PERSIAN
Persian was not the language of the Afghans and the Mughals who ruled India. According to Zahiruddin Bahar (1483-1530), the founder of the Mughal dynasty in India, he captured Ghazi Khan, a chief of the ruling Lodhis, and ‘ordered a person well acquainted with Hindustani to interpret my words to him, one after another’ (Babar 1528: 459). This appears to imply that there were at least some chiefs who did not understand Persian as spoken by Babar. Moreover, Babar also says before his battle with Ibrahim Lodhi that ‘our affair was with a foreign tribe and people; none knew their tongue, nor did they know ours’ (ibid: 470). Notwithstanding these statements, the Lodhis have left behind coins, orders, and other documents in Persian since they used it in the domains of power. Babar himself wrote his memoirs (Tuzk) in Turkish and the Mughal princes kept using it as a private royal language almost till the end of their urle. However, no matter what the language of the rulers themselves might be, Persian had been established as the language of culture in north India much before the Mughals.
Indeed, if we are to speak of Persian linguistic influences rather than medieval Persian itself, then we can go back to the sixth century BC. The Gandhara region, which extended at least upto Taxila (Dani 1986), was ruled by the Persians at about this period. Thus, in some of the inscriptions of Darius ‘clear mention has been made of Hi(n)du, that is, the Punjab territory, as a part of the realm’ (Gupta 1958: 33). Moreover, an Armaic-Greek inscription of Asoka, the great Buddhist ruler of around 265-238 BC, was found near present-day Kandahar in April 1957. Carratelli, writing on this discovery remarks:
…the region had been an old Iranian province and it is logical to assume that the tradition of the Achaeminian state language was maintained. Satrapal offices must have survived during Macedonian domination (when Greek was added) and continued their use of Armaic when the Mauryas took over. The importance of Armaic for administrationo purposes in the former Iranian provinces is borne out by the Taxila and the Pul-i-Durunteh inscriptions (Carratelli & Garbini 1964: 12).
Armaic ‘came to the fore’ at ‘the time of the Assyrian empire and became the principal means of communication in the Persian empire’ (Garbini 1964: 61). It was, therefore, a kind of lingua franca in the northern part of present-day Pakistan.
Another linguistic gift of Iranian origin was the Kharoshthi script. This script, which is written from the right to the left (Dani 1979), was used by the Iranian rulers of this part of South Asia and the Maurya kings who succeeded them. That is why the edicts of Asoka at Shahbazgarhi and Mansehra (Pakistan) are in Kharoshthi rather than Brahmi, the script used for similar edicts in the rest of India (Sircar 1957: 29-30). A Buddhist text, the Gandhari Dhammapada, written in this script around AD 269 was discovered in Chinese Turkestan (Katre 1964: 33). This suggests that this script of Persian origin remained in use in areas of present-day northern Pakistan and surrounding regions for many centuries. But leaving these early influences aside, let us see how Persian became ascendant in medieval north India.
Although Arabic was the language of Islamic culture in the beginning, it was Persian which became the dominant vehicle of Islamic culture in India. Indeed, as Arnold Toynbee suggests, India fell in the ‘Iranic’ zone after the Muslim conquest and not the ‘Arabic’ zone where Arabic remained the lingua franca (Katre 1964: 33).Thus Persian was the dominant language which the Turkish and other conquerors of India used in preference to their mother tongues because it was the vehicle of a culture which had tremendous prestige in their eyes (Yarshater 1998). Persian seems to have been made the official language of the court of Ghazni in place of Arabic by the initiative of Abdul Abbas bin Ahmad Isfaraini, who has been mentioned earlier in the chapter on Arabic. It was also he who introduced the poet Firdausi to the court of Sultan Mahmud (Ghani 1941: 71-2). Persian was the language of edicts, even when Hindavi and the Devanagari script were used alongside, of the Muslim kings of pre-Mughal India. According to the historian Badaoni (1540-1615), even during Ghaznavid rule Ustad Abul Faraj Runi and Masud Sa’ad Salman (d. 1121), both poets of Persian and other languages, flourished in Lahore (Badaoni 1595a: 551). Persian poets kept flourishing in Lahore for some time to come. Sultan Beiram (d. 1152), son of Masud, is described as a ‘great promoter of literature’ by the historian Ferishta. According to him:
Several works were, by his order, translated from various languages into the Persian tongue; among which was an Indian book, called the Kuleel-oo-Dumna (Ferishta 1612, Vol. 1: 149).
This Kuleel-oo-Dumna (or Kaleela wa Damna), was a collection of tales, strung together by a connecting narrative, of Indian origin originally written in Sanskrit. Its name has been given as Karinka o Durna and The Fables of Vishnunarma in different sources. It was translated into both Persian and Arabic. The Persian translation was made from the Arabic version of Abdullah ibn al Maqaffa in AH 304 (916) for Nasr bin Ahmad of the Samanid dynasty. It was put into Persian verse by the poet Abu Abdullah Jafar bin Muhammad, better known as Rudaki. One of its later Persian versions, by Husain Waiz Kashifi of Heart (d. 1504), became famous as the Anwar-e-Suhaili. In 1587 Akbar’s minister, Abul Fazl, wrote his lyar-e-Danish based on Anwar-i-Suhaili. Both books remained part of the canon of Persian studies in India for many years to come. The names of poets like Nizami Ganjwi (born between 1141-46; died between 1180-1317), Masud Ziauddin Nakhshabi (d. 1350), Amir Khusrau (1253-1325) and Hasan Sijzi (d. 1328) are well-known. Also according to Ziauddin Barni (died between 1351-88), the writer of Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi, Muhammad Sultan, the son of Ghiasuddin Balban, was a patron of Persian studies. As governor of Multan he invited Persian scholars to attend his court. Says Barni:
His attendants used to read (to him) the Shah-namah, the Diwan-i-Sanai, the Diwan-i-Khakani, and the Khamsah of Shaikh Nizami. Learned men discussed the merits of these poets in his presence. Amir Khusru and Amir Hasan were servants at his Court… (Barni c. 14C: 19).
Indeed, according to the details furnished by Abdul Ghani, Persian literature was well-established under the Ghaznavids, the Khiljis, and the Tughlaqs before Babar entered India in 1526 (Ghani 1941, also see Schimmel 1998: 147-71).
This, the Mughals encountered an established tradition of formal writing when they entered India and not an empty slate on which they could write whatever they wished. In any case, there were many people in the Mughal camp who wrote Persian. Babar had been helped by the Iranians and, even more importantly, Humayun had stayed in Iran and reconquered India with their help (Alam 1998: 319). Moreover, and this crucial point has been made by Muzaffar Alam, Akbar wanted his influence to spread to Iran and, for this reason, courted ‘the non-conformist and dissident Iranians’ who ‘found a natural refuge in India’.
Akbar intended thus to neutralize the awe and the impact the Iranian Shah had exercised over the Mughal household because of the Iranians’ help to Babar and Humayun, (Alam 1998: 321).
Moreover, Persian poetry, adopted by the Muslim mystics to express their tolerant views, was also suitable for the Mughals’ policy of preventing religious antagonism from breaking up the empire. This point too has been explained by Muzaffar Alam as follows:
Persian poetry, which had integrated many things from pre-Islamic Persia and had been an important vehicle of liberalism in the medieval Muslim world, helped in no insignificant way in creating and supporting the Mughal attempt to accommodate diverse religious traditions. Akbar must have got support for his policy of non-sectarianism from the verses like the ones of Jalal-ud-Din Rumi whose masnawi the Emperor heard regularly and nearly learnt by heart (Alam 1998: 332).
