Mapping the Literary Corpus: The Geography of Early Modern Persian Anthologies
Panel I-13, 2021 Annual Meeting
On Monday, November 29 at 2:00 pm
Panel Description
In discussing space and place, authors position themselves physically, temporally, and socially, and reflect on their ideological concerns. When it comes to writing literary history, the examination of pre-modern conceptions of geography therefore offers a way of interrogating those modern scholarly narratives which impose the temporal and spatial interests of modern nationalism on the texts of the past.
Geography is a particularly salient issue in the study of pre-modern Persian literature, because literary networks extended over much of Eurasia. This point has been recognized repeatedly in recent publications. Historians of literature and culture have grappled with the question of space theoretically, by investigating ideas of the ‘Persianate’ (Green 2019; Amanat and Ashraf 2019; d’Hubert and Papas 2019; Kia 2020); and practically, by close-reading different kinds of pre-modern texts: travelogues (Alam and Subrahmanyam 2007); biographical anthologies of poetry, known as tazkiras (Smith 2009; Sharma 2012; Kia 2014; Schwartz 2020); and the collected works of individual poets (Ingenito 2018; Mikkelson 2017).
The present panel is designed to enhance these findings by examining three Persian anthologies which date from the mid-sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century. These are works of literary historiography which ostensibly document, but inevitably offer a subjective representation of, the location of major and minor players of the literary scene, the centers of textual production, and networks of writers, patrons, critics and audiences, as they were known to the compilers. The three texts that we have chosen were produced in Iran and Khurasan; Mughal North India; and the Deccan, elucidating coeval views on the locus of literary authority from different geographical vantage points.
Our common approach is a holistic one which examines these works in their entirety, uncovering the ways in which the entries are connected to one another and piecing together the compilers’ mental maps of their literary worlds. In addition to reconstructing the intellectual and literary genealogies which the anthologies document, we also pay attention to the verse that they transmit, and demonstrate what the choice of these particular poems is designed say about the state of literature, the leading writers of each generation, and the centers of literary innovation – all key issues for the anthologists. Taken as a group, the papers offer fresh perspectives on the seismic shifts that affected how Persian literary texts were produced, disseminated and received during the early modern period.
The Kashkul of Bahaʾ al-Din ʿAmili is a five-volume anthology which was compiled at the end of the sixteenth century. Its author, one of the famous emigres from the Jabal ʿAmil region in Lebanon to Iran, counted among the best-known writers of the Safavid period and as a reference-point for Shiʿi scholars in the centuries after his death. Consisting of many different extracts drawn from across the spectrum of textual production, the Kashkul is mostly dedicated to narrative prose and poetry in both Arabic and Persian, forming an archive of literary history. The poets featured range from Rudaki (d. 329/940-941), perhaps the earliest author of verse in New Persian to enjoy substantial courtly patronage, to ʿAmili’s contemporaries, including Malik Qummi (d. 1024/1615), who emigrated to the Deccan and became a leading panegyrist to the ʿAdilshahs of Bijapur. The bilingual aspect of the Kashkul also offers a pre-modern attempt at doing comparative literary history, speaking to ʿAmili’s ideas of how poetic texts in Arabic and Persian were connected.
In the middle of the seventeenth century, the writer Ahmad b. Muhammad ʿAmili, another scholar whose family hailed from the Jabal ʿAmil region, made a full Persian translation of the Kashkul under the patronage of the Qutbshah Sultan ʿAbd Allah (d. 1083/1672), ruler of Hyderabad in the Deccan. Ahmad b. Muhammad ʿAmili expanded the corpus of Persian poetry quoted in the Kashkul, and also translated most of the Arabic texts that it contains. This translation and expansion of the Kashkul offers a window onto understanding how poetry in Persian, its historic and contemporary centers, the networks of writers who produced it, and the relationships between verse in Persian and Arabic, were seen from the perspective of multilingual Hyderabad, where Arabic, Persian, Dakani and Telugu all served as languages of high culture.
