Edward G. Browne’s travelogue, A Year Amongst the Persians, stands out in the broader genre of nineteenth-century European travel literature. For historians of the Middle East, European travelogues have long had a double-edged quality to them: on the one hand, they often provide invaluable empirical information. On the other hand, they occasionally suffer from their authors’ biases and prejudices, which color their depictions. In this context, Browne’s travelogue has been described as a “sympathetic” portrayal of late nineteenth-century Iran, and Browne himself has been held up as an example of an Orientalist who did not quite fit the model criticized most forcefully by Edward Said. This paper moves the discussion on Browne forward by exploring a crucial period during which his knowledge of and expertise over Iran’s history, society, and literature was formed. Before traveling to Iran in 1887, Browne’s sole experience in the Middle East had been a summer spent in Istanbul while a student at Cambridge. His knowledge of Persian, and of Iran, derived mainly from his university studies and from evenings spent reading Persian texts while working as a physician. Browne’s election as a fellow to Pembroke College, in 1887, lent him institutional support, but it was only during his extended stay in Iran in 1887-1888 that his understanding of the country’s history and culture began to acquire the depth for which he later became famous. Browne’s unpublished four-volume diaries, which he kept during his travels, offer a window onto the development of a rising scholar. The diaries are replete with anecdotes of individuals Browne met in Iran, and of the information, books, and excursions they shared with him. Browne’s “informants” ranged from members of the Qajar royal family, to Babis, Sufis, geomancers, and dervishes – an extraordinarily diverse group of people. He took the time to record his conversations with these individuals, providing the raw material from which A Year Amongst the Persians was written. These interactions shaped Browne’s early views of Iran’s literature, religions, politics, economy, environment, and food. The picture that emerges is of an enthusiastic, self-assured, and naïve scholar whose work more closely resembles careful ethnographic research than that of his contemporaries, like George Curzon. This paper suggests that the key to appreciating Browne’s travelogue and later scholarship (including his monumental four-volume A Literary History of Persia) is in his ability to empathize with his contacts in Iran during his sojourn in the country.

The contribution of E G Browne (1862-1926) to the study of pre-modern Persian poetry, in particular the impact of his reading of pre-modern Persian literary history as presented in the first three volumes of his monumental A Literary History of Persia, remains relevant today. Browne’s role in fostering the academic study of Persian poetry in the west, and his influence on indigenous poetic canonicity in Iran, is worthy of detailed study, but the Cambridge professor’s engagement with and praise for poets of the first half of the nineteenth century have largely gone unnoticed. This presentation analyses a series of statements made by Browne spanning the period 1893-1924 in which he acquaints his readers with those poets he considers the most significant of early Qajar Iran, and encourages them to read their works without prejudice. Repeatedly Browne argues against what he sees as the misperception that no worthy Persian poets appeared after Jami (d. 1492). Although he does comment on a few key Safavid poets, Browne seems most taken by what could be termed the “high Bazgasht period”: the first few decades of the nineteenth century during which the nascent Qajar state co-opted the Isfahan-centred grassroots Literary Return movement that had emerged in the eighteenth century to become the poetic bedrock of its cultural policy. Browne demonstrates that he is not only abreast of literary publications printed in Iran in the 1880s and 1890s, but that he is in regular contact with Iranian scholars based in Iran and the broader Middle East (e.g. Istanbul) engaged in the academic study of Persian poetry. Browne displays most interest in two groups of early Qajar poets: 1) the leading panegyrists of the court (in particular two Shirazi poets, Visal [d. 1846] and Qa’ani [d. 1853]); and 2) Babi poet-martyrs (chiefly Tahira Qurrat al-‘Ayn [d. 1852]). Browne’s connection to Visal and Qa’ani is facilitated through his intimate association with descendants when in Iran (1887-88). In terms of the Babi martyr-poets, Browne’s first-hand experience of the recitation of verses attributed to Tahira Qurrat al-‘Ayn at clandestine Babi-Baha’i gatherings left its mark on him, and her ghazals were among his favourite Persian poems, modern or pre-modern. It seems that Browne not only believed poets of substance had existed in early nineteenth-century Iran, he felt personally connected to their descendants and did not shy away from confessing that he was emotionally affected by their verses and biographies.

Although the British scholar Edward Granville Browne died just over 90 years ago, his foundational scholarship continues to be relevant to the field of Iranian studies. Contemporary scholars of Iran still engage directly with his works in their studies of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution, classical and modern Persian literature, and early Babi-Baha’i history. There has been less attention, however, to how Iranians received Browne’s ideas during and shortly after his own lifetime. This paper focuses on Browne’s reception in Iran by a host of literary and political figures who either met with him, corresponded with him, or read him from afar. It begins by considering Browne’s unique approach to studies of Iran, which was characterized by a wide-ranging series of exchanges with Iranians themselves about their history, politics, and literature. Contrary to many contemporary historiographical evaluations of Browne, this paper argues that he was by no means an ivory-tower Orientalist who crafted a totalizing narrative of Persian literature or the 1906 Iranian Constitutional Revolution that later Iranian nationalists slavishly imitated. The paper then shifts to two events that drew the attention of Browne’s many Iranian interlocutors: his sixtieth birthday in 1921 and his death in 1926. Using unpublished letters and poems, as well as published obituaries, translations, and commemorative volumes, it examines how contemporary Iranians generally viewed Browne as an anti-imperial figure who challenged British policies towards Iran. Many Iranians considered Browne’s canonization of Persian poetry as an external validation of indigenous nationalist efforts to do the same. Browne also became the object of contemporary critique from other segments of Iranian society: to opponents of classical Persian literature like Ahmad Kasravi, Browne was thought to reinforce a reactionary and “backwards” tendency within Iran while to certain Iranian Baha’is, his scholarship on early Babi history were viewed as deviations from official hagiography. This paper suggests that instead of reading Browne’s writings anachronistically as a foil to contemporary scholarly approaches, it would be more productive to situate him among his Iranian contemporaries to better understand the broadly reciprocal set of transnational relationships that shaped debates over Iranian historiography, Persian literature, and anti-imperial politics over the course of the 1910s-1920s.