>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. ^M00:00:22 Joan Weeks: >> Well good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of all my colleagues and in particular, Dr. Mary Jane Deep, Chief of the African and Middle East division, I'd like to extend a very warm welcome to everyone. I'm Joan Weeks, head of the Near East Section which is sponsor of today's program along with the Roshan Institute for Persian studies. We're very pleased to continue the Persian book lecture series. This year with the 2016 focus on literature and the performing arts. Before we start today's program and introduce our speaker. I'd like to give you brief overview of the division and its resources in the hopes you'll come back and use our collections and this beautiful reading room for your research. This is a custodial division which is comprised of three sections that build and serve the collections to researchers from around the world. We cover over 75 countries and more than two dozen languages. The Africa section covers and includes countries from all over Sub-Sahara Africa. The Hebraic section covers and is responsible for Judaic and Hebraic worldwide. And the Near East section covers all of the Arab countries including North Africa, Turkey, Turkic Central Asia, Iran, Afghanistan, the Muslims in Western China, Russia and the Balkans as well as the people of the Caucuses. After the program we'd like to invite you to fill in the evaluation surveys we've placed in your seats and leave them at the information desk at the front of the room. And I'd also like to invite you to try out our new 4 Corners blog. We've got very, very interesting stories and posts by the Hispanic, Asian, European and our African and Middle Eastern curators and specialists, very fascinating stories, as well as please subscribe to our Facebook page. This way you'll learn about other programs and alerts. So also we'd like to remind you that this program is being videotaped and if you ask questions, you implicitly giving permission to be on film. So without much more ado, I'd like to invite Ahmet Karamustafa to the podium to talk a few minutes about the program. Ahmet Karamustafa: >> Thank you. Good afternoon all. It's a great pleasure to be here to speak on behalf of the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies, I'm Ahmet Karamustafa, Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park and as you've gathered, I'm also affiliated with the Roshan Institute. And my better half, Director of the Roshan Institute, Fatemeh Keshavarz who is also my spouse cannot be here today because she's traveling, so you get to put up with me. I just am here to say that I am delighted to have been able to actually strike up this partnership with this great institution, the Library of Congress and especially the African and Middle East Division. And we hope very much that they will be able to actually continue this indefinitely as far as we're able to. And here again to enjoy the rest of our series that some of us have had the privilege of coming frequently and we're looking forward to talk by Kevin Schwartz who has also been affiliated with UMD in the past and has actually been a fellow at the institute and organized a great conference for us, so we're looking for to continuing the relationship ever so many ways. Thanks a lot. Hirad Dinavari: >> Greetings everyone. It's wonderful to see you. Thanks for coming on another busy weekday, especially during your lunch break, so this means a lot. I want to take a second and introduce our wonderful speaker, Dr. Kevin Schwartz. Kevin Schwartz is a Kluge fellow at the Library of Congress working on a project devoted to mapping the transregional production and circulation of commemorative texts of Persian poets in the 19th Century. Prior to arriving to the Library of Congress he was a distinguished professor, Middle East chair at the United States Naval Academy where he taught classes on history, politics of the Middle East and Iran. And a social science research council post doctorate fellow for transregional research and visiting scholar at the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland, our wonderful partners. His research has appeared or it is forthcoming in publications such as the Journal of Persian Aid Studies and Indian economic social and history review, frequent common tincture on Iranian politics and US policy in the Middle East. His writings have appeared in such publications as Al Jazeera, the Baltimore Sun, Jadaliyya and Words Without Borders. He received his PhD in Middle Eastern studies in 2014 from the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation which forms the basis of this talk today focuses on the literary culture and debates across Iran, Central and South Asia, in the 18th and 19th Century and their implications for Persian literary history writing. It was awarded the Rahim M. Irvani Dissertation Award for best dissertation on Persian literature and its cognate fields by the International Society of Iranian studies awarded this past August in Vienna, Austria. On a personal note, Kevin has been here for the past seven, eight, maybe longer years. He's been coming for years and using our materials here in the African and Middle Eastern division. Both are rare Persian materials, contemporary Persian materials, literature and the Asian division as well. He has unearth so many wonderful Persian materials from Indian and the sub-continent that are in the Asian division and the microfilm, microfiche format. So I'm really delighted that he's a Kluge here for eleven months. We will benefit from his work at the library and it will help us better and better understand our own collections in many ways. Kevin it's a delight to have you, [inaudible]. ^M00:06:47 [ Applause ] ^M00:06:52 Kevin Schwartz: >> Great, well thank you so much Hirad for that very kind introduction. Thank you, Professor Karamustafa and the Roshan Institute, to Mary Jane Deep as well and just to return the compliment to Hirad. I am just thrilled to be here and so honored having spent, I don't want to say eight years, but long enough at the desk here listening to some talks and working on my dissertation. So it's nice to be, an honor to be on this side of the podium, so thank you. My talk today is based on my dissertation research and it's called, "Return of the