Indian Friends, Iranian Selves, Persianate Modern

Kia, Mana

doi:10.1215/1089201x-3699019

Cited by 11 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 27 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Yet while denying their own ethnicity, of late, Persian colonialist intellectuals have been finding the Orientalist neologism ‘Persianate world and communities’ referring to non‐Persians rather useful (cf. Kia, 2016). This term, originally coined by the Orientalist scholar Marshall G. S. Hodgson (1974), is now used to ‘Persianise all and any communities that their literati's might have used Farsi along with other languages’.…”

Section: Farsi: the Supreme Language Of Powermentioning

confidence: 99%

Textualising the ethno‐religious sovereign, history, ethnicity and nationalism in the Perso‐Islamic textbooks

Soleimani

Osmanzadeh

2021

Nations and Nationalism

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper is a study of the Islamic Republic of Iran's 1st‐ to 12th‐grade textbooks. This paper examines issues of language, race, ethnicity and religious nationalism in textbooks to cast light on how the state in Iran has striven to Perso‐Shi'ify the polity through its education system. The official textbooks depict the sovereign community (Persians) as the sole agent of history. The state considers alternative (unofficial) narratives treasonous. This is an in‐depth study of how Iran's state‐sanctioned textbooks, their situatedness and the contextual knowledge gained from them offer revealing points of interpretation, illuminating the foundation of the existing structural ethnolinguistic dividing lines, and shows that Islamism, as the governing bounded logic implanted in textbooks, lends solidity to racial theories and historiographies. This study sporadically discusses the views and experiences of a number of Kurdish schoolteachers with whom we could conduct in‐depth interviews.

show abstract

Section: Farsi: the Supreme Language Of Powermentioning

confidence: 99%

Textualising the ethno‐religious sovereign, history, ethnicity and nationalism in the Perso‐Islamic textbooks

Soleimani

Osmanzadeh

2021

Nations and Nationalism

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Graveyard of Development? Afghanistan’s Cold War Encounters with International Development and Humanitarianism

Nunan¹

The Development Century

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A New Language of Rule: Alwar's Administrative Experiment, c. 1838–58

Thelen

2023

Law hist. rev.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Many rulers of newly formed Indian Princely States enacted substantial administrative reforms in the first half of the nineteenth century as they sought to reinforce their power and secure revenue in the wake of British colonial conquest. In one such case, the ruler of Alwar, Banni Singh, recruited Aminullah Khan, a former record-keeper in Delhi's colonial courts, to serve as diwan (chief minister) and undertake administrative reforms starting in 1838. These reforms focused on agrarian taxation, the civil courts, and the military, and included changes to the roles of local officials, methods of record-keeping, and the language of governance. The reforms were encoded in seven slim volumes of regulations and model forms, handwritten in Persian. Through a study of these regulations, I situate the reforms of Alwar's administration within Banni Singh's broader self-fashioning as a modern ruler in a Mughal mode and show how the reforms drew from both Mughal and colonial ideas of statecraft. The regulations represented a shift toward a legalistic conception of that state as seen in the ideals of good governance that they espoused, and they constructed contractual relationships among villagers, low-level officials in the districts, and the central state through the extensive bureaucratic procedures that they encoded.

show abstract

Indian Friends, Iranian Selves, Persianate Modern

Abstract: thoughtfully commented on earlier drafts. Any shortcomings remain my own.

Cited by 11 publications

References 27 publications

Textualising the ethno‐religious sovereign, history, ethnicity and nationalism in the Perso‐Islamic textbooks

Textualising the ethno‐religious sovereign, history, ethnicity and nationalism in the Perso‐Islamic textbooks

Graveyard of Development? Afghanistan’s Cold War Encounters with International Development and Humanitarianism

A New Language of Rule: Alwar's Administrative Experiment, c. 1838–58

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About