Regionalization without Vernacularization: The Place of Persian in Eighteenth-Century Sindh
In: Journal of the Economic and Social History of the OrientAbstract
This article examines a turn towards the region in two genres related to Persian poetry in eighteenth-century Sindh, the bayāẓ or poetic anthology and taẕkira or biographical dictionary. I argue that poets in Sindh’s premier city, Thatta, established Sindh as an organizing principle for poetry and the poetic community, initiating a process of regionalization in Persian after the end of Mughal rule. Notably, this was done without the patronage or encouragement of the regional successors to the Mughals in Sindh. These poets neither sought out vernaculars, nor predicated regionalization upon cultural difference. Rather, regionalization without vernacularization was the basis for their participation in the transregional enterprise of Persian poetry in a milieu where the Mughals and their officials were no longer sources of patronage or of poetic standards. The case of Persian poetry in Sindh calls for rethinking the function and status of Persian beyond its role as a language of power and for considering the role of Persian poets in bringing the region to renewed cultural salience in eighteenth-century Sindh.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
-
Aḥmad, Niżām al-Dīn. n.d. Tabaqāt-i Akbar Shāhī. British Library APAC Add. 6543.
-
Al-Badāonī, ʿAbdu-l-Qādir. 2009. Muntakhabu-t-tawārīkh, tr. T.W. Haig, Delhi: Idārah-i- Adabiyāt-i-Dillī.
-
Alam, Muzaffar. 2013. The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1707-48. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
-
Alam, Muzaffar. 2004. The Languages of Political Islam: India, 1200-1800. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
-
Alam, Muzaffar and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. 2007. Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-
ʿAlī, Bāgh. 1953. Nāma-i Naghz. Sindhi Adabi Board MS-129.
-
‘Allāmī, Abu’l-Faẓl. 2005. Ā’īn-i Akbarī, ed. Syed Ahmed. Aligarh: Sir Syed Academy.
-
Allana, Ghulam Ali. 1991. An Introduction to Sindhi Literature. Jamshoro: Sindhi Adabi Board.
-
Amanat, Abbas and Assef Ashraf, ed. 2019. The Persianate World: Rethinking a Shared Sphere. Leiden: Brill.
-
Asani, Ali. 2007. At the Crossroads of Indic and Iranian Civilizations: Sindhi Literary Culture. In Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, ed. Sheldon Pollock. Berkeley: University of California Press: 612-646.
-
Asif, Manan Ahmed. 2016. A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
-
Awfī, Muḥammad. 1906. Lubāb al-Albāb, ed. Edward Browne. London: Luzac.
-
Baiglārī, Idrākī. 1980. Baiglārnāma, ed. N.A. Baloch. Hyderabad: Sindhi Adabi Board.
-
Bayly, C.A. 1999. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-
Bayly, C.A. 1998. Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
-
Bayly, C.A. 2012. Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
-
Bilgrāmī, Āzād. 1913. Ma’ās̤ir al-Kirām: Mausūm bih Sarw-i Āzād. Lahore: Mat̤baʿ-i Dukhānī-yi Rifāh-i ʿĀm.
-
Burton, Richard. 1992. Sindh and the Races that Inhabit the Valley of the Indus. New Delhi: Asian Educational Services.
-
Busch, Allison. 2011. Poetry of Kings: The Classical Hindi Literature of Mughal India. New York: Oxford University Press.
-
D’Hubert, Thibaut. 2018. In the Shade of the Golden Palace: Alaol and Middle Bengali Poetics in Arakan. New York: Oxford University Press.
-
Dāghistānī, Alīgolī Khān Wālih. 2012. Riyāẓ al-Shuʿarā, ed. Abū al-Qāsim Rādfar and Gītā Oshīdarī. Tehran: Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies.
-
Dalmia, Vasudha. 2010. The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harischandra and Nineteenth-Century Banaras. Ranikhet: Permanent Black.
-
Dani, Ahmad H. 2018. Thatta: Makli Monuments: Islamic Architecture. Karachi: Endowment Fund Trust for Preservation of the Heritage of Sindh.
-
Deshpande, Prachi. 2007. Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700-1960. New York: Columbia University Press.
-
Dhavan, Purnima. 2011. When Sparrows Became Hawks: The Making of the Sikh Warrior Tradition, 1699-1799. New York: Oxford University Press.
-
Digby, Simon. 2001. The Indo-Persian Historiography of the Lodi Sultans. In Les sources et le temps, ed. François Grimal and Alexis Sanderson. Pondicherry: Institut Français de Pondichéry: 243-264.
