The last ten or fifteen years have seen a considerable growth of scholarly interest in Persian biographical dictionaries (i.e., tazkirahs), to an extent that it may now be possible to point to tazkirah studies as a recognized and active subfield of Persian literature studies. In English-language scholarship, this trend has been advanced by researchers such as Paul Losensky, Sunil Sharma, and Rajeev Kinra, to name a few. Despite the recent wave of publications and dissertations, however, there remain a number of fundamental questions about the tazkirah tradition. These works, after all, are collectively myriad and often individually massive, and they have not tended to receive serious attention on their own terms (with some exceptions, mostly in Persian). We still have a huge amount of ground to cover. One of the major questions surrounding tazkirahs, particularly from earlier periods, is how they were researched and written. The authors only occasionally mention their sources or their writing processes, and what statements we find tend to be vague. I would like to discuss an atypical case: a tazkirah titled "Khayr al-bayan," written by Malik Shah Husayn Sistani (b. 978/1571) in multiple drafts between 1017/1608-9 and 1036/1627, mostly or entirely during stays in Harat. (The "Khayr al-bayan" has not yet been edited for publication; my paper relies on the earliest extant manuscript, held at the British Library.) Throughout this work, Shah Husayn includes bits of information about the process of authoring it. We know when and why he started to write his tazkirah; on what dates he completed some individual sections; where, and with whose help, he carried out a round of extensive revisions in 1035/1625-6; and more. In my paper I will attempt to piece together the story of the composition of the "Khayr al-bayan." While we cannot assume that all tazkirahs were written in similar ways, looking at one unusually detailed example may at least serve to open a discussion. And it is important for us to ask more questions about how tazkirah authors carried out their work, if we hope to make nuanced use of this body of sources.

Until recently, tazkirahs have been predominantly utilised by scholars in the field of Persian literary studies as encyclopaedia-like repositories of information, to be mined for facts regarding the lives and poetry of individual poets. My paper will build on the work of recent scholarship, reading two tazkirahs as literary-historical projects, indicative of their local and wider literary cultures, and constituting an important stage in the formation of the Persian literary canon. The contemporaneous tazkirahs of Muhammad Tahir Nasrabadi (Tazkirah-i Nasrabadi, Isfahan, 1672-1680) and Muhammad Afzal Sarkhvush (Kalimat al-Shu'ara', Delhi, 1682), each, somewhat unusually, focusing on the work of their contemporaries, offer us a unique snapshot of the priorities, practices, participants, and trends in two important political and literary centres in the second half of the 17th century. In addition to highlighting the major points of divergence between these two important literary projects, I will discuss the treatment of some of the more prominent literary figures of the day included by each writer (such as Sa’ib, Kalim, and Bidil), in order to illuminate to what extent Safavid and Mughal "sukhan sanjan" (“evaluators of speech”) had a shared perspective on good style and literary celebrities in this period. This comparative reading will help to further contextualise the historic bifurcation of the Persian literary tradition along “Iranian” and “Indian” lines. Situating my analysis of Nasrabadi and Sarkhvush’s tazkirahs in the historical and political moment in which they wrote, I will conclude with some remarks regarding the consequences and effectiveness of their respective strategies of memorialisation.

This paper will examine four early modern Persian tazkeres – two composed by literary critics from India, and two by Iranians – in order to extrapolate and compare their explicit and implicit arguments about the nature of literary style, the centrality of such figurations as metaphor and ambiguity to the evaluation of poetry, and the connections between style and geographical belonging. In his "Khezane-ye ?amere" (1762/1763), Gholam ?Ali Azad Belgrami presents an important, path-breaking discussion of approaches to literary criticism. He argues that Persian literary history came to be reconfigured along the lines of an Indian/Iranian divide a century prior to his own time, and locates the origins of this reconceptualization in a specific biographical compendium: Taher Nasrabadi's "Tazkere-ye Nasrabadi"(1672/1673), wherein figures from India were treated independently of those from Iran and Turan. A strong case for an even earlier example of geographically partisan literary criticism can be made for ?Abd al-Nabi Fakhr al-Zamani Qazvini’s "Tazkere-ye Meykhane", completed in 1618. Two important aspects of Fakhr al-Zam?n?’s literary-critical vision will be highlighted: the reliance of his definitions of style on the presence or absence of difficult metaphor, and implicit arguments he makes about geography and literature that betray an anti-Indian bias. Finally, this paper will consider "Mer??t al-khayal", completed around 1690 by Sher ?Ali Khan Lodi, an Indian scholar active during Aurangzeb’s reign. Lodi’s literary-critical approaches to style and geography intersect definitively in his discussion of the Indian Persian poets of his time (including Naser ?Ali Serhendi, Bidel, and others), whose ornate poetic imagination and inclination towards difficult metaphor were so unique that Lodi considers these poets to have launched an “Indian style” of Persian poetry. Careful reconstruction of emic literary-critical concepts from these four tazkeres has several consequences. First, it becomes clear that the interconnectedness of style and geography in early modern Persian literary criticism predates the contentious split into Indian-vs.-Iranian styles of Persian associated with the later Bazgasht-e Adabi movement (“Literary Return”). Secondly, looking to these early modern tazkeres for guidance can help us navigate certain thorny terminological issues in modern criticism (for instance, the appropriateness and of the very idea of an “Indian style” of Persian poetry, sabk-e Hendi). Finally, recovering those features of literary style deemed to be of pivotal importance by critics in the early modern period allows us to better focus our own analysis of early modern Persian poetry.

The Persian canon shared by writers and readers throughout the Persianate cosmopolis was apportioned and contested by national historiographies of the late 19th and 20th centuries. Scholars have emphasized the rupture of this process, and of the methodological shift from tazkirah to anthology, textbook, and chrestomathy. The anthologies produced within the multinational Soviet literary system complicate this narrative of division and rupture with their appeal to a Persianate basis for institutions of world literature. This paper traces the lineages that connected Stalinist anthologies of Tajik literature to antecedents and contemporaneous undertakings around the Persianate world. An examination of the sources and methods of Sadr al-Din ‘Ayni’s 1926 Sampler of Tajik Literature (Namunah-i adabiyat-i Tajik) and Khaliq Mirza-zadah’s 1940 Samples of Tajik Literature (Namunah’ha-yi adabiyat-i Tajik) reveals how interconnected national literary projects were. Through the international circulation of historiographical narratives and methods, a traditional canon of texts and literary practices gave way to a neoclassical pantheon of heroic writers. In the anthologies that produced this transformation, Iranian Bazgasht critics, Lahore publishers, late Ottoman encyclopedists, and Baku Constitutionalists jostle with Jadid language reformers, young Bolshevik Uzbek folklorists, and Firdawsi Jubilee planners. In early Kemalist Turkey, Pahlavi Iran, and Soviet Transcaucasia and Central Asia, radical critics challenged the very idea of a classical literary canon as a form of elite cultural capital, but from the 1930s to the 1950s, this critique gave way to concerns about equal representation of Persianate national literatures in world literature. By mid-century, from these polemics came an eclectic synthesis enshrined in state school literature textbooks.