Textual Culture Between India and Iran: The Reproduction of Verse in Nasrabadi’s Biographical Anthology

Abstract

ABSTRACT Until now, the textual history of the poetry transmitted in Persian literary anthologies has solely been the concern of editors preparing works for print publication. This article contends that an investigation of variance is also of relevance for writing the cultural history of how anthologists encountered, manipulated, and published poems in the manuscript age. While a shortage of independent textual witnesses makes it harder to undertake this kind of study for the earliest periods of Persian literary history, such research can be conducted for later eras, including the seventeenth century, the time-frame covered by the biographical anthology of Muhammad Tahir Nasrabadi (d. ca. 1698). In order to sample the degree of variance present in Nasrabadi’s anthology, his recensions of the verse of twenty poets are compared here with the available manuscript copies of the same twenty poets’ collected works. Instead of judging Nasrabadi’s accuracy in reproducing each fragment, I evaluate what variance can tell us about paths of textual transmission between Mughal North India, the Deccan Sultanates, and Safavid Iran. The evidence presented here reinforces the supposition that anthologies are fundamentally shaped by the social networks out of which they arise.