This article makes an argument for literary modernity as a shared discourse produced through scholarly exchange between Iranians and Indians reworking their shared Persianate literary heritage, considering literary history as an important and perhaps overlooked site for the production of literary modernity. Arguing for a verbal as well as textual discourse of modernity shared between early twentieth-century Iranian and Indian intellectuals, Jabbari examines how these intellectuals made use of premodern materials for their modernizing projects, and how nationalism shaped this process. Four aspects of modern literary history writing receive particular focus here: engagement with the tazkirah tradition, inclusion of extraliterary national figures alongside poets, use of a shared set of references and sources, and new sexual aesthetics that break with the homoerotic Persianate past.
Mohammad-Taqi Bahār’s 1942 textbook Sabkshenāsi (“Stylistics”) was a landmark text in modern Persian literary studies. It coined terms (like sabk-e Hendi or the “Indian style” of Persian poetry) and laid out a tripartite, geographical-temporal model for the history of Persian poetry which largely remain dominant today. Bahār’s articulation of a national canon of Iranian literature (comprising writings in various stages of the Persian language as well as Arabic) made Sabkshenāsi an important text not only for the nascent department of Persian literature at the University of Tehran for which it was written, but for twentieth-century Iranian nationalism in general. By combining traditional forms of knowledge with the methodologies pioneered by European Orientalists, it played an important role in modernizing Persian literary studies. The influential introduction to Sabkshenāsi is translated here into English in full for the first time, along with a preface explaining the work’s importance for Persian literary studies.
of the Mongol period. Elsewhere, Aubin draws on the Safwat al-Safa to explore the process of Turkicization in Mongol Azerbaijan and the role of a prominent Sufi of the period, in political and economic life in the province. The final section addresses "Acculturation, political problems and social movements", and again focuses on the Ilkhanid period and its aftermath, dealing with the Mongol tribal group the Qaraunus on the Indian frontier, the collapse of the Ilkhanate, and the Sarbadar movement that replaced the Ilkhans in Khurasan. Uniting these studies in a single volume is a useful service to historians of medieval Iran, and one can only hope for a future volume that will republish Aubin's important articles on later periods of Iranian history.
This article examines twentieth-century Persian translations of Urdu-language works about Persian literature, focusing on two different Persian translations of an influential Urdu-language work on Persian literary history, Shiʿr al-ʿAjam (Poetry of the Persians), by Shibli Nuʿmani. The article offers a close, comparative reading of the Afghan and Iranian translations of Shiʿr al-ʿAjam in order to understand why two Persian translations of this voluminous text were published within such a short time period. These translations reveal how Indians, Afghans, and Iranians were invested in the same Persianate heritage, yet the emergence of a “Persianate modernity” undergirded by a cultural logic of nationalism rather than cosmopolitanism, along with Iran’s and Afghanistan’s differing relationships to India and Urdu, produced distinct approaches to translation.
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