Basatin al-Uns (The Gardens of Fondness, c. 1325-26) is the sole surviving work of an erudite courtier named Akhsitan Dihlavi (1301-1351), who spent most of his adult life in the service of Sultan Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq (1320-1324) and his son Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq Shah (r. 1324-1351). This book was conceived when Akhsitan accompanied Sultan Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq on the latter’s military expedition to Sunargoan, Lakhauti, and Tirhut in east India. On their return journey, he fell sick due to the extreme heat of Tirhut. While he was convalescing under the watchful eyes of the famed physician Muhammad Khujandi, his friends narrated several Sanskrit love stories for his amusement. Although their stories had moved him profoundly, he was quite disappointed by the literary style of their Persian translation and narration. Consequently, he decided to recast these romances in an elegant and charming style in his Bas?t?n al-Uns. Alongside the fictional tales of kings and queens from Kalyan, Sarandip (Ceylon), Ujjain, Kashmir, Kannauj and China, Akhsitan Dihlavi narrates the political events and military campaigns of his Tughluq patrons and portrays the social and cultural conditions prevailing in early modern India. Thus, Basatin al-Uns exemplifies one of the earliest efforts by an Indian writer to interweave history (tarikh), autobiography (zindaginama), eulogy (qasida) and folklore (qissa) in the form of Persian prose (nasr). My paper reexamines the fictional stories of Basatin al-Uns with the aim of elucidating Akhsitan’s engagement with South Asian literary cultures and folklore, on the one hand, and Persian literary genres on the other hand. It reflects on the modalities of literary translation and cultural exchange, which underscored the emergence of Persian prose writing in South Asia. Through a critical appraisal of Akhsitan’s pathbreaking work, I argue that early modern Persian genres acquired a global profile primarily because they facilitated a cross-regional exchange of ideas, narratives, and ethoi. In doing so, I critique various Iranocentric models of literary history and propose cultural resonance as a more inclusive and ethical basis for exploring the history of Persian literature.

Early modern Persianate cultures have been greatly influenced by the “mirror for princes” genre, which offers monarchs advice on how to treat their subjects justly as if they were intimate friends and familial companions. While scholars have chosen to study this genre from a patriarchal perspective, how royal women shaped this genre have remained underexamined. This paper argues that the Humayunnama, an autobiography written in Persian by the 16th century Mughal Princess, Gulbadan Begum, offers readers new ways of seeing how elite Mughal women used autobiographical writing to broker imperial power with male co-sovereigns. Building on Michel Foucault’s theory of counter-memory, I argue that Gulbadan creates a new “mirror for princesses” autobiography that redefines the genre by combining memory narratives and historical facts in the Humayunnama. Through this, she is able to instruct both female and male readers on how elite Mughal women embodied the Persianate masculine chivalry central to Mughal definitions of virtuous kingship, and how this integrated matriarchy contributed to the early formation of the Mughal Empire.

The paper takes as a premise that inasmuch as the Safavids were heir to the Aqquyunlu and the Timurds in terms of their political and social structure as well as cultural models, there were also strong continuities between the Turkic — in addition to the Persian — literary traditions these three regimes cultivated. Setting out from a discussion of certain general features of Turkic literary practices at the court of Shah Isma‘il I (r. 1501-1524) in Safavid Iran through the poetry of poets like Shah Ismail himself, as well as Kishvari and Habibi, it outlines how this tradition was embedded on the one hand in what may be termed Western Oghuz literature, from which Ottoman Turkish also derived, and in Chaghatay Turkic on the other hand, the cultivation of which connected Safavid Turkic litterateurs to the prestige of the Timurids. Instead of a dynastic vision of literary history, which is very often a mere disguise for nationalist frameworks, however, the paper also offers a new periodization scheme for the history of Turkic literature in Iran. I argue that the first period of a continuous Turkic literary tradition started with the Islamization of the Mongols around the turn of the fourteenth century and the collapse of Mongol rule in Iran in ca. 1335, this first period lasting until around the end of the sixteenth century, when fundamental changes took place in literary patronage, related to political, social, economic and religious centralization in Safavid Iran, as well as to the Turkic tribal aristocracy’s loss of most of its power.

This paper explores the connections between devotion to the Imam ‘Ali al-Riza (d. 818) and the cultivation of ambiguity in the personae of Persian poets. Its main source is Maliha Samarqandi’s Muzakkir al-Ashab (completed in Samarqand, ca. 1693), a tazkira (“remembrance”) of poets that comprises accounts of contemporaneous poets’ lives (most of whom Maliha had met) alongside citations from their verses. These accounts include a number of poets who elude being known in various ways - for instance, through their refusal to identify as either Sunni or Shi‘i. I argue that Maliha invests the ambiguity of these poets with positive significance, such that ambiguity does not simply result in opacity. Rather, the poets’ eluding being known in certain terms enables their being known in other terms. In particular, I demonstrate that the lived devotion of a number of these poets to Imam al-Riza is one way in which Maliha marks their personae without defining or circumscribing them. A growing body of modern scholarship has worked to qualify an older scholarly narrative of political and sectarian rupture in the Persianate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, following the establishment of the Safavid dynasty in Iran in 1501 and their promotion of Shi‘ism. One productive way of demonstrating the functioning of the Persianate as a sphere of exchange extending across political and sectarian lines has been to trace the circulation of Persian literati across these lines (cf. for example Szuppe, 2004). This paper draws upon and aims to contribute to this scholarship, by considering the question of what made it possible for the high mobility of Persian literati to result in not only transregional encounters, but affiliation and intimacy. It finds that the cultivation of ambiguity by poets enabled new modes of sociability, cemented by shared understandings that include the widely-held and deeply felt sense (irreducible to readings as either Sunni or Shi‘i) of the sacred power and significance of the Imams. As such, this meaningful ambiguity asks to be read as both informed by and formative of the Persianate ecumene.