Masters, Connections, Contestations and the Redrawing of Persian Literary History". And I'm going to give a kind of world wind tour into Persian literary culture in the 18th and 19th Century and try to tell you how I think about Persian literary history and some of the gaps in its writing and as well as some of the stakes involved. Now if I could do just one thing today, that would be to really impart upon you a basic idea. And that is that Persian literary history as written, particularly when it comes to the 18th and 19th Century is insufficient. It's insufficient because in the 18th and 19th Century, Persian literary writing is unable to account for trends and multiple literary phenomena occurring outside of Iran. So Persia was this great, prevalent, prodigious social, linguistic cultural idiom that connected Sufis travelers, [inaudible] and Sultans from Anatolia to Western China. And we hear about this in the development of Persian literary history but suddenly in the 18th and 19th Century, we lose these kinds of trends regional scope and suddenly the story of Persian literary history becomes Iran's story. And to put it more bluntly, Persian literary history at this period is Iranian literary history. So Persian literary history has been infused with some kind of national sentimentality stemming from Iran. And I think actually we can pinpoint the idea, the point at which this idea of Iranian nationalists sentimentality interjected or intervened in the writing of Persian literary history and that's an idea that's called Bazgasht-i Adabi or Literary Return. And I'll talk about in more detail in a moment, but I just wanted to kind of mention this because it's a framework I'm working with today and also kind of working against. And this idea is that in the 18th and 19th Century, Iranian poets rescued Persian poetry from despair by returning to the styles of the Masters. So they returned to the styles of the classical Masters that were prevalent to the 9th and the 15th Century. They returned to their glorious and simple prose. And they did so by moving away from this stagnant literary style that we're told was occurring and being written and produced throughout Central and South Asia and elsewhere but crucially not in Iran. So there it is, Iranian poets in the 18th and 19th Century, they somehow divide themselves, they reconnect with the Masters while others elsewhere do not. They remain kind of stagnating in this decadent literary culture. Now there's some major impacts of this idea, there's a lot of kind of historiographical debris in its wake. One thing I already alluded to was the conflation of Iranian and Persian literary history. I mean suddenly the story in the 18th and 19th Century is not this kind of cosmopolitan macro level view of Persian literary history. ^M00:10:20 But it's focusing slowly or exclusively rather on Iran. The second thing that happens is that there's a greater proprietary right over the Masters in Iran. So these great Masters like Rumi, Hafiz, Ferdowsi who were productive in the 9th to 15th Century are the ones in which Iranian poets and only Iranian poets are reconnecting with. And so if we're told that Iranian poets are reconnecting with are re-finding these Masters while others are not, well that asserts a kind of more proprietary right by Iran at this time. The second, the third thing rather it does it that it erases other facets of Persian literary culture. I mean again, we're told by this narrative that the important element of Persian literary history in the 18th and 19th Century is that these few Iranian poets connected with the Masters while the rest of the world kind of remains decadent in their negative literary ways. And so again, that erases a lot of kind of multiple literary phenomena occurring at the time. And towards the end of my talk, I'll point other things that are happening around this time outside of Iran which I think are a integral part of this story. So I'm going to break my talk into three parts. First I'll at how this narrative of return Bazgasht became to be fashion, what it entails, what are the stakes involved. Second, I'm going to look at the poets themselves. Who were these Bazgasht poet's? Because there were poets that actually existed in 18th and 19th Century Isfahan, Tehran and greater Iran who sought return the styles of the Masters. But as you will see they didn't exactly do so in the way they were told. And finally, I'll look at some kind of other literary phenomena or literary communities occurring outside of Iran. Again, just to give you an idea of what's happening outside of this kind of tantalizing, dominant narrative that we'll turn to right now. So first, what is this idea of Bazgasht? How did it come to be? Well the classification of Persian literary history and its development, particularly now we're talking about poetry can be traced back to this man, Muhammad Taqi Bahar who died in 1951, a great poet and literary historian of Iran. And what he does is he divides the development of Persian literary culture, particularly poetry into four schools or styles each with its own literary characteristics and roughly corresponding to different periods in history. So you have the Khurasani School, the Iraqi School, the Indian style and Literary Return. Now which period is given a name? It maintains a core set of stylistic attributes and is affiliated with a different temple or period. And even Bahar recognizes that there's some slippage between these terms, but as far as talking about the core elements of development over a period of time he does a fairly good job in distinguishing between say the Khurasani School which tends to be located at the core of the praise of a patron, deals very kind of naturalistically, talks about the hunt and feasting and merrymaking. And praise the patrons of beneficence and glory versus the Iraqi School which tends to be the poetry associated with Hafiz and Rumi and is more inward looking, more mystical which Bahar and others would say kind of stems from destructive practices of the monguls leading into a more introspective type of poetry production. The Indian style which we'll talk about in just a moment is known for its intellectualism, its mannerism, its abstract acrobatics, it's complicated metaphors. And then finally, Literary Return is already mentioned is referencing