Possibly it was with some such intention that Akbar also got Hindu legends and works of knowledge translated from Sanskrit to Persian (Badaoni 1995a: XVII & 95). The Jesuit fathers too translated the Bible in Persian. Father Jerome Xavier, who is supposed to have translated the Bible himself, reports an earlier translation. He wrote in 1604 that they had sent to Rome another ‘book of the Gospels in Persian, the translation of which is more than 300 years old’ (Machlagan 1932: 214). The Jesuits’ aim was to convert the Mughal elite to Christianity and, when Jahangir showed interest in the Persian version of the Bible, they presented it to him in 1606 (Guerreiro 1930: 30-31). They also presented him a book ‘containing the lives of the Apostles in Pakistan’ (ibid.: 43-4). These translations added to the corpus of knowledge available in Persian. It was also in Akbar’s reign that it became possible for Hindus to acquire power by joining the network of state functionaries by learning Persian. Earlier, revenue accounts were kept in Hindi by Hindu clerks but ‘Todar Mal ordered that all government accounts should henceforth be written in Persian’. Commenting upon this development Blochmann, the translator of the Ain-i-Akbari where this information is given, says that this development ‘may well compare to the introduction of the English language in the courts of India’ (Fazl 1590: 377). The Hindus, who had first started learning Persian in Sikandar Lodhi’s time (1489-1517), now learnt it in such large numbers that the Kyasths and Khatris became a Persianized, and even culturally Muslimized, class not unlike the Anglicized Muslims and Hindus of later days. Since the Mughal court was powerful, Europeans too had to learn its language (Persian) and even wear its dress. Thus ambassadors, travelers, and priests learnt Persian Which is what Indians and Pakistanis now have to do, i.e. learn English, when they go to Britain or the United States. The Jesuit Fathers were probably the first Europeans to learn Persian systematically and competently. Since they had to indulge in theological debate they had to be really good at the language of their opponents, the Muslim clergy, and, indeed, of the Great Mughal himself. Once, in one such debate, Jahangir ‘asked them if they had understood what he had said. They replied that they had, and repeated the words he had used’ (Guerreiro 1930: 61). Other Europeans too have left accounts which supports the contention that when a language is used by the powerful, it is learned by natives and foreigners alike because all are affected by power.
The Mughal language policy was not very different from that of the British. Both used non-Indian languages as languages of command---to use Bernard Cohn’s (1985) words---restricting them to a narrow elite. These elites were highly skilled in the languages of power, Persian and English respectively, and assimilated the cultural norms and world view of the rulers. Thus, people like Harkaran Das Kambuh of Multan (Mohiuddin 1971: 215-20), Chandrabhan Brahmin, Madho Ram, Sujan Rai, and Anand Ram wrote Persian works which became established models of excellence. What is more significant is that these Hindu writers used Islamic norms of writing. They began their works with bismillah (in the name of Allah), and very often followed this with a hamd (poem in praise of God) and a na’at (poem in praise of the Prophet of Islam). A number of histories, collected by Elliot and Dowson in volume VIII of their famous The History of India as Todl By Its Own Historians (1867), written by Hindus, have a Muslim tone. Umrao Singh’s Zubdetu-l Akhbar (Vol, 8: 374-5); Harnam Singh’s Sa’adat-i-Jawed (Vol. 8: 336-54); Subhan Rai’s Khalasala-t Tawarikh (Vol. 8: 5-12), to name only a few of them, look like works written by Muslims as Dowson notes. Even during British rule the Hundu elite, or at least the Muslimized part of it, followed Islamic rituals in education. Rajindra Prashad, later the president of India, tells us in his autobiography that a maulvi sahib taught him the bismillah and after that the Karima of Sa’adi (Prashad 1956: 27). In short, certain aspects of Muslim verbal behaviour did become part of the cultural norms of Persianized Hindus as a result of the dominance of Persian.
Persian was a symbol of upper-class breeding and cultural elitism rather than Islam as such---Arabic being that symbol par excellence. However, since Muslims were the major part of this elite, it was also seen as a symbol of Muslim identity. Mir Jamal uddin Inju, who compiled his Persian lexicon Farhang-e-Jahangiri, at Akbar’s behest, makes the point that Persian, along with Arabic, is also a language of Islam (Alam 1998: 329). However, notwithstanding anything Inju or others might have said, Persian literature was not theological. It was mostly poetic and the world view of this poetry was not Islamic as interpreted by the ulema. Its best works were in the sufi tradition where love stood for divine love; the beloved, often symbolized as a beautiful boy, stood for a immanent deity and wine was a metaphor of mystic distraction. At another level, this literature celebrated romantic love, dwelt upon boyish and female beauty, mentioned drinking as a matter of course and with a certain iconoclastic, heterodox pride and had several erotic passages. These aspects of Persian literature will be dealt with in detail later (Chapter 15).
One of the most popular textbooks of Persian was Bahar-e-Danish written by Shaikh Inayatullah Kumboh (1608-1671) sometime in 1650-51? The author’s younger brother, historian, Mohammad Saleh Kumboh, has praised this work as a model of sophisticated workmanship (Kumboh Vol. 2, 1660: 862). It must have become part of the syllabi of Persian schools because it is mentioned in a manuscript copy of Khulasatul Makatib, written in 1688 (Sufi 1941: 78). Thus it was used in all the Persian schools and educated men (but very few women), both Muslims and Hindus, were acquainted with it in Mughal India. During British rule too, according to the education reports, it was taught in nearly all the schools and its ‘style and idiom’ were ‘regarded as the best models of composition’ (Reid 1852: 54).
The story begins with the author, Inayatullah, going into a garden with his friends. As the friends are enjoying the beauty of the garden a Brahmin youth (Brahminzada) comes in. The youth is so beautiful that all of them are smitten by his good looks. The Brahminzada warns them against being seduced by mere externals and narrates a tale, within which there are other tales, to illustrate this philosophical truth. The tales themselves are not relevant here. What is relevant is that they belong to the magical, medieval world view to which the Alf Laila and other medieval tales belong. The other point is that the representation is unashamedly in the male chauvinist tradition. Women are cunning, lustful, unfaithful, unchaste and inconstant. This is especially driven home by the tale of four women who vow to deceive their husbands.
The four beautiful wives are enamoured of a handsome youth with whom they vow to fornicate in the presence of their husbands, One ties a bandage on her husband’s eyes and, while he milks a cow, enjoys herself with the youth. The second one pretends to be possessed by an evil spirit which can any be exorcised by an evil spirit which can only be exorcised if she is carried on the shoulders of her husband and other relatives. The spiritual healer, who is none other than the same youth in disguise, is inside the litter where he has sexual intercourse with her. The third one takes her husband to a tall palm tree with supposedly magical properties. She tells him that if he climbs up the tree he would see incredible sights. When he does so she calls the youth who copulates with her in open daylight. Seeing this the husband shouts at her and hurries down only to find her all alone---the youth having run away by this time. She then climbs up the tree herself and accuses her husband of being in the act of sodomizing a boy. He tells her to climb down and believes her story that the tree makes one hallucinate. The fourth pretends to be ill and the cure lies in the hands of a certain physician (the same youth) using a certain method---i.e. being with the patient behind a curtain. The youth then has access to her body while she places her head on the husband’s knee outside the curtain.
The sex scenes are quite explicit though metaphors and similes are used instead of explicit tabooed words. The burden of the stories is the moral inferiority of women. The men, who are their partners in fornication, are never vilified to the same degree nor are men in general seen as being deceitful, inconsitant, lustful, and wayward as women are. The idea that women should be controlled by men in not only illustrated form the tales but also reiterated as formula repeatedly.
Another textbook, written in the Punjab and mentioned as part of thecurricula of Persian schools in that province (Leitner 1882: 63), was Maulana Muhammad Ghanimat’s Masnawi Nairang-e-Ishq (called Masnavi Ghanimat). Ghanimat, whose dates of birth and death are uncertain (date of death is given as 1688 in some books) but who definitely flourished in the seventeenth century, was born in Kunjah, a small town near the Pakistani city Gujrat. He was a courtier of Jahangir’s governor of Lahore, Mohammad Mukarram. He probably wrote his famous Masnavi during the days of his association with the governor’s court (some give the date 1684 for this event). Soon, the Masnavi became part of the curricula of the schools and almost every educated Muslim in Mughal India knew it. The story is about Shahid, a poor boy whose beauty captivates men and women alike. Even judges, teachers, and religious people are smitten by his charms. When he enters a city he gathers such crowds of admirers around him that the ruler throws him promptly out. However, the ruler’s son, infatuated with Shahid, brings him back secretly and installs him in a magnificent house. Later on Shahid leaves him for a beautiful girl who is as smitten with his good looks as the male lovers. The story ends, as usual, on the mystic theme of all earthly quests ending in nothingness and beauty being but a symbol and evidence of God.
The Gulistan and Bustan, poetic collections of Musleh Uddin Sa’adi (d. 1292), without having read which nobody could pretend to be learned or even educated, too mention the love of boys (amrad parasti) as if it were as natural as the love of women. In chapter 5 of the Gulistan one tale begins as follows:
I saw a religious man so captivated by the beauty of a youth, that his secret became public…
and another one:
There was a certain youth of most exquisite beauty, to whom his tutor, through the frailty of human nature, became attached… (Sa’adi: 184).
