Persian in the Age of Mughal Decline: A Reevaluation

Muzaffar Alam
University of Chicago

The essay undertakes to reevaluate the trajectory of Persian in Mughal Hindustan in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when receding social and political spaces for the language eventually led to the disappearance of its prestige and power. In an earlier analysis I have explained this phenomenon in terms of the victorious voice of Hindavi / Rekhta / Urdu in the wake of the eighteenth century debates around “Indian” and “Iranian” Persian, and that the rise in power of the regional states and the English East India Company further nourished the vernacular languages.

I read here more closely the literary works of several key eighteenth-century Mughal literati, so that we may get a more nuanced picture of their views and inform our generalizations about the literary cultures of this period. The picture that emerges is complicated: poets composing in Hindavi helped themselves to copious Persian phrases, topoi, and metaphors to resonate with the old Persian canon. The way in which Hindavi made itself literary was only through active engagement with and employment of Persian. The trend of gradually ceasing to compose poetry in Persian and turning instead to Hindavī was not simply a capitulation to criticism leveled at Indo-Persian poets by Iranian critics such as Shaykh ‘Ali Ḥazīn; it had just as much to do with opposition at home. The essay notes several Indian Persian poets’ criticism of even Bedil (d.1722), the paragon of ist’mal-i Hind.

Notable is also the reason, referred to as the “demand of the custom of the time” (muqtaza-i ravāj-i zamāna), that became a factor for some major figures of the eighteenth century, who began their careers as Persian poets, to turn to the vernacular. Who generated this demand, what exactly was this custom, and indeed, this time? Can we also see something here like a proto-consciousness of a kind of territorial identity emerging alongside a new sense of linguistic identity?