this group of Iranian poets and is exclusively Iranian poets who sought to return to the simple ways of the Masters. So we sought the return back to poetry Ferdowsi, Sadi and Hafiz, those poets of the Khurasani and Iraqi school. So what if I was interested when I first kind of looked at this and settled my dissertation topic was there's a clear kind of delineation between the first three categories and the last category. So the first three categories, they speak to the geographic, expansiveness of the Persianate world. They speak to trends happening in South Asia and Iran and Central Asia and elsewhere. But when we get to the fourth category, there's a delimiting quality around geography. The fourth category refers to Iran alone. So you see there's a kind of whittling down of Persian literary history reaching its apex, not elsewhere in the Persianate world, not across the Persianate world, but solely in 18th and 19th Century Iran. So I found this kind of very fascinating and what was the reason behind it and really testing whether it was true or not. So as I noted there you have the first three categories that referred the Persianate world while the fourth category refers to Iran alone, just that small group of poets who decided to return back to the simple styles of the Masters. Well of course, if the returning back to the simple styles of the Masters, the question is what are they returning from and Bahar and others are very clear on this. What necessitated such a return was the Indian style. According to Bahar and others, it was this abstract and complicated style and this argued that the Indian style which prevailed across Central and South Asia was causing the downfall of Persian. And what they needed was a simpler style, so poets in Iran rectified this course. But crucially by returning to the Masters in Iran, other poets did not, they remained mired in this stagnant literary culture. And just as an aside here, this idea of the Indian style is now very much being interrogated, undermined and overturned. Because you can see it's quite a kind of inappropriate style associated with this kind of geoethnic moniker of Indian with the stagnation and decline of Persian literary history. So people have offered up other names for this kind of prevalent style, tazah-gui and others, Safavid Isfahani poetry. But for now I'm just referring it to this kind of historiographical category that Bahar does. And for Bahar, he was very clear. This was his overly complicated style that really was causing a kind of negative and detrimental impact on the development of Persian poetry. And he notes in here, here's a bit by him, translated by [inaudible]. The Indian style possessed novelty but had very many failings. It was affirm and spineless. Its ideas were feeble. It's imagery odd. The poems were crowded with ideas but unattractive, they were wanting in eloquence. So it's quite clear about what the mandate of the Indian style was. Unless you think I'm just I'm just unfairly kind of pillaring, Bahar, it's important to note that this impression of the Indian style was kind of mimic and replicated by quite a few scholars until fairly recently so we can look at fabulous scholars like Jiri Becka and Annemarie Schimmel who adhere to more or less the same argument that Bahar does in regards to Indian style. Becka saying, the Indian style led to quote attempts to originality supported on two narrow a foundation to the grotesque to a lack of good taste and unity. And the great Annemarie Schimmel and Islamic literatures of India, Persian literature in India ended in the autumnal hopelessness of bizarre expression, so not too positive and appraisal by other of those scholars. What's really interesting is that this kind of juxtaposition the position between literary return and Indian style or simple poetry and complicated poetry can actually be found in earlier writings. You can actually go back to writings of the 19th Century in Tazkirahs, these great commemorative texts that include biographical information and aversive poets. And you can find this same kind of juxtaposition, this same kind of tension between a simple style on the one hand and a complicated style on the other hand. And here is a Riza Quli Khan, a great statesman, diplomat, traveler and scholar of the quote of [inaudible] and he's writing in the kind of greatest [inaudible] Tazkirah in 1850, Majma' al-fusaha and here you can see that he has the distaste for kind of one complicated style which would come to carry all the weight of the Indian style that Bahar would place upon it and the championing of a group of poets who rescued poetry in Iran. So again, Hidayat here, he doesn't have the terminology that Bahar kind of co-defies later on, but he's making the same kind of observations in regards to poetic practice. And here he says during the Turkmanian Safavid period reproachable methods became manifest. The well considered manner of writing a splendid ode and eloquent method of composing writings on admonition, advice, governance, pious devotions and epics which were the custom of our proceeding writers were entirely supplanted. Reversifiers became inclined toward the outlining of riddles the conjuring up misnomers and now here's the Indian style poets, they established a style of confused speech, idle prattle and vain oratory after a manner of sickly dispositions and indirect style. The ascendants starved this people, poets fortune was the cause of the setting star of excellence, wisdom, eloquence, rhetoric, philosophy and knowledge. And now finally we get to these revivers of the glory days of Persian poetry, the return poets but several people settled on the restoration of the old Masters method. They became aware of the tastelessness of the modern style and their contemptable fashion. ^M00:20:02 They struggle to the upmost limit and down the road of earnest strive and forbade other people from their approachable style of the moderns. They became inclined with the pleasant style of the old masters so it says, Hidayat and [inaudible]. You can really hear the echoes of Bahar who's writing in the next century as far as kind of codifying this narrative Iran on one hand and everyone else on the other or a simple style with poetry and everyone else on the other. And thank you for going through that whole quote with me, but I really