Going Native: Iranian Émigré Poets and the Indic Environment

This paper will introduce and historically contextualize two categories of Iranian poets resident in India: Firstly, we consider those like Qizilbāsh Khān Ummīd, who not only wrote in Hindī (that is, in a form of what we would call Urdu) but was reputedly so aware of its subtleties that he corrected the usage of native Indians. Secondly, we consider poets who used a large amount of Indic vocabulary in their Persian poetry. In particular, we will study the works of Mullā Tughrā of Mashhad (d. 1078/1667) and trace the way that Indo-Persianists of the eighteenth-century used his work to support their claims about the nature of proper Persian. By considering these outliers—and observing that they were not viewed as outliers in their own time—we can historicize questions of Persian literature in contact with other languages, and the language ideology inherent in those contacts. Our understanding of Persian “linguistic purity” (and native speakers’ concerns with it) is filtered through the nationalism that begins at the end of the eighteenth century, and does not accurately reflect pre-modern views on the subject, such as the idea most clearly stated by Khān-i Ārzū (d. 1756) that Indic words present no difficulty in Persian poetry but should only be employed for the first time by a master-poet with sound aesthetic judgment.