The Kashmiri munshi Mohan Lal accompanied Sir Alexander Burnes on a political mission to Iran and Afghanistan in 1834, a few years before the First Anglo-Afghan War. Interestingly, both individuals published travelogues describing this trip, yet the two narratives couldn’t be more different in their tone and self-representational devices. Burnes’ narrative, Travels into Bokhara, Being an account of a Journey from India to Cabool, Tartary and Persia, which instantly became a popular and important work, is a dry official account of the geography and politics of the regions in which he traveled. Mohan Lal’s work, Travels in the Panjab, Afghanistan & Turkistan [and Iran], although written in English and revised in an 1846 edition, reads as if it were a translation of a Persian text. Mohan Lal’s descriptions of the places he visited and people he encountered are poetic and engaging, and his ethnographic observations are not detached and scientific, as one would expect from a travel book influenced by British models, but lyrical and personal. In addition to his identity as an Indian munshi, he often represents himself as a Muslim, even undergoing a conversion of sorts at some point. His encounters with women and a Persian lad are described in an erotic vein, suggesting that he is performing a role from the world of a Persian poetic narrative. This paper argues that Mohan Lal’s travelogue, as an early work of the genre that is situated between multiple traditions, should be read as a Persianate text in English, and the author’s representation of himself is part of the negotiation of various identities in the milieu of complex social and historical circumstances in the early nineteenth century.