Thinking Iranian Nationalism with the Persianate

Seeking the “Persianate”

Displacing the nation-state and its civilizational genealogy as a privileged unit of analysis remains one of the primary objectives of various fields in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. While trendy concepts du jour like World Literature and Global History claim the banner of problematizing nationalistic discourses, alternative models have often organically emerged from within area studies, in spite of its many structural flaws. In the past two decades, the term “Persianate” has gained near ubiquity in fields concerned with West, Central and South Asia and in multiple disciplines, including history and literary studies.1 The Persianate designates a cultural geography, roughly from Bosnia to the Bay of Bengal, in which the Persian language operated as an essential—but far from a singular—medium of literary production, inter-imperial diplomacy, and cultural historiography. While its utility as an analytic category has recently been debated, its definition has remained quite stable since the historian Marshall Hodgson coined it in 1974.2

The Persianate is not just a designation for a territory or temporality. It also elucidates certain modes of circulation and cultural exchange, and as such, it carries with it methodologies for understanding and analyzing the many cultural offsprings produced in Persianate premodernity. By offspring, I refer to how Persian-language forms and aesthetics informed and shaped the making of multilingual products in other literary traditions, for instance consider the Urdu ghazal (lyric poetry), Turkic historiography, and Pashto romance. The Persianate therefore stands as a linchpin for different fields and disciplines, challenging the siloization of area studies as a modern disciplinary formation.3 Jabbari’s intervention is best understood within the context of Persianate studies as a distinctly transregional, transnational, and multilingual field.

The Making of Persianate Modernity examines the modernizing projects of early twentieth-century Iran and South Asia side-by-side, and puts Persian and Urdu in conversation with one another in new and generative ways.4 There is so much to be gained from putting literary nationalism in Persian and Urdu in conversation with one another as I hope this review will make clear. Jabbari argues that the making of modernity in Iran must be understood in the context of Persianate transregionalism and its attendant cultural forms, texts, and conventions. And the study delivers on these accounts: we learn how premodern models of literary historiography informed the modern genre of literary history (chapter one), how heteronormative erotics become the privileged and socially acceptable norm in literary anthologies (chapter two), how Persian and Urdu diverge in producing their originary narratives (chapter three), and how modernity took visual and material form through changes to orthography, typography, and punctuation (chapter four). Complementing these four chapters is a section that follows the introduction called “connections” which makes an empirical and historical case for the utility of Urdu in studying Iranian nationalism, and modernity more broadly. I will now briefly delve into each chapter.

The introduction defines the nineteenth and twentieth centuries not as the undoing of the Persianate cosmopolis in toto, as has been the received wisdom in the field, but by its redeployment, reimagining, and regeneration in new cultural guises and (trans)national contexts. There is a body of recent scholarship that theorizes the formation of modernity from within Persianate literary and cultural traditions, instead of framing the rise of modernity, of which modern nationalism is an outgrowth, as the dramatic and definitive end of transregionalism.5

Chapter one, “Histories: From Tazkirah to Literary History,” argues that tazkirahs or biographical dictionaries served as critical source materials for the making of literary history as a modern genre. Translated as commemorative compendia or biographical dictionaries, tazkirah constitutes one of the most systematic and popular categories of texts in premodern Islamicate societies. There has been a renaissance of tazkirahs studies in the field of Persian literature as scholars turn to this diverse and multilingual corpus to discern literary taste, draw historical information, and overall better understand the cultural milieu of any given period. By contrast, scholars of modernity, particularly in Iran but also in the US, have been dismissive of tazkirahs as arbitrary and unreliable. In fact, the pioneers of literary studies as a modern discipline in Iran, India, and Europe framed tazkirahs as unscientific and devoid of critical value.

Jabbari not only challenges this negative assessment, he also analyzes its rhetorical effect as a necessary distancing tactic, a way for modernists to manufacture distinction. He does so by showing how literary history, hailed as a positivist and scientifically-informed genre, would have been unimaginable without an intimate and durable engagement with tazkirahs as a treasure trove of literary, textual, and historical information. Jabbari examines Persian, Urdu, and English-language literary histories and identifies key characteristics that mark literary history as a modern genre: the placing of Persian poets within a historical chronology, the framing of Persian poetry as a tradition with a linear progressive trajectory, and the celebration of littérateurs as national figures. Yet, belonging to the category of literary history does not result into a set of identical qualities. Jabbari highlights crucial differences that set a seminal Urdu text like Shiʿr ul-ʿAjam (Poetry of Persians) apart from Edward Browne’s A Literary History of Persia, but he always returns to his broader point: how they belong to a shared discourse of literary nationalism, a strength of his comparative method.

