In the April issue of CSSH, Sumit Guha offers us a transregional deep history of Persian as a language of empire.
Empires, Languages, and Scripts in the Perso-Indian World. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 2024; 66(2):443-469.
The paper begins in ancient Persia and ends in modern South Asia, weaving in and out of Persian and the numerous language communities it has ruled over, through, and alongside. It is, in its layout and execution, the ideal CSSH essay. Guha combines immense scope with painstaking detail – historical, linguistic, and political – and anyone who reads the piece will see new ways to build on its insights.
Given all this, it is ironic that Guha’s paper is the sole occupant of its rubric, “Language of Empire.” Normally, we group two or three essays, to enhance their comparative effect. Does Guha’s solo act mean his work is incomparable? Yes, we think it is. But is it beyond compare? Happily, no. To prove this, we invited four CSSH authors to read and respond to Guha’s essay. Scroll down for the amazing result: a crash course in Persianate language ideology, focusing mostly on South Asia, but with fascinating segues to England, East Africa, and the late Ottoman Empire, where some of the most adept users of Persian were … Greeks.
Our cast, in order of appearance:
Nile Green. The Trans-Border Traffic of Afghan Modernism: Afghanistan and the Indian “Urdusphere.” Comparative Studies in Society and History. 2011;53(3):479-508.
Michael Fisher. Political Marriage Alliances at the Shi’i Court of Awadh. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 1983;25(4):593-616.
Farina Mir. Genre and Devotion in Punjabi Popular Narratives: Rethinking Cultural and Religious Syncretism. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 2006;48(3):727-758.
Christine Philliou. Communities on the Verge: Unraveling the Phanariot Ascendancy in Ottoman Governance. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 2009;51(1):151-181.
And for the final act, Sumit Guha will assess and respond.
Enjoy the show!
Persianate Legacies of the Languages of State in South Asia (and Beyond)
Nile Green
In his important essay “Empires, Languages, and Scripts in the Perso-Indian World,” Sumit Guha draws attention to the sociolinguistics of skills in written Persian during the six centuries of state bureaucratic reliance on the language in South Asia. He makes the crucial observations that mastery of written Persian was not only a rare and hard-won professional asset, but one which was also patchily distributed in social no less than spatial terms. This availability of crucial bureaucratic skills was also variable over time, such that scarcity also necessitated occasional supplementation by importing “Persographic” secretarial labor from Iran.[1] (These “pull” factors were partnered with “push” factors during periods of crisis in Safavid Iran, whether from persecution—Guha’s “sectarian displacement”—in the mid-1500s or the Afghan invasions of the early 1700s.) What maintained this enduring state of affairs—which Guha suggests was more favourable for members of the secretariat themselves than the states that paid them—was what he terms “bureaucratic capture” through which scribes “fortunate enough to be in at the founding of a lasting government would therefore seek to capture the chancery and archive and turn office into patrimony.”[2] Which is to say, if a particular professional/kinship community with expertise in a particular written language and its associated forms of record-keeping was present at the founding of a new state bureaucracy, their language of record—and their progeny—were likely to maintain multi-generation control over lucrative chancery positions through what we might also label as a process of bureaucratic path dependency. This is a very valuable observation, to which I will return below.
Tracing the ebb, flow, and rare overturning of this pattern across the South Asian longue durée, Guha argues it was the East India Company that propelled Persian towards its widest usage in the subcontinent. This expansive “second life of Indo-Persian” came not only through the Company deploying its own growing secretariat, but also through the Company’s application of a new technology to Persian: the printing press. However, the economics of print vis-à-vis manuscript production came with an inherent trajectory towards the use of vernacular languages. “Printed books depended on widening markets to reduce marginal cost per copy,” notes Guha, such that it was more economic to print—that is, mass-produce—texts in languages which larger numbers of people could understand, whether through direct reading or listening to the text being read out. Consequently, the introduction of printing by the Company (and by the Christian missionaries it reluctantly allowed into its territories in 1813, just as printing in Persian and other Indian languages was gathering pace) set in motion a technological tilt toward vernacularization that, combined with ideological and social factors, overturned the longstanding pattern of Persographic bureaucratic capture to which the Company itself had initially succumbed after its rapid transformation into a governing power in the late 1750s.
In what follows, I briefly explore some of the consequences of these developments to widen the ambit of their implications.
I will begin with the big picture of Indo-Persian by way of the chronology of Persian-use in South Asia. This has invariably been determined by political history, from the introduction of the language under the Delhi Sultans, its expansion under the Mughals, and its final abandonment by the East India Company in 1835.[3] While the role of the state—and the “capture” of its bureaucracy—is crucial for understanding the status of written Persian in regions where it was not a widespread spoken language (hence in parts of Central as well as South Asia), the problem emerges when we allow this to set the chronology of Persian’s demise beyond the realms of the state. For, as all historians know, the policies of powerful states have enduring (and often unintended) aftereffects, such that the long temporal shadows of Persian in South Asia continued long after its abandonment by the Company in 1835. Yet—and my aim here is to extend rather than reject Guha’s analysis—this was a consequence of the processes that Guha lays bare.
A few examples. One is the important legacy of Company and Christian missionary investments in Persian printing for the fortunes of the language around the Indian Ocean, whether in Iran, the large Iranian diaspora across maritime British Asia, or even Afghanistan and the khanates of Bukhara and Khiva. These Company and Christian missionary investments in Persian printing had led to the concentration of both skills (Persographic secretaries and printers) and capital (typographic presses and Persian typesets, or lithographic presses) in the key Company headquarters of Calcutta and Bombay. This maritime geography—quite distinct from the earlier inland centres of Persian manuscript production, and skills concentration, of the Delhi Sultans, Mughals, and successor states—in turn enabled the cheaper import of paper and the cheaper export of Persian books, journals, and newspapers to the larger remaining readerships and markets for Persian texts that remained outside India, especially in Iran.
Calcutta also played a crucial role as an informational port through which, as the capital of the Company then Raj, newspapers and other sources of information entered the subcontinent, providing rich informational resources that could be transferred into Persian (as well as vernacular) publications. This was especially true for the likes of the exiled Iranian newspaper Habl al-Matin, which selected and editorialized news sources imported to Calcutta then exporting the transformed Persian results of this news circulation to Iran and its diaspora.[4] Habl al-Matin ran from 1893 to 1930—almost a century after the British decision in Calcutta to abandon Persian.
Although in the history of Indo-Persian the year 1835 is usually associated with the language’s bureaucratic disestablishment by the Company, it was also the year of the crucial Indian Press Act pushed through by the Governor-GeneralSir Charles Metcalfe, still sometimes recalled in India as the “Liberator of the Indian Press.” Although subsequent press freedoms remained subject to various conditions, this still produced a far more liberal publishing environment in India than in Qajar Iran (and Afghanistan), where publishing remained dominated by the state and subject to strict political and religious censorship. As a consequence of these combined factors, the decades after 1835 saw Bombay and Calcutta as major centers of an expatriate Iranian printing industry whose output ranged from literary classics that were cheaper to issue in India and the works of ambitious new authors unable to find a publisher in Iran to anti-Qajar newspapers, Parsi-sponsored Persian works on Zoroastrianism, and the first printed editions of the Baha’i scriptures.[5] Across the Bay of Bengal from Calcutta, even its twin port of Rangoon hosted a Baha’i missionary journal, al-Ishraq, in Persian, Burmese, and English that was launched as late as 1923.[6] The shadow of Company investment in Persian reached long after its disinvestment in 1835.