do think it's important to kind of return these sources. Because I think if you return to these sources, even going further back than Majma' al-fusaha in 1860, you begin to hear a different story, you begin to get the traces of a different kind of narrative that I help explains what's going on with these return poets, what was happening to Persian poetic culture in Iran. And there are I think elements of this story that have been edited out. So let's kind of see if we can recover them and this is part 2 and this is looking at the Bazgasht poets themselves. And they noted, they were a group of poets who existed in Isfahan and later in Tehran who sought to survive the styles of the Masters. So what were they doing? Was it that these poets were really motivated by rescuing Persian poetry from despair? Were they keeping tabs on how Persian poetry was being denigrated in decline across the globe? And the answer is clearly no and I think I wouldn't be here if the answer was yes. But what we notice with these poets is they were more in tuned to their social conditions. So poets of the late 18th and early 19th Century Isfahan, really were seeking to constitute poetic networks and reestablished the social value of poetry following the downfall of the Safavids. And why is this important distinction? Why is it important that we go back to sources and see how these poets understand their local social conditions? Because I think it helps dislodge some of this kind of nationalistic parameters and sentiments of this grandiose narrative of Persian literary history. We're no longer setup with Indian versus Iranian on the one hand with some kind of nationalist competition coursing through how Persian literary history was written. Instead we can go back to sources and actually kind of reconstruct what poets were finding at the time. And again if you go back to the Tazkirahs and the poets of these times, the actual Bazgasht poets, we find that their narrative, their attitudes for trying to reestablish the role of poets in their own society, was something that was kind of edited out and alighted in the narrative of later authors such as Hedayat and Bahar was still kind of conscious of creating this dichotomy of between a simple and complicated style and India and Iran. So, why was it important for these Bazgasht poets to reestablish the role of the poet? Well first you have to know something about what was happening in Safavid times and in Safavid times, poetic culture was situated in the coffee house. It served as the epicenter of productivity, not only in Isfahan but also in [inaudible] and elsewhere in Iran. You can have informal literary societies. You could have educational networks and literary networks forming there. The coffee house was the epicenter where people cited their poetry, had it critiqued, etcetera. In addition to which Safavid times you had the institution of the court. Now it wasn't as grandiose in promoting or giving patronage to poetry as there, as the moguls did, for example in South Asia, but nonetheless it provided an avenue for people to receive patronage, people to produce poetry. But what happens with the sacking of Isfahan 1722 and the downfall of the Safavids is there's this great dislocation. And so there's no longer an avenue to produce poetry, neither at the coffee house not at the court. And just to give a sense of what was happening to Isfahan in 1722. Here's a quote from Michael Axworthy who notes by mid-century, most of the built up area of Isfahan, the former capital was deserted, inhabited only by owls and wild animals. In the last years of the Safavids it had been a thriving city of 550,000 people, one of the largest cities in the world, a similar size to London at the time or bigger. By the end of the Siege of 1722, only 100,000 people were left and although many citizens returned thereafter, the number failure again during the Afghan occupation and later so, by 1736, there were only 50,000 people left. So in such as a disastrous situation and following the destruction of Isfahan at the hands of invaders, it's very kind of easy to see it would be a poetic climate that was dislocated. No longer in a coffee house to produce poetry, no longer in the court to provide patronage and the sources bear this out. So in [inaudible] in poetry social conditions and its impact on what matter first and foremost. So if you look at a tazkirah from Arabic that was in the last quarter of the 18th Century and often look back to as the first text that was kind of championing this proto-nationalist movement of return poets. We see that it was very much in tuned to the social conditions around him. And he writes, for many years on the count of the revolution at the time, I'd onced the customs of poetic compositions are nullified in poets from anguish are changed and the resolve of poets is corrupted. The scattering of easy circumstances and the state of confusion are such that no one is in the state of reading poetry and composing poetry." Notice in that quote, there is no mention of the Indian style, there is no mention of a denigrated style that's kind of taking the Persianate world by storm, that's causing its decay. But instead he's very much in tuned to the social conditions of his time. And this attitude indeed is confirmed in the poetry of these Bazgasht poets. And here is a selection of three poets, Azar, Sabahi and Hatif meeting in a rose garden. And they're again discussing in a social situation, the institution of the poet and Persian poetry in Iran at the time. And again, no real mention of style but more focused on what opportunities a poet has. And there's tons of examples in this, both in praised poems and in elegies as well. And so Sabahi says, don't you see how the sacred Homa in this land and country is worth less than the hour of misfortune. There's no buyer of gems in this domain. The seller makes no profit from selling the goods. After this, may you tune us, suffer senseless pain. Don't deliver a spine, a thine speech for anyone. What's the use to put yourself through such trouble, just to put a few lines into verse. When you begin to recite it, they will signal with their fingers with the lips to stop. And if you prepare something from pen and paper, they'll value it as nothing just like this book. So in the absence of a market of poetry and the