Chapter two, “Erotics: From Bawdy to Bashful,” argues that the adoption of heteronormative desire and a rejection of homoerotic practices in premodern Persian poetry marked a crucial component of tazkirah’s refashioning into modern literary history. Jabbari draws on the work of the historian Afsaneh Najmabadi to elucidate how a diverse set of scholars in South Asia, Iran, and Europe, such as Muhammad Husain Azad (d. 1910), Shibli Nuʿmani (d. 1914), E. G. Browne (d. 1926), and Badiʿ al-Zaman Foruzanfar (d. 1970), essentially wrote homoerotic desire out of Persianate literary modernity. The chapter argues that the moderns’ rejection of practices such as amrad-parasti, which Jabbari translates as “worshiping handsome male youths,” in the biographies and poetic oeuvre of premodern poets was in keeping with Victorian sensibilities and their ideas of civility and morality. Jabbari here introduces biographical—and at times salacious—information related to Nuʿmani and Browne in order to demonstrate the gap between their lived experiences and the rhetorical tactics they deployed in their scholarly work to distance themselves from homoerotic practices that were now flagged as aesthetically undesirable. Future research on this topic would need to engage recent scholarship, such as Domenico Ingenito’s Beholding Beauty, to better parse out homoerotic practices in genres beyond the ones anthologized in tazkirahs.

Jabbari is particularly adept at distinguishing between process and product. His understanding of Persianate modernity is defined by a set of social norms, discursive methods, and mechanics and semantics of print culture shared across borders and languages. But this shared literary habitus did not lead to uniform outcomes in Iran, India, or elsewhere (again, here we see the advantages of his comparative method). This is nowhere clearer than in chapter three, “Origin Myths: Indigeneity and Hybridity in National Narratives,” which focuses on how Persian and Urdu diverged in the way they located and narrated their own origin stories in the early twentieth century. We learn that while Iranian intellectuals created a historical narrative based on continuity and purity—animating a linear connection between ancient Iranian languages and New Persian and muting the influence of Arabic after the spread of Islam. Indian Muslims, by contrast, emphasized hybridity as the locus through which Urdu’s origins and true character may be viewed. In doing so, Urdu-language intellectuals sought to downplay the same pre-Islamic past that their Iranian counterparts celebrated as a more authentic iteration of Persian literary culture. This divergence demonstrates the historically contingent nature of Iranian and Indian nationalisms, seen in the different relationships that Iranian and Indian intellectuals had to European scholars such as Browne.

Chapter four, titled “Print: Typography, Orthography, Punctuation,” turns to modernity’s material and visual forms, which like originary stories of Urdu and Persian, were also not uniform. If chapter one identifies both continuities and ruptures in the refashioning of tazkirahs into literary history, then this chapter focuses on how the latter breaks from biographical dictionaries and signals its belonging to a modern scientific discourse. This chapter builds on existing studies on modern language ideology, which, in the case of Persian, have tended to focus mainly on script reform. Jabbari tells us why Persian and Urdu opted for naskh and nastaʿliq scripts respectively and how that choice was informed by the particular form of their national and linguistic identity. In opting for nastaʿliq, which was used commonly in premodern manuscripts, Urdu-language intellectuals sought to maintain an element of the Perso-Arabic script as a key defining feature in contradistinction to Hindi, which used the Devanagari script.

Whereas Persian, framed by Pahlavi-era (1925–1979) intellectuals as the most prized element of Iranian identity across time, opted for naskh which offered a very different look in print form. A break from the manuscript script did not generate as much anxiety for Iranians since Persian had deployed many different scripts throughout its developmental history. Overall, chapter four clearly shows how modernizing formal conventions repackage the Persianate literary tradition to make it congruent with the dominant ethos of a national community’s linguistic identity. In this vein, Jabbari illustrates how the success of formal conventions in shaping any literary heritage ultimately depends on how well they cover their own track. In this regard, The Making of Persianate Modernity provides a roadmap not only to (now mythologized) historical scenarios of modernity but a toolkit with which to generate distinctly different futures.

Forging Connections

In a way, this study has been in the making since 2012. When Jabbari was preparing for his MA exam, he observed that most historiographical accounts of modern nationalism in Iran only paid lip service to the importance of India and Indic cultures. In spite of this widely-acknowledged role, Indians were often spoken about, but rarely heard from. This observation led Jabbari to learn Urdu in Lucknow, India, where the idea for his MA thesis took shape during daily readings of Urdu periodicals. There he encountered Saʿdi’s Gulistan, a seminal text of Persianate learning and ethics, curiously serialized for a public readership. Thus, Jabbari turned away from India as a symbolic fixture of Iranian national historiography and turned to Indians as historical interlocutors who forged important material, intellectual, and personal relationships with Iranians and with Persian literature.