The afterlife of Company—and, indeed, prior Mughal—investments in Persian contributed to a parallel export trade in Persian texts to Afghanistan as well as the Russian and Chinese imperial domains in Central Asia. In this case, the publishers were more often based in inland cities, such as Delhi, Lahore, and Lucknow, which remained linked to Kabul, then beyond, via the old imperial infrastructure of the Grand Trunk Road (the Shahrah-e ‘Azam or Badshahi Sarak in its old Persian titles). Well into the 1900s, the legacy of earlier “bureaucratic captures” remained alive in Delhi, Lahore, and Lucknow, in the chanceries of the Mughals, Ranjit Singh’s Sikhs, and Nawwabs of Awadh (the latter supplemented by imported secretaries from Iran in the early 1800s). Because the families of former Persographic scribal employees of these states provided publishers with a labor pool, especially since the adaptation of lithography from a technology that the Company had initially imported to print maps into one that could be used to print handwritten Persian texts meant that Persian-writing scribes found new sources of employment in supplying books both beyond the realm of the Raj in Central Asia and beneath its ambit in India, where madrasa students, Sufis, and other sub-state literati continued to read old Persian classics, albeit in the form of cheap lithographs that were an unintended consequence of imperial technology policies.
By the same token, the decision of the Company, then more fully the officialdom of the Raj and its missionary/educational partners, to shift its linguistic investments from Persian to Urdu also had consequences far beyond the formal jurisdictions of British India. The result was what I have elsewhere termed an “Urdusphere” that reached not only into Afghanistan but also to East Africa and Ceylon as well as the Malayalam- and Tamil-writing Muslim communities of south India and even Iran, where the booming literary, educational, theological, and political voices in Urdu that were amplified by print were translated or otherwise absorbed into other languages.[7] In other cases, the Raj’s switch to Urdu—and its investment in a new Urdu-using secretariat—saw it find new uses in places far beyond its Gangetic home-region as a spoken language. This was partly a result of the Raj’s promotion of Urdu as the official language of Punjab, which saw it carried as a written language to new regions by patterns of imperial labor migration.
A case in point is the series of historical texts written in Urdu by bureaucrats dispatched to little kingdoms in such highland regions as Kashmir, the Karakoram, and the Pamirs. One example is the Tarikh-e Chitral written in Urdu in the 1890s by the imperial bureaucrat Muhammad ‘Aziz al-Din ‘Aziz, which prompted the writing of a rival history with the same title by the local secretary-literatus Mirza Muhammad Ghufran, who from 1882 to 1926 served as chief secretary (dabir) of the little kingdom of Chitral. Yet while this second Tarikh-e Chitral was written in the earlier Pamiri language of state, Persian, it nonetheless had to be published in distant Bombay for the lack of printing facilities in Chitral or elsewhere in the highlands.[8] In another striking consequence—and afterlife—of British imperial language policy in Punjab, the descendants of Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim workers who migrated from Punjab to British East Africa to work on the Uganda Railway have used Urdu to write poetry that celebrates their new homeland in the late imperial language of their old one.[9]
In his longue durée account of the role of Persian, then Urdu, in imperial language policies in South Asia, Sumit Guha provides a compelling survey of the interplay of state, language, and society up till the end of the nineteenth century. As I hope to have shown in these few remarks, the consequences of the processes he uncovers also unfolded beyond the borders of British India and continued after 1900.
Shifts in the Prestige of Persian and its Speakers
Michael Fisher
Let me begin by expressing how much I admire the cultural and chronological sweep and also the deep historical insights of Sumit’s article and other work. Within such a masterful survey, one can always peer within broad interest groups or “coalitions of cliquish institutions” to reveal internal subgroups (or even individuals) who simultaneously held differing language ideologies toward Persian and Persian speakers, for instance based on gender, class, and location. Like Nile, I concentrate here on the culminating section of Sumit’s article titled the “Second life of Indo-Persian” under the East India Company (EIC) and then, less so, under the British Raj.
As Sumit notes, during the EIC’s first two centuries (c. 1600-1800), many Britons in India (who were overwhelmingly male) highly valued Persian and Persianate culture as carrying the prestige of the Mughal Empire. Some Britons emulated in their dress, households, and literary tastes the Persianate court culture of the Mughals and many regional Mughal successor states, including Hyderabad and Awadh. Several prominent Britons married (and many more cohabitated with) Persian-speaking Indian women (e.g., Dalrymple 2002). Other Britons “mastered” Persian to advance their own careers, particularly as envoys or diplomats, or to access judicial or revenue records, as Sumit and others have shown (e.g., Chatterjee 2021).
There were always far fewer British women in India than men, and most were charged by the British establishment with sustaining a “pure” British social world there. Some elite Indian men, including Persophones, drew a few non-elite British women into their households (e.g., Ali 1832). But some British women in India perceived aspects of Persianate culture as exotically romantic, if only as tourists within the “safety” of British society. Several punctuated their autobiographical travel narratives with Persian terms (sometimes in Persian script) that displayed their putative access to that world (e.g., Parkes 1850).
Over the early 19th century, however, Persian faded as the EIC’s “language of command” (Cohn 1999). Famously, Thomas Babington Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Education stands as the symbolic and effective shift from the EIC’s patronizing Persian to propagating English. Hence, as Sumit shows, the prestige and income of teachers and scribes devoted to preserving and propagating Persian declined, although many persisted in their dedication. Some landholders also sustained their ideological commitment to Persian which evoked past but declining Muslim power and glory.
Nile and I are among those who have studied early Persophone Indians and Iranians in Britain (Burton 1998, Fisher 2004, Green 2015, Gulfishan Khan 1998, Tavakoli-Targhi 2001, Visram 2002). Collectively, this work shows how different from those in India and shifting over time were the language ideologies and the personal interactions in Britain among various classes of male and female Persian-speakers and male and female Britons. Working-class Britons and some British aristocrats in Britain proved more open to Persian-speaking Indians (and Persians) than were the British bourgeoisie or Britons in India.
From the late 18th century onward, many middle class and elite Indians (mostly male) who traveled to Britian as diplomats, sojourners, or settlers prided themselves on their Persian expertise. They and other Persophones occasionally (but apparently effectively) captivated British ladies by using classic Persian poetry, sometimes by allegedly working in those ladies’ names into the verses. For instance, Mirza Abu Talib Khan (1752-1806) while visiting Britain (1799-1802) played up the mistaken identification of him in Dublin as “the Persian Prince” (Abu Talib Khan 1814). He moved in the highest British society wearing Persianate robes and citing Persian verses that proved especially attractive to British aristocratic women. Similarly, an Indian of mixed ancestry, D.O. Dyce Sombre, M.P. (1808-51), used Persian verses and endearments to woo and wed (1840) the daughter of the Viscount St Vincent, Mary Anne Jervis (1812–93); after his death, she occasionally wore Persianate clothes in upper class British society, fashionably styled “the Begam” (Fisher 2013). Indeed, during this period and after, various Indian men in their writing and in their oral accounts to their (male) friends back in India, contrasted their relative social and sexual freedom in Britain with their growing racial subordination and social exclusion from British womanhood in India. Among the relatively fewer Indian women who migrated to Britain during this period (most often as the wives of Britons returning from careers governing India), abandonment of their Persianate (or other Indian) culture and adoption of “Christian”/Anglo appearance and behavior enabled social acceptance and assimilation.
