Reading Outside the Lines: Literary Exchanges between Iran and India in the 19th Century

For at least half a millennium, Persian was a lingua-franca across large swathes of Asia. A large chunk of its literary production happened outside the borders of modern Iran. While its use at the imperial level has been well studied, its role and agency in formations of popular culture and aesthetic has been largely ignored. Studies of later Persian literature are mired with nationalist paradigms and modern categories, reading contemporary distinctions into the historical record. One major casualty of such scholarship is the reception history of Persian works written in India. The received wisdom is that such works were unwelcome in Iran. This observation hinges on the transmitted opinions of an Iranian emigré to India in the 18th century,Ḥazīn-i Lāhījī, and the large surveys of Persian literature written by the nationalist poet of Iran, Bahār (d. 1951). This limited evidence says little about the actual reception of Persian works written outside the Iranian plateau. This paper engages the debate by examining publishing patterns and the sale and transfer of books between North India and Iran in the 19th century. By surveying purchase records, oral histories of bookstores, and public and private collections in Iran for books by South Asian authors, this paper demonstrates not only the absence of guidelines such as “Iranian” and “Indian” in the consumption of Persian literature, but also pushes against notions of a single “national” language with its own unique literature. It demonstrates the critical changes that occurred in publishing after the rise of Iranian nationalism, underlining the role of language reform and new curricula in creating a new geographically limited canon of Persian literature.