India in the Persian World of Letters

Front matter

India in the Persian

World of Letters

Khan-i Arzu among the Eighteenth-Century Philologists

Introduction

The Cosmopolitan and the Classic

On Method, the West, and the Non-West Where This Study Will Take You

1. A Literate Life: Placing Ārzū and His Works in Their Social Context Becoming Khan-i Ārzū Early Life and Family Delhi Final Years in Lucknow Arzi’s People: Friends, Patrons, and Rivals Anand Ram Mukhlis Tek Chand Bahar The Ticket to Success: Mirza ‘Abd al-Qadir Bedil Other Poets in Ārzū's Network Patrons Rivals and Enemies Arzü's Works Conclusion

2. Àrzü's Fruitful Theory of Language The Fruit of the Fruitful Tree A Brief History of Arabic Philology The History of Persian Literary Culture as Described in Musmir Phonetics, Vocabulary, and Regional Variation Connections between Languages Three Kinds of Connections Figurative Language and Where Meaning Comes From Conclusion

3. Innovation and Poetic Authority in Eighteenth-Century Persian The “Indian Style" and India

X CONTENTS

The Texts: Munir's Critique and Àrzü's Responses 114 Dad-i Sukhan’s Prefaces 117 The Commentary and Intertextuality 124 Hazin’s Critique and Arzi’s Response 126 Ārzū and the Persian Cosmopolis 129 4. Dictionaries Delimiting Literary Language 142 Mughal Lexicography before Ārzū 144 Reading Siraj al-Lughat and Chiragh-i Hidāyat together 149 Other Major Eighteenth-Century Persian Dictionaries 154 Ārzū's Vernacular Lexicography 161 Observations on Indian Religion as “Proto-Anthropology” 176 Later Persian Lexicography in the Sub-Continent 184 5. Building a Vernacular Culture on the Ruins of Persian? 187 Beginning in the Middle: How Ab-i Hayat Presents the Eighteenth Century 193 A Who’s Who of the People of Rekhtah 198 Shah Hatim (1699-1783) and His “Contemporaries” 201 Mir Muhammad Taqi Mir (1722-1810) 203 Rekhtah in Majma‘ al-Nafa is 206 Defining the (Literary) Vernacular 208 Hindi outside of Delhi and the Language of Delhi 222 Urdu and the Everyday 224 Revisiting the Question of the “Unprivileged Power” of Indo-Persian 232 6. How Language Actually Works: Contrasting Europe and the Non-West 235 Language and Early Modern Thought 238 Arzü's Philology and Its Possible (But Unlikely) Influence on European Philology 245 Ancients and Moderns in India and Europe 250 Europe and Vernacular Politics: The Vernacular as Modernity? 256 The Pre-Colonial Language Economy 260 Multilingualism and the Individual 263 Relevant and Irrelevant Linguistic Distinctions for Pre-Colonial South Asia 266 The Social Mechanisms for Defining Language 270 “Imagine There’s No Countries” 275 Conclusion 278 Bibliography 283

Index 319

Abbreviations of Ārzū's Major Works

"Atiyah-i Kubra Chiragh-i Hidayat Dād-i Sukhan Khiyaban-i Gulistan Musmir

Majma‘ al-Nafis Mauhibat-i ‘Uzma Nawādir al-Alfaz Siraj al-Lughat Siraj-i Munir Tanbih al-Ghāfilīn

Notes on Conventions Used

Instead of “Hindi,” this study uses the term “hindi” in pre-colonial contexts to remind us that the Indic language(s) generally called "hindi" in the Persian sources should not be confused with today's Modern Standard Hindi or uncritically contrasted with Urdu. As late as 1832, the poet Mirza Ghalib’s preface to a volume of what we would call his Urdu poems refers to them as "hindi." Even later, Munshi Bhagwant Rai Kakorwi’s Nal Daman Hindi (1859, reprinted 1869) uses the word in that sense in its title (see Alam and Subrahmanyam 2012, 205n3).