There is less evidence that British middle-class men found Indian men’s Persianate practices attractive. For instance, when the EIC recruited Persian language teachers to instruct trainee officials and cadet officers in England at Haileybury College and Addiscombe Military Seminary respectively, these Indians rose from relatively shabby gentility in the eyes of Britons in India to be highly paid professors in Britain. Several of these teachers married or cohabitated with middle-class British women. But a few exceptional students aside, their pupils largely devalued them and their Persian language teaching. Instead, British “orientalists” who often knew much less Persian and then often only written not spoken Persian, stood higher in the faculty and the salary schedule.
The traumatic events of the 1857 “Sepoy Mutiny”/“First War of Indian Independence” customarily mark an historical crisis in the status of Persian language and Persian-speakers in both India and Britain. The reconquering British executed or exiled much of the remaining Mughal dynasty and blatantly desacralized many symbols of its Persianate culture. Muslim Indians in India and Britain had to demonstrate their loyalties to the British Raj and to develop a language ideology based on the more “modern” Urdu language, as Sumit shows. Hence, his article suggests even more widespread significance than he states and is the excellent basis for further study and discussion.
Language Policy and Transformations in India’s Epistemological Terrain
Farina Mir
In focusing attention on the significance of scribes and scribal communities to the spread and establishment of languages in imperial contexts, Sumit Guha reveals an important dimension of linguistic policy that the focus on language ideologies and state agency has undoubtedly elided. Relatedly, his essay is an important reminder that we too often conflate imperial language policy with widespread linguistic practice. Guha provides an important corrective to our understanding of Persian and its use in India, particularly to the assumption that Delhi Sultanate and Mughal imperial use of Persian as an administrative language resulted in its widespread adoption there. In doing so, he reemphasizes the importance of vernacular languages such as Hindustani/Urdu in Indian governance, showing that their influence in administration—now associated most closely with the colonial period—in fact pre-dates colonialism by centuries.
All of these are important correctives. And generative. Here, I engage Guha’s discussion of the Company state’s shift from Persian to a combination of English and Indian vernaculars for administration in early-nineteenth century India as a jumping-off point to think both about other aspects of this history, and its implications. Guha argues that the British in India initiated “modernizing processes” that transformed administrative practices, created a new school system, and established a new bureaucracy in such a way as to push “the question of a ‘ground-level’ choice of language and script to the forefront” (21). Key to this quest for modernization, I have argued elsewhere, were Liberal sentiments about just governance in India.[10] These sentiments didn’t emerge immediately upon the takeover of Indian territory, however. They coalesced over time, making the colonial state’s prior ways of contending with India’s linguistic complexity on the ground less tenable.
The colonial record shows that prior to the 1830s colonial officials recognized that local linguistic practices across India were complex, and that vernacular languages were critical to effective rule. An 1802 letter from the London-based Court of Directors to the Governor General in India, for example, makes clear their knowledge of how things worked on the ground in practice: “Of the three languages current on the Bengal side of India,” they wrote, “the Persian and Hindostanny are necessary for the transaction of business in all our offices; with respect to the Bengalese or provincial Language … we conceive that the knowledge of it will be found indispensably requisite to the provincial collectors; nor less so the Civil Judges.”[11] But such an acknowledgement that Hindustani (which functioned as a vehicular language in north India and sometimes beyond) and Bengali (the local vernacular) were “indispensable” for administration posed no contradiction with an imperial policy that dictated governance—or at least the written transactions of governance—be conducted in Persian and English.
Increasingly from the turn of the nineteenth century, however, officials in India and England voiced dismay not only with the efficiency of the language policy, but with its consequences for just rule. One example of this comes from a memorial placed before the Court of Directors in 1819 by Bombay justices, who complained of a delay in translating the Police Enactments of the Town and Island of Bombay into the “native languages.”[12] The justices’ concern was that even men who were “the best informed and most respectable natives … had no knowledge whatever of the existence of the Regulations which they were charged with having violated.” They thus ruled that convicting Indians for violating laws that had not been translated into vernacular languages was illegal, arguing that making laws (linguistically) accessible to subjects was “a dictate … of common Justice.”[13]
By the 1830s, this kind of discomfort with language policy permeates the colonial record. Persian was now, in fact, viewed as an impediment to good governance. An 1836 minute by Governor General Auckland noted that Persian was not the colloquial language in any part of Company territory, and that to retain it as the language of the courts was to keep “the bulk of the people in ignorance to the Judicial proceedings … to which they may be parties.”[14] The momentum of such arguments coalesced with the passing of Act No. 29 of 1837. That Act instituted the use of vernacular languages for provincial administration and justice, underscoring the Liberal sentiment that it was “just and reasonable that those Judicial and Fiscal Proceedings on which the dearest interest of the Indian people depend should be conducted in a language they understand.”[15]
This aspect of the history of the Company state’s abandonment of Persian dovetails with Guha’s argument about the importance of scribal communities. It was, after all, the availability of scribes that dictated which vernacular languages were employed where for official purposes in colonial India. I remind us of this history not to reassert the importance of state agency, but rather to show what is to my mind an interesting confluence of Liberal ideology with the pragmatic concerns of employment and livelihood in scribal communities that led to the use of particular languages for local/provincial government in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India.
The shift from Persian to Urdu for administration and (later) education in much of north India not only empowered certain scribal communities, it also led to transformations in the epistemological terrain. We might think of this, as Green has done above, as an unanticipated consequence of imperial policy. The Persian-trained intelligentsia, many of whom found employment with the colonial state for their Urdu skills, appear keenly aware of the implications of imperial policy for the dissemination of knowledge. One example of this cognizance comes to us from Munshi Sadasukh Lal (Guha mentions in his essay that a munshi is a Persian-knowing secretary), who in the mid-nineteenth century wrote an Urdu textbook in two volumes for use in colonial schools, Guldasta Akhlaq (A Bouquet of Ethics). Written at the behest of the lieutenant governor of the Northwest Provinces “for the benefit of young scholars,” the book enjoyed tremendous circulation.[16] Volume One was first published from Allahabad in 1853 (3000 copies). The colonial record indicates at least eight subsequent editions of that volume were published through 1873, with print runs ranging from 2000 to 6000. Publishing information on the second volume is a bit more scant, but a second edition was published in Allahabad in 1861 with a print run of 2000; and a third edition in 1870, with a print run of 1025.