The Making of Persianate Modernity critically delineates some of the most salient trajectories of literary nationalism in late Qajar and early Pahlavi Iran. There is no doubt that all four case studies—literary history, origin stories, erotics, and print—have had a wide-reaching impact on the development of Persian as a modern language. But are these case studies all generalizable to the same extent or on the same scale with regards to their role and relevance in shaping literary nationalism in Iran? For instance, literary history concerns an elite cohort of intellectuals whose specialized work took quite a long time to become mainstream through mass literacy and national education. By comparison, can the same be said of how heteronormativity was understood by scholars like Shibli or Browne? To what extent are their experiences applicable or relevant to the greater society?

Arguably, the strongest case here can be made about print whose proliferation permeated society and served as a robust—though far from singular—vector for modernity. While the discourse of literary nationalism was by no means an automatic outcome of print culture, it did play an outsized role in shaping modernity such as Urdu and Persian’s diverging origin stories or material form. This is not a critique of Jabbari’s work alone, but of a broader field including my own. The question of applicability or generalizability is often either overlooked or discussed only in a cursory manner, creating an imbalance in how the trajectories of modernity are scaled and developed. To begin in earnest the task of adding much needed texture and dimension to the study of modernity, books like The Making of Persianate Modernity offer a crucial starting point.

Aria Fani is an assistant professor of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of Washington in Seattle. At UW, he co-directs the Middle East Center at the Jackson School for International Studies and is a co-investigator of the Translation Studies Hub. Aria’s first book, Reading across Borders: Afghans, Iranians, and Literary Nationalism, was published by the University of Texas Press in April 2024 and its Persian translation was published by Shirazeh Press in Tehran in September. In addition to teaching and research, Aria engages in social advocacy for non-citizen Americans, particularly asylum seekers from Central America.

Notes

1. 1. The idea of Sinophone, outlined by such scholars as Rey Chow and Shu-mei Shih offers another compelling parallel example to the Persianate. For more, see Chow, Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory and Shih, Tsai, and Bernards, Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader.

2. 2. See, for instance, the edited volume The Persianate World, edited by Nile Green. The Persianate is a modern concept for which there existed no equivalent in premodernity, and in fact, the Persian of today has not yet settled on a single equivalent for it. A number of terms have been used in Iran-based journals: donyā-ye irani (the Iranian world), jahān-e pārsi (the Persian world), fārsi maʾāb (Of a Persian orientation), fārsi bonyān (Foundationally Persian), and fārsi-khu (Of a Persian disposition). The first two center the Persianate on Iran as a timeless geopolitical entity, and as such, represent blatant misreadings of the Persianate. The latter three offer generative pathways, but are used less frequently than the former.

3. 3. For instance, the fields of Middle Eastern and South Asian studies require doctoral students to pair languages that “fit” within their (arbitrary) territorial purview. In the case of Middle Eastern studies, that pair excludes Persian and Urdu. In South Asian studies on the other hand Persian and Urdu are frequently paired together, albeit in research projects focused on pre- and early modernity. It is important to mention that the Persianate is also vulnerable to homogenizing forces itself. See Fani et al, “Pathways to Persotopias.”

4. 4. Jabbari’s period of focus largely corresponds with the British Raj but parts of the book also deal with Pakistan (and Pakistanis). As such, I have opted for the more blanket term “South Asia” instead of India or India and Pakistan.

5. 5. See the following four special issues: Kia and Marashi, “After the Persianate;” Fani and Schwartz, “Persianate Pasts; National Presents,” Fatima, Jabbari, and Ozedmir, “The Late Persianate World,” Dabashi, “Persianate Wor(l)ds and Methods.”

Works Cited

1. Chow, Rey. 2001. Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field. Durham: Duke University Press.
2. Hodgson, Marshall. 1974. The Venture of Islam: The Expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods. Vol. 2, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
3. Green, Nile. 2019. The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca. Oakland: University of California Press.
4. Ingenito, Domenico. 2020. Beholding Beauty: Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry. Brill.
5. Kia, Mana and Afshin Marashi. 2016. “After the Persianate.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 36.3: 379–383.
6. Fani, Aria and Kevin Schwartz. 2022. “National Presents: Persian Literary and Cultural Production in the Twentieth Century,” Iranian Studies 55.3: 605–609.
7. Fani, Aria, Kevin Schwartz, Samuel Hodgkin. 2024. “Pathways to Persotopias.” PMLA. 139.2 (Spring): forthcoming.
8. Fatima, Maryam, Alexander Jabbari, and Mehtap Ozdemir. 2023. “The Late Persianate World: Transregional Connections and the Question of Language” Philological Encounters 8: 111–120.
9. Dabashi, Pardis. 2024. “Persianate Wor(l)ds and Methods.” PMLA. (Spring): forthcoming.
10. Jabbari, Alexander. 2016. “The Making of Modernity in Persianate Literary History.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 36.3: 418–34.
11. Shih, Shu-mei, Chien-hsin Tsai, and Brian Bernards. 2013. Sinophone Studies: A Critical Reader. New York: Columbia University Press.