India--Reflected and Refracted--in Hedayat's The Blind Owl

This paper explores the role accorded by Hedayat to India in the emergence of modern Iranian literary culture and artistic sensibilities. Its starting point is my contention that The Blind Owl is not only a work of fiction, but also a literary manifesto—a parable about Iranian cultural reform, which examines issues of continuity and change, and the nature of the transition from classical Persian to modern Iranian literature and art.
Historically, India under the Raj, and the Iranian expatriate communities living there, have been important conduits of novel ideas, and a source for the “rediscovery” of the Iranian pre-Islamic past (e.g. through the Zoroastrian rivayats), vital for the construction of an Iranian national identity (see, e.g. M. Bonakdarian and M.Tavakoli-Targhi). In literary terms, the mythical image of India, formulated in the 18th c. by early Orientalists like Wilkins and William Jones, and developed further by philosophers like Fichte and Herder, left a lasting imprint not only on early Romantic poets and writers like Novalis and Schlegel, but also on Modernists writing in the interwar period (e.g. T.S. Eliot). In Europe, the mythos of India and of the shared Indo-European past provided authors with an alternative antiquity--distinct from the Judeo-Christian tradition, more ancient than the classical Greco-Roman civilization, exotic and yet presumably kindred in nature-- and thus a serviceable point of departure from the established aesthetic “givens”. In India, according to Amrit Ray, modernizing elites utilized the European image of India to their own cultural ends, and in their own nation-building endeavours.
I situate the image of India in The Blind Owl within the force-field between these two poles, taking into account three important factors, which shaped Iranian cultural attitudes to the Subcontinent during the early decades of the 20th c.: The adversarial rhetorics of the Bazgasht movement against the “Indian style”; the reality of the Indo-Iranian cultural interactions in the early modern period; and the mythos of India, formulated by early Orientalists, and refracted through trend-setting European literary works. Given the impact of Hedayat’s masterpiece on Iranian cultural consciousness, this analysis may provide additional observations to the robust scholarly discourse on the shaping of Iranian literary modernity.