Lal described Guldasta Akhlaq as “a small treatise containing in Urdu easy lessons for children chiefly on moral subjects.”[17] While the first volume is divided into 12 lessons, or “sabaqs,” the second tries to engage students in broader pedagogical (and philosophical) discussion. In a section titled, “On the Affirmation of Knowledge,” Lal provides a broad overview of various branches of knowledge, describing both localized and colonial knowledge systems. Of particular interest are two knowledge trees, one mapping knowledge from Persian and Arabic books and the other mapping knowledge from English books. The concern that led to the production of these knowledge trees, I think, was not only about the ability to bring English knowledge into the vernacular—a central concern of the Anglicists who held sway over early colonial education policy—but also about the knowledge that was being eclipsed with the waning of Persian (and Arabic) literacy. Indeed, the author of another akhlaq (ethics) text published later in the century laments the loss most explicitly. In a didactic ethical story, he has a character say: “Miskawayh and Tabrisi and Fakhr Razi and Ghazali and Zahir and Nasiri and Jalali, great treatises have been written … But how can they help us now? We do not know enough Arabic or Persian to understand them.”[18] Among those referenced here are Miskawayh (d.1030), the author of the first ethical treatise in Arabic; Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d.1209), an important philosopher and theologian; al-Ghazali (d.1111), among classical Islam’s most significant philosophers and theologians; and Nasir al-Din Tusi (d. 1274; referenced by his text the Akhlaq-i Nasiri), who wrote among the most significant ethical treatises of Persian literature; and Muhammad Ibn Asad Jalal al-Din Dawani (d. 1502; referenced by his Akhlaq-i Jalali), an significant medieval Persian philosopher who wrote an important recension of Tusi’s Akhlaq-i Nasiri.
This concern with the epistemologies that waned with imperial language policy had an impact on the history of Urdu literary production. But that is a history that will have to be told on another occasion. Suffice to say that Guha’s essay opens up a number of avenues for further exploration. One can only hope that scholars will take the baton and run with it.
A Phanariot among Persographs (or, a Hellenist among Persianists)
Christine Philliou
Reading Sumit Guha’s “Empires, Language, and Scripts in the Perso-Indian World” and the responses from Green, Fisher, and Mir, I am flooded with thoughts about the many connections and parallels to Greek and Ottoman in world history. The relationship between the Greek and Persian languages is quite literally epic, going back millennia and meeting often but not exclusively in Asia Minor/Anatolia since antiquity. Their speakers, and the states that used these two languages (from Achaemenid to Sassanian and from Ancient Greece to Byzantium) have been rivals – overlapping, supplanting each other, and ultimately intermixing in countless eras, and on an array of social and political registers. In some sense, Guha’s broad schema for language ideologies in the case of Persian holds an implicit comparison to the normative “world languages” of (Eurocentric) yesteryear: Greek, Latin, and more recently French (lingua franca, after all). Yet when we think about Greek and its iterations and engagements eastward rather than westward, a host of different and fascinating relationships surface.
From the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE to the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BCE, Greek language and culture (or “Hellenism”) spread as far east as Afghanistan, overwhelming the Persianate world and burying the Achaemenid Empire. Hellenism was in a sense the first humanism, rather than the narrow ethno-nationalism revolving around Athens that it would become in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One might say that the origins of our modern conception of cosmopolitanism date back to this earlier Hellenistic era. As a language ideology, Hellenism was inclusive and synthesizing. It set the stage for the Roman imperium and “Greco-Roman” civilization as modern scholars would come to call it. It contrasts sharply to the case of Aramaic scribal elites, who kept knowledge of their governing language to themselves.
With the rise of the Roman Empire, Greek never went away. It was the language of state and high culture in the Eastern Roman Empire. Here, the conflict and symbiosis between Greek (Greco-Roman?) and Persian administrative and cultural domains were fundamentally disrupted by monotheism. First, by Christianity, and then by Islam. Christianity sharpened the distinction between the Hellenophone Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire as a separate entity from the decaying Western Roman Empire, linking Greek to the [Orthodox] Church. In a different but also fascinating process, the inception of Islam as a spiritual, political, and intellectual/theological community established Arabic as the dominant language, decentering and almost extinguishing Persian. Arabic, the language of divine revelation, forced a new script for Persian. Both Greek and Persian were fundamentally altered by religious and language ideologies, albeit in converse ways. While scholars would later write of a (by definition pre-Christian) Greco-Roman civilization, for many reasons they were less likely to speak of a “Perso-Arabic” civilization, and this despite the complex relationships between Persophone scholars, statesmen, and cultural-philosophical expression in Abbasid and broader Islamicate civilization between the eighth and fourteenth centuries.
If monotheism – Christianity in the fourth century and Islam in the seventh – fundamentally altered language ideologies of both Greek and Persian, the arrival of Turkophone groups caused unprecedented disruptions, as well as new opportunities in the linguistic and political landscape of the region. Turkish, or at least Turks, turned Western Asia upside down in the eleventh century (Seljuks), then more so from the thirteenth (Ilkhanids) to fifteenth (Timur). These cataclysmic military incursions fragmented the world of high Islamic learning, with its delicate relationships between Persian and Arabic, and nearly demolished the sophisticated Arabophone urban culture of Western Asia. Turkic forces and their civilian settler/itinerant communities improvised new kinds of Muslim belief and practice, all the while chipping away at the eastern borders of Byzantium. For three hundred years these Turkophone communities lived alongside Hellenophone Orthodox Christians, making a volatile new cultural and linguistic synthesis.[19] The principalities (beyliks) that were established in Anatolia/Asia Minor often adopted Persian as their official language of court, since Turkish did not have a highly developed written form. This broader “Turco-Persian synthesis” across Western and Central Asia complicated the language ideology of Arabic as the privileged and sacred language of the Muslim umma, and it changed the meaning of Islamicate state formation, as Marshall Hodgson demonstrated so masterfully with his treatment of the empires we now call “early modern”: the Ottomans (est. 1300), Safavids (est. 1501), and Mughals (est. 1526). Each was a distinct product of this Turco-Persian synthesis. Persian rose again, this time in partnership with Turkish.
Where did these changes leave our old friend, Greek? In the Ottoman Empire, it remained, paradoxically, both essential to governance and invisible on the formal landscape of sovereignty. A new language of court and state, Ottoman Turkish, melded Persian, Arabic, and colloquial Turkish. Knowledge of these three language, the “elsine-i selâse,” was part of being an Ottoman gentleman, much as knowing Greek and Latin was in antiquity and, until surprisingly recently, in Western Christendom. As for Greek in the Ottoman realms, its journey was equally complex. It remained the language of the Orthodox Church after the conquest of Constantinople by Ottoman Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror in 1453. The Roman/Byzantine state was gone, but the Ottomans not only allowed the Church to survive, they repurposed it to suit the needs of the Ottoman military-fiscal apparatus. Hellenophones and Hellenographs never went away. They were taken alongside (not into) a formal Ottoman state that was avowedly Muslim and, from the early sixteenth century, increasingly self-consciously Sunni in contradistinction to the Shi’i Safavids. Alongside the Ottoman court and bureaucracy, which employed Ottoman Turkish, a kind of vestigial Byzantine state apparatus survived in the Greek-dominated Orthodox Church, which was in place until the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1922.
