Concurrent with the formation of Persian literature as an academic discipline in early twentieth-century Iran and Afghanistan, literary journals developed a novel poetic practice called eqterah (a test of poetic talent). The first time this practice appears in print appears to date back to 1918 when the journal Daneshkadeh featured a prose translation of a French-language fragment by Boileau and accompanied by a versified translation by Mohammad Taqi Bahar. Daneshkadeh asked readers to compose a poem that would capture the meaning of this fragment in Persian poetry. Literary journals used eqterah to create and connect with their reading community and establish adabiyat as a new discourse of literature entangled with communal identity. This talk examines two instances of this practice in the journals Ayandeh and Kabul, respectively published in Tehran and Kabul. It analyzes how Iranians and Afghans were engaged as co-conspirators in a shared literary project to nationalize Persian literature as their own.

In a whole host of Persian textual forms, the figure of the friend is ubiquitous. The friend sometimes renders the text possible, either by requesting or inspiring its writing. In other cases, texts offer anecdotes of friends who give or receive information, often authorizing the author. More than just dialogues over aesthetics, commemorative texts articulate social worlds undergoing upheaval in the 18th-century, in the aftermath of Safavid and Mughal empires. I focus on two widely read and reproduced texts written in the 1760s, Azad Bilgrami’s Khizanah-yi ‘amirah (Deccan) and Azar Baygdili’s Atashkadah (Iraq- ‘ajam), against the background of other tazkirahs produced in the late 18th century. Friendship and its social practices were crucial for the way Persianate community could be commemorated and these texts illuminate the possibilities and limitations for a transregional social imaginary undergoing political and social reconstitution. Various regions of Iran and India experienced the mid-late 18th century in different ways that impacted their relationship with other regions. I look at how social ties enacted in companionship and correspondence resulted in different kinds of commemorative texts, constituting divergent views of the Persianate world, based on what forms of sociality were possible. How was the awareness and coherence of a transregional poetic community affected by the fall of Mughal and Safavid empires? What happened to the production and circulation of texts, people, and ideas and what became of the transregional social imaginary? In other words, how do we historicize the Persianate, its limits and possibilities, in the 18th century? This paper outlines how forms of commemorating the social provide new insights into the meaning of how Persians in and between Iran and India experienced political changes. This approach allows us think about the relation of political and material circumstances to representational possibilities and aesthetic affiliations in terms of reconfiguration of the transregional circulation in the turbulent period between empires.

What were the implications of consensual plagiarism among Persian writers in the early modern period? How did one navigate the politics of keeping poetic diaries in literary society? What forms of history writing emerged from this context? In assessing these issues, this presentation considers a text shared between Ghulam Hamadani Mushafi (1751-1824) and Muhammad Hasan Qatil (1757/8-1818), two eighteenth-century Persian-educated literati writing in late Mughal India. In spite of the Mughal throne’s fracturing power, India's Persianate public sphere continued to incubate among regional courts a productive ferment of debates on appropriate language, local influence, and vernacular literary style, all controversial topics that broke friendships and birthed new enmities among the semi-elites of the wider Persian-educated world. Both Qatil and Mushafi grew prominent in this setting, but as friendly competitors: Mushafi became a celebrated poet in the salons of Lucknow, writing eight divans in Rekhtah—the Persianized vernacular today known as Urdu—and Qatil, a Hindu convert to Shi‘i Islam, also rose to fame in Delhi and later Lucknow as a composer of Persian verse and a commentator in prose. This paper focuses on a commonplace book traded between Mushafi and Qatil, a work that culminated in the tazkirah known as ‘Iqd-i Surayya (The Necklace of the Pleiades). The tazkirah is a type of biographical compendium compiled from diaries and commonplace books, now gaining renewed importance among contemporary historians of the early modern Islamicate world. In this case, ‘Iqd-i Surayya chronicles Persian-language writers patronized in the years before Mushafi and Qatil’s time (roughly 1720-1770), and while Mushafi is credited as its author, Qatil collected its verse, biographies, and anecdotes. It is a work reflecting shared tastes and contrasting understandings of literary history, begging the question why did Qatil give Mushafi his commonplace book to be edited into a tazkirah? Reading this text in dialogue with both writers’ later output and other period compendia reveals that crafting literary history in the 1780s was an enterprise co-determined by the hierarchical demands of local literary sociability and competitive notions of inter-regional distinction. The tazkirah ‘Iqd-i Surayya unsettles our understanding of period socio-linguistic hierarchies, revealing that shared texts and the practices that created them chart contradictory histories of the Persianate world’s public sphere.

At the turn of the eighteenth century a number of Afghans, i.e. Pashtuns began translating Persian texts into Pashto and these subsequently acted as a foundational canon for a Pashto literary tradition. But Pashto also had a strong oral tradition and during this same period numerous authors started transforming oral tales into literary texts and these also became a core of the Pashto literary tradition. In this paper I seek to understand the social and literary landscape of the Persianate world at its linguistic margins by examining developments at the turn of the eighteenth century in Pashto. When the son of the famous Khushal Khan Khattak (c. 1636-1689), Abdul Qadir Khan (c. 1652-1714) decided to translate Sa’di’s Gulist?n into Pashto he described the decision as a response to requests of Pashtuns who desired to have texts in their own language that could be enjoyed by people of all classes. The implication was that Persian and Arabic, while functioning as a lingua franca and language of religious authority, were limited in other crucial ways, namely in their ability to be a language for the people. Through an examination of extant manuscript copies of Pashto oral tales this presentation interrogates the limits of the Persianate by underscoring attempts to not only incorporate Persianate literary traditions into Pashto, but also to distinguish and differentiate Pashto as a language not beholden to Persian. Through an examination of the circulation and production of Pashto literary texts the Persianate as a dialogic arena of negotiation, differentiation, and expanding social imaginaries comes into clearer focus.