This paper compares and contrasts Ahmad b. Muhammad ʿAmili’s edition of the Kashkul with Bahaʾ al-Din ʿAmili’s original, and argues that the Persian translation should be understood as an attempt to restate the locus of literary authority, and to re-conceive literary history for a cosmopolitan, multilingual audience. This text helps us to interrogate overly simplistic divisions of Persian literary history into regional styles and schools, instead offering the paradigm of a continuum, in which places and periods were linked through the circulation of people and texts.
Biographical anthologies (tazkirahs) have always been among the central sources for Persian literary history. They offer, among other things, information about poets' lives; perspectives on stylistic trends in given contexts; and documentation of practices such as javab-gu'i (imitatio) and extemporaneous verse composition. Researchers have traditionally utilized tazkirahs by focusing on notices for individual poets, or perhaps a few poets at a time. It is often the case that one is studying a certain figure, and so one looks for discussion of him or her across a range of tazkirahs -- treating the texts as reference sources. This can be a productive approach, but there are aspects of literary anthologies that are unlikely to come into focus without more sustained reading. One such feature is the sense of geography that can be developed in a tazkirah. Where are the poets from, and where do they ply their trade? Are there distinct clusters? Does the author include descriptions of migration? To answer such questions, we need to invest the time to explore an anthology on its own terms.
This paper will present some of the conclusions resulting from a comprehensive study of an early Safavid tazkirah, the Tuhfah-i Sami (ca. 957/1550). It was written by Sam Mirza (d. 975/1567), a brother of Shah Tahmasb who served as titular governor of Harat in his youth, and later as custodian of the Safavid shrine in Ardabil, before being imprisoned and put to death. The Tuhfah contains over seven hundred notices on individuals who had some engagement with Persian or Turkic poetry, representing a wide range of socioeconomic strata. Most were contemporary with the author. While the entries in this tazkirah tend to be brief, an overwhelming majority of them offer some information about geographic origins -- at least by attaching a nisbah to a poet's name. A review of this data yields several interesting results. There are, unsurprisingly, cities and regions that have disproportionate representation in the Tuhfah. In a few cases, Sam Mirza indicates the local dominance of a certain group, for instance, a sayyid family in Qazvin known as the Sayfiyah. And in the section of the tazkirah that focuses on Turkic poets, we sometimes find mention of an individual's tribal affiliation, apparently in lieu of geographic origin. It is possible to recover a bit of the vision of the world that Sam Mirza embedded in this work.
In Shīr Khān Lodī’s biographical poetry anthology titled Mir'at al-khayāl (“The Mirror of Imagination,” 1690/91), short treatises on Islamicate sciences and arts interspersed between the entries occupy as much space as the biography of the poets and samples of their poetry. With topics ranging from the art of speech to calligraphy and music, from demonology to dream interpretation and breath control, from geography to medicine and ethics, these treatises were dismissed by such a specialist as the Iranian scholar Gulchīn-i Maʿānī as irrelevant to the objective of taẕkiras.
The present paper offers a fresh look at the Mir'at al-khayāl by examining both of its components not in isolation but rather in relation to each other. Lodī’s focus on contemporary poets, including the less known local literati of the eastern fringes of the Mughal Empire where he served for some years before entering the service of the high-ranking Mughal nobleman Navvāb Shukr Allāh Khān in Delhi and its environs in 1679, allows us to reassess the extent and the modus operandi of literary networks within the empire. The subjects of Lodī’s short treatises and their placement under specific entries in the taẕkira, on the other hand, reveal much about both the breadth of learning and the intellectual, artistic, and spiritual pursuit of the literary elite. As a whole, Lodī’s taẕkira, despite its conciseness, provides a fascinating window into the circulation of ideas, texts, and trends via intersecting and overlapping networks and intellectual genealogies in the late Mughal era.