We are now in a position to understand the evolving relationship between Greek and Persian in the Ottoman Empire, particularly the making of the improvised patriciate of Phanariots, who emerged out of this complex political, fiscal, and sociolinguistic reality. Phanariots first appear in the seventeenth century as an elite of clerical and then lay office holders who connected the Orthodox Church apparatus to the Ottoman imperial administration proper. The Phanar quarter of Istanbul, also the headquarters of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, was their base of operations and residence.
Phanariots created a niche for themselves, particularly after the 1699 Treaty of Carlowitz, when the Ottoman Empire ceased to be a state driven by constant military expansion and became instead a bureaucratic state, with fixed and ultimately shrinking borders. This transition necessitated a new array of relationships and forms of knowledge that educated Orthodox Christians were in a unique position to supply, despite their status as institutionally excluded from power in an officially Muslim-dominated empire. The Phanariots were useful not for their knowledge of one particular or privileged language, but for their knowledge of multiple languages, including Italian and other European languages. What scholars often neglect is the fact that, to be useful to their Ottoman overlords as interpreters, translators, and negotiators, Phanariots had to know Ottoman Turkish and thus its constituent languages, including Persian and Arabic, as well. While Greek scholars today are apt to focus on, for instance, the Mavrocordatos family and their formative role in the early Enlightenment, they forget that the raison d‘être for these families as elites, and their day jobs, so to speak, involved communicating with their Ottoman patrons in Ottoman Turkish. They engaged in the world of Ottoman letters in fascinating ways from the start.[20]
Where does this fit into Guha’s scheme of language ideology? If the Phanariots had a language ideology, it was focused on Greek, and the relationship of Greek learning and letters to their status as Romans (yes, Romans, which to them was an identity inseparable from the Greek language and its concomitant world of ideas). This was the setting in which figures from the Mavrocordatos famiIy, for example, could decide what it meant to be an empire within an empire, and whether that would ever mean taking over the Ottoman Empire in toto. Much has been written about the ideas that anticipated modern Greek nationalism, and it is an intriguing fact that many (but not all) Phanariots were involved in the conspiracy that hatched the Greek Revolution in 1821. But when we look at these developments differently, in the longue durée of Greek and Persian as world languages, what is most revealing is the fact that Phanariots did not develop a language ideology that centered on their knowledge and daily use of Ottoman Turkish, with its Persian and Arabic components, when they certainly could have. This outcome shows us the extent to which the confessional/institutional divide in Ottoman governance was more powerful than the vernacular, administrative reality. In that reality, Phanariots, despite being Christians, were ever more enmeshed in the scribal languages, not just of the vestigial Byzantine state in the guise of the Orthodox Church, but in Ottoman provincial and central administration proper, not to mention foreign relations, which was increasingly important to Ottoman political survival in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But their ideology fell short of their intricate language reality, and this would be ever more painfully true as the Ottoman Empire was “unmixed” along confessional rather than language lines in the twentieth century.
Further explorations in language, society, and power: a response
Sumit Guha
I am honored that four distinguished scholars would engage so deeply with my work! They have brought their wide-ranging expertise to bear and offer many insights into areas that I never explored, or indeed overlooked altogether.
Numbers
It may at the outset be worth examining the relative importance of the oral and written in a by-gone era. But as historians know, dependable statistics are themselves indicators of a state’s bureaucratic capacity. Most of South and West Asia did not develop this competence until the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. The first comprehensive Census of British India that included “princely states” like Hyderabad was conducted in 1881. It reported that across the empire, 7.65 million men could read and write in some language; another 2.88 million were “under instruction.” For women, the numbers were 277,000 and 155,000. The total population enumerated was 130 million men and 124 million women.[21] Thus only 4.3 percent were literate in any script. In British Punjab, there were 158,000 men under instruction and 482,000 able to read and write. Among women, this was 6,100 and 8,400 respectively. There were 10.2 million men and 8.6 million women counted in that province. The “Persographs” were certainly even fewer. Even in Hyderabad, a state where the governing Minister, Salar Jung I, had demanded the retention of Persian, only 815 persons reported speaking Persian in 1891. It is possible more could read it, but the total would still be small.[22]
What is more significant is the enormous disparity in literacy between men and women. It implies that literate men would usually have illiterate wives (not to speak of servants and wet-nurses). So early child-rearing, with its profoundly formative linguistic effects on infants, would be conducted in the household, and early language acquisition would most usually involve an Indian language. It would be “women’s speech.” Even in Persographic settings, the household language would have been acquired aurally. In north and central India, this early language would have been what is usually termed Hindustani or Hindi-Urdu. I should at this point correct my careless labeling of Urdu as a “creole.” I have since realized that it does not possess the structural characteristics of what linguists describe as a “creole.”[23] If we consider Persian and Arabic within this frame, it is clear that these superstrate (“high”) languages functioned as “lexifiers” for Hindustani, but the inflection of Indic languages was largely unaffected. Indeed, Khaṛi Boli Hindi markers, such as gender in nouns, were added to loan-words that did not originally possess them. Schmidt describes the speech of the “women’s quarter”: “Begamāti zabān was an unwritten dialect… It was characterized by a straightforward and idiomatic style without the flowery and Persianized phrases of polite Urdu. Often tadbhava vocabulary items from the vernaculars such as Braj Bhāṣā, Avadhī and Dakhanī are used rather than Persian loans…”[24]
Returning to the numbers of people reading and speaking Persian, Anne Lambton frankly confesses that there was little basis for calculating the population of Persia under Qajar suzerainty. Knitting together speculation from consular officials and envoys, she reckons that it grew from six million around 1810 to nine or ten million in 1900. Curzon’s informants told him that Islamic schools existed in almost every village, though most boys learned only to read and a minority to write. One expects that a smaller fraction could afford books.[25] Furthermore, many communities spoke Turkic languages rather than Iranian ones, and religious minorities would have tried to maintain the study of their own sacred languages. The situation was probably analogous to the “feudatory” or Indian-ruled states of greater Punjab. Here, out of a total population of 3.86 million, approximately 112,000 were able to read and write, or were learning; of these, barely 1,200 were women.[26] If Persia had two and a half times the population, there would be perhaps 300,000 literates.
With the Census data in hand, it becomes possible to estimate the number of literates from the counts of students at various schools in the N-W Provinces, circa 1850. In 1881, this area had approximately 10 literate males for every 3 reported as under instruction. If that ratio is applied to the 28,000 school students of 1850, then those already literate would number about 92,000. Since 8,500 were reported as studying Persian, then only about 28,000 would have been able to read and write it. But it is obvious that once type-set printing and lithography cheapened texts, Persia would be a much larger market than other regions. The data confirm what Green has written: Persian in South and Inner Asia was always a thinly spread, highly networked language of elite communication, but the freer press in the British empire made it a safer location for publishers of Persian texts. By far the biggest market, despite all obstacles, would be and remains the Iranian world.