For clarity, bait is always translated as “couplet” even though the form should technically be called a “distich” when the two lines do not rhyme.

Years are generally cited in both the sources’ Islamic lunar date (AH) as well as Common Era (cE). Converting years according to a formula leaves a range of error + one year unless the exact date is known because the Islamic lunar calendar cycles over the solar calendar. The dating systems are generally obvious from the context (namely that tenth- to twelfth-century dates are Islamic while seventeenth- to nineteenth-century dates are Western), and ambiguous dates are marked.

Translations from Arabic, Hindi, Persian, Urdu, and European languages are mine unless noted. The principal exceptions are passages from Azad’s Ab-i Hayat, which are cited by page number from the 1907 Urdu edition but with English text provided from Frances Pritchett and Shamsur Rahman Faruqi's translation. Quranic passages are drawn from the M. A. S. Abdel Haleem translation.

The crucial term tazkirah has no good English equivalent so it appears in the original throughout. The name is derived from the Arabic root z-k-r which has to do with remembering, including remembering people for the purpose of praising them. In Persian and Urdu, tazkirah in the context of literary communities refers to a book containing a number of

Xiv NOTES ON CONVENTIONS USED entries on individual poets, including in most cases anecdotes about them and selections of their poetry. It has often been rendered into English as "biographical dictionary" but both parts of that translation are misleading: "Biographical" obscures the implied purpose of the work, namely preserving the memory of the poets of the tradition and their works, while "dictionary" suggests that it is about words rather than people and is organized alphabetically, which is not necessarily the case. Especially in Arabic, tazkirah can also mean a “memoir” which refers to a different sort of work. It has this sense in the title of Shaikh Muhammad ‘Ali Hazin’s autobiography Tazkirat al-Ahwal [Tazkirah of (My) Circumstances]. The rendering of “tazkirah” as “memorative communication” (as in Hermansen and Lawrence 2000, 150), while undoubtedly more correct than other options, is too unwieldy for our purposes.

Transliteration

Marked or Ambiguous Consonants t òè € kh è sh è sr th g 6 d s S 9$ o š e dh s € Z è j z N Ž 5 t b jh az A r 5 S Z b ch & ud th os $ ‘ e chh 4&4 3 £e 3 ģh è h z s v N q ô Vowels and special marks ? £ (hamza) yfī/e/ai — s X "ye" as semi-vowel and vowel (ma'rūf and maj hūl) w/ū/o/au 5 “waw” as semi-vowel and vowel (ma'rūf and maj hil) I 7 the vocalic “r” which cannot be specifically represented in Perso-Arabic script but appears here in the transliteration of some Sanskrit words à & alif maqsürah (a word-final “ye” pronounced as/a/that appears in some Arabic words) w s quiescent (unpronounced) wāw as in khwandan m U nūn-ģhunnah (nasalization of the preceding vowel) an 7

Í tanwin

a sign marking the rare cases in which “h” follows a consonant that could be aspirated but in which the two are actually separate sounds (e.g. maj hül)

! Nota bene that in Devanagari sources this transliterates the letter "W" (as in "bhāsā”), which is unrelated to the Perso-Arabic letter “y>

XVI TRANSLITERATION

There is something here for everyone to dislike, but this system appears to be the best compromise between accurately representing orthography and approximating pronunciation for the primary research languages of this study, namely Persian and Hindi/Urdu. Furthermore, it can completely represent all the letters in Arabic, from which the other languages in question have heavily borrowed. The great contradiction in scholarly attention to diacritical marks is that people who know the words already do not generally need them, and people who do not know the words are bewildered by the infestation of dots marching across the page—the present work takes a completist approach and attempts to show all diacritical marks (except in place names and the names of modern scholars).

The maj'hül vowels [“o” and “e”] have been lost in standard modern dialect of Tehran (the collapse of the vowels probably started in the seventeenth century) but are preserved in most eastern Persian dialects, including Indo-Persian, and are therefore marked here (on present conditions see, for example, Henderson 1975; Hodge 1957; in a historical context Baevskii 2007, 163).

