Introduction The Frontiers of the Persianate World (ca. 800–1900)

Abstract

Nile Green DEFINING THE "PERSIANATE" By the fifteenth century, having gained written form as a fashionable patois of the court poets of tenth-century Bukhara, Persian had become a language of governance or learning in a region that stretched from China to the Balkans, and from Siberia to southern India. 1 As a lingua franca promoted by multi-ethnic and multireligious states, and aided further by education and diplomacy, Persian reached the zenith of its geographical and social reach between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Then, from the early nineteenth century on, it was undermined by the rise of new imperial and vernacular languages. By around 1900, the language, which had once served to connect much of Eurasia, had retreated to Iran and neighboring pockets of Afghanistan and Central Asia, where it was refashioned into the national languages of Farsi, Dari, and Tajiki. The period between 1400 and 1900, then, marks an era defined by the maximal expansion then rapid contraction of one of history's most important languages of global exchange. By focusing its case-study chapters on these five centuries, The Persianate World aims to understand the reasons behind both this expansion and contraction of Persian by identifying what functions the language was able and unable to serve in the transformative early modern and modern eras of intensifying interactions across Eurasia. By looking at the various "frontiers" of Persian-in the linguistic, geographical, and social senses of the term-the following pages chart the limits of exchange and understanding between the diverse communities brought into contact by this language. In geographical terms, this book moves beyond a static model of Persian's linguistic geography to trace the mobility of texts and text producers as far away as the British Isles and China, as well as the localization of Persian in Central Asia and India. By focusing on "horizontal" geographical frontiers and "vertical" social frontiers, on routes and roots, this book seeks to identify the limits-indeed, the breaking points-of Persian's usefulness as a medium of information, understanding, and affinity. If scholars now take for granted the notion that Persian was a shared lingua franca, it is important to identify more precisely who shared it, and for what (and indeed whose) purposes they did so. In focusing on the five centuries that most densely marked both the making and unmaking of one cultural Geist. Rather, it is conceived as a set of specific skills and practices belonging to small, often professionalized, groups of people who were not connected by an immaterial common language or "culture, " but whose contact and communication was based on tangible written documents and often limited to specific topics. An emphasis on the practice and material of writing and on the social and spatial locations of writers (whether literati, bureaucrats, or plain scribes) are therefore key constituents of such an approach. Another recent vision of the Persianate world (or rather, an "Iranian world") is art...