Rhymed tales, or dastans, were also part of the traditional course of Persian studies. The Khulasatul Makatib (1688) mentions, among other books, Yusuf Zulaikha, Sheereen Khusrau, Laila Majnun in verse and Tuti Nama, Anwar-e-Suhaili, Lyar-e-Danish, and Bahar-e-Danish in prose. These were taught by famous teachers, sometimes but not always, attached to educational institutions. Bairam Khan, for instance, was taught a version of the Yousuf Zulaikha legend by Abdul Ghafur Lari (Badaoni 1995a: 588). Likewise, Ziauddin Nakshabi translated the Tuti Nama from Sanskrit into Persian probably in 1330. There are fifty-two stories in this version of the Tuti Nama. Later on Abul Fazl also wrote the Tuti Nama, again containing fifty-two tales. We are told that some of the more obscene tales were expurged (Shah 1971: 861). However, by the standards now in vogue in Pakistan, even the expurged versions would not pass muster. That, indeed, is true for all the tales which were part of the curricula before the British arrived. The tales are always formulaic. The hero and the heroine are beautiful beyond description. They fall in love but there are circumstances which prevent legal cohabitation. In the end they generally die. In Jamit’s (d. 1492) Yusuf Zulaikha, since Yusuf is described as a prophet of God in the Quran, the impediments in the way of the union are his own moral scruples. Zulaikha is married to his Egyptian benefactor and, no matter how much she tries to tempt him, he remains oblivious to her charms. In keeping with prevalent literary norms, the description of Zulaikha’s bodily beauty and the methods she adopts to tempt Yusuf are erotic. Yusuf Zulaikha was not only taught in the schools, it was also translated into Urdu and became a part of popular entertainment for educated Indians in the nineteenth century. However, the later version deviated from Jami’s original so that, while the central story remains the same, the descriptions, dialogues and minor events keep varying. The mystic aspect of the romantic tales in general is best explained in Annemarie Schimmel’s words:
Persian poetry if filled with pairs like the rose and the nightingale, and when the nightingale’s longing is endless, so is the moth’s wish to cast itself into the flame and immolate itself to reach union with the highest goal. Whether Farhad and Shirin, whether Mahmud and Ayaz or Majnun and Laila, Yusuf and Zulaikha---they all express the same longing for the last union that can be reached only through suffering (Schimmel 1998: 170).
In a sense then, these fables drew upon a lore common to some of the greatest pre-modern civilizations of the world. The rhymed tales---such as Yusuf-Zulaikha and Sheereen-Farhad---are mostly about romantic passion. This was generally love at first sight between a man and a woman (or a boy). The passaon was so intense that it made the lovers oblivious of social hierarchies, norms of society, societal taboos, material well-being, and even pain and death. Interpreted in a mystic way the love passion served as a metaphor for the mystic’s (sufi’s) quest for an immanent deity. Falling in love with the beloved, then, was like an epiphany---the encounter with a god’ as the Greeks called it. The epic, which generally ends in tragedy, is redeemed in the eyes of the people whereas mere love affairs are not.
Despite these deeper, mystical undertones, medieval Persian and Arabic literary texts were full of Rabelaisian humour and erotic scenes. For this reason they would embarrass the modern Pakistani establishment which is highly puritanical. Nor, for that matter, would they be approved of by the liberal Pakistanis who are not puritanical. They (the liberals) would disapprove of them because they are anti-feminist; indeed misogynist. As already mentioned, women were regarded as lustful, foolish, cunning, faithless, deceitful, and unintelligent. They were always to be controlled through men and through the fear of immediate as well as divine punishment.
This medieval world view, born as it was in an unabashedly male-dominating culture, was reinforced by a constant reading of the Persian classics. The readers of these classics also assumed, because they belonged to a powerful elite or were associated with it, that they were culturally and intellectually superior to the speakers of the vernacular languages of India. Although, as mentioned earlier, the Muslim elite knew Hindavi, the ancestor of Urdu, by the time of the Mughal king Shahjahan, it was Persian which remained the language of prestige. Indeed, according to Shahjahan’s biographer Kumboh, the king generally spoke fluent and unembellished Persian, purged of high-flown rhetorical devices, though he could also speak ‘Hindi’ at times (Kumboh Vol. 1, 1660: 218). The decisive challenge to the power of Persian came from English, the language of the new conquerors of India.
Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, in an otherwise highly informative article on the sociology of Persian and Urdu in the nineteenth century, dismisses the theory that Persian declined ‘after the site of power shifted from Delhi to Calcutta’. His argument deserves to be quoted at length:
First and foremost, it was the Indians themselves, and not the British, who knocked down Indian Persian and Urdu from the pedestal of cultural value, and they did not put English, but Iranian Persian, in the space vacated by Indian Persian and Urdu. Iranians had no political power in India in the eighteenth century. They may have enjoyed cultural prestige in small areas, but they had no kind of power. Second, Persian, and Urdu continued to be languages of high culture in India for a long time, until late in the nineteenth century (Faruqi 1998: 16).
Unfortunately, there is much that is wrong with these arguments. Leaving aside the case of Urdu for the moment, the argument boils down to the facts that (a) Indians lost confidence in their own norms of Persian usage sometime in the eighteenth century and that (b) Persian retained cultural prestige for many years after it ceased to be used in the domains of power.
According to argument (a), the loss of confidence in Indian Persian is said to have begun at the end of the eighteenth century and ‘the wind became a storm by 1827-28’ with Ghalib refusing to accept the authority of any Indian including that of the poet (Abdul Qadir) Bedil (1644-1720) whose Persian poetry he once admired (Faruqi 1998: 24). However, the great exemplars from Iran were highly valued even earlier. After all Mahmood Shah I, the Bahmuny ruler of Deccan (r. 1378-1397) is said to have invited the poet Hafiz from Shiraz to Deccan because he valued his poetry (Ferishta c. 1612. Vol. 2: 347-9), though Mullah Shaeda, who flourished in Shahjahan’s time, is said to have been critical of the Persian while he admired the Indian writers of Persian (Kumboh Vol. 3, 1660: 827). The crucial point is that the eighteenth century which is said to be the age of loss of confidence is also the age of loss of political power. The Mughal empire was obviously falling apart as Ghulam Hussain Khan’s Seir Mutaqherin [more correctly spelled as Siyyar-e-Muta’ akhereen] (Khan 1789) so clearly and poignantly demonstrates. The Mughal emperors were at the mercy of bands of marauding Marhattas and Rohillas even earlier than Lord Lake’s conquest of Delhi in 1803. Is it not possible, then, that the Indian Muslim elite lost confidence in endonormativism in Persian usage because of its loss of power? Elites which have no political power to fall back upon insist more emphatically on other markers of elitist status: sartorial, culinary, linguistic, behavioral, cultural, and so on. Language was probably such a marker and it had to be purged of Indian associations because the elite owed its distinguished status initially to conquest, hence to foreignness. This also explains why Urdu was Persianized and deliberately purged of Hindvi words at about the same time as Amrit Rai has described (Rai 1984: Chapter 5; also see Alam 1998: 347). Thus, if Iranian Persian was privileged at the expense of the Indian variety, it was probably because of self-contempt---one of the signs of political failure. An obvious parallel which comes to the mind is the fact that, even after years of using English, there are non-native varieties of the language and that Pakistani English is one of them (Rahman 1990). However, most people in Pakistan still consider British English the only acceptable variety of English. Indeed, the term Pakistani English is still an ego-shattering invective and not a neutral description of a variety of English. What is true for modern Pakistanis, who have passed through colonial rule, could also be true for the elite of India in the eighteenth century which had just started experiencing colonial rule.
It is, of course, true that Persian retained cultural prestige even after 1837 when, after the Anglicist victory, it ceased to be the language of the courts, but cultural patterns of not change overnight. However, the nineteenth century is the time when they did change, slowly but surely. Let us, therefore, look at the period of the decline of Persian more closely.