-
Dudney, Arthur. 2017. Metaphorical Language as a Battleground for Tradition and Newness in Late Mughal Persian. International Journal of Persian Literature 2/1: 138-160.
-
Dudney, Arthur. 2016. Sabk-e Hendi and the Crisis of Authority in Eighteenth-Century Indo-Persian Poetics. Journal of Persianate Studies 9: 60-82.
-
Eaton, Richard. 1993. The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760. Berkeley: University of California Press.
-
Faruqi, Shamsur Rahman. 2001. Early Urdu Literary Culture and History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
-
Goswami, Manu. 2004. Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
-
Green, Nile. 2012. Making Space: Sufis and Settlers in Early Modern India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
-
Green, Nile, ed. 2019. The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca. Oakland: University of California Press.
-
Green, Nile. 2008. Tribe, Diaspora, and Sainthood in Afghan History. Journal of Asian Studies 67: 171-211.
-
Gupta, Satya P. 1965. Expansion of the Territory of the Kachhwahas in Mughal Times. Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 27: 177-183.
-
Hermansen, Marcia and Bruce Lawrence. 2000. Indo-Persian Tazkiras as Memorative Communications. In Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia, ed. David Gilmartin and Bruce Lawrence. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
-
Hūshiyārpūrī, Ḥāfīz̤, ed. 1957. Maṣnawīyāt-i Hīr o Rānjhā. Karachi: Sindhi Adabi Board.
-
Islam, Riazul. 1948. The Rise of the Sammas in Sind. Islamic Culture 22/4: 359-382.
-
Jabbari, Alexander. 2016. The Making of Modernity in Persianate Literary History. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 36: 418-434.
-
Kaicker, Abhishek. 2018. The Promises and Perils of Courtly Poetry: The Case of Mir ʿAbd al-Jalil Bilgrami (1660-1725) in the Late Mughal Empire. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 61: 327-360.
-
Kanbū, Muḥammad Ṣāliḥ. Copied 1729. Aʿmāl-i Ṣāliḥ. British Library APAC Add. 26,221.
-
Keshavmurthy, Prashant. 2016. Persian Authorship and Canonicity in Late Mughal Delhi: Building an Ark. Basingstoke: Taylor & Francis.
-
Khān, Amīnuddīn. 1873. Mat̤laʿ al-ʿAjā’ib: Tarjumah-yi Maʿlūmāt al-Āfāq, tr. Mahdī ʿAlī Khān. Lucknow: Nawal Kishore Press
-
Khān, Bakhtāwar. Not dated. Mir’āt al-ʿĀlam. British Library APAC Add. 7657.
-
Khān, Muḥammad ʿAlī. Mir’āt-i Aḥmadī. British Library APAC Add. 6580.
-
Kia, Mana. 2020. Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
-
Kia, Mana. 2018. Space, Sociality, and Sources of Pleasure: A Response to Sanjay Subrahmanyam. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 61: 256-276.
-
Kinra, Rajeev. 2015. Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State Secretary. Oakland: University of California Press.
-
Lakho, Ghulam M. 1983. Kalhora ja Takhtgah. Mehran 3/2: 215-235.
-
Lakho, Ghulam M. 1985. Sindh men murattab thayal Farsi-gu shairan ja taẕkira. Mehran: 175-190.
-
Lakho, Ghulam M. 2006. The Samma Kingdom of Sindh. Jamshoro: Institute of Sindhology.
-
List of MSS Persian. British Library APAC Or. 2073.
-
Losensky, Paul. 1998. Welcoming Fighani: Imitation and Poetic Individuality in the Safavid-Mughal Ghazal. Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers.
-
Markovits, Claude. 2008. Merchants, Traders, Entrepreneurs: Indian Business in the Colonial Era. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
-
Maʿṣūm, Sayyid Muḥammad. 2014. Ta’rīkh-i-Sind Best Known As Ta’rīkh-i-Ma‘sūmī, ed. ʿUmar bin Muḥammad Daudpota. Karachi: Endowment Fund Trust for the Preservation of the Heritage of Sindh.
-
Melvin-Koushki, Matthew. 2016. Of Islamic Grammatology: Ibn Turka’s Lettrist Metaphysics of Light. Al-‘Usur al-Wusta 24: 42-113.
-
Melvin-Koushki, Matthew. 2017. Powers of One: The Mathematicalization of the Occult Sciences in the High Persianate Tradition. Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 5: 127-199.
-
Mihr, Ghulām Rasūl. 1958. Ta’rīkh-i Sind. Jamshoro: Sindhi Adabi Board.
-
Mirzā, K.F. 1980. Life of Shāh ʿAbdul Lat̤īf Bhittāī. Hyderabad: Bhit Shah Culture Centre Committee.