The unpronounced “he” at the end of some words is marked as [ah] in both Urdu and Persian sources. Thus, for example, the word ows; (living) will appear as “zindah.” The izāfat construction is written [-i] in both Persian and in Urdu, as in the famous diamond “koh-i nar.”

The Arabic prefix “al-,” which assimilates to the following consonant when it is one of the so-called “sun letters," has been represented here as it is written rather than as it is pronounced. Thus, for example, the name “Siraj al-Din” is pronounced [sirāj ud-din]. The Arabic ta’ marbūtah (s) is not specially marked and is transliterated as "-t” or “-h” as context requires. Furthermore, the Arabic case inflections reflected in the pronunciation are not noted except in direct quotations from Arabic.

Devanagari sources follow the transliteration scheme of the Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary, except that ^w" has generally been preferred to "v."

Introduction

In the eighteenth century, the lamp of intellectual achievement in Persian literature and scholarship burned brightly in India even as the glory of the Mughal Empire's political order faded. In recent decades, scholars have reexamined the narrative of late Mughal political decline, and have nuanced our understanding of the implications of the loss of Delhi's centralized control over the provinces.' This study is not concerned with that political history. Instead it focuses on the intersection of literary culture—especially the scholarly apparatus behind it—with social and political thought. How did the cultured elite who staffed the imperial bureaucracy make sense of the world through poetry and belles lettres? The research presented here is intellectual history and biography focused on that specific question, namely reconstructing how people critically analyzed and used literary language. This study is not a literary history, but rather a history of thought as expressed through language that is largely “imaginative” (such as poetry) or in service of imaginative language such as critical and analytical writing.”

Why was there an efflorescence of Persian literary and philological scholarship in Delhi in the first half of the eighteenth century? Why was Persianized hindi—what would come to be known as Urdu—emerging as a literary language (for poetry if not yet for prose) without becoming an administrative language until a century later? How was India [Hind,

1 See, for example, Marshall 2003; Alam and Subrahmanyam 1999; Bayly 1993, 35ff.; Alam 1986; Wink 1986.

? I use the word “imaginative” here in the sense of language that creates the possibility of meaning rather than establishing literal fact. I follow Northrup Frye in my understanding of this distinction: “In literature the standards of outward meaning are secondary, for literary works do not pretend to describe or assert, and hence are not true, not false, and yet not tautological either, or at least not in the sense in which such a statement as ‘the good is better than the bad’ is tautological. Literary meaning may best be described, perhaps, as hypothetical, and a hypothetical or assumed relation to the external world is part of what is usually meant by the word ‘imaginative ” (Frye 2000, 74).

India in the Persian World of Letters: Khàn-i Ārzū among the Eighteenth-Century Philologists. Arthur Dudney, Oxford University Press. © Arthur Dudney 2022. DOI: 10.1093/0s0/9780192857415.003.0001 or more narrowly, Hindustan] constructed as a cultural space, and how was it linked to the wider Persian-using cosmopolis that stretched across South and Central Asia from the Ottoman Balkans in the west to the Bay of Bengal and frontiers of China in the east? These are enormous questions, each one deserving of a detailed historical study, and my scope here is significantly more modest: This study approaches these three fields through a particular inflection point in each of them, the career of the poet-philologist Siraj al-Din ‘Ali Khan (1688-1756), commonly known by his pen-name [takhallus], Ārzū.* Ārzū is at the center of all of these transformations because he was a great Indian Persianist, an important early teacher of Urdu composition in Delhi, and a keen cultural observer whose ability to situate India in the rest of the Persianate world was probably unparalleled in his time. By circumscribing this research so that it focuses on the thought of one remarkable individual, I hope to give others an anchor for larger questions about the early modern South Asian world.

