Indo-Persian Encounters in Southeast Asia by Arash Khazeni, a Professor of History at Pomona College. The book is a series of micro-histories tracing the ways in which British and Indo-Persian officials, secretaries, travelers, botanists, and artists understood, mapped, and defined the Southeastern frontier of the Mughal Empire by employing a hybrid epistemological framework that “merged Indo-Persian knowledge and its perceptions of the wondrous edge of the Indian Ocean with the Orientalist pursuits of the East India Company and its scientific wing” (p. 2).

The book is divided into two parts. Part One, “Indian Ocean Wonders,” explores how the Southeast Asian world, or “lands below the winds,” was depicted by Indo-Persian travelers through an Islamicate frame of wonders (ʿajaʾib) tinged with a new appreciation for European scientific knowledge. As eighteenth-century “Indo-Persians travelers came to serve the East India Company as intermediaries, interpreters, and translators of environments, kingdoms, and cultures on the edges of Mughal India” (p. 49), traces of the colonial sciences—such as archaeology, geography, and botany—began to rub-off in their works. The result of this amalgamation was the creation of “hybrid” texts that captured the period of transregional contact taking shape during the waning days of the Mughals and rise of the British Raj. While cultural intermediaries in the opening chapters, like Mirza Abu Talib Khan Isfahani and Mir ʿAbd al-Latif Khan Shushtari, are not unknown to scholars for their treatment of the European or Indian “other,” their observations of the Southeast Asian frontier are freshly presented here.

The second part of the book, “Mughal Meridian,” consists of three chapters. Each chapter focuses on a different figure's engagement with the imperial and cultural worlds of Mrauk U (1430-1784) or the Konbaung dynasty (1752-1885). One is Michael Symes, who served as the envoy of the 1795 East Indian Company (EIC) embassy to the Konbaung dynasty and was “among those company agent-explorers embedded, skilled, and immersed in the cultural terrain of Persian” (p. 74). Symes and his mission were responsible for both making diplomatic contact with the Burmese Kingdom and providing the company with scientific knowledge of its physical and cultural landscape. The result was Symes's Account of an Embassy to the Kingdom of Ava (1800), which was heavily based on information gleaned and mediated by Indo-Persian intermediaries and middle-men either accompanying the mission or residing in the Burmese Kingdom itself. Through a close accounting of the mission and Symes's work, Khazeni demonstrates that the hybridity of colonial and Indo-Persian epistemologies can cut both ways in defining the texts they inhabit and thoughts they shape: if Abu Talib Khan and Mir ʿAbd al-Latif Khan wrote Indo-Persian travelogues with a colonial frame, then Symes wrote an English safar-nāmah (travelogue). The textual frontiers of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Indo-Persian world, connecting genres and operating across languages, appear just as messy as the physical ones, and the exploration of their contours equally as enriching. Khazeni's attention to the genre-bending nature of the texts analyzed in The City and the Wilderness is a welcome contribution to more recent scholarship, such as that of Walter Hakala, Alexander Jabbari, and James Pickett, who have made similar observations elsewhere in the Persianate world.

The focus of Chapter Four is Singey Bey, who accompanied the 1795 EIC mission and was tasked with providing botanical and landscape drawings during the journey. These drawings would later appear as lithographs in Symes's printed account. Bey's drawings “were essential to the mission's venture to collect and classify the rare botanical specimens and flora of the Burmese Kingdom and its vast monsoon forests” (p. 119), Khazeni writes, and highlight the importance of the forest and fauna as a site of cultural encounter, in particular for the mission's contact with the sacred signs of Buddhism. Bey was among a cadre of native artists trained by the EIC in the 1790s and, for Khazeni, represents how colonial botany was indebted to people like him. It is yet another example of how the Indo-Persian “moonshee” (munshī) helped shape British colonial understandings of the surrounding world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, complementing the work of earlier scholars like Kumkum Chatterjee and Simon Digby.

The focus of the final chapter is another Indo-Persian munshī, Shah ʿAzizallah Bukhari Qalandar, who along with others in the service of the EIC—through the employ of the Scottish officer and Orientalist John Murray MacGregor (d. 1822)—helped “decipher the syncretic Theravada Buddhist beliefs and rituals of Mrauk U through the translation of Pali literature into Persian” (p. 134). Shah ʿAzizallah and others’ translations from Pali-into-Persian reveal the syncretic world of Mrauk U, from the extent to which the kingdom relied on an Indo-Persian cultural lexicon for imperial self-fashioning to how its Muslim denizens could recognize and accept Buddhist holy men as akin to Sufi mystics and ascetics.

Here, it seems, on the frontier between the Mughal and Arakan Empires, between Islam and Buddhism, cultural and religious sensibilities were intertwined, enmeshed, and made mutually legible, a feat made possible by Indo-Persian peoples and vocabularies. There is perhaps no greater testament to the relevance of employing a Persianate frame to trace the transregional connections across South and Southeast Asia, nor to its overall methodological and scholastic viability elsewhere. The many (often valid) critiques levelled against the Persianate frame notwithstanding, most notably advanced by the late Shahab Ahmed, Khazeni convincingly argues that it was the world of Indo-Persian that brought together travelers, Sufis, Buddhists, Armenian merchants, Orientalists, secretaries, artists, and botanists. Remarkably, and crucially, there is nary a significant mention of Iran anywhere in the book. The Persianate frame, at times misapplied as a short-hand to explore Iran's contact with the outside world, demonstrates its fullest potential when Iran is historicized and de-centered from the narrative, or even absent altogether.

Khazeni's book also reveals the immense value of utilizing an “East-East” paradigm rather than one of “the West and the Rest” when it comes to exploring cross-cultural and cross-regional encounters in Eurasia. As Khazeni puts it: “It now seems worthwhile to delve more deeply into the archive of vernacular representations of spaces and environments, not within the context of the European encounter but rather within the missing terrain of inter-Asian contacts and exchanges (p. 13).” Khazeni has offered an admirable contribution to this growing body of literature that seeks to explore the construction and development of the transregional Persianate world in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries by looking outside of Europe. Further likeminded possibilities in the study of South and Southeast Asia, as elsewhere across the Persianate world, remain an open frontier.