First, although Persian was replaced by the vernacular languages in the courts and by English at the highest level of government, the large number of people literate in Persian did not vanish immediately. Indeed, according to Lelyveld, the ‘old reservoir of people literate in Persian and able to participate in sharif culture continued to preside over most of the courts and government offices, even of the British Raj’ (Lelyveld 1978: 33). Persian appeared to dominate the polite mind if not the official institutions created by the British. Even many British officials regarded it as the supreme language of politeness and culture. Thus Ghalib tells his friend in a letter of 1858 that John Jacob, who died in his youth, discouraged people from writing in Urdu while encouraging them to write in Persian (Ghalib 1858). Ghalib himself wrote to the British Chief Secretary in Persian in 1863 (Ghalib 1863) though he wrote to his Indian friends (except Tipu Sultan’s maternal grandson) in Urdu since long (Ghalib 1866). People of Ghalib’s generation---and, indeed, till the end of the nineteenth century---were very proud of their knowledge of Persian. Ghalib’s letters and poetry provide ample evidence of his expertise in Persian. He boasted:
Farsi ki mizan yani turazu mere hath men hai
The criterion [or measuring scale] of Persian is in my hands (Ghalib 1862).
As we have seen earlier, Ghalib was a recognized authority on Persian believing in preserving its ‘purity’ by not Indianizing it. In his view, which he expressed in his book Qata-e-Burhan, all Indian lexicologists had Indianized Persian and none, therefore, could be approved of (Letters to Mirza Rahim Beg in Mehr 1982: 551-61). In 1825 ‘at the request of friends, he collected the general principles of Persian letter-writing in a popular booklet called Panj ahang’ (Varma 1989: 125). In 1842 he was offered the professorship of Persian at the Delhi College which he did not accept because Thompson, secretary to the government of India, did not receive him at the gate (ibid.: 127). But, however much Ghalib may have looked down upon Urdu, the excellence of his Urdu letters and his poetry are ample proof, if any is needed, that it was in Urdu that he was at his best. Persian was only part of the intellectual and social snobbery of the day. It belonged to the past, the past which was glorious in the eyes of those members of the Muslim elite who lived under British rule, and its psychological significance as a symbol of power, success, refinement, glory, splendour---all that was positive---was tremendous. Thus, as Varma says, Ghalib’s ‘public non-acceptance’ of Urdu ‘was, probably, more a peg to hang his unrationalized alienation from a historical period of which this language had become a singularly striking symbol’ (Varma: 36).
As mentioned earlier Persian was replaced by the vernacular languages of India in official domains between 1835-37 as part of the change from Orientalist to Anglicist policies of governance. The order itself was rather cautious and gave subordinate authorities much discretion to ensure that there should be no political agitation or unrest (the order is reproduced in Adam 1838: 305-306). However, the change was nothing short of revolutionary in import. As this change has been described in detail before, it need not detain us here (Rahman 1996: 36-7). What needs to be noted is that some British officers did express concern about the revolutionary potential of the language. Adam reported that the Muslims learned Persian because ‘It is the language of the former conquerors and rulers of Hindustan from whom they have directly or indirectly sprung, and the memory both of a proud ancestry and of a past dominion---the loyalty which attaches itself rather to religion and to race than to country---attract them to its cultivation’ (Adam 1836: 108). C. A. Bayly describes how Persian newspapers were widely disseminated among the educated elite. The fear, as expressed by R. Cavendish, Resident at Gawalior in 1833, was that if a resolute man sat on the throne in Delhi he could agitate for his rights through these newsletters (Bayly 1996: 287). And not only Cavendish but probably other officials also feared, as Bayly puts it, that ‘Persian was the language of dissidence and its suppression was therefore desirable on political grounds’ (1996: 286).
Apart from this Persian was also a mark of identity; a compensatory symbol. Such compensatory symbols appear irrational to unsympathetic aliens. Thus some British officers, especially the ardent Anglicists, were impatient of it. They wondered why Persian was allowed to continue at all. Judge Fred J. Halliday wrote in a report on the Calcutta Madrassah on 16 March 1852:
What is it to us whether the rising generation of Mussalmans know Persian or not? Or why should we trouble ourselves about a language which we have sedulously excluded from our courts and offices, and which if we let it alone, will soon in India die a natural death (Presidency 1854: xxvi).
Others were ambitious about the complete ascendancy of English. Captain A. R. Fuller wrote in a report of 1863-64 about the Punjab:
If sufficient encouragement be afforded, English will soon take the place that formerly belonged to Persian. Already natives who have received a good English education usually correspond in that language, in preference to the vernacular. It is my belief that English will become in time, what Persian never has been, the commercial language of the country… (Edn. P 1864b: 21).
This is reminiscent of the gloating of an earlier Anglicist, Charles Trevelyan, who wrote to Lord William Bentinck, the Governor-General who brought about the demise of Persian, as follows:
…the abolition of the exclusive privileges which the Persian language has in the courts and affairs of court will from the crowning stroke, which will shake Hinduism and Mohammadanism to their center and firmly establish our language, our learning and ultimately our religion in India (in Philips 1977: 1239).
But the government was not willing to go quite so far. The zealous Fuller was reprimanded. The Lieutenant-Governor, refuting the idea that Persian could be eliminated, made it clear that it would remain necessary for examinations (Thornton 1865: 7).
This did not deter individual officers from attacking Persian. In 1871-72 the Education Report of the NEFP (then a part of the Punjab) said:
Persian is a language nowhere spoken in the Punjab, except perhaps in the city of Peshawar itself. It is the vernacular of no class of the people. Its use is confined to men of rank or Munshis of Government offices; and by devoting so much attention in its schools to its study the Government has embarked on a policy of questionable wisdom (Edn. P 1873: 61).
One reason why the British did not abolish Persian at once, apart from the fact that some of them were genuinely fond of it and had perfect command over it, was that it was firmly entrenched in the educational system of the people. Henry Stewart Reid, a British official in what is now UP in the middle of the nineteenth century, describes how a Muslim boy began his education in that part of India. The boy was supposed to be four years, four months and four days old when he began but was usually seven. He was first taught the Persian alphabet for two months and then the Khaliqbari or the Karima of Sheikh Sa’adi. In the villages they taught the former while in the cities the latter was more popular (Reid 1852: 55-7). After this the Gulistan and Bustan were read. Then, if the boy studied any further, came other works: Yusuf Zulaikha, Bahar-e-Danish, Sikandar Namah, and Several Inshas. The Inshas were meant to provide models of composition and letter-writing while all the other works were well-known books of Persian tales. The manuscript copy of Khulasatul Makatib (1688) mentioned earlier provides us with a list of texts used in India at that time (Sufi 1941: 77-8, reproduced in Annexure 4-A). These texts were also taught in Bengal and Behar (Adam 1836: 199-215) as well as in the Punjab (Leitner 1882: 62-4).
In the early part of the nineteenth century schools functioned in Persian, not Urdu, in north India. Such schools are also mentioned in ‘Fisher’s Memoir’, one of the earliest documents of British rule in India. William Adam, in his reports on education in the Presidency of Bengal also gives detailed descriptions of Persian schools (Adam 1835, 1836, and 1838). In the Punjab, which the British conquered in 1849, there were 458 Persian schools in the early 1880s. The number of students, however, was not high being only 4015 and W. R. M. Holroyd, the Director of Public Instruction, reported that only 95 contained more than twelve students while 247 had as few as only six or less students. Some of these schools were established by rich men or by village notables such as lambardars. The boys often learnt Persian texts by heart or translated them into Urdu (Edn. P 1883: para 26, p. 10). In Bengal and Behar the number of Bengali schools was much larger than the Persian ones, but the study of Persian was held in great esteem especially among the Muslims (Adam 1836: 199-215).
Apart form Persian schools, Persian was also part of the curricula at all levels in the madrassas. The British eventually introduced educational policies which led to the marginalization of Islamic learning. However as we have noticed before, ironically enough, the first major educational undertaking of the British was the establishment of the Calcutta Madrassah in 1781. Warren Hastings paid Rs 57,745 for the establishment of this institution which he later charged to the company. Later, according to H. T. Prinsep, a civil servant whose claim to fame will be discussed later, the madrassa received a grant of land to yield Rs 29, 142 in 1819 which was guaranteed by the government at Rs 30,000 (Prinsep 1904). According to ‘Fisher’s Memoir’ the ‘original intention of the founder appears to have been, to promote the study of Arabic and Persian languages’ and Islamic law (Fisher 1826: 2). A certain philanthropist, Mr Fraser, also opened a school in Delhi to teach Persian to eighty Indian boys in 1814. He wanted to develop this into a larger institution where ‘Persian and Hindoo languages’ could be taught (ibid.: 25). The British-established Agra and Delhi colleges taught modern knowledge but here too the languages taught were classical---Persian, Arabic and, at Agra, Sanskrit, English too was taught but the emphasis was on Persian. However, according to a letter of the Court of Directors to Bengal dated 5 September 1927, at Agra the ‘Hindoo’ language was also supposed to be taught (ibib.: 155). What exactly is meant by ‘Hindoo’---Hindustani? Urdu? Hindi? any other?---is not clear but it is clear that a vernacular language was admitted to a college at this early date. Most students, of course, took Persian. As it was needed in the courts of law and general administration, the British were only acting in the interests of the Raj by teaching Persian. Thus, in keeping with the Orientalist policy of upholding traditional institutions and conciliating the Indian elites, the establishment of institutions which taught Persian was part of political policy.