Arzi’s work is an important entry point into many historical questions. It is lamentable but not surprising that there is no monograph in English about him, when Sir William Jones (an eighteenth-century British philologist to whom he has been compared) has been the subject of dozens of recent books and articles.* Furthermore, why, given that Ārzū's works set a standard for meticulously detailed analysis, were all but a couple of them ignored by colonial-period scholarship? This colonial connection is worth noting, if only in passing, as part of what Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi has called the "genesis amnesia" of Oriental studies, namely that not enough attention has been paid to why certain non-Western texts and not others became part of the West's scholarly canon. The narrative of the eighteenth century as understood by

> “Siraj al-Din” means “Lamp of the Faith” and is probably an homage to Ārzū's famous ancestor, the Sufi master Chiragh-i Dihli [*Lamp of Delhi”) (d. 791/1389). (Siraj is the Arabic cognate of the Persian word chiragh.) Likewise, Arzü's student Lalah Tek Chand, known by his pen-name Bahar, refers to his teacher as “Siraj al-muhaqqiqin" [Lamp of the Scholars] and “Siraj al-shu'arā” [Lamp of the Poets] (Bahār-i ‘Ajam 2001, preface). Khan is a title ultimately derived from the Mongol tradition.

^ [n 2015, Habib University (Karachi, Pakistan) recognized Ārzū's importance by inaugurating a center named for him, the Arzu Center for Regional Languages and Humanities.

* Tavakoli-Targhi 2001.

Europeans, as John Dowson admits in The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians (1867-77), is based overwhelmingly on the most “English” of the Persian histories, Ghulam Husain's Siyar al- Muta'akhkhirin [Deeds of the Moderns, 1783], to the neglect of the other materials available. Dowson writes: "In fact, the native side of the history of Ghulám Husain's days, as it appears in the works of English writers, rests almost entirely upon his authority," that is, as told in Siyar al-Muta akhķhirīn.* Both James Mill and Lord Macaulay, two key architects of colonial historiography, approved of this work, and its adoption was no doubt helped by being translated into English in 1789 before other relevant texts were available in European languages. Why does engaging with the development of the colonial canon matter for pre-colonial history? The master narratives that still shape our understanding—since, after all, many of the translations gathered in The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians have not been superseded despite the collection's obvious flaws—are based on a colonial engagement with the pre-colonial past. In many cases, this colonial discourse has silently displaced the tradition's own narratives, so that ideas about Indic language and literature presented as "culturally authentic" in fact have a much newer origin than is generally believed." My goal here is to strip away the accretions of interpretation and historical happenstance (that one text was translated into English before another, for example), and face the eighteenth-century Indo-Persian milieu on terms that would have been more familiar to its participants. This involves reconstructing the circumstances under which philological knowledge was created and put into practice? In part, such an analysis requires understanding pre-colonial India—and indeed the whole of the Persian cosmopolis—as a multilingual zone, including the recognition that even within Iran the

* Elliot and Dowson 1877, 194ff. In the 1770s, a period in which British colonial scholars were particularly interested in history, these scholars tended to consult recently prepared Persian historical summaries instead of the original chronicles (Teissier 2009, 141-2).

7 Allison Busch has made a similar case about recent Hindi literary criticism: She observes that "the voice of the postcolonial speaks in English, whereas the Orientalist voice is still alive, and speaking in Hindi" (Busch 2011, 14).

* As Roger Chartier has written: "The historian's task is thus to reconstruct the variations that differentiate the espaces lisibles—that is, the texts in their discursive and material forms— and those that govern the circumstances of their effectuation—that is, the readings, understood as concrete practices and as procedures" (Chartier 1994, 2).

cosmopolitan poetic language co-existed with unstandardized local dialects of Persian. The present analysis begins with the assumption that everything we think we know about language ideology, particularly how languages build nations, must be rigorously tested before it can be applied to the early modern period.

