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Back to the Literary Future? Reappraisals of the Bazgasht-i adabi in 18th- and 19th-century Iran, Afghanistan, and India

This panel engages in a reappraisal of the Bazgasht-i adabi (Literary Return movement). Through exploring and challenging the boundaries and dimensions (literary, temporal, geographic, political, and aesthetic) of the so-called Bazgasht-i adabi, the papers challenge widely-held assumptions about the dynamics of Persianate poetic culture in the 18th and 19th centuries, including the following: that the Bazgasht was a grassroots movement of Iranian poets motivated by their staunch opposition to an "Indian Style"; that women did not play a part in refashioning the contours of Persian poetic expression in this period; and that it was only Iran that witnessed a conscious reevaluation of poetic aesthetics in this period, and that poets writing in Persian in Afghanistan and South Asia were both oblivious to, and divorced from, this reevaluation.

Presentations

Gender and the Nation in the Limits of the Bazgasht-i adabi: Two Women Poets and Their Practice of Literary Return in 18th- and 19th-century Iran and Afghanistan
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The so-called Bazgasht-i adabi (Literary Return movement) is believed by many to have begun in post-Safavid 18th-century Isfahan, and to have come to fruition in the context of early Qajar Tehran. To date, this neo-classical literary movement has been presented by most scholars of Persian literature as: a) an exclusively Iranian phenomenon (one that consciously saw itself in opposition to the wayward “Indian” style it sought to replace); and b) as a movement among male poets in which women played no significant (or insignificant) part. This paper challenges both these tropes in the established narrative on the geographical and gender scope of the Bazgasht-i adabi through a close reading of the divans of two women poets who wrote in Persian in the 18th and 19th centuries. One of these literary figures, the Afghan poet ‘A’isha Durrani (d.1819), was active in Kabul at the same time the grassroots poetic movement that had taken shaped in the literary societies (sing. anjuman) of Isfahan was being co-opted by the Qajars for their cultural project. The other, the Kurdish poet Mastura Kurdistani (d.1848), composed poetry of a neoclassical character and of considerable sophistication in a provincial environment, while her male counterparts at the courts of Fath-‘Ali Shah and Muhammad Shah vied with one another to demonstrate their prowess in imitating the poets of the pre-Timurid Iranian world.

Rivalry and Debate on the Margins of Bâzgasht in 19th Century India
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India and Indian poets feature prominently in understandings of bâzgasht-i adabî (“literary return”), both in the way the movement is considered to have developed in 19th century Iran and in its construction as a conceptual category in the 20th century as inaugurated by Muhammad Taqî Bahâr (d. 1951). This paper moves away from India’s more passive place in such understandings to the way in which debates in India itself were taking shape in the mid-19th century, alongside the emergence of bâzgasht. It takes as an example the court of the Last Nawab of Arcot (d.1855), one of the final official epicenters of Persian literary activity in post-Mughal times. Framed by the Nawab’s promotion of Persian poetry through an exclusive society, and the competitive practice of tazkirah writing at his court and its environs, this paper delves into the heady world of personal clashes, competing networks of poetic instruction, and high-stakes debates defining the climate of this far-off outpost of Persian literary culture in South India. At its core, lies the heated rivalry between the local poet Maulavi Muhammad Mahdî “Vâsif” (d. 1873), on the one hand, and the Nawab and his deputies, on the other, culminating in a debate over the style of Abd al-Qâdir Bîdil (d. 1721) and what constitutes acceptable poetry. In disentangling such a rivalry, this paper draws attention to the way some poets of mid-19th century India understood their place within the greater literary landscape of the time as well as within the spectrum of Persian literary history, in particular in relation to the great “masters.” In doing so, it gives a fuller sense of how larger literary trends occurring elsewhere, such as bâzgasht, were being understood and received by some poets of mid-19th century India, on the margins of an increasingly fracturing Persianate world.

Away from Where? Cosmopolitanism, Localization and the ‘Purity’ of Persian in and beyond 18th-century South Asia
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This paper will deal with some aspects of the debate over the notion of stylistic and linguistic ‘purity’ in 18th century Indo-Persian literary culture, with a special attention to the conflicting reception of the aesthetics of ‘newness’ often identified with Mīrzā ‘Abd al-Qādir Bīdil (d. 1721) and his school in the works of famous Indian critics and linguistic scholars such as Sirāj al-Dīn ‘Alī Khān Ārzū (d. 1756) and Mīrzā Ḥasan Qatīl (d. 1817), but also in lesser known lexicographers such as Siyalkotī Mal Wārasta (d. 1766) and in coeval tazkira literature. This will lead us to finally tackle some central issues connected to the dialectics of Persian cosmopolitanism and nationalization at the eve of the colonial period and problematize the notions and nomenclature related to the (mis)construction of the so-called sabk-i hindī, to the ghost of ‘Indian Persian’ (and Hindu Persian writers) and to the idea of bāzgasht-i adabi - with all the appendant assumptions of baroquism and anti-baroquism in relevant Western scholarship. Well aware of the necessity of finally placing this transregional, multilingual problem in a proper Eurasian perspective, we will also call upon some compelling parallel - and possibly connected - phenomena regarding, for instance, literary Greek in the Ottoman empire, at the other end of the Persianate world.