The papers in this panel present four views of Persianate travels into colonial worlds in the early nineteenth century. They trace the journeys of Muslim Shi'i scholars and poets between Iran and India in the first decades of the nineteenth century, a merchant trekking on behalf of the East India Company from Delhi to Central Asia in 1812 in search of the world's fleetest horses, a student expedition dispatched from Qajar Iran to England circa 1815, and a Kashmiri munshi traveling from India to Afghanistan and Iran in 1834. Through a reading of Persian travel literature and the literary genre of the "travel book," the papers collected here examine the ways early nineteenth-century travel writing revealed interconnections and shared worlds while also ascribing ethnographic and cultural difference. The panel addresses the simple question, how did early nineteenth-century Persianate travelers see the world?
Ranging from the Indo-Persian crossroads to European cities, the travel narratives explored in this panel represent the routes of people "in between." At their most elemental, the papers seek to comprehend colonial effects on the methods and conventions of Persianate travel writing. At their most instructive, they suggest the persistence of Persianate customs of travel literature in an age of colonial print. The first paper analyzes the pilgrimages of Persian speaking Shi'i Muslims whose travels across the Indian Ocean between the Middle East and South Asia articulated Persianate ideas of geography and culture. The second paper follows the trail of an East India Company "native" explorer adrift in the middle ground of Central Asia and Tibet, recovering the fragments of his journeys into environments where empires held little sway. The third paper turns to a Persian student mission to Britain and mutual learning between London and Tabriz, detailing encounters between Persian students and British orientalists and missionaries. The fourth paper explores the travails and writings of a Kashmiri scribe who was educated in English and took to the road on a British imperial expedition to Afghanistan and Iran on the eve of the First Anglo-Afghan War, depicting how his travelogue was written as if it were a Persian text, even though it is in English. Together, the papers move away from the notion that contact with the colonial marked the ebb of indigenous forms of travel literature to offer views of the flourishing genre of Persian travel writing in times of intensified global travel and circulation.
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Dr. Arash Khazeni
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the East India Company deployed “native” writers or munshis from the Persophone world to survey the lands of Afghanistan, Tibet, and Central Asia. This paper traces the life-long journeys of one of these Indo-Persian travelers. Drawing on manuscripts and letters from the India Office and the Bodleian Library, it follows the trail of Mir Izzat Ullah, a merchant from Delhi who trekked the caravan roads of Central Asia in the first decades of the nineteenth century and composed a “book of travels,” Ahval-i Safar-i Bukhara, merging Persianate and colonial genres of travel writing. Dispatched to the city of Multan in the Punjab in 1807 and subsequently on the Kabul Mission in 1808, Mir Izzat Ullah entered into the service of the Central Asian explorer William Moorcroft and in 1812 led an expedition into Afghanistan, Turkistan, and Tibet in search of the world’s fleetest horses. Traveling across Central Asia for over two decades, he contracted cholera near the Afghan city of Balkh and died on the road in 1825. Piecing together the fragments of a life of journeys, the paper suggests Mir Izzat Ullah’s itineraries traversed a “middle ground,” lands in between, connecting the worlds of Central Asia and Mughal India.
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Prof. Nile Green
In 1812, and again in 1815,the government of Persia dispatched its first parties of students to study in Europe. However, soon after their arrival in England, they found themselves bereft of financial or other support from their princely sponsor, the reformist crown prince 'Abbas Mirza. During the years they spent in London before returning home in 1819, the six students skillfully negotiated their way into a variety of social networks among East India Company orientalists, scholars at the universities, physicians, military officers and missionaries. Drawing on archival evidence, diaries and other sources from the period, this paper focuses on what the various students were studying; who they were studying with; and what their various British cooperators learned from them in return. Occuring a full decade before the better-known arrival of the Egyptian students in Paris in 1826, the Persian student mission affords us a detailed picture of intellectual exchange between Europe and the Middle East early in the nizam-i jadid period of reforms across the entire region.
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Dr. Sunil Sharma
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.
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Dr. Mana Kia
In 1805, Ahmad Bihbihani (1777-1819), a Shi‘i mujtahid (jurisconsult) educated in Iran and Iraq, traveled to India, where he spent five years in various cities of the subcontinent. After unsuccessful attempts to gain long-term patronage in Hydera¬bad, Lucknow and Murshidabad, Bihbihani obtained the position of Friday prayer leader at the Shi‘i congregational mosque in British-ruled Patna. In 1810, before he undertook the journey back to Iran, he wrote Mirat al-ahval-i jahan numa, a noticeably autobiographical narrative of his journeys heavily inflected with ethnographic observations. Dedicated to the Qajar prince, Mohammad ‘Ali Mirza Dawlatshah (1789–1821), it was self-consciously written to present information peoples, places and practices outside of Iran. This text was written at a critical juncture, early in the life of the Qajar dynasty, before it had suffered the military defeats of later decades. Bihbihani encounters an India in which the British are important players, but where regional kingdoms are still prominent and Persian is still the language of government and learning. This paper explores the ways in which Bihbihani represented religious and gender difference through descriptions of social comportment and encounters. I argue that though descriptions of religious and gender differences distinguish Iran from India, these are localizations of culture. Differences are still posed within a continuing sensibility of shared culture, derived from a common Persianate education that Bihbihani shared with his Hindustani Persian subjects and interlocutors. I read Bihbihani’s text against the background of other descriptions of difference in contemporaneous Persianate travel narratives written between Iran and India.