Ārzū was a significant and influential thinker even if few nonspecialists know his name today. He settled in Delhi near the beginning of the emperor Muhammad Shah’s reign (probably in early 1720) and had a successful career for just over thirty years in the capital before taking up a post in Lucknow and dying there soon after. He was survived by two generations of students and by his works, which included commentaries, a body of Persian poetry, three dictionaries, a tazkirah, and a treatise on language called Musmir [lit. "fruitful" ], which is the subject of Chapter 2. It is notable that besides the sheer volume and range of his scholarly and creative works, his colleagues and students were among the most important Persian scholars and Urdu poets of their generations. He is regarded as one of the first intellectuals to take Urdu literature seriously (although it should be noted that not a single line of Urdu survives that is unquestionably his work) but was also arguably the greatest Indian Persianist of his day. He was referred to as a “marja?” [a refuge or point of reference] and as “Lamp of the Researchers" [siraj al-muhaqqiqin] and was at the center of most of the famous literary debates of his time. As a scholar, he drew upon an unusually broad range of research materials and correspondingly employed an encyclopedic critical approach that compared numerous sources. He drew deeply from the resources of the Arabic tradition, for example basing his Musmir on al-Muzhir ft "Ulūm al-Lughah wa Anwā'ihā [The Luminous Work Concerning the Sciences of Language and Its Subfields] written by the fifteenth-century Egyptian polymath Jalal al-Din al-Suyūtī, while also having easy access to indigenous Indic traditions. Ārzū was a keen, detail-obsessed observer of society and tradition who sought to correct cultural misconceptions, whether those held by Indians or non-Indians, and to record regional usages faithfully, even if he found them ineloquent or inappropriate for poetry. However, his ethnography, if we can call it that, was based on his interest in language, which was in turn focused on the practice of poetry. Since he does not fit easily into any of our contemporary disciplines, I will refer to him as a “philologist.”

The term “philology” has seen its stock rise and fall since it was coined in late Antiquity. After hitting rock bottom during the postmodern turn of the 1980s and 1990s,’ there has been recent scholarly interest in reclaiming the term.'? Philology literally means, of course, “the love of words," but throughout history it has referred specifically to ways of studying language and literature. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it has meant variously a devotion to books, the careful study of literature (especially Greco-Roman Classical texts), and the systematic study of language in order to discover its structures." In the last sense, it came to be synonymous with "historical linguistics," although this usage is now rare. So why choose as the key term in this study one which has little resonance for people today? Precisely because it is capacious and ambiguous: It is a word that forces us to think historically. For example, we might be tempted to call Ārzū a linguist, but he certainly would not get hired in a modern university's Department of Linguistics, whose members have entirely different presuppositions about the nature of language and its relationship to literature. Avoiding the term "linguistics" prevents the false assumption that for someone like Ārzū to be worth our attention, he must have had the remarkable foresight—before there was such a thing as "linguistics"—to have thought about the development of language in terms that are familiar to us. (In fact, his works demonstrate a sophisticated sense of the historicity of language, but one that is quite unlike ours.) Furthermore, linguistics is narrowly focused on language as its object, but philology acts upon a body of texts (rather than on a set of linguistic

? Through a process of sloppy synecdoche, philology has been called to account by postmodern philosophers like Paul de Man for the sins of all the modern human sciences and even blamed for the rise of fascism (Pollock 2009). The translator of Ulrich von Wilamowitz- Moellendorff's Geschichte der Philologie laments having had to title his translation History of Classical Scholarship for the sake of clarity because as far as the name philology is concerned “it is deplorable that we in England have ceased to use this valuable term correctly" (Wilamowitz- Moellendorff 1982, vii). For an influential (and famously broad) early eighteenth-century definition of the term as proposed by Giambattista Vico (1688-1744), see Burke 1985, 84 and Manson 1969, 46.

19 See, for example, Philology (Turner 2014), World Philology (Pollock et al. 2015), and the journal Philological Encounters, which has been published since 2016.