Ideologies of language
I will begin with a domain that I could only gesture toward: the place of language ideology in imperial systems. As this term is little used by historians, I need to emphasize that historians suffer from it too. In the modern era, language ideology usually manifests as an implicit nationalism: even when nationalists are advocating for their cause in a “foreign” language. Furthermore, empires made history, but they did so with personnel and institutions received and transmitted from the past. The strength of their commitment to a language ideology would have to be balanced against the pragmatic needs of empire, as has been sufficiently illustrated by the example of Achaemenid Persia. Here the ruling dynasty adopted and sustained a Semitic language – Aramaic – for its own functioning. This, as Philliou notes, contrasts to the domains of Alexander’s successors from Gandhara to Cyrenaica, where the conquerors’ cities became centers of a Hellenized life. The Hellenes clearly valued their own language highly.
But Aramaic persisted: the Maurya emperor Ashoka left his Kandahar inscription in Greek and Aramaic. This was likely a pragmatic decision: those were the languages read there. But later dynasts had a stronger attachment to their ethnic speech. It was possibly Hellenic domination that excited a response from the Kushan conquerors of eastern Iran and Northwest India. The Rabakatak inscription of the fourth king, Kanishka (second century CE), was written in Greek letters, but in an “Aryan” language; more specifically, in the Kushans’ own Bactrian language.[27]
Religion, the power elite, and language choice
Philliou asks cogently why the Phanariot bureaucrats did not identify ideologically with the Ottoman Turkish that they wrote and communicated in. I would additionally ask why the Ottomans themselves retained it and did not adopt another language like Arabic or Persian as their Chaghatai cousins did in India? I have offered an explanation of Mughal (Chaghatai) choices but cannot venture to explain the Ottoman decision, except that Turkish may have been bound up with their identity as a power elite.
Philliou also introduces the important theme of the religious inflection of language choice. The religious intelligentsia were important for the transmission of literacy in most societies before the nineteenth century. The new language, Ottoman Turkish, melded Persian, Arabic, and colloquial Turkish, but on a Turkic grammatical basis. Greek-speaking bureaucrats had to write and communicate in it. They were, however, affiliated to the Greek Orthodox Church that sustained the Greek language. The Church itself was repurposed, as Philliou tells us, for “the needs of the military-fiscal apparatus.” That ensured the Church’s institutional survival and, with it, a religious language ideology that necessarily privileged Greek.
Print capitalism
This topic, as Green points out, was not sufficiently explored in my article, even though it led to a long afterlife for Persography in British India. Copying texts for lithographic reproduction, he notes, supplied alternative employment for the scribes displaced by the adoption of Urdu/Hindustani in official print and record in North India. The effect of print capitalism on language standardization has been invoked ever since Benedict Anderson’s path-breaking exploration of the print market roots of modern nationalism. Anderson was focused on Western Europe, where modern standard languages emerged and vernacular printing exploded beginning in the late 1400s. Green’s perceptive essay draws our attention to the “afterlife” of Persian following the East India Company’s demotion of the language. He remarks that the commercial and political milieu of British India was better suited for printing and publishing in Persian than was the homeland of the Persian language. Bombay and Calcutta therefore emerged as “major centers of an expatriate Iranian printing industry…”
While Anderson’s booksellers may have encouraged standard languages, printing’s expansion was not driven solely by the profit motive. The age of print was also the age of religious wars across Europe, from Bohemia to Ireland. Protestants and Catholics intensively used the new technology for propaganda warfare. Early printing came to the Indian Ocean region as part of the Roman Catholic effort to win “Preste” (Prester John, the legendary emperor of Ethiopia) to their brand of Christianity. A mishap landed the printing press destined for that country in Portuguese Goa. It used the Roman fonts in use in Portugal at the time. Efforts at developing a font for the languages of South India came soon after. Priolkar’s pioneering work suggests that this was intended to print religious literature in Tamil for catechists and lesser functionaries in the congregations gathered around Portuguese pastors across the Indian peninsula. Secular printing for state purposes was unknown in Portuguese India, and there was no market for printed works sold as commodities. Church and state concurred on the importance of controlling the press. Priolkar describes how Goan printing petered out in the late seventeenth century. The dictatorial Marquis de Pombal in Portugal suppressed an effort at renewing printing in Goa in 1754-55. Printing was not resumed there till 1821. By then, efforts at printing had advanced in the early British colony of Bengal. But they were not directed to state printing in Persian or Hindustani, but to printing Sanskrit and Bengali.[28] The latter had retained dominance in fiscal matters even after Verelst (who wrote in 1767). Linguistic clues in the report of the Amini Commission on tax assessments (1778) indicate the original tax manuscripts were in Bengali.[29]
Print capitalism saw its beginnings in the commercially minded city of Bombay, where Rustom Caresajee, a Parsi, printed an English “Calendar for the Year of our Lord 1780” to sell for the relatively large sum of two rupees.[30] Short-lived English language newspapers began around this time too in both Calcutta and Bombay. Gujarati fonts were cast and printing began in that language. Then, in the 1820s, the newly arrived technique of lithographic reproduction was turned to printing a Persian language monthly in Bombay. Its promoter described it as aimed at “the many Moguls, Persians, Arabs and other natives in Bombay and elsewhere who does not understand either English or Guzrattee languages…” Subscribers were to pay nine rupees a quarter, which would suggest it had a limited circulation. The government of Bombay subscribed to five copies. The paper nonetheless appeared till 1831. A “Hindoostanee newspaper in the Persian character” also began to publish in 1825. Unlike the Persian paper, it was advertised as an “interesting reference, and value to the Gentlemen of the Honorable Company’s Civil, Military and Marine Services.” If these were indeed its target audience, it would indicate that some were able to read the language but could not comfortably read English. This was also expensive, at ten rupees a quarter.[31]
Company Persian and its Anglicist challengers
In the 1760s, hardly any European East India company employees knew Persian. By the 1770s, a small group of Englishmen had learned Persian. The process that unfolded in India and Britain has been studied by Michael Fisher in several works, only one of which could be cited. He has described in rich detail how a few Persian-speaking expats moved among the upper classes as Dyce Sombre and Rammohun Roy did. But I would argue that the “prejudice” against instruction by a native that Fisher mentions was in fact racial prejudice, pure and simple. There was no strong prejudice against Persian or other “Oriental” languages as such. Charles Stewart, who went from Army officer to Persian professor at Haileybury, the college that trained future civil servants, proudly advertised that his History of Bengal was based on Persian primary sources. Such men were infuriated by challenges to the value of their scholarship that emerged in the 1830s. A participant in the debates on the Anglicist side, Charles Trevelyan, wrote in florid prose:
[English scholar-bureaucrats] felt as if the world were given to understand that they had spent their strength for nought, and that their learning was altogether vanity. The axe seemed to them to be laid at the root of their reputations. This was more than human nature could bear.[32]
Liberal empire and language policy
