In Persian literary history, it is commonplace to find numerous citations from various medieval and early modern biographical works. These works may be from a number of different--but related--genres, including tazkereh, tabaqat, seyar, malfuzat, and divan introductions (muqaddemeh). However, the approach of most scholars to these texts is relatively similar: that is, they treat them as repositories of biographical data that can be mined for factual information. While there is a broad recognition that some of the information that is provided in these accounts is certainly fallacious, there is still a stubborn tendency in Persian literary studies to read medieval poetic biography traditions as if they represent a factual core adulterated by some inaccuracies, exaggerations, and stylized elements that can be sifted through to reveal their real, factual foundations. In my view, however, this approach to medieval Persian biographical literature is not only largely unproductive, but, more importantly, I think it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of these texts and thus leads to serious misuses of this body of literature in the scholarship on the medieval period. This problematic approach to biographical traditions is especially evident in the scholarship on the medieval Persian poet Fakhr al-Din ‘Eraqi, whose biographical tradition I will use as a case study for the present essay. I will suggest an alternative way of reading these texts through a exploration of ‘Eraqi’s biographical tradition as it is represented in a number of the most important Persian biographical works, including the anonymous 14-15th introduction/muqaddemeh to his divan, Dowlatshah Samarqandi’s "Tazkerat al-Shu’ara," Jami’s "Nafahat al-Uns," Gazargahi’s "Majalis al-‘Ushshaq," Qazvini’s "Tazkereh-ye Meykhaneh," and Arzu’s "Tazkereh Majma’ al-Nafa’is." Utilizing analogous studies of poetic biographical traditions (vita, vida, razo) in other literary traditions (e.g. the studies of Poe, Burgwinkle, Nagy, Zumthor) and recent critical assessments of Islamicate/Persianate historiographic/hagiographic literature (e.g. studies of Chabbi, Waldman, Noth, Khalidi, Meisami, Cornell, Hermansen, Mojaddedi, Steinfels, Stewart), I will argue that ‘Eraqi’s biographical tradition should primarily be read as an interpretive and discursive construct that (1) fashions deeply symbolic and stylized biographical sitz im lebens for some of ‘Eraqi’s most famous poems, and (2) constructs a Sufi exemplar in its portrayal of ‘Eraqi. This reconceptualization of the nature of these biographical genres could have a profound effect on the evaluation of previous Persian literary history and the writing of any future histories of Persian literature.

Sometime in the first half of the nineteenth century, Birbal Kachru (1775-1865, takhallos “Varasteh”), a Persian poet, distinguished prose stylist, and historian of Kashmir, composed a masnavi boldly titled “Satinameh”. The poem is a strange and wonderful black-humour fusion of the classical Persian “suz o godaz” register and the theme of sati, where the widow is described, quite literally, as burning with the grief of separation. Though the practice of sati had long been frowned upon by Mughal officials and was eventually banned by the British in the nineteenth century, an incident of sati occurred during Varasteh’s lifetime, in 1831, only two years after the latest in a series British sati bans. Whether or not it was inspired by this historical incident, as Girdhari Tikku has suggested, Varasteh’s poem is a brilliant example of the verbal pyrotechnics associated with sabk-e hendi, whereby clichéd tropes and images from the poetic and conceptual lexica of Zoroastrianism, Sufism, and Hinduism are melted down and reforged anew. Surprisingly, Varasteh was not the first to take up this unusual topos. Molla Nou'i-e Khabushani (d. 1610), a student of Mohtasham-e Kashani (1528-1588) and court poet under Emperors Akbar and Jahangir, had composed a masnavi titled “Suz o godaz”, describing two lovers' separation and their subsequent mystical reunion – a tragic tale with unmistakable sati undertones. But possibly the earliest example of a Persian poem on the theme of sati was penned by Amir Hasan Dihlavi (1254-1338), a disciple of Nezam od-Din Ouleya and close friend of Amir Khosrou. Originally from Sistan, his limpid, earnest verse earned him the title of “Sa'di of Hendustan”, and among his extant poems is a masnavi titled “'Eshqnameh”, which, as has been noted, shares both its meter (hazaj) and theme with Nou'i’s poem. In what posture does Varasteh’s poem preside over this mini-canon of Indo-Persian sati poems? Does he unambiguously imitate and extend the mystical and/or social aims of his predecessors, or does he invert their themes into a sati satire? What did it mean for a Kashmiri brahmin to compose a poem on sati, in Persian, during British rule? This paper will address these questions through close readings of all three poems.