Persian occupied a place of honour in the traditional system of schooling as we have already seen. The higher institutions of learning for Muslims, the madrassas, taught the Dars-e-Nizami as in Mughal days. However, the Persian content of the curricula was reduced till it remained only nominal. Arabic, as we have seen, was the main language of the madrassas because their object was to produce the ulema.
During British days the medium of instruction in the madrassas changed from Persian to Urdu though some of the books of Arabic, as we have seen, had, and still have, explanations and translations in Persian. The traditional texts in Persian (for example at Deoband) were: Amad Nama, Karima, Nam-e-Haq, Hamd-eBari, Gulistan, Bustan, Rah-e-Najat, Anwar-e-Suhaili, Yusuf Zulaikha, Sikandar Namah, Kikayat-eLatif, Mufid Nama, and some Inshas and letters. Sufi 1941: 133-4) and so on. While the madrassas eschewed the traditional amorous texts as far as they could, they were part of curricula elsewhere. Aart from the madrassas, the government examined candidates in the Maulvi, Munshi, and Pandit examinations. The Maulvis were examined in Arabic, the Pandits in Sanskrit, and the Munshis in Persian. There were three stages of the examination at the end of which the candidate was required ‘to show an accurate knowledge of Persian Grammar and Prosody, to carry on a conversation with fluency and elegance in the Persian language, and to read and translate passages’ from a number of books including classics like Shah Nama and Ain-e-Akbari (Proceedings 1973: 141).
Apart from formal schooling, boys (hardly any girls) learned Persian informally from people literate init. Literacy in it was greatly valued both for instrumental reasons (employment) and extra-rational ones (prestige). Thus, according to Muzaffar Alam ‘even ordinary literate Muslims like soldiers, for instance, were expected now [by the late 17th century] to read simple Persian’ (Alam 1998: 329). It was perhaps for such people that Persian chapbooks were written. These were written in simple Persian and were of a religious nature. One such chapbook, the Hujjat-ul-Hind, is in the British Museum and its purpose is to make rural, or less educated, Muslims knowledgeable about the rudiments of their faith and more conscious of their Muslim identity. Such chapbooks were in circulation during Shahjahan’s time (r. 1628-1658), which is also a period when chapbooks in indigenous languages came to be written (Alam: 330).
Notable among those who learned Persian informally was Guru Nanak (1469-1539), the founder of the Sikh religion in the Punjab. This is what the Siyyar-e-Muta’akhereen says about the way he was educated:
There was then in those parts a fakir or religious of note, called Seid-hassen, a man of eloquence as well as wealth, who having no children of his own, and being smitten with the beauty of young Nanec, upon whom he cast his eyes, conceived an affection for him, and charged himself with his education (Khan Vol. 1, 1789: 83).
Guru Nanak not only learned Persian but learnt it so well that, according to the same authority, he translated passages from it to his native Punjabi. Most people, however, merely got basic literacy though quite a few, aspiring to become poets, sent their Persian verses to be corrected to an established poet who became their teacher (ustad). Thus Gahalib corrected the Persian poetry of Munshi Hargopal Tufta, Haqir, and other people (Russell and Islam 1969: 95-7).
Being aware of the importance of Persian for trade and political negotiations in India, there was a proposal for establishing a professorship of Persian at the University of Oxford. This printed pamphlet, probably written by Warren Hastings (1732-1818) and Henry Vansittart (1732-70) outlines the necessity of promoting the knowledge of Persian among young gentlemen who might be expected to administer India. Among the arguments for introducing Persian ‘into our Seminaries of Learning’ the first is that Persian will ‘promote the interests which this country has lately acquired in the political, as well as the commercial affairs of Indostan’. The second is relativist---that it would give the British insights into a great civilization. The clinching argument is that it will enable the British ‘to discharge the difficult offices of government’ which, given the growing power of the company, is absolutely vital (Persian 18C). However, Persian did not become a subject of study at Oxford University. It was, of course, taught at the Haileybury College established in 1806 at Hertford. This college closed down in 1858 but while it functioned, it taught generations of future civil servants. A report of 26 October 1804 outlining the necessity of teaching Persian says that the French ‘carry on the most important negotiations at Asiatic courts without the intervention of an Interpreter’ whilst the English cannot. It then goes on to say that ‘political reasons might be assigned why there ought to be Seminaries at home for promoting the study of the most general and distinguished of the languages spoken in our Eastern Territories’ (Haileybury 1804: 18). Accordingly, Persian was taught at the college along with ‘Oordoo or Hindostanee, Teloogo’ and ‘Arabic, Bengalee, Hindu and Mahratta’ at the request of the student. These arrangements continued at least upto October 1852 as mentioned in a report of that date (E. Thornton 1852). The names of some Indians---Ghulam Haider, Hasan ali, and Mirza Khalid---exist in the records of October 1812 (Haileybury 1804). For those who were not at Haileybury, there were private teaching institutions such as the London Oriental Institute whose annual reports show that both Persian and Hindustani were taught. The 1925 report mentions such classics as Gulistan, Bahar-e-Danish, Anwar-e-Suhaili, Tuti Nama, and the diwan of Hafiz. Sandfort Arnot and Duncan Forbes, who were associated with this institution, also wrote memorials to the effect that oriental languages were neglected and the Persian and Hindustani should be part of the examination of non-Haileybury writers too (Haileybury 1829-1833). Thus, even before young Englishmen came to India, they could pick up some Persian in England.
Soon after the East India Company assumed the charge of collecting the revenue of Bengal in 1765, the British had to use Persian more often and more frequently than before. Thus, for reasons which Bernard Cohn (1985) as well as Edward Said describe in their work, British officers began to take great interest in Persian. Some of them, of course, became fond of it for its own sake and retained a lifelong interest in it. Among the Indians who traveled to England at this early period, I’tisam al-Din and Abu Talib both met people who were greatly accomplished in Persian. I’tisam al-Din visited England between 1767 and 1769 while Abu Talib went there in 1799. I’tisam al-Din was asked to teach Persian to students and helped William Jones with his Persian studies while reading the ‘historical literature available in Persian’ in Britain (G. Khan 1998: 76). Abu Talib, however, was critical of Jones’ grammar and says that ‘having been written when he was a young man, and previous to his having acquired any experience in Hindoostan, [it] is, in many places, very defective’ (Talib Vol. 2, 1810: 42). Abu Talib taught Persian to students (ibid., Vol. 1: 200) and says that people were ‘so desirous of learning the oriental languages, that they attended self-taught masters, ignorant of every principle of Science, and paid them half-a-guinea a lesson’ (ibid., Vol. 1: 164, emphasis in the original). He tried to set up an institution to teach Persian but appears to have met with governmental indifference in the beginning. Eventually, however, he reports that the ministers ‘made me an offer of 6000 rupees ( 750) annually, with liberty to reside either in Oxford or London, to superintend it, but as I had then resolved to return to India, and was disgusted with their former apathy on the subject, I politely excused myself’ (ibid., Vol. 1: 164). However, Abu Talib reported that some British scholar-administrators, such as John Wombwell and William Chambers, spoke Persian fluently (ibid., Vol. 1: 185-6).