1 It has also, from early on, had a pejorative sense in English as the Oxford English Dictionary attests, e.g., Henry Cockeram's The English Dictionarie, or an Interpreter of Hard English Words of 1623 gives “loue of much babbling” as the definition for “phylologie.” Two other entries for this sense contrasted philology unfavorably with philosophy since philology (by this definition) is the study of mere words while philosophy gets at truth directly.

data), and indeed Ārzū and his peers generally made their living or their reputation or both as practicing poets. No one, it goes without saying, expects linguists to be poets today. The idea that a language can be abstracted from a literary tradition is therefore totally alien to Arzü's scholarship. It is also important to dispense with the presumption that composing literature or engaging with it was a leisure-time activity, a domain of play separate from serious business. While mocking bad poets is a staple of Persianate literature, there is no sense (before the colonial encounter) that reflecting on language or composing verse are inherently indolent activities. The Islamicate tradition never gave up on Aristotle's famous formulation that poetry “is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular." In seeking to position aspects of Arzi’s life-world as separate from basic features of our own experience, whether in the present-day West or elsewhere, the term “philologist” throws us a lifeline since it encompasses “literary scholar,” “linguist,” and "litterateur" —all of which accurately but incompletely describe Arzü.?

The Cosmopolitan and the Classic

This study will return often to the concept of the cosmopolitan, taking as given that for centuries there existed a Persian cosmopolis stretching from the Balkans in the west across Central and South Asia to the Bay of Bengal and Chinese frontier territory of Xinjiang in the east. This vast region was the zone where Persian language and literature, and its corresponding ethical and political culture, was common currency, just

12 Poetics 1451b, trans. Butcher. Indeed, some of the greats of the tradition, like the tazkirah compiler Muhammad ‘Aufi (died c. 1232-3 cE) and the poet Amir Khusrau, described the craft of poetry as “ilm [learning, often associated with religious studies], and Khusrau even went so far as to compare it to divine revelation (Keshavmurthy 2011; Gabbay 2010, 27ff.).

13 However, it should be made clear from the outset that there is no single pre-modern Persian term that captures an equivalent meaning “philologist” because someone like Ārzū could be slotted into perhaps a dozen or more common categories such as ahl-i qalam [people of the pen] or sukhan-dandn [knowers of speech/poetry]. He was an adib, that is someone who dealt with adab, but while this term contains the sense of philology (see Bonebakker 1990), nothing distinguishes general poetic practice from inquiry into the nature of language. It is worth also problematizing the applicability of the term "literature," which has no exact analogue in pre-modern Persian since adabiyāt is a nineteenth-century Turkish coinage (De Bruijn 2009).

as Latin and Latinity was a "European sign" that maintained a similar cultural zone in the West.'* Sanskrit, of course, linked South and Southeast Asia in the same way for centuries. Part of the appeal of the cosmopolitan as an object of analysis is precisely that it has no long scholarly genealogy in contrast to its obvious importance throughout world history.'? It is a real but nonetheless difficult-to-locate phenomenon that can serve as a historiographical bulwark against the nationalist thinking that is often the default mode for modern people, and which distorts our understanding of the past. A cosmopolis is not merely a linguistic zone—for example, where most elites are educated in Persian—but a textually constituted entity. A textual canon existed across the whole of the Persian cosmopolis, with some texts virtually universal, such as the works of the thirteenth-century writer Sa'di, and others less common in circulation. Indeed, many texts were written in the cosmopolitan language but never left the place where they were written. The texts that make a cosmopolis are not constitutive of a national language but are anchored in a tradition that cannot be mapped neatly onto a single extant political unit even if there is a sense of where it originated. The texts can be plausibly claimed by different groups in forming their identities. All of the disparate regions in the Persian cosmopolis shared an appreciation, for example, for Firdausi’s epic Shāhnāmah [Book of Kings, c. 1000 cg]—today claimed as the text that created an Iranian national identity but in fact composed in present-day Afghanistan on the Indian frontier—just as the Ramayana and Mahābhārata were touchstones across the Sanskrit cosmopolis and localized as required. In the case of the Persian cosmopolis, the early modern Mughals, Ottomans, and Safavids—the three great empires of the cosmopolis—all used similar curricula largely derived from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Central Asia and Iran.'* The lyric poetry of Hafizand ‘Attar (to pick two influential examples) was quoted from Istanbul to Khotan, from Tashkent to Hyderabad, as was the political philosophy of Nizami "Arüzi. The works of Sa'di were probably read by every single child in the world educated in the Persian medium for more than half a millennium.