absence of avenues of patronage and the overall destruction in the market of speech, I think these poets did a very interesting thing which their poetry bears out. They turn to one another, in praise of one another. And so of course, the panegyric ode is reminiscent of Kharasani School, it usually happens the court, it's usually at the praise of the glory and beneficence of a Sultan. But in this case in the absence of that figure of patronage, with no ability to achieve patronage, these poets decided to reconstitute the role of the poet. They started to reconstitute their networks but they need to do so by praising one another. And so they solidify their networks and roles as poets by doing so and they did so by relying on the form and style of those earlier poets that praised patrons in the form of the ode. And so going back to their poetry, one finds profound examples of this. Poets would exchange or recite poems to one another, praising each other as the master of the age. Not only with direct reference to Masters themselves, but did so in some cases to direct imitation of their poems. And here we see a back and forth ode of [inaudible] between Sabahi and Azar. Not only as a reference of master like Anvari one of these great classical poets but also is written in the same style as one of his [inaudible]. Sabahi says, O ye before him the teacher of knowledge kneels in deference to learning. Before you the nod of the Pleiades and to its need arrangement. Before you're grander, the Red Sea spill abundant water. The sun which is the source of life performs ablution of your door. And as [inaudible] responds, your poetry is the knob opening the Pleiades. Your prose is the river stealing the Red Sea. It appears that Anvari wrote this [inaudible] but I see him planting barely while yours is like rain. In your company, poetry from others means no more than dry ablution by the banks of the tigress. So what is the main point here? The main point is that this return wasn't an example of a group of poets seeking to combat a particularly problematic and stagnant style of poetry, increasingly to be associated with places outside of Iran. But instead it was a group of poets responding to social and political dislocation on a local level in Isfahan and trying to rectify the rule of poet, in poetry in general. To do so, they offered one another patronage and did so by reaching back into their literary cultural memories and drawn the model most apt for the task. The great Khurasani poets of old adept of praised palms. And again I think to just return to this point it's so important, because we don't have any of the geoethnic or georacial competition horsing through this poetry like we do later on with [inaudible] and certainly with Bahar. ^M00:30:09 There's something else going on. It's a more kind of inward looking movement that's really interested in reconstituting poetic networks and the role of the poet in Iran at the time following this great dislocation after destruction of Isfahan at the hands of the invaders. Now while the Isfahani poets were reestablishing themselves, where they were going back to the styles of the Masters trying to reestablish the role of the poet. Other things were happening in the Persianate world as well, things that were not told about through the tantalizing Iranian centric framework of Bahar and others. And now I'm going to turn to that and look at both a case in South Asia and a case in Afghanistan just very briefly. And this isn't the whole story, but it just goes to show you that there are other voices out there, there are other things happening outside of Iran in regards to Persian poetic culture. It's to this decadent stagnant literary environment, but in fact quite the contrary and I think they actually have some correlations with what's happening in Iran. So first I'm going to look at the Carnatic state which is a state that emerged following the breakup of the [inaudible] empire in the 18th Century. And I'm not going to get into all the reasons why it emerged, emerged in the same way. A lot of successor's states did whole interplay between various elites, the local and imperial level competing over resources and revenues. But more important it's to understand the general situation of Persian poetic culture and literary culture in Iran at the time. And to understand what those locations were in regards to Persia at the time. Because Persian at the time was really under strain and that's just the context I think like it did with Iran for what's going to happen in south Asia what I'm going to discuss in a minute. So first of all what are the strains on Persian during this time in the 18th and 19th Century? Well first the break of the mobile empire. So all these individuals were situated in Delhi who averse administrative technologies and accounting in scholarship and poetry that was all based on Persia now need to find employment elsewhere. And that they were able to do at some successor states. They could go to [inaudible], they could go to Hyderbad and we'll see they could go to Arcot as well. But they were forced to kind of leave and seek out other opportunities. This kind of put a strain on their employment opportunities. Secondly and most importantly perhaps, the British intervention educational activities puts on strain on Persian. So for example, Persian instructors were, they continued to be hired both in Calcutta and in colleges across United Kingdom. One could look at the great colonial entity at the college of fort William in Calcutta. And that was a place where Persian was still being taught but by the 1800s something was changing, vernacular languages, Hindustani and Urdu were beginning to replace Persian at this level. And it was really a serious intervention by the British. Persia still remained relevant. It was still taught, just like it was still relevant for some of these successor states court. But Urdu was more than keeping pace in terms of class offerings, translations and enrollment. And just as a quick parenthetical clause, this is not to say that Persian evaporated at all or in one fell swoop. I mean it continues well into the 20th Century in India to say nothing of the traces it leaves in Urdu of poetic culture but something was really changing and something was underway. And the British had a large part to do with kind of