In his pioneering work 'Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Nationalist Historiography,' Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi explores how the role of Persianate India in producing Iranian ‘modernity’ and national identity has been written out of history by Iranian and Indian nationalist narratives. He ends with a call for other scholars to engage with the questions he has raised, but in the decade since the publication of Refashioning Iran, not enough have done so. Current scholarly work such as Tavakoli-Targhi’s addresses the impact of intellectual developments in India, such as neo-Zoroastrianism and the fascination with pre-Islamic Iranian culture, on the social milieu of late 19th- and early 20th-century Iran. However, the role of the ‘Indian style’ (sabk-e hendi)— with its use of innovative vocabulary and popular language, attention to economic and social reality, and emphasis of content over style— has been under-analyzed or ignored. In analyzing Iranian intellectual and literary trends at the turn of the 20th century, the function of the ‘Indian style’ as emblem of what lies outside the fold of the Iranian nation-state deserves a place alongside and within the revolutionary currents of socialism and nationalism that have received far more academic attention. This paper expands upon Tavakoli-Targhi’s work and examines how turn-of-the-century Persian literary scholarship of Iran dealt with the ‘Indian style’ as a symbol of once-Persianate India. Following Derrida’s ‘hauntology,’ I demonstrate that the recently-erased history of Persianate India haunts literary critics of the age such as Mohammad-Taqi Bahar; for them, the 'Indian style' marks a decline in Persian literature and has no place in the newly-imagined Iranian nationalist modernity, yet, contradictorily, I will explore how the 'Indian style' also may serve as an early prototype of the very kind of modernism promoted by its Iranian critics. My paper demonstrates that India cannot be erased from Iran’s turn-of-the-century literary and intellectual scene, despite the best attempts of nationalists to the contrary.