Persian was, of course, a major subject at fort William College. The professorship of Persian was one of the original nine professorships established in that institution. The Persian class was large, as was that of Hindustani, and the curricula of 1801 to 1805 include the well-known classics: Tuti Nama, Lyar-e-Danish, Bahar-e-Danish, Qissa Hatim Tai, and the Gulistan (Fort William Vol. 1). We learn from the autobiographical accounts of a number of British officers, not only early ones like H. T. Prinsep (1792-1878), but also later ones such as John Beames who came to India in 1857-58 how important it was for them to learn Persian whether at fort William, Haileybury or privately. In 1809 when Prinsep came to India, he was lodged in the Writers’ Building where he learned Persian standing first in it, ‘second in Hindoostanee and fourth in Bengalee’ (Prinsep 1904: 59). When Beames came to Calcutta in 1858, the young officers were taught by Munshis and examined by an English officer. The Munshis with a good reputation were much sought after and were paid an extra sum (Rs 30 per student was paid officially) by the officers themselves (Beames 1961: 80-81). The officers knew that Persian would have to be learned as it was necessary for carrying on the business of the empire in India (Cohn 1985: 284-7). As we have seen earlier, even after 1837, when it was no longer the official language of rule, it was considered politically important. A report of 1909 attributes its importance to the ‘political position’ of Iran and because educated Muslims in Afghanistan and India know it (Treasury 1909: 117). We have seen how the use of Persian in the domains of power was part of what is called the Orientalist language policy---the continuation of established practices so as to give the Indians as little ground for revolt as possible (Rahman 1996: 98-9). But, by constant use and the perusal of the Persian classics, some British officer-scholars themselves internalized the Indian attitude towards languages. As Persian was highest on a scale on which the village dialects were lowest, the British too came to express admiration for the ‘elegance’ of Persian and contempt for the ‘uncouth rudeness’ of the local languages.
Matters of policy aside, many of these early Orientalists genuinely appreciated Persian poetry and Mughal culture in general. There were, therefore, a handful of Europeans who could not only speak and write Persian as business required but even enjoyed and wrote poetry, the distinguishing mark of a cultivated gentlemen, in it. These Persian poets were not only English but also French, Armenian, Portuguese, and of European and Eurasian extraction. Some of them were: Edward Henry Palmer (1840-87), John Thomas (served with Begum Sumru about 1782); Lt.-Colonel Shadwell Plough (1858-1903); Lt.-Colonel James Skinner (1778-1841). The names of others and specimens of their verse have been preserved in Ram Babu Saksena’s monumental work on European and Indo-European Poets of Urdu and Persian (1943). Some of these early Europeans not only wrote poetry in the literary languages of India but also dressed and lived like Indian aristocrats. They seem to have genuine affection for things Indian which was missing among the Englishmen trained in the ‘Anglicist’ ideology who replaced those brought up in the ‘Orientalist’ fashion upto the middle of the nineteenth century.
With such facts in mind it would be reductionism to conclude, on the basis of an erroneous but widespread misunderstanding of Edward Said’s theory, that all Orientalists were calculating imperialists with no real liking for the Oriental classics. Eventually, of course, Persian was dethroned but the Orientalists did not acquiesce into this without regret (Rahman 1996: 36-7).
Persian was replace for several reasons: the idea of providing justice to people in their vernacular languages rather than a foreign language; appealing to the masses rather than only to the elite and, though this is expressed only in letters by a few officials, to symbolize the end of Muslim ascendancy (Rahman 1996: 36). In 1832 the Presidencies of Bombay and Madras began the experiment and in 1837 Bengal followed suit (see Act XXIX of 1837). In the areas now in Pakistan, except in Sindh, the vernaculars were not used either. In Sindh, B. H. ellis, a famous British administrator, said:
The Persian has so long been cultivated in Sind, for its literature, as well as on account of its being the language of official records and accounts, that any present attempt to establish schools where the Vernacular only is taught would probably fail; while the combination of the two is likely to lead to the study of Sindee, now not learnt at all, but which will become popular by degrees, as the language is more and more used in the transaction of official business (Ellis 1856: para 89, p. 26).
Ellis did, however, recommend the charging of a fee fro teaching Persian while keeping the teaching of Sindhi free. This is how Sindhi replaced Persian in the schools in Sindh. In most of the other areas now in north India and Pakistan it was Urdu which was recognized as the vernacular language by the British. While Persian lost to English in the higher domains of power inhabited initially only by Englishmen, there was a tussle between Urdu and Persian in the lower domains, both private and public, which the Indian gentlemen (ashraf) occupied.
The British introduced Urdu in the Persian schools by the middle of the nineteenth century in north India. But this, they reported, made the schools unpopular. Individual British officers had their own views abot introducing Urdu into them. A number of officials noted at various occasions in the nineteenth century that ‘the chief reason why our Vernacular schools are so unpopular is, because so little Persian is taught in our lower classes’ (Hutton 1866: para 3). Sometimes, they tried to increase the content of Persian; even of teaching Persian literature produced in Iran (Fuller 1866), while at others they toyed with the idea of appointing teachers knowing only Arabic and Persian, rather than the certified teachers of the British educational system (Thornton 1866), in schools. In general, however, the British continued to emphasize Urdu and by the twentieth century the public had come to accept it as a substitute for Persian. While Urdu and Hindi were being introduced in the schools, Persian still dominated the courses fo the higher institutions of education. Indeed, the distribution of language learning corresponded to the power-and-class structure. Villagers, who were mostly Hindus in UP, went more to Hindi schools than their urban counterparts who went to Urdu ones. The elite studied Persian or, if it was a modernizing elite, English (King 1994: 98-101).
Persian was necessary not only because of its prestige but because the language of the courts, wherever it was Urdu, was actually Persianized Urdu. Thus, as a report of 1873-74 put it: a ‘large vocabulary of Persian and Arabic words and a free hand’ was always ‘sufficient to form the needful insha’ (compositional style). However, the report went on to say, the Government schools ‘teach the vernaculars, with a little top-dressing of Persian…’ (Edn. NWP 1874: 23) their pupils were at a disadvantage in the business of life than the products of the old Persian schools. Whereas in 1863 Sir Syed supported the learning of English in a lecture delivered in Persian (Khan 1863), in 1888 when he was awarded the KCSI, the British officer presiding over the ceremony made his speech in Urdu (Hali 1901: 321). Linguistic attitudes had changed so fast that the language of elitist discourse was no longer Persian. Likewise, the British patronized Urdu so much that they used it sometimes on ceremonial occasions where Persian would have been used earlier and English took its place later. Even so, when in 1942 Maulana Nadvi, having been released from prison, came to the Darul Uloom Deoband, probably the most famous Islamic seminary in India, the head of the institution read out panegyrics which he ‘himself had composed in Persian’ (Rizvi 1980: 241).
Upto VI class, even upto 1877, Persian was still taught and Arabic (or Sanskrit for Hindus) began in class VII (Senate 1877). However, by now Persian was in decline. Its rival was not Urdu as yet but English---the language of the most lucrative and powerful jobs (positive responses towards English, demand for it, and so on will be referred to elsewhere). In the context of Persian the evidence of some Hindu members of the Punjab University Senate is revealing. These members claimed that in the Punjab the complaint is that government throws away its money on this language [Persian], which seems only to raise a class of pauper munshis (of whom there is no lack at present), instead of usefully employing it on the diffusion of English (Nobin et al. 1873: 89). As these members were Hindus it might be imagined that they were anti-Persian because the language was symbolic of Muslim cultural dominance. But the Muslims too expressed similar opinions.
A caricature of the pauper munshi (or maulvi) fawning at the feet of the ‘kiranee’ (English copyist) is drawn by Rahim Khan, a member of the Punjab University’s senate, in his memorandum of 17 April 1872. The English copyist makes between fifty to sixty rupees a month while a munshi gets five to six (Khan 1872: 283-4). Even the Anjuman-e-Punjab---well-known for its championing of Persian---complained that too much time was spent on it and that this time should be utilized for learning English. Holroyd, the Director of Public Instruction who had always championed the cause of the Oriental languages, was stunned by the unexpectedness of this response. He, therefore, criticized the petition though he reluctantly conceded that it should be given attention since the ‘natives’ were to be conciliated. However, Holroyd really suspected that the petition was inspired by rich people who could afford to teach their sons Persian at home---that somebody should not desire to teach Persian to boys at all was not credible for him (Holroyd 1871: 117-18). Ironically, when in 1883 the National Muhammadan Association of Calcutta did point out that Muslims had suffered as a consequence of the abolition of Persian, they did not demand Urdu in its place. They asked ‘that measures should be adopted and means afforded to facilitate the study of English by the Muhammadans’ (Memorial 1883: 145). Similarly, Mohammad Latif, Secretary of an Arabic journal on Muslim education, emphasized that higher education should be in English though he began by claiming that it was in Persian and Arabic that the Muslims had reached the highest point in their education (Latif 1883). The Muslims, it may be concluded, were learning to say good bye to Persian when the nineteenth century was drawing to its close.
