Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Editorial Board
Professor Julia Bray, Laudian Professorial Fellow in Arabic
Dr Dominic Brookshaw, Associate Professor of Persian Literature
Dr Elizabeth Frood, Associate Professor of Egyptology
Professor Henrietta Harrison, Professor of Modern Chinese Studies
Professor Christopher Minkowski, Boden Professor of Sanskrit
Professor Alison G. Salvesen, University Research Lecturer in Hebrew
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Acknowledgments
viii
Contents
x
Transliteration
t: ﭦ ट :
kh ﺥ sh ﺵ श
t:h ﭨﮫ ठ d: ﮈ ड s: ¹ ﺹ
s̄ ﺙ :
dh ﮈﮪ ढ z ﺽ
j ﺝ ज ż ﺫ t̤ ﻁ
jh ﺟﮫ झ r: ﮌ ड़ z̤ ﻅ
ch ﭺ च r: h ﮌﮪ ढ़ ʿ ﻉ
chh ﭼﮫ छ z̄ ﮊ ġh ﻍ
h: ﺡ s ﺱ स q ﻕ
ʾ ء (hamza)
y/ī/e/ai ﻯ “ye” as semi-vowel and vowel (maʿrūf and majˈhūl)
w/ū/o/au ﻭ “wāw” as semi-vowel and vowel (maʿrūf and majˈhūl)
r̥ ऋ the vocalic “r” which cannot be specifically represented
in Perso-Arabic script but appears here in the translit-
eration of some Sanskrit words
a̍ ﯼ :
alif maqsūrah (a word-final “ye” pronounced as/ā/that
appears in some Arabic words)
w: ﻭ quiescent (unpronounced) wāw as in kh : wāndan
:
ṁ ﮞ nūn-ġhunnah (nasalization of the preceding vowel)
an
ﺍﹰ tanwīn
ˈ a sign marking the rare cases in which “h” follows a
consonant that could be aspirated but in which the two
are actually separate sounds (e.g. majˈhūl)
¹ Nota bene that in Devanagari sources this transliterates the letter “ष” (as in “bhās:ā”), which
is unrelated to the Perso-Arabic letter “ﺹ.”
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xvi
There is something here for everyone to dislike, but this system appears
to be the best compromise between accurately representing orthography
and approximating pronunciation for the primary research languages of
this study, namely Persian and Hindi/Urdu. Furthermore, it can com-
pletely represent all the letters in Arabic, from which the other languages
in question have heavily borrowed. The great contradiction in scholarly
attention to diacritical marks is that people who know the words already
do not generally need them, and people who do not know the words are
bewildered by the infestation of dots marching across the page—the
present work takes a completist approach and attempts to show all
diacritical marks (except in place names and the names of modern
scholars).
The majˈhūl vowels [“o” and “e”] have been lost in standard modern
dialect of Tehran (the collapse of the vowels probably started in the
seventeenth century) but are preserved in most eastern Persian dialects,
including Indo-Persian, and are therefore marked here (on present
conditions see, for example, Henderson 1975; Hodge 1957; in a historical
context Baevskii 2007, 163).
The unpronounced “he” at the end of some words is marked as [ah] in
both Urdu and Persian sources. Thus, for example, the word ( ﺯﻧﺪﮦliving)
will appear as “zindah.” The izāfat construction is written [-i] in both
Persian and in Urdu, as in the famous diamond “koh-i nūr.”
The Arabic prefix “al-,” which assimilates to the following consonant
when it is one of the so-called “sun letters,” has been represented here as
it is written rather than as it is pronounced. Thus, for example, the name
“Sirāj al-Dīn” is pronounced [sirāj ud-dīn]. The Arabic tāʾ marbūt̤ ah ()ﺓ
is not specially marked and is transliterated as “-t” or “-h” as context
requires. Furthermore, the Arabic case inflections reflected in the pro-
nunciation are not noted except in direct quotations from Arabic.
