This paper will examine Munīr Lāhūrī’s (1610-1644 CE) commentaries on the development of the early modern literary style of tāzah-gū’ī (‘Speaking Anew’), also known as sabk-i Hindī (‘Indian style’). A central focus of this paper will be Munīr’s unedited commentaries on a number of qaṣīdahs by the eminent Safavid-Mughal poet, ʿUrfī Shīrāzī (1556-1590 CE). Although Munīr is critical of the Iranian poet’s use of tāzah-gū’ī and the overly complex nature of his style, his criticisms are qualified, grounded in the logical interrogation of metaphor, placing a premium on semantic plausibility and clarity.
In addition to critiquing proponents of this style, Munīr is also critical of literary and cultural developments in Mughal, Deccan, and other regional courts that began to favor Iranian poets and literati over their Indian counterparts. For Munīr, ʿUrfī was symbolic of a wider emerging literary movement that emphasized the importance of a poet’s Iranian origin while simultaneously detracting from the role played by South Asian poets in the development of Persian aesthetics. By examining Munīr’s philological criticism of ʿUrfī’s qaṣīdahs and the promulgation of tāzah-gū’ī, it will be possible to determine how the discourse on early modern Persian literary developments has been influenced by the prominence of Iranian figures in South Asian courts, as well as painting a clearer picture of the methodologies at play in Safavid-Mughal literary criticism. Shining a light on the cultural and literary climate that promoted and facilitated tāzah-gū’ī, these understudied commentaries nuance our view on the development of early modern Persian literature, pushing back on both the Iran-centrism of Persian literary history and narratives that reduce the period to a singular (and especially “Indian”) taste for ‘newness’ in poetry.