But British officials were still being encouraged to learn Persian. The reward for passing an examination was Rs. 1200 in 1872 while it was only Rs 750 for Urdu (Home 1872: 576). Since Urdu was necessary for daily life in British India---even the servants were ordered about in a basilectal form of it---a lower pecuniary reward for it is understandable. But to give 1200 rupees for a language dying out in Indian society implies that it had intrinsic worth and would be useful---a legacy of the past which took time to discard.
By the beginning of the twentieth century Persian was no longer in demand as a language of instruction. The British now felt it could be eliminated from the syllabi. In Bengal, the Governor-General made out a case for teaching Bengali, Urdu, Arabic, and English as follows:
The Governor in Council believes that [if] Urdu is properly taught, [it] will contribute as much to the culture of Muhammadan [s] at the present day---as Persian did some 50 years ago. Under the circumstances, His Excellency in council has decided, not without regret, to omit Persian from the school course (Report Madrasah 1941).
In 1914 a report on the Punjab also said that, although Persian was a part of studies ten years earlier even in the rural schools, it is ‘now entirely omitted except where there is a definite local demand for it’ (Edn. P 1914: 12).
After this, Persian declined steadily. Its place was taken by English and Urdu. in the elitist domains of power where it had held sway from the mountain fieldoms of the Karakoram and the Himalayas now in Pakistan to the feudal estates of Bengal, it was replaced by English. Thus, all the successors of the British---the ruling elites of Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan---use English and it is taught in elitist institutions all over South Asia. The other successor of Persian, at least for theMuslim intelligentsia of north India, was Urdu. Urdu replaced Persian as the identity symbol of the Muslim intelligentsia in British India. However, this change was gradual and the idea that Persian was a symbol of Muslim culture, if not of past Muslim power, lingered on. In Sindh, for instance, where the influence of English was less, the desire for studying Persian remained strong. In 1907, during the All India Mohammadan Educational Conference, there was a complaint that Persian had been done away from the school courses years ago (Report Conference 1907: 11). Commenting on this the Commissioner of Sindh A. D. Younghusband, wrote to the Governor of Bombay that ‘some cautious experiments might now be made in the direction of its re-introduction’ (Letter dated 27 July 1908, SA). Later a report of 1916 specifically recommended that ‘the study of Persian be encouraged by the award of allowances to masters in selected schools and that Persian be recognized as an alternative to Native Accounts in the Vernacular Final Examination’ (Report 1916: 4, item 20). Such attitudes lingered on and even in 1929 the British reported that Muslims attached great importance to it (ISC 1929: 193) and there was demand for teaching it in Sindh. Indeed, in this province, in 1937, out of 1290 students 1034 took it for their matriculation examination whereas only fifty-nine took Arabic and 132 Sanskrit (Edn. S 1938a: 87). Even at Aitchison College, an elitist English-medium public school for the aristocracy, where no Persian is taught nowadays, it was taught in British days. Indeed, Aitchison sent Anwar Sikandar Khan, their senior Urdu and Persian Master, to Iran from where he brought a knowledge of modern Persian and teaching material which, says the report, ‘are possessed by no other school in India’ (Aitchison 1937: 5). By this time, it is possible, however, that Persian was studied not only for its symbolic value but also because Persian courses were easy, mostly consisting of memorizing a few lessons or translating passages, and students got high marks in them. Thus, the popularity of Persian---such as it was---was no longer based on its intrinsic merit or symbolic cultural value but because it was a ‘soft’ option.
Indeed, whatever the lingering sentiment for it, Persian had become a marginalized subject by the end of British rule. It was no longer part of elitist schooling which was now in English but was taught either in the madrassas or in vernacular-medium schools. Even there, it was either an easy subject or an optional one. In short, by the time Pakistan came into existence the teaching of Persian had become a secondary matter.
The teaching of Persian falls into three major categories in Pakistan. first, there are the madrassas which teach it as part of their conservative educational philosophy. Then, there are non-elitist state schools, colleges, and universities where it is an optional subject---and a soft option at that. And, lastly, there are institutions, such as the National University of Modern Languages and the Khana-e-Farhang, where modern, spoken Persian is taught according to modern techniques so as to enable students to become interpreters in functional modern-day Iranian and Afghan Persian. Let us, therefore, take the madrassas first.
Persian lingers on in the madrassas mainly because they value tradition which, to them, appears to be associated with the pre-colonial glory of Muslim rule. It is no longer the language of learning and the secular system of education has discarded it but the madrassas still teach it, though at a much reduced level, because they remain resistant to certain aspects of modernity and, therefore, value continuity. Persian literature may have been a source of embarrassment for some of the more puritanical ulema after the reformist zeal of Shah Waliullah and his disciples in India. However, during the heyday of Persian, the madrassas also taught Persian literature. In 1551 Abdul Haqq of Dehli studied the Bustan and Gulistan of Sa’adi as well as the Diwan of Hafiz before learning the Arabic texts from his father Sheikh Saif Uddin (Sufi 1941: 56-7; also see Nadwi 1936: 118-23) for the Persian curricula of the madrassa of India).
The Persian schools, of course, taught much more Persian literature. But even if the madrassas did not teach them, the Gulistan and Bustan did have chapters on love, and in this chapter there were references to love, even to love of boys. Poetry was, indeed, suspected by the ulema and there is a religious decree of a Deoband alim who blames poets for having ‘fanned the flames’ of unnatural lust (Zafeeruddin 1965: 37). Drinking wine, asking for kisses, desiring the beloved---however much they might be metaphors for the mystic desire for union with an immanent deity---could not but focus the minds of the students on the aesthetic and erotic aspects of life. Since Persian literature was understood till recently it is possible that the ulema did not think it safe to teach those texts which were about worldly pleasures. In most madrassas visited by the author, the chapters on love in the Gulistan and not taught nowadays.
The books which the ulema did approve of, and which remain necessary texts even now, were Attar’s Pand Nama, Nam-e-Haq and Sa’adi’s Karima. These books are didactic and they are in Persian rhymed couplets. Although they are ‘safe’ from the ulema’s point of view, being about morality, this morality is strictly medieval and patriarchal. Both Pand Nama and Karima approve of hospitality and condemn miserliness. In both silence is a virtue and spontaneous talkativeness is not. In both women are inferior, untrustworthy and alluring as, indeed, are beardless boys. Both belong to a male would confident in its superiority. Women are faithless and the wise must suspect them. As Pand Nama has it.
Awal az zan aashtan chashm-e-wafa
At first women appear to be faithful. Understand that giving one’s heart to women is a mistake; a great mistake.
and Karima, Gulistan and Bustan, the basic texts which are taught in madrassas, reinforce this attitude.
Nama-e-Haq, however, is a guidebook on Islamic rules of cleanliness and worship such as are found in all the languages of South Asian Muslims as given in detail elsewhere in this book. It is, therefore, about cleanliness, ablutions, prayers, and other rituals. In a way all these books complement one another. The reality of the world view in the other books is supported by the rituals which are part of the faith. That is probably why the ulema feel that any idea challenging their patriarchal world view is a danger to the faith itself.
The other books too are taught through rote learning. In the end, the products of madrassas can neither write nor speak modern Persian. In some Shia madrassas too, although the textbooks of Persian are those prescribed for classes VI and VII in government schools, there is no special emphasis on teaching the language as such. Indeed, in some the traditional Persian texts are not prescribed as they are in some Sunni madrassas (see Annexure 4-B for details of the major sects and sub-sects). However, since a number of books on other subjects, mostly printed on excellent paper in Iran, are part of the curricula and the teachers claim that students can read and understand them, it is possible that Shia clergymen are better than their Sunni counterparts in Persian (Shakeri Int. 1999). For the most part one may conclude that the teaching of Persian is meant to keep a symbolic link of continuity with tradition. That is why only the traditional texts, the ones which were used in medieval India, are used in most madrassas while modern Persian literature is ignored. Persian, like all the other languages, is meant to reinforce the ulemas’ world view not to disrupt it.
