Persianate Pasts; National Presents: Persian Literary and Cultural Production in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

Persianate pasts die hard. Despite the birth of nation-states, advent of colonialism, rise of national literatures, and emergence of new global technologies, the Persianate connections defining the texts, idioms, and vocabularies that bound together large swaths of Islamic Eurasia throughout the early-modern period continued to shape and inflect cultural and literary production in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries established the high-water mark of Persianate transregionalism, then the following two centuries were defined not so much by the undoing of this world in toto, but by its redeployment, reimagining, and regeneration in new cultural guises and (trans)national contexts. Exchanges across borders and languages helped to articulate new meanings for Persian texts. Educational practices in British India and journalistic ones in Central Asia provided venues for Persianate norms to be preserved, contested, and consecrated. The internationalism of the Soviet East created a new avenue for dynamic conversations about the nature of Persianate heritage and traditions. While new national practices and political ecologies were taking shape across Afghanistan, the Caucasus, Iran, and Central and South Asia, refashionings of Persianate pasts persisted. It is an exploration of such refashionings and the people who participated in them that form the contents of this special issue.