Indo-Persian Manuscripts

Abstract

The present collection of papers represents a selection of those presented at a conference on “Indo-Persian Manuscripts: Issues and Challenges in Modern Times” organised by the British Institute of Persian Studies and the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad, and held in Hyderabad on 6–8 March 2020. The conference brought together scholars from India and Europe to consider various aspects of IndoPersian manuscripts, ranging from detailed studies of individual texts and manuscripts to overviews of important collections, and that variety of approaches is reflected in the present collection. That Persian is not simply the language of Iran, but of a whole cultural complex that stretched, in various conceptions, from the Balkans to Bengal, or even into China, has been increasingly emphasised in scholarship. Of nowhere is this more true than India, where Persian was a major – and often the major – tongue of administration as well as literature over the eleventh to nineteenth centuries, giving birth to a huge body of texts. As the authoritative Encyclopaedia Iranica states, “The amount of Persian literature composed in the Indian subcontinent up to the nineteenth century is larger than that produced in Iran proper during the same period.” Much of this, however, remains unpublished in manuscript form, and it has been comparatively little studied. Modern scholarship has designated this Persian literary production in India as Indo-Persian, a term which although employed in the title of this collection is somewhat problematic, as I discuss below. India is also significant for Persian studies not just for its indigenous Persian-language literary production, but as an important avenue through which knowledge of Persian culture more generally was transmitted to the west, and Britain in particular. Sir William Jones’ hugely influential A Grammar of the Persian Language (1771) was intended for the use of East India Company employees, given Persian’s status as the official language of numerous Indian courts. The Asiatic Society, founded by Jones shortly after his arrival in Calcutta as a judge, played a major role in promoting translations into English of Persian classics, as well as editions of Persian texts, including the earliest critical editions of the Shahnama (1811, 1829). A large proportion of the Persian manuscripts in western collections, and especially British ones, come from or via India. For instance, to take the example of one major British collection, about two thirds of the British Library’s 11,000 Persian manuscripts come from the India Office Library. At least half of the remaining manuscripts from the old British Museum collection were also acquired in India, meaning that in total about four fifths of the Persian manuscripts in the British Library today are in some way associated with India. Clearly, not all these manuscripts were written or copied in India; some had come from Central Asia or Iran to India and thence to Europe, but they do indicate the major role India has in the transmission of knowledge of Persian culture to Britain in particular. Despite the centrality of India to western understandings of the Persianate world and the importance of its cultural contribution to the latter’s formation, its role has been rather marginalised, in western, Iranian and Indian academia. Persian/Iranian studies in