English-medium schools do not teach Persian at all. Vernacular-medium schools offer it as an optional subject. It is taught from class VI till class X and the textbooks prescribed by the Textbook Boards are fairly easy. The emphasis is on translation into Urdu and rote learning. An analysis of the ideological contents---those relating to Islam and Islamic personalities; nationalism and the military---of the textbooks gave the following results:
|
Table 12 (1 of
Chapter 4) |
||
Level |
Percentage of
Ideological Lessons |
|
Balochistan% |
NWFP and Punjab% |
|
|
Class VI |
16 |
14 |
|
Class VII |
50 |
47 |
|
Class VIII |
46 |
35 |
|
Class IX |
28 |
28 |
|
Class X |
28 |
28 |
|
Source: Field research in 1998. |
||
Like schools, Persian is also an optional subject at the BA level and in the examination of the central superior services of Pakistan. At all levels, students say that they take Persian because it is an easy option and one in which they expect to get high marks. Most students who obtained high marks cannot, however, speak Persian.
In the traditional universities Persian literature is taught at the MA and higher levels. In an interview Dr Sajid Ullah Tafhimi, Chairman of the Department of Persian at Karachi University, said that speaking the language was emphasized in the certificate and diploma courses (both of one year each) in his department. He also said that they had included modern post-revolutionary literature in the MA course also (Tafhimi Int. 1999). In the other universities too there were courses in both classical and modern literature. However, Dr Noor Mohammad Mahr, Chairman of the Persian Department at NUML, claims that nearly all students from his department can actually speak modern Persian. He says that he himself, though the winner of a gold medal in the subject (this medal is given to the student who stands first in MA), could not ask for water in a hotel in Iran when he visited that country for higher studies for the first time. At the NUML, since the emphasis is on functional linguistic ability, it is not surprising that the emphasis should be on spoken Persian. However, despite this emphasis, even successful students report and are observed to face difficulty in speaking and understanding native speakers of Persian.
Among the institutions which try to teach modern Persian the foremost is Khana-e-Farhang which is administered and financed entirely by the Iranian government. It offers courses in Persian at Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Hyderabad, and Multan. The Karachi and Lahore centers were set up very early and the Rawalpindi one was set up in 1968. according to Iranian officials, the Karachi center used to draw between four to five hundred students in the fifties. Even upto 1998 there were over 200 students in the Rawalpindi center. Now, however, there are no more than 170 students studying Persian in the Rawalpindi Centre. Exact figures were not available about the other centers but Iranian officials said that there were around fifty students in Karachi, between 80 to 100 in Lahore and an average of forty to fifty in the other centers. Likewise, there were no exact figures for expenditure, but an employee from the Rawalpindi center said that approximately $300 were spent per month on the teaching of Persian in that center (conversation with officials of Khana-e-Farhang, Rawalpindi). Iran also promotes Persian studies in Pakistan through other ways. In 1971, for instance, the Iran-Pakistan Institute of Persian Studies was established. One of the functions of the Institute is to collect information about the teaching of Persian in higher education institutions in Pakistan. The Institute also distributes books and enables teachers of Persian to go on short trips to Iran. Lately, probably because of the growing Shia-Sunni antagonism and the attacks on Iranians carried out buy the Sunni extremists, Iranian help has decreased. However, even now the NUML is given books and teachers from Iran. For Iran, the teaching of Persian is a means of cultural diplomacy. It helps to sustain friendly ties between the two countries and projects Iran’s positive image in Pakistan (Mehdi Int. 1999; Mustafavi Int. 1999).
On the whole, however, Persian is all but dead in Pakistan. According to Dr Tahira Siddiqui, Professor of Persian at the University of Karachi, Persian is being finished off in Pakistan. In Sindh, it is bracketed with drawing among the optional subjects. As most schools have teachers of drawing but not those of Persian, students tend not to take it (Siddiqui Int. 1990)
Dr Ghulam Nasir, Chairman of the Department of Persian at the University of Peshawar, also agreed with this. Indeed, he claimed the Persian was no longer an option at the school level in the NWFP which is not correct though it is true that very few students study it in schools (Nasir Int. 1999). In Balochistan, however, there is a sizable Persian-speaking community (between 20 to 23 per cent in Quetta) and Persian is a popular option. Besides the Department of Persian at the University, there are private bodies like the Anjunam-e-Khusrau which keep up literary activity in Persian. They publish magazines like Ogal (Bazam-e-Khusrau) and Tuluh (Hazara Students Federation) and even run a language center to teach Persian. The presence of the Hazara community, who speak a dialect of Persian, ensures much greater understanding of the language than elsewhere in Pakistan. A number of Hazaras write poetry in Persian even now as Sharafat Abbas’s history (1999) tells us. Thus, Quetta is probably the only city of Pakistan where chapbooks, such as the tale of Gul Bakaoli, are available in Persian. This shows that there are people who are literate in the language and read it for pleasure (Abbas Int. 1999). At the BA level out of a total number of 8996 candidates, 4787 took Persian as an option but the fact that 99.5 per cent passed suggests that here too, as elsewhere is deliberately trying to eliminate Persian, it is true that it is no longer seen as a prestigious or useful subject. Thus, though it is still studied for the most part by students who want to get a high overall percentage in examinations, very few students study it for other reasons. The response of matriculation students towards Persian is as follows:
|
Table 13 (2 of Chapter 4) Students’ demand for Persian |
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|
|
Madrassas (N=131) |
Sindhi-medium (N=132) |
Urdu-medium (N=520) |
English-medium |
||
|
Elitist (N=97) |
Cadet Colleges (N=86) |
Ordinary (N=119) |
||||
|
Medium of instruction? |
0.76 |
Nil |
Nil |
Nil |
Nil |
Nil |
|
Desired as the only language to be taught as a
subject? |
3.82 |
Nil |
Nil |
Nil |
Nil |
Nil |
|
Desired to be taught in addition to other
languages? |
22.14 |
Nil |
3.85 |
8.24 |
12.79 |
7.56 |
|
Source: Appendix
14.7 All figure except those in brackets, are percentages. |
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The decline in the fortunes of Persian which had started with the coming of the British has now made it all but an unknown and uncared for language in Pakistan and north India. It lingers on as a link with the past or as a convenience for students or, in the case of modern Persian, because of the efforts of Iran and the requirement of interpreters for official and other purposes.
NOTES
1. According to some historians Ghanimat was employed by Mirza Artaq Beg at Sialkot. Artaq Beg’s son Abdul Aziz fell in love with a girl called Shahid and the story was written at Aziz’s request (Naqvi 1971: 426). Whatever the facts may be, in the masnavi itself Shahid is a boy.
2. The ulema interviewed for this book conceded that some of the classical texts could be embarrassing. However, they added that the classroom situation was such that the minds of the students were more concerned with the linguistic rather than the erotic aspects of the texts.
Annexure 4-A
Persian books taught to Indian Muslims are given below (Sufi 1941: 77-8). For details of books, see bibliography (Section 1).
Prose
1. Bada-i-ul-Insha (Insha-e-Yusufi).
2. Prose Works of Mulla Jami and Mulla Munir.
3. Letters of Abul Fazl.
4. Handbook of Sheikh Inayatullah, Secretary to Shahjahan.
5. Bahar-e-Sukhan by Shaikh Mohammad Salih.
6. Letters of Mulla Munir.
7. Epistles of Shaida and Mulla Tughra.
8. Lilavati Translated by Shaikh Faizi.
9. Story of Lal Chand.
Poetry
1. Gulistan & Bustan (Beginners) by Sa’adi
2. Yusuf Zulaikha by Jami
3. Tuhfat-ul-Ahrar ”
4. Nuzhat-ul-Abrar ”
5. Sikandar Namah by Nizami
6. Makhzan-ul-Asrar ”
7. Haft Paikar ”
8. Sheereen Khusrau ”
9. Laila Majnun ”
10. Qiran-us-Sa’dain by Amir Khusrau
11. matla-ul-Anwar ”
12. Ijaz-e-Khusravi ”
13. Works of the poets Shams-i-Tabrix, Zahir-i-Faryabi, Sa’abi, Hafiz Shirazi, and Sa’ib. Also the Qasaid of Badr-i-Chach, Anwari, Khaqani, Urfi, and Faizi.
14. Fiction: Tuti Nama by Nakshab; Anwar-e-Suhaili by Bahar-e-Danish by Sheikh Inayatullay.
Note: Books of history and ethics have been omitted.
Annexure 4-B
Textbooks of Persian in Pakistani Madrassa |
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|
It is taught in Mutawassata |
Deobandi |
Barelvi |
Ahl-i-Hadith* |
Shia** |