LANGUAGE AND EMPOWERMENT

Since this study relates the learning of Persian with empowerment it is necessary to explain how these terms are used here. The term power has been defined earlier as the capacity for obtaining various forms of gratification (Rahman 1996: ; Rahman 2002: ). So, when an individual or group seeks empowerment, they seek the capacity to gratify themselves. Individuals generally seek tangible goods and services (good housing, transport, food, clothes, sexual satisfaction, leisure, the consumption of objects d’art etc) even at the cost of others. They also seek prestige, recognition, control over others and resisting other’s control on themselves). Groups have similar goals. While individual interests may clash with those of the group, it is only in highly individualistic societies, and withen certain legally laid down limits even there, that group aims are considered secondary. Indian was not one of these societies during the time of Persian ascendancy. Thus, while individual agendas are important, it is the urge for group empowerment which gives us insight into the learning of languages.

In India the ruling family were of Turkish origin (though connected on the female side with the Mongols) and used the Turkish language as a private means of communication even till the time of Prime Azfari who claims mastery in it in his travelogue and memoir Waqiat-e-Azfari which, however, was written in Persian (Azfari ). However, as the Indian Muslim civilization fell into what Toynbee calls the ‘Iranie Zone’, Persian was used in the domains of power (Toynbee ). The domains of power were the court of the ruler himself, the courts of law presided by judicial officials (qazis), the bureaucracy, the educational institutions (maktabs for small children and higher madrassas for older ones) and upper class society. In the later Mughal period, however, even nobles were not always proficient in spoken Persian as Samsam al-Daulah, Khan-i-Dauran’s example suggests. He is said to be unable to speak good Persian but even he took came to embellish his conversation with some Persian couplets (Alam 2004: 133-134). But till 1837 when the British substituted Persian by English at the upper level and some vernacular languages of India at the lower one, it was not possible to function in the formal state apparatus without knowledge of written Persian or assistance of someone who did have that knowledge. Those who did have this knowledge were the Muslim elite (ashraf). The Hindu Kayesth class were also the subordinate partners of this elite since Todar Mal’s introduction of Persian in the domains of power (Alam 2004: 128). The ordinary peasants and other menial workers could on occasion get the necessary leisure to pursue their studies so as to enter this elite, but generally they were too over burdened with poverty to find the time or, indeed, the books and the teachers, to do so.

The educated elite performed the functions of the class Antonio Gramsei class ‘the intellectuals’-namely, they were ‘the dominant group’s “deputies” exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government’ (Gramsci 1929-1935: 12). They created, elaborated and disseminated the world view which enabled the masses to give their consent to ‘the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group’ (ibid, 12). In short, Muslim and Muslimized Hindu ‘intellectuals’ made people accept the hierarchical, male-dominated, Muslim-ruled society as ‘normal’ and ‘natural’. Arbitrariness rather than a rights-based political and social system made them accept inequality and injustice as their fate (kismet). Both women and the lower orders were seen as subordinate and, therefore, to be controlled. These constructions of the social order, experienced as verities by contemporaries, were sustained by education both informal and formal. And of the formal part of it, the learning of Persian was important. As we have seen, it empowered individuals and groups and the group whose power it maintained over all other was the ruling Mughal elite and its mightiest officers who might have conquered India by the sword but who ruled it by moral, intellectual and legal hegemony—a hegemony maintained, among other things, by Persian texts learned during the process of individual self-empowerment.