-
Muḥammad, Sayyid M. 1965. Tarkhānnāma, ed. Ḥusām al-Dīn Rāshdī. Hyderabad: Sindhi Adabi Board.
-
Muḥammad, Sikandar ibn. 1961. Mir’āt-i Sikandarī, ed. Satish Chandra Misrā and M.L. Rahmān. Baroda: The Maharājā Sayājīrāo University.
-
Muḥsin, Muḥammad. Miḥakk-i Kamāl. Sindhi Adabi Board Archives, Jamshoro MS137.
-
Nisyānī, Sayyid T̤āhir Muḥammad. 1964. Tarīkh-e-Baldah Thattah alias Tarīkh-e-T̤āhirī, ed. N.A. Baloch. Hyderabad: Sindhi Adabi Board.
-
Novetzke, Christian. 2016. The Quotidian Revolution: Vernacularization, Religion, and the Premodern Public Sphere in India. New York: Columbia University Press.
-
Orsini, Francesca. 2019. Between Qasbas and Cities: Language Shifts and Literary Continuities in North India in the Long Eighteenth Century. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 39: 68-81.
-
Orsini, Francesca. 2014. Traces of a Multilingual World: Hindavi in Persian Texts. In After Timur Left: Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth-Century North India, ed. Francesca Orsini and Samira Sheikh. New Delhi: Oxford University Press: 403-436.
-
Orsini, Francesca and Katherine B. Schofield, ed. 2015. Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India. Cambridge: Open Books Publishers.
-
Pellò, Stefano. 2015. Persian Poets on the Streets: The Lore of Indo-Persian Poetic Circles in Late Mughal India. In Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India, ed. Francesca Orsini and Katherine B. Schofield. Cambridge: Open Books Publishers: 303-325.
-
Petievich, Carla. 1992. Assembly of Rivals: Delhi, Lucknow, and the Urdu Ghazal. Delhi: Manohar Publications.
-
Pollock, Sheldon. 2006. The Language of Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley: University of California Press.
-
Pritchett, Frances. 1994. Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and its Critics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
-
Qādirī, ʿAbdul Rasūl. 2006. Makhdūm Muḥammad Hāshim Thattawī: Sawāniḥ-i Ḥayāt ain ʿIlmī Khidmatūn. Jamshoro: Sindhi Adabi Board.
-
Qāniʿ, Mīr ʿAlī Shīr. Intikhāb-i Shuʿarā-yi Fārsī. Sindhi Adabi Board Archives, Jamshoro MS130.
-
Qāniʿ, Mīr ʿAlī Shīr. Maqālāt al-Shuʿarā. British Library APAC Add. 21,589.
-
Qāniʿ, Mīr ʿAlī Shīr. 1961. Mas̤nawīyāt o Qaṣā’id-i Qāniʿ Thattawī. Karachi: Sindhi Adabi Board.
-
Qāniʿ, Mīr ʿAlī Shīr. 1957. Niṣāb al-Bulaghā’. National Archives of Pakistan, MS326.
-
Qāniʿ, Mīr ʿAlī Shīr. 1957. Taẕkira-yi Maqālāt al-Shuʿarā, ed. Ḥusām al-Dīn Rāshdī. Karachi: Sindhi Adabi Board.
-
Qāniʿ, Mīr ʿAlī Shīr. Tuḥfat al-Kirām. British Library APAC Add. 21,589.
-
Qazwīnī, M.A. Pādshāhnāmah. British Library APAC Or. 173.
-
Quraishi, Fatima. 2019. Necropolis as Palimpsest: The Cemetery of Makli in Sindh, Pakistan. PhD dissertation, New York University.
-
Rajā, M. Panāh. Bayāẓ-i Panāh Rajā. Sindhi Adabi Board Archives, Jamshoro MS131.
-
Rajani, Shayan. 2018. Reimagining the World, Remaking the Region: Distinction and Difference in Early Modern and Modern Sindh. PhD dissertation, Tufts University.
-
Ramaswamy, Sumathi. 1997. Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891-1970. Berkeley: University of California Press.
-
Rāshdī, Ḥusām al-Dīn. 1959. Muṣanif Mīr ʿAlī Shīr Qāniʿ ki Sawāniḥ-i Ḥayāt. In Tuḥfat al-Kirām, v. 3, ed. Ḥusām al-Dīn Rāshdī. Jamshoro: Sindhi Adabi Board.
-
Sadarangani, Harumal I. 1987. Persian Poets of Sindh. Jamshoro: Sindhi Adabi Board.