By framing this analysis around cosmopolitanism, I am also necessarily invoking something that can be called “the classical,” which like “philology” requires quite a bit of explanation in today’s world. We are perhaps more familiar with the concept of “classical” as the textual “canon,” a substituted term that is deliberately not as explicitly honorific as “classical,” but still denotes a body of texts elevated above others that provided an identity for a literate elite." This identity based on the mastery of these classical texts, an identity that could certainly have local inflections but was by definition cosmopolitan, was on par with or more important than what we consider standard identity markers today (nation, language, class, and so on). Not only did the classics build pre-modern elite communities, but for us they flag important historical moments: When an attempt is made to redefine which texts are classical and how critics should approach them, it can be an illuminating historical discontinuity, such as when Renaissance Latinists became confident enough to question ancient editors of classical texts.'* While the classical canon is inevitably represented as static, even in many cases divinely ordained, the reality is that it is contested and constructed. The South African novelist J. M. Coetzee observes that,

The classic defines itself by surviving. Therefore, the interrogation of the classic, no matter how hostile, is part of the history of the classic, inevitable and even to be welcomed. For as long as the classic needs to be protected from attack, it can never prove itself classic.'”

In making this provocative claim, Coetzee is drawing upon a contrast between the classic as an object of veneration versus that of the classic as something to be questioned, even derided as a force that retards progress. Such tension appears as early as the first century cE in the works of the Roman grammarian Quintilian, who is ambivalent about Quintus Ennius, an early Latin poet who was by then already outmoded: "Ennius we must venerate as we do groves whose age makes them holy, full of great oaks that nowadays have less beauty than sanctity.””°

17 Guillory 1993, 6. 18 D'Amico 1988, 9. Coetzee 2001, 14. ?° Institutio Oratoria 10.1.85-90, quoted and translated in Steele 1990, 121.

This study considers Ārzū's own interventions in the Persian canon: He attempted to maintain the unity of the Persian cosmopolis through careful attention to the classics while at the same time broadening the range of permitted interpretations of Persian texts. A hallmark of early modernity was this blend of the continued centrality of the classics alongside the development of new textualized knowledge. The modern impulse to cast progress and tradition as opposites can obscure the fact that historically there was no inherent contradiction between venerating a textual canon and supporting aesthetic development.

On Method, the West, and the Non-West

Before starting to read texts historically, we should posit that historical study is necessarily a conversation with a text, in which the ways that we the interpreters pose the questions condition our understanding of the replies we receive. The present study is guided by Hans-Georg Gadamer's dictum that "at the beginning of all historical hermeneutics, then, the abstract antithesis between tradition and historical research, between history and the knowledge of it, must be discarded." At first glance, this seems a willfully obfuscatory position—why can we not just read a historical text and extract information from it? Furthermore, does this view not presuppose that only emic analyses (that is, ones based on the tradition’s own assumptions) are legitimate?? It is obvious that the purpose ofthe study of history is gathering knowledge about the past, but intellectual history, the goal of this project, is not just a matter of collecting names and dates but of sustained interpretation. For

? Walter Mignolo observes that Gadamer's hermeneutics is ill-equipped to think transculturally because it is “monotopic,” presuming that the interpreter stands within the tradition being interpreted. This is frequently not the case, especially in colonial situations. Mignolo proposes a "pluritropic" approach as an alternative "that reflects on the very process of constructing (e.g., putting in order) that portion of the world to be known" (Mignolo 2003, 15-25).