this displacement of strain on Persian and their attitudes towards Persian is perhaps both best encapsulated and Thomas Macauley's famous minute in 1835 where he says quote, a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature in India and Arabia, yeah. And I think by that he means basically Persian and Arabic. So it was time for English and vernacular languages like Urdu to replace the supremacy of Persian. And finally, really on aside a level you have the rise of [inaudible] which was slowly coming to call itself Urdu. One sees the increased acceptability of Urdu to serve as a viable literary and cultural medium of expression. Both in informal poetic gatherings and also some of the successor states. Patrons were beginning to fund poets who were composing in Rekhta or in Urdu. So again, this doesn't mean Persian necessarily disappeared but it was a long [inaudible] of decline at this time. So which to me makes this notion that there was this small court in South India even more exciting and even more kind of counterintuitive and that's the example I want to turn to you right now. And this is a Carnatic state, this is a successor state that lasted from about 1698 to 1855. There you can send the map and the South of India. So we're not talking about the great Islamics of learning in North India like [inaudible] Delhi or Agra but in fact, in the south of India. And it was a really predominant place for Persian poetic activity and productivity. And we can look at the reasons why that was and I've listed a couple here. Well first it was a matter of politics. So after 1801, this small state was under the [inaudible] of the British. That meant the British controlled political and military affairs that allowed people like the [inaudible] of Arcot or the Carnatic state to focus on more nonpolitical matters and that they did. They created printing presses. They created libraries for the collections of Islamic literatures and Persian, Arabic and Urdu. Another reason why Persian I think was able to thrive is because the court was located right next to [inaudible] which is now present day [inaudible] three seats of the East Indian presidency in India at the time, part of that colonial enterprise and they were still utilizing Persian. They utilizing for administrative purposes. They were utilizing it in order to interface with local courts and elites. And so people could come down to Arcot or Mardras and they could work for the British or they could come and produce poetry for the Nawab. And finally, the reason Persian poetry and poetic culture thrived in this sort of small sort of outpost in South India was the personality of this individual Muhammad Ghaws Kahn, pen name A'zam who was really invested in Persian poetry. He produced Persian poetry in Urdu at an early age and he established his great poetic society, an exclusive poetic society where people in Persian could recite their verse and correct it as well. So again, I just want to kind of harp on this point that contrary to what this kind of grandiose narrative is saying, that nothing is happening in Persian culture outside of Iran. And contrary to the fact that most of the great Islamic centers of learning are in North India. You have the court of the last [inaudible] of Arcot who becomes invested in promoting Persian poetry and Persian literary culture. And not only that but you find out through a close reading of sources that they're actually dealing with the same kind of issues that the poets in Isfahan are dealing with as well. And I'm not going to get into all of the twists and turns of these debates but what you find out is that there's a huge kind of outpouring of Tazkirah production. You see that chart I guess on your left and that's really what attracted me to this topic to begin with that they were the most kind of prolific Tazkirahs produced in all of the Persianate world at this time. And not only do you have examples of poetic verse and their biographical information, but you start finding out about their lives and what they were debating and what was vexing them. And you combine that or you find out through that there were rival of networks. There were actually some poets who were promoting a simple style of poetry and some poets promoting a complicated style of poetry and you find out that in fact during this time, during this dislocating time for Persian literary culture, they were actually interested in some of the same issues that vexing the poets in Isfahan. Issues such as who had the right to speak for Persian poetry. Was it Indians or was it Urduranians who had a more kind of native fluency in the language? What's complicated or a simple style of poetry. And so in some ways raising these issues kind of juxtaposing a complicated and simple style of poetry or even juxtaposing Indians on the one hand and Urduranians on the other it kind of anticipate some of the geoethnic fault lines that Bahar is going to talk about you know, 100 years into the future. But what's interesting about this is these are Indians having these debates. So even if we work within the categories that Bahar's laid out, even if we inscribed just some of the characteristics of the simple versus complicated poetry, we can find Indian voices that were invested in these debates that are kind of attaching themselves to this framework. And I think by starting to look at some of these elements, these other kind of multiple sights of Persian literary production we could really begin to write a more inclusive and integrative Persian literary history. So the last example I'll give you and I wanted to make just brief mention of Afghanistan. Because Afghanistan in particular and Central Asia in general I think often kind of falls through the cracks and the gaps. And time kind of prevents me of getting a full appraisal of how I think 19th Century Afghanistan or trends and Persian literary culture there are connected to this story but I do want to mention it. And first let's talk about dislocations, I mean if that's one of the connective threads of this talk, that there were dislocations in Isfahan or dislocations in India and South India. ^M00:40:04 There were also dislocations in Afghanistan and the main dislocation there was a political one. It was the first Ango Afghan from 1839 to 1842. When the British came in they invaded Afghanistan. They