Devanagari sources follow the transliteration scheme of the Oxford
Hindi-English Dictionary, except that “w” has generally been preferred
to “v.”
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Introduction
¹ See, for example, Marshall 2003; Alam and Subrahmanyam 1999; Bayly 1993, 35ff.; Alam
1986; Wink 1986.
² I use the word “imaginative” here in the sense of language that creates the possibility of
meaning rather than establishing literal fact. I follow Northrup Frye in my understanding of this
distinction: “In literature the standards of outward meaning are secondary, for literary works do
not pretend to describe or assert, and hence are not true, not false, and yet not tautological
either, or at least not in the sense in which such a statement as ‘the good is better than the bad’ is
tautological. Literary meaning may best be described, perhaps, as hypothetical, and a hypothet-
ical or assumed relation to the external world is part of what is usually meant by the word
‘imaginative’ ” (Frye 2000, 74).
:
India in the Persian World of Letters: Khān-i Ārzū among the Eighteenth-Century Philologists. Arthur Dudney,
Oxford University Press. © Arthur Dudney 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192857415.003.0001
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³ “Sirāj al-Dīn” means “Lamp of the Faith” and is probably an homage to Ārzū’s famous
ancestor, the Sufi master Chirāġh-i Dihlī [“Lamp of Delhi”] (d. 791/1389). (Sirāj is the Arabic
cognate of the Persian word chirāġh.) Likewise, Ārzū’s student Lālah Tek
Chand, known by his
pen-name Bahār, refers to his teacher as “Sirāj al-muhaqqiqīn”
: [Lamp of the Scholars] and
“Sirāj al-shuʿarā” [Lamp of the Poets] (Bahār-i ʿAjam 2001, preface). Khān
: is a title ultimately
derived from the Mongol tradition.
⁴ In 2015, Habib University (Karachi, Pakistan) recognized Ārzū’s importance by inaugurat-
ing a center named for him, the Arzu Center for Regional Languages and Humanities.
⁵ Tavakoli-Targhi 2001.
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⁶ Elliot and Dowson 1877, 194ff. In the 1770s, a period in which British colonial scholars
were particularly interested in history, these scholars tended to consult recently prepared
Persian historical summaries instead of the original chronicles (Teissier 2009, 141–2).
⁷ Allison Busch has made a similar case about recent Hindi literary criticism: She observes
that “the voice of the postcolonial speaks in English, whereas the Orientalist voice is still alive,
and speaking in Hindi” (Busch 2011, 14).
⁸ As Roger Chartier has written: “The historian’s task is thus to reconstruct the variations
that differentiate the espaces lisibles—that is, the texts in their discursive and material forms—
and those that govern the circumstances of their effectuation—that is, the readings, understood
as concrete practices and as procedures” (Chartier 1994, 2).
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The term “philology” has seen its stock rise and fall since it was coined
in late Antiquity. After hitting rock bottom during the postmodern turn
of the 1980s and 1990s,⁹ there has been recent scholarly interest in
reclaiming the term.¹⁰ Philology literally means, of course, “the love of
words,” but throughout history it has referred specifically to ways of
studying language and literature. According to the Oxford English
Dictionary, it has meant variously a devotion to books, the careful
study of literature (especially Greco-Roman Classical texts), and the
systematic study of language in order to discover its structures.¹¹ In
the last sense, it came to be synonymous with “historical linguistics,”
although this usage is now rare. So why choose as the key term in this
study one which has little resonance for people today? Precisely because
it is capacious and ambiguous: It is a word that forces us to think
historically. For example, we might be tempted to call Ārzū a linguist,
but he certainly would not get hired in a modern university’s
Department of Linguistics, whose members have entirely different pre-
suppositions about the nature of language and its relationship to litera-
ture. Avoiding the term “linguistics” prevents the false assumption that
for someone like Ārzū to be worth our attention, he must have had the
remarkable foresight—before there was such a thing as “linguistics”—to
have thought about the development of language in terms that are
familiar to us. (In fact, his works demonstrate a sophisticated sense
of the historicity of language, but one that is quite unlike ours.)
