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Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

India has lost the language for Iran

When the British replaced Persian with English as the administrative language in 1837, they uprooted a seven-century tradition that had become, in every sense, Indian.

Over the last weeks, American missiles have pummelled Iranian cities and destroyed Iranian ships off the coast of Sri Lanka. But India has had little to say about the war reshaping its neighbourhood, and endangering its diasporas and energy flows in the Gulf of Hormuz.

The silence points to something older than oil prices: India has lost the language for what Iran actually means to it. This column is an attempt to recover some of it—not just the Indian history of Farsi itself, but of the Iranians who became Indians, from a poet in Lahore, to a Nawab in Lucknow, to an Ayatollah in Tehran.

Persian, an Indian language?

In an earlier Thinking Medieval column, I argued that ideas flowed continuously between India and Iran until the imposition of colonial national borders. The focus here is on the generations of  Iranians who came to India, stayed, and changed the subcontinent. Their story begins with the Persian language.

Persian is often seen as a conqueror’s language, a colonial imposition. It arrived on horseback, wielding the sword. It was the court language of the Ghaznavid sultans; the Delhi Sultanate continued to patronise it over the next three centuries. However, the fact is that within a generation of its arrival, Indians were writing Persian—and within a few more, Indians had become an influential and distinct set of Persian voices. The 11th century poet Mas’ud Sa’d Salman, born in Lahore to an Iranian immigrant, is considered the foundational writer of this tradition, which would run unbroken until Ghalib.

By the 16th and 17th centuries, the Persian poetry of Mughal India was known to critics as sabk-i hindi, the Indian style. Poet Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, in his essay “Stranger in the City: The Poetics of Sabk-i Hindi,” characterises it as marked by “metaphorical conceits, personification, proverbs, unusual imagery, colloquialisms, tangled syntax”—all the trademarks of other Indian poetic traditions. Sa’ib, an Iranian poet who........

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