My article has already drawn on Farina Mir’s work on languages in British Punjab to illustrate that substrate languages could maintain their vitality even when deprived of state patronage. I also cited her study as an example of bureaucratic capture of an emerging imperial bureaucracy in the nineteenth century. Green traces some of the ripple effects beyond the edges of that province. But Mir’s comment also brings up conscious policies of “modernization” or Liberal empire in British India that in turn drove the standardization of print and growth of bureaucratization. This is an important observation that I did not consider in the article. On reflection, I would place this phenomenon in the frame of inter-imperial competition for “soft power” in the nineteenth century. French studies of Egypt had served to legitimize the Napoleonic invasion of 1798. That conquest was the prelude to an era when, as legal historian Sharon Korman argues, the post-Vienna world system became oriented toward the idea of “legitimacy” as principle in relations between “civilized” states or members of the Concert of Europe. On the other hand, the “mission civilisatrice” legitimized the political domination of “barbarous peoples” for their own good. John Stuart Mill, that paladin of democracy, wrote that Barbarians had “no rights as a nation except a right to such treatment as may, at the earliest possible period, fit them for becoming one…”[33]
That treatment included the introduction of printing for education and “uplift” of the indigenous population. Such ideas explain the considerable expenditure by the government of Bombay on the Vernacular School Book society long before the governor-generalship of William Bentinck brought Utilitarian ideas to India in 1834-35.[34]
Linguistic hybridization in hierarchical settings
It is clear that Hindi-Urdu (or Hindustani) was and is a north Indian language whose lexicon was significantly changed by borrowing from the “high” languages, Arabic and Persian. This does not mean that any large fraction of the population was ever in fact bilingual. As the linguist John McWhorter writes:
low levels of bilingualism are well known for having a disproportionate effect, even on casual spoken language. Only a minority of English speakers were at any point bilingual in French during the Norman occupation of England, and yet the well-known predominance of French-derived words in even casual English speech traces directly to that bilingualism; the effect of Chinese on Japanese is a similar case among many.[35]
Edward Moor observed that native speakers of Marathi were impressed by Perso-Arabic words in Hindustani and sought to learn and use them. Versions of Hindustani thus spread across the Indian peninsula too: we find the Mysore sultan Hyder Ali (d.1783) speaking it to a Portuguese interpreter.[36] Another source of Persianate loans was the specialized ‘Perso-Marathi’ that grew up around the courts of the southern sultans by 1600. When Maratha rulers established themselves further south, their officials introduced a Persianized Marathi in their revenue administration, even though the populations they taxed were mostly Tamil speaking. This system endured into British rule.[37] Meanwhile, in North India, the British government was from the 1830s trying build a large, standardized but inexpensive bureaucracy. The common language of urban speech, Hindi-Urdu, was a logical choice. I argue elsewhere, and in my article, that the creation of a new apparatus from the ground up was the result of the discovery that the Persian revenue records on which the early Company had relied contained little authentic information. The urbane intelligentsia in even old Persianate regions like Awadh lacked the scribal skills needed to collect and supply it.[38] But the regional elite educated in the Persian script were then able to capture the colonial administrative apparatus in non-Hindustani regions like Punjab because they were already adapted to colonial bureaucratic systems introduced in their homelands a generation earlier.
The rise of Indian-language print and literature in the later colonial period, and the simultaneous decline of Persian as a language of rule, thus originated in an intertwining of administrative, religious, and commercial activities across South Asia and beyond in the nineteenth and twentieth century. I am grateful to the scholars who have commented on my article for pushing its possibilities to wider realms than I had originally visualized. I am indebted to them all.
References
Ali, Mrs. Meer Hassan. 1832. Observations on the Mussulmauns of India, 2 vols. London: Parbury, Allen.
Burton, Antoinette. 1998. At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain.Berkeley: University of California Press.
Chatterjee, Nalini. 2021. “Sharīʿa translated: Persian documents in English courts” In Mahmood Kooria and Sanne Ravensbergen, eds, Islamic Law in the Indian Ocean World: Texts, Ideas and Practices. London: Routeledge, pp. 88-110.
Cohn, Bernard. 1999. “The Command of Language and the Language of Command.” In Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies IV. Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 276–329.
Dalrymple, William. 2002. White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-century India London: HarperCollins.
Fisher, Michael H. 2004. Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857. Delhi: Permanent Black.
Fisher, Michael H. 2013, The Inordinately Strange Life of Dyce Sombre. New York: Oxford University Press.
Green, Nile. 2015. The Love of Strangers: What Six Muslim Students Learned in Jane Austen’s London. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Green, Nile, ed., 2019. The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Khan, Gulfishan. 1998. Indian Muslim Perceptions of the West during the Eighteenth Century. Karachi: Oxford University Press.
Khan, Mirza Abu Taleb. 1814. Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan in Asia, Africa, and Europe during the Years 1799, 1800, 1801, 1802, and 1803, trans. Charles Stewart, 3 vols., 2nd ed. London: Longmans.
Parkes, Fanny. 1850. Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque, 2 vols. London: Pelham Richardson.
Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad. 2001. Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography (New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Visram, Rozina. 2002. Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History. London: Pluto.
[1] The term “Persographic” is used here to emphasize the key skills of writing in Persian which were the defining professional asset of the secretarial groups in question. For fuller discussion, see Nile Green, “The Frontiers of the Persianate World (ca. 800–1900),” in idem. (ed.), The Persianiate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca (University of California Press, 2019). On the issue of scribal mobility, see also Rosalind O’Hanlon, Anand Venkatkrishnan, and Richard Williams, “Scribal Service People in Motion: Culture, Power and the Politics of Mobility in India’s Long Eighteenth Century, c.1680–1820,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 57, 4 (2020): 443–606.
[2] Sumit Guha, “Empires, Languages, and Scripts in the Perso-Indian World,” Comparative Studies in Society and History (2024), 18, 19.
[3] For the fullest statement of this abrupt endpoint, see Tariq Rahman, “Decline of Persian in British India,” South Asia 22, 1 (1999): 47–62, and Guha’s own critique of Rahman’s argument in Guha, “Empires, Languages, and Scripts,” 18.
[4] On the prior stages of this transformation of news reporting, see Michael H. Fisher, “The Office of Akhbar Nawis: The Transition from Mughal to British Forms,” Modern Asian Studies, 27, 1 (1993): 45-82.
[5] Nile Green, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840-1915 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), ch.4; idem, How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding (Yale University Press, 2022), ch.1; Afshin Marashi, Exile and the Nation: The Parsi Community of India and the Making of Modern Iran (University of Texas Press, 2020), ch.4 and 5. See also Alexander Jabbari, The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India (Cambridge University Press, 2023), especially ch.4 on the textual consequences of adopting printing.
[6] Green, How Asia Found Herself, 77-79.
[7] Nile Green, “The Trans-Border Traffic of Afghan Modernism: Afghanistan and the Indian ‘Urdusphere,’” Comparative Studies in Society and History 53, 3 (2011) and idem, “Urdu as an African Language: A Survey of a Source Literature,” Islamic Africa 3, 2 (2012).
[8] On the Persian historiography of Chitral, see Alberto M. Cacopardo and Augusto S. Cacopardo, Gates of Peristan: History, Religion, and Society in the Hindu Kush (Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, 2001), 25-39 and Wolfgang Holzwarth, “Chitral history, 1540-1660: Comments on Sources and Historiography,” in Elena Bashir and Israr-ud-Din (eds.), Proceedings of the Second International Hindukush Cultural Conference (Oxford University Press, 1996), 117-134.