Furthermore, linguistics is narrowly focused on language as its object,
but philology acts upon a body of texts (rather than on a set of linguistic
⁹ Through a process of sloppy synecdoche, philology has been called to account by post-
modern philosophers like Paul de Man for the sins of all the modern human sciences and even
blamed for the rise of fascism (Pollock 2009). The translator of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-
Moellendorff ’s Geschichte der Philologie laments having had to title his translation History of
Classical Scholarship for the sake of clarity because as far as the name philology is concerned “it is
deplorable that we in England have ceased to use this valuable term correctly” (Wilamowitz-
Moellendorff 1982, vii). For an influential (and famously broad) early eighteenth-century
definition of the term as proposed by Giambattista Vico (1688–1744), see Burke 1985, 84 and
Manson 1969, 46.
¹⁰ See, for example, Philology (Turner 2014), World Philology (Pollock et al. 2015), and the
journal Philological Encounters, which has been published since 2016.
¹¹ It has also, from early on, had a pejorative sense in English as the Oxford English
Dictionary attests, e.g., Henry Cockeram’s The English Dictionarie, or an Interpreter of Hard
English Words of 1623 gives “loue of much babbling” as the definition for “phylologie.” Two
other entries for this sense contrasted philology unfavorably with philosophy since philology (by
this definition) is the study of mere words while philosophy gets at truth directly.
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data), and indeed Ārzū and his peers generally made their living or their
reputation or both as practicing poets. No one, it goes without saying,
expects linguists to be poets today. The idea that a language can be
abstracted from a literary tradition is therefore totally alien to Ārzū’s
scholarship. It is also important to dispense with the presumption that
composing literature or engaging with it was a leisure-time activity, a
domain of play separate from serious business. While mocking bad poets
is a staple of Persianate literature, there is no sense (before the colonial
encounter) that reflecting on language or composing verse are inherently
indolent activities. The Islamicate tradition never gave up on Aristotle’s
famous formulation that poetry “is a more philosophical and a higher
thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the
particular.”¹² In seeking to position aspects of Ārzū’s life-world as sep-
arate from basic features of our own experience, whether in the present-
day West or elsewhere, the term “philologist” throws us a lifeline since it
encompasses “literary scholar,” “linguist,” and “litterateur”—all of which
accurately but incompletely describe Ārzū.¹³
This study will return often to the concept of the cosmopolitan, taking as
given that for centuries there existed a Persian cosmopolis stretching
from the Balkans in the west across Central and South Asia to the Bay of
Bengal and Chinese frontier territory of Xinjiang in the east. This vast
region was the zone where Persian language and literature, and its
corresponding ethical and political culture, was common currency, just
¹² Poetics 1451b, trans. Butcher. Indeed, some of the greats of the tradition, like the tażkirah
:
compiler Muhammad ʿAufī (died c. 1232–3 ) and the poet Amīr Khusrau,
: described the craft
of poetry as ʿilm [learning, often associated with religious studies], and Khusrau
: even went so far
as to compare it to divine revelation (Keshavmurthy 2011; Gabbay 2010, 27ff.).
¹³ However, it should be made clear from the outset that there is no single pre-modern
Persian term that captures an equivalent meaning “philologist” because someone like Ārzū
could be slotted into perhaps a dozen or more common categories such as ahl-i qalam [people of
the pen] or suk: han-dānān [knowers of speech/poetry]. He was an adīb, that is someone who
dealt with adab, but while this term contains the sense of philology (see Bonebakker 1990),
nothing distinguishes general poetic practice from inquiry into the nature of language. It is
worth also problematizing the applicability of the term “literature,” which has no exact analogue
in pre-modern Persian since adabiyāt is a nineteenth-century Turkish coinage (De Bruijn 2009).
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¹⁴ Waquet 2001, 121. ¹⁵ Pollock et al. 2000, 577. ¹⁶ Robinson 1997, 154.
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