removed the ruler or the [inaudible] and they established a protector. As we well know from depictions of this event in history and other books, the British had to withdraw quite ignominiously and they were pushed out by an Afghan resistance which is a great sense of pride for the national narrative in Afghanistan. What I think is less known, that for Afghans, this event was commemorated and memorialized in jangnamahs. That is battle poems that to pick the events, occupation and retreat of the British in the style of Ferdowsi, in the style of perhaps the most iconic and famous work of Persian poetry, the Shahanamah, the work of one of this grandiose Masters that we're told was only the domain of Iranian poets in the 19th Century to return to. And what's so fascinating is that you have multiple texts being produced around this time all focusing on this one singular event. Now of course people throughout Islamic history imitating Ferdowsi and Shahanameh, but I don't think on this scale Iran won one particular event. And certainly, not in the 19th Century. And you could see, these are the covers from these various battle poems recounting the first Anglo Afghan war and there were other -ones as well. And these were both in the Library of Congress collection here. You have [inaudible] by Muhammed [inaudible] and you also have the cover of the [inaudible] written by Akbar and Kashmiri and they were both put out by the Afghan historical society in the 1950s. As an element or indication of the way in which these texts have been promoted by the Afghan nation just as an aside, if you look at the poetry of the Taliban today you'll also find that there are references to Akbar as well as being this great kind of nationalist hero. My point here is not to talk about nationalism is in fact to talk about what kind of prevalent these texts were. And not just these two texts but other texts, an imitation of one of the great masters, Ferdowsi were circulating around this time, in not only Afghanistan but also in South India as well. And I think it's really, really important to recognize that. At the production of these texts and their circulation extends some [inaudible] Kabul to South India. They were based in oral tales and different passerby travelers who witnessed key events. They circulated in manuscript form, they were printed in places like [inaudible] Agra and benefited from the patronage of both local rulers and the British themselves. In other words, these texts again drawn on the style of the masters created a type of market that privilege and valued this style. Which in of itself would be interesting if we just had these texts that were kind of percolating around. But even more so at the story Persian literature, literary history tells us precisely that this shouldn't be happening. That we should only be having an engagement with the Masters in Iran and this is again, I think an element like the court of [inaudible] that has kind of been edited out of Persian literary history. And I think it's kind of you know, due time to incorporate these and other voices. So I'll just say in conclusion in the 18th Century and 19th Century was a time of kind of serious, kind of social and political, linguistic dislocation for Persian and a lot of different places and I'll be pointing to those. And a lot of the longstanding norms that created kind of connectivity between various elites and poets are being strained. But if we kind of maintain adherence to this framework that is nationalists in scope and erases a multiplicity of literary phenomena occurring outside of Iran, I think that's really going to militate again writing a more integrative and inclusive literary history. So the hope is that, I mean these are a couple of examples we can begin to integrate into our understanding of Persian literary history and kind of move it away from an Iranian story and make it more of a global story. So, thank you very much for your time. ^M00:44:21 [ Applause ] ^M00:44:26 [ Silence ] ^M00:44:32 >> Folks thank you for coming. We have time for about a few questions. Feel free to ask. Dr. [inaudible] go ahead. ^M00:44:38 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:45:56 >> Yeah, I mean this is a really interesting question and I just kind of went over it quite quickly. Of course the origins of Urdu whether it could be established in the Delhi literary salons or in the [inaudible] is very controversial. I mean particularly for a kind of Urdu literatures and speakers. Yeah, I mean something is definitely happening. I mean there's a groundswell of people who has become interested in this language both as a societal level and sort of a kind of court level in the 19th Century. And again as I mentioned the British really have a part to play in this. You know, I think there is some kind of healthy competition between them. You can even see when if you look at the production of Tazkirahs over time these great kind of codifiers of poetic culture. I mean the first Tazkirahs of Urdu poets are written in Persian. And really it's not until the 1840s that you begin to see Tazkirahs in Urdu about Urdu poets. So you know, I don't know what that means as far as the unit workings of their competition, again I think Urdu becomes a more kind of acceptable literary medium, cultural medium for the you know, North Indian Muslim gentry and elites. But I think people are still trying to figure out exactly what the relationship is. Someone like [inaudible] says, well into the 20th Century you can walk into an Urdu literary salon and you can speak Persian and no one would bat an eye. They were quite acceptable of that. But again I think people are kind of working on this issue and really going back to Tazkirahs and some of the debates between [inaudible] and the [inaudible] and you're right I mean that story is one that is repeated over and over again. But it's kind of unclear to what extent perhaps that was true and how it defined debates at that time. I haven't looked into the question, Urdu question you know, my understanding was you know, that kind of happened until the early 20th century. I'm not sure when the first written Pashtu text emerged. I think some time in the mid to late 19th Century. So I don't know, but I'd be surprised if it has the same level of competition that Urdu and Persian do just because poetic