-
Ṣādiq, Muḥammad. n.d. T̤abaqāt-i Shāhjahānī. British Library APAC IO Islamic 259.
-
Sarkhush, M. Afẓal. 1951. Kalimāt-al-Shuʿarā, ed. S. Muḥammad Ḥussain Nainar. Madras: Madras University Islamic Series.
-
Schofield, Katherine B. 2015. Learning to Taste the Emotions: The Mughal Rasika. In Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India, ed. Francesca Orsini and Katherine B. Schofield. Cambridge: Open Books Publishers: 407-421.
-
Schofield, Katherine B. 2012. The Courtesan Tale: Female Musicians and Dancers in Mughal Historical Chronicles, c. 1556-1748. Gender & History 24: 150-171.
-
Schwartz, Kevin. 2014. Bazgasht-i Adabi (Literary Return) and Persianate Literary Culture in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Iran, India, and Afghanistan. PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.
-
Schwartz, Kevin. 2016. The Curious Case of Carnatic: The Last Nawab of Arcot (d. 1855) and Persian Literary Culture. The Indian Economic and Social History Review 53/4: 533-560.
-
Sharma, Sunil. 2017. Mughal Arcadia: Persian Literature in an Indian Court. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
-
Sheth, Sudev. 2018. Revenue Farming Reconsidered: Tenurial Rights and Tenurial Duties in Early Modern India, ca. 1556-1818. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 61: 878-919.
-
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 1991. The Portuguese, Thatta and the External Trade of Sind, 1515-1635. Revista de Cultura, 13-14: 48-58.
-
Subtelny, Maria. 1988. Socioeconomic Bases of Cultural Patronage Under the Later Timurids. International Journal of Middle East Studies 20: 479-505.
-
Syed, G.M. 2013. A Nation in Chains—Sindhudesh. Publisher unidentified.
-
Syed, G.M. 1996. Shah Latif and His Message, tr. Egbert Azariah. Sehwan: Sain Publishers.
-
Thattawī, A.H. ʿAt̤ā. 1956. Dīwān-i ʿAt̤ā, ed. Rāshid Burhānpūrī. Karachi: Sindhi Adabi Board.
-
Thattawī, ʿAz̤īmuddīn M. 1962. Dīwān-i ʿAz̤īm Ḥussainī, ed. Ghulām Muṣt̤afá Khān. Hyderabad: Sindhi Adabi Board.
-
Thattawī, Ghulām ʿAlī M. 1959. Kullīyāt-i Mā’il, ed. Maḥmūd Aḥmad ʿAbbāsī. Karachi: Sindhi Adabi Board.
-
Thattawī, M. Ibrāhīm. 1958. Taẕkira-yi Takmila-i Maqālāt al-Shuʿarā, ed. Ḥusām al-Dīn Rāshdī. Karachi: Sindhi Adabi Board.
-
Thattawī, M. Muḥsin. 1963. Dīwān-i Muḥsin Thattawī, ed. Muḥammad Ḥabībullah Rushdī. Hyderabad: Sindhi Adabi Board.
-
Trivedi, Madhu. 2010. The Making of the Awadh Culture. New Delhi: Primus Books.
-
Truschke, Audrey. 2016. Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court. New York: Columbia University Press.
-
Wālih, ʿAlī Qulī. Riyāẓ al-Shuʿarā. British Library APAC Or. 2693.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 502 | 141 | 15 |
| Full Text Views | 58 | 16 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 131 | 38 | 1 |
Regionalization without Vernacularization: The Place of Persian in Eighteenth-Century Sindh
In: Journal of the Economic and Social History of the OrientAbstract
This article examines a turn towards the region in two genres related to Persian poetry in eighteenth-century Sindh, the bayāẓ or poetic anthology and taẕkira or biographical dictionary. I argue that poets in Sindh’s premier city, Thatta, established Sindh as an organizing principle for poetry and the poetic community, initiating a process of regionalization in Persian after the end of Mughal rule. Notably, this was done without the patronage or encouragement of the regional successors to the Mughals in Sindh. These poets neither sought out vernaculars, nor predicated regionalization upon cultural difference. Rather, regionalization without vernacularization was the basis for their participation in the transregional enterprise of Persian poetry in a milieu where the Mughals and their officials were no longer sources of patronage or of poetic standards. The case of Persian poetry in Sindh calls for rethinking the function and status of Persian beyond its role as a language of power and for considering the role of Persian poets in bringing the region to renewed cultural salience in eighteenth-century Sindh.
| All Time | Past Year | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 502 | 141 | 15 |
| Full Text Views | 58 | 16 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 131 | 38 | 1 |