The romance tradition in Persian literature is typically traced back to the early eleventh century, with the appearance of four important works: sections of the Shâh-nâma (Ferdowsi, d. 1020), Varqa-va-Golshâh (Ayyuqi, d. ca. 1030), Vâmeq-o-Azrâ (Onsori, d. 1039), and Vis-o-Râmin (Gorgâni, c. 1055). These works, the story goes, set the stage for Nezâmi Ganjavi (d. ca. 1209), whose “Quintet” firmly established the conventions of the Persian romance and provided the model for countless imitations, responses, and adaptations by poets well into the seventeenth century. This narrative, while accurate in the broad sense, comes with some significant drawbacks: it collapses a large body of poetry of considerable thematic and stylistic variety into a single category, elevates the work of one poet as the standard against which all others are measured, and posits the concept of “romance” as a fixed form and genre with its own historical trajectory. However, “romance” is not an indigenous term, and while our use of it, both in Western and Iranian scholarship, does illuminate some intriguing points of comparison between Persian, Greek, and European models, it makes it difficult to recreate the original context from which this literary movement emerged. What exactly is a “romance” in Persian literature? Where did it come from? What is its relationship with other forms and genres? This paper seeks to begin to address these questions through a thematic and structural reading of the four works mentioned above against some of their known sources, which include Pahlavi songs, Hellenistic novels, Arabic lyric poetry, and Abbasid court literature. The results of the study, although preliminary, already suggest a few important themes that warrant further investigation: that music may play a much more significant role in the performance and reception of the text than was previously thought; that content, and not form, is the dominant element in setting the horizons of expectation for a poem; that the conceptual distinction between epic, lyric, and romantic poetry will not map very well onto Persian literature without some careful adjustment of these terms; and finally, that a transformation of the “genre” seems to have occurred in the early eleventh century, in which poets inverted, interiorized, and destabilized their sources to create impossible moral dilemmas to which death was the only solution. Through this study, we hope to contribute to the ongoing effort to bring greater nuance and precision to the history of Persian literature.

This paper analyzes the role of one of the earliest ‘modern’ Iranian histories of Persian prose, Muhammad-Taqi Bahar’s landmark Sabkshinasi (“Stylistics,” 1942 CE), in the emergence of the University of Tehran’s Department of Persian Literature, and, more broadly, the place of this literary history and the discipline of Persian literature in the Pahlavi modernization project. Sabkshinasi was composed by Bahar (1884-1951, also known by his title ‘Malik al-Shu`ara’ or Poet Laureate) after the Ministry of Culture requested a textbook be compiled for doctoral students of Persian literature. Treating Sabkshinasi as part of the state project of modernization, I examine how tropes of modernity, such as the urge towards categorization, manifest themselves in Bahar’s view of literary history in similar ways to his European sources of influence, such as the German Orientalist Ernst Herzfeld’s model of Iranian art history. I thus demonstrate how the emergence of Persian literature as a ‘modern’ discipline, or what Bahar calls the “new science” of literary criticism, separately bounded from other kinds of knowledge, reflects the breakup of traditional knowledge production into distinct sciences in Europe, as described by Foucault in The Order of Things. I also consider the relationship between Bahar’s text and the built environment it serves, comparing how this modern literary history functions in service of its physical location (the Department of Persian Literature) to the relationship between pre-modern tazkira literary histories and Sufi shrines. Through doing so, I argue for a close connection between Bahar's Persian literary history, the University of Tehran Department of Persian Literature, and the Pahlavi state's efforts towards constructing an Iranian modernity.

Siraj al-Din Khan-i Arzu was one of the most significant literary figures of South Asia in the 17th-18th century CE, and had authored close to 36 written works in the field of research on Persian literature, such as stylistics (sabkshinasi), and introduced innovative ideas in various fields including stylistics, linguistics, rhetoric, poetic criticism, hagiographical writing (tazkira-nivisi), and others. One of his most important works is his tazkira titled Majma` al-Nafa’is. This work has not received the scholarly attention it deserves, in spite of its importance for literary studies. Khan-i Arzu was a highly knowledgeable litterateur, and he devoted serious attention to the issue of poetic style (sabk) and stylistics. In his own works, especially Majma` al-Nafa’is, he developed his profound opinions on the subject of poetic style. Although Arzu’s critical views on stylistics are mostly disconnected and scattered throughout the tazkira, they can be compiled into a distinctive set of opinions and in this way his approach to poetic style can be identified. Through a careful reading of Majma` al-Nafa’is and comparison with Khan-i Arzu’s other works, I have attempted in this paper to draw out Arzu’s critical views on various aspects of poetic style, in order to subject them to classification and analysis. Through doing so, I hope to open Arzu and his critical thought up for further study and entice other scholars to devote more serious attention to this important and often overlooked literary figure.