[9] Anjum ‘Abbās, Pardēs Hamāra Dēs: Kēnyā (Mashriqī Afrīqa) kē Tīn Mashhūr Shā‘irūn kā Muntakhab Kalām (Bombay: Kokan Writers Guild, 1989). Urdu has also provided a literary lingua franca for the Indian diaspora in South Africa: Imdād Sābirī, Junūbī Afrīqa kē Urdū Shā‘ir (Delhi: Sābirī Akādimī, 1978).
[10] Farina Mir, “Imperial Policy, Provincial Practices: Colonial Language Policy in Nineteenth-Century India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 43, 4 (2006): 395–427.
[11] Court of Director, letter to Governor General in Council at Fort William in Bengal, 27 Jan. 1802, Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library, London (hereafter OIOC), F/4/300.
[12] “Memorial of His Majesty’s Justices,” OIOC, F/4/638.
[13] “Memorial of His Majesty’s Justices,” OIOC, F/4/638.
[14] “Minute by the Right Honourable The Governor General,” 25 Sept. 1836, OIOC, F/4/1684.
[15] “Resolution of the Governor General,” Political Department, 4 Sept. 1837, OIOC F/4/1684.
[16] Publication information is compiled from a combination of extant copies of the book in the OIOC and quarterly lists on all books published, by province, produced by the Government of India beginning in 1867. The lists are available at the OIOC.
[17] Sadasukh Lal, letter to Eliza Rebecca Elliot, February 23, 1854, attached to Sadasukh Lal, Guldasta Akhlaq, 1853, OIOC, 14106.a.2.
[18] Aziz Samdani, Aziz al Afaq fi Masail al Akhlaq (Allahabad, 1894). More context for this reference, and the Urdu akhlaq tradition of which it is a part can be found in my essay, “Urdu Ethics Literature and the Diversity of Muslim Thought in Colonial India,” The American Historical Review 127, 3 (2022): 1162–1189.
[19] Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the process of Islamization from the eleventh through the fifteenth century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).
[20] One example we have from 1731 and then reissued at several points in the nineteenth century:
In the Name of the Apostles: Houses of the Arts (Be-nām-i ḥavariyyun bürūc-i fünūn), of the Nasihatname or Mirrors for Princes genre aimed at training a Phanariot prince—written in heavily Persian Ottoman Turkish. See Christine Philliou, “Communities on the Verge: Unraveling the Phanariot Ascendancy in Ottoman Governance,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History Vol. 51, No. 1 (Jan. 2009): 173; and Biography of the Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of Calfornia Press, 2011): 30. For more see Nir Shafir, “Phanariot Tongues:The Mavrocordatos Family and the Power of the Turkish Language in the Eighteenth Century Ottoman Empire” in Oriente Moderno 101 (2021): 181-220.
[21] Compiled from The Indian Empire. Census of 1881. Vol. 2: Statistics of Population. (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1883). Form X. Persons whose literacy was unspecified are included in the total.
[22] Guha, ‘Empires’, 22; Census, 1881.
[23] John H. McWhorter Defining Creole. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Ruth L. Schmidt “Urdu”, 286-350. In George Cardona and Dhanesh Jain eds. The Indo-Aryan Languages. London: Routledge Language Family Series, 2003.
[24] Schmidt, 304.
[25] George N. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question. London: Longman, 1892. vol. 1, 493.
[26] Census of 1881, Form X.
[27] Nicholas Sims-Williams, “The Bactrian Inscription of Rabatak: A New Reading” Bulletin of the Asia Institute, 2004, New Series, Vol. 18 (2004), 53-68.
[28] Anant K. Priolkar, The Printing Press in India: Its Beginnings and Early Development. With a foreword by Chintaman D. Deshmukh and An Historical Essay on the Konkani Language by J.H. da Cunha Rivara. Bombay: Marathi Samshodhana Mandala, 1958, 6-27, 48-55.
[29] For example, R.B. Ramsbotham, Studies in the Revenue History of Bengal 1769-1787. Bombay: Humphrey Milford, 1926, 133.
[30] Priolkar, 71.
[31] Murali Ranganathan, “Newspapers in Early Colonial Bombay”. Forbes Gujarati Sabha Traimasik, Volumes 83-84(2018-2019), 156-183. Quotations reproduce the original wording.
[32] Charles E. Trevelyan On the Education of the People of India. (London: Longman, 1838), 52
[33] Sharon Korman, The Right of Conquest: The Acquisition of Territory by Force in International Law and Practice. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 59-63. For a vigorous statement of this doctrine by the paladin of liberal democracy, John Stuart Mill ‘A few words on Non-intervention’, 157-71. In The Spirit of the Age, ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb. Online 2017. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.12987/9780300150247-fm/html
[34] Kenneth Ballhatchet 1957. Social Policy and Social Change in India, 1817-1830. London: Oxford University Press, 260-272.
[35] McWhorter, Defining Creole, 22.
[36] Guha, “Empires”, 11.
[37] Bhavani Raman, 2011. Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Prachi Deshpande 2023. Scripts of Power: Writing, Language Practices, and Cultural History in Western India. Ranikhet: Permanent Black.
[38] Sumit Guha, “Rethinking the Economy of Mughal India: Lateral Perspectives”. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient. 58: 532-75; and Guha, “Empires”, 21-22.
Nile Green is Professor of History and holds the Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History at UCLA. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he is recognized as one of the world’s leading historians of Islam. He has published numerous articles and edited volumes, and he has authored nine books, most recently Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies and Global Islam (Oxford, 2015), How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding (Yale, 2022) and Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan (W.W. Norton, 2024).
Michel H. Fisher is the Danforth Professor of History, Emeritus, Oberlin College, USA. Among his books are: An Environmental History of India (Cambridge, 2018), A Short History of the Mughal Empire (I.B. Tauris, 2015), and (ed.) The Travels of Dean Mahomet: An Eighteenth Century Journey through India (University of California, 1997).
Farina Mir is Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. She studies colonial and postcolonial South Asia, with a particular interest in the religious, cultural, and social history of late-colonial north India. Her monograph, The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab (University of California, 2010), was awarded the 2011 John F. Richards Prize in South Asian History from the American Historical Association and the 2012 Bernard Cohn Prize from the Association of Asian Studies.
Christine Philliou is Professor of History at UC-Berkeley. She specializes in the connected histories of the Balkans and Middle East since the 17th century, focusing on the emergence of the Greek and Turkish nation-states out of the Ottoman Empire. She is interested more broadly in comparative empires and the cultural/historical interfaces of Europe and the Middle East. Her books, Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (University of California, 2010) and Turkey: A Past Against History (University of California, 2021), have been translated into Greek and Turkish.
Sumit Guha is Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor in History at the University of Texas at Austin. He specializes in multiple aspects of South Asian society and history. His many books include Ecologies of Empire in South Asia, 1400-1900 (University of Washington, 2023), History and Collective Memory in South Asia, 1200–2000 (University of Washington, 2019), and Beyond Caste: Identity and Power in South Asia, Past and Present (Brill, 2013).
