The tadhkira (biographical anthology) represents one of the most prolific and prevalent categories of texts produced in Islamicate societies, yet few studies have sought to understand the larger processes that governed their production and circulation on a transregional basis. This article examines and maps the production, circulation, and citation networks of tadhkiras of Persian poets in the 18th and 19th centuries. It understands tadhkiras of Persian poets as a transregional library that served as a repository of accessible and circulating texts meant to be incorporated, reworked, and repackaged by a cadre of authors separated by space and time. By relying on a macroanalytical approach, quantifiable data, and digital mapping, this article highlights the overall construction of the transregional library itself, the impact of state disintegration and formation on its constitution, and the different ways authors on opposite ends of the Persianate world came to view this library by the end of the 19th century.
While the nineteenth century is a period that generally witnessed Persian's longue durée of decline in post-Mughal South Asia, it is also one in which Persian literary culture reconstituted itself in multiple ways that allowed participants to remain invested in its production. This article focuses on one such environment in the nineteenth century-the court of the last Nawab of Arcot (d. 1855). It highlights the development of Persian literary culture at Arcot, its promotion by the last Nawab through an exclusive Persian poetry society and the personal clashes and poetic rivalries that beset debates around Persian poetry. It demonstrates how Persian literary culture not only remained an important part of the Arcot court's cultural milieu but also how its poetic debates remained connected to larger issues vexing poets elsewhere in the Persianate world, in particular around the questions of 'who speaks for Persian' and 'what constitutes the Persian canon'.
This article focuses on the different ways in which the personality and poetry of the Indian-born poet ʿAbd al-Qāder Bidel (d. 1721) has been interpreted and deployed in a variety of contexts across the Persianate sphere of West, Central, and South Asia, particularly in the nineteenth century. By highlighting different interpretations of Bidel as an obscurantist poet, agent of change, progressive voice, unabashed innovator, and canonic master, I present a more complicated historiography of the poet than the way he is typically presented in Persian literary history. An exploration of the ways in which different peoples and places in the Persianate world have interpreted Bidel reveals a larger complex historiography, which identifies transregional similarities among West, Central, and South Asia and contributes towards a more integrative literary history of the Persianate world.
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