culture is built up on so many sites, with so many people in a place like South Asia. Yeah. ^M00:48:10 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:50:03 >> No, no, that's absolutely right. No, no, no, I mean thanks for clarifying I should've mentioned that yes. I mean one of the interests of this topic is that for better or worse this is actually the time when the Persian world begins to fray and break apart and so it's kind of interesting to figure out how that happens, how people understand it. And so what I pointed to with all these cases, in particular with Iran and south India case is that it was about trying to get a sense of self, amidst this change of culture with the stakes to the game were changing. I mean you're right there's stories to be told and people like telling these stories [inaudible] and elsewhere. It's really a fascinating period for that reason. And you're right I probably shouldn't be too hard on Bahar. I shouldn't say that necessarily that he consciously edited things out. I mean he had a project to undertake and he didn't probably have the materials, certainly he didn't have the materials that we did in all the catalogs that we went through. And he's certainly a foil for me and for other people. But no, I mean he really sets the parameters of this debate. He does and I'm still working within you know, his categories. I still go back and look to the Bazgasht poets and perhaps I shouldn't even go back and look for Bazgasht poets. I shouldn't be you know, limiting my scope. But yeah you know he did some great things but you know, he just had a couple of errors, a couple of errors that tended to what I think Iranian nationalism and we'll just slightly correct them and move on. Yeah thanks. ^M00:51:37 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:52:02 >> Yeah, I mean this issue of accessibility text circulation, of text [inaudible] is the kind of project I'm working on right now. And I think if you look at these commemorative texts, that charred poetic activity, see which ones circulated more than others, see which ones were privileged over time, I think we'll have a better insight into kind of this question to people actually saw themselves and what their kind of preview was of the world and that's the kind of thing I'm very much interested in. You know, what was the preview geographic or temporal of you know, 19th Century South Asia versus kind of 19th Century Iran. And so it's kind of a large undertaking. And I should say this Tazkirahs genre is absolutely prolific. It's totally unyielding. I mean I'm trying to map them right now. There could be 400, 500 that could recount the lives of you know, sometimes up to 1000 poets. So it's a long work ahead and people are kind of you know, making end roads in different ways. But yeah, to your point in the relationship between the poets and the texts, that is a big one and look for example, these poets in South India, they knew who Azar was. I mean they knew who the poets in Isfahan were. They didn't have a sense of them being the revivers of Persian poetry at the time, but they knew who they were based on the circulation of the text. I mean Azar's [inaudible] which is kind of held off as this first text that [inaudible] Persian poetry and promotes this kind of protonational story I mean was lithographed in Bombay at the time. And I only know that because I've looked at you know, these two places in conversation. But there's a whole world out there to kind of start drawing connections to. >> I have a little follow up question very quickly. This will be the last question if that's okay. You can ask questions afterwards. Just in terms of Central Asia and Turkistan I'm just curious if you were to take these tribes, especially when Turkistan then was being divided and given these sort of identities to come later on. How does that play itself out in that area? A and B, if you could give a little overview of the Tazkirah project you're working on now, so the people know what to look forward to. >> Okay so, no great so the first question yeah I mean Central Asia actually has a story to tell as well. And later in the 19th Century you have a group of [inaudible] that were advocating for [inaudible] reform that were moving against what they saw as the decadent kind of static Islamic culture of the time. And they were very much invested in creating a simpler prose and a simple style of verse which I think has its kind of resonances in places like well Iran but also Afghanistan later in the century. So yeah, they were Jadids, people that [inaudible], people like [inaudible] who very much recognized that or thought that the complicated Persian prose and verse was ill equipped to deal with the modern kind of issues they want to deal with. So yeah, that is happening as well and again, I mean I think there is something happening with Persia and the way people are kind of transforming both in poetic and in prose form to make it more durable for the modern world. And you see that with the poetry of Muhammed Taqi Bahar, Bahar you see it with tarz-i in Afghanistan, you see it with the Jadids in Central Asia. Yeah, the Tazkirah project, I kind of mentioned it briefly. What I'm trying to do is just kind of take a macroscopic look at Tazkirahs production. So just kind of actually plot on a map were certain Tazkirahs were being produced during what time. And I think if we see that we can start to see the kind of connectivity of the Persianate world. And not only that, to see which kind of Tazkirahs circulated most prominently. So a lot of kind of intertextual connections, bibliographic citations within these texts. They were always adamant to kind of prefer to previous Tazkirahs authors whether that means they really saw the Tazkirahs or they were just kind of padding their bibliographies like I do or many of us do I don't know. But it is indicative I think of some kind of you know, integrated transregional Cosmopolis of the times. So yeah, that's kind of the project. It's still working itself out and the last element is to see kind of which poets to be remembered at a particular moment in time. And when that changes over time and what that says about how people saw the Persianate world at the time. ^M00:56:39 >> Thanks. >> Thank you everyone for coming. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.