Although Persian was the pre-eminent language of the courts, government and written communication for most of cosmopolitan India- Hindu or Muslim- over 600 years from the 12th century, very few people in India read Persian right now.
India was an integral part of the Persianate cosmopolis and an important center of Persian language writing and literature. Many of the greats of Persian literature were from the subcontinent or migrated and succeeded there like Amir Khusrau Dehlavi (1253-1325 CE), ‘Urfi Shirazi (1555-1591), Ghani Kashmiri (1630-1670), Bedil (1640-1720) and Saeb (1592-1676).
Certainly, Persian was never a widely-spoken language but although it was an elite form used for literary production, teaching, correspondence and official documents, it acquired its own flavor in India: the Indo-Persian register is recognizable from the Persian of Iran or Dari of Afghanistan.
Modern Persian and Indo-Persian
The distinctions between modern Persian and Indo-Persian are significant. One of the basic differences lies in phonology. Indo-Persian retains older vowel distinctions, in written form, that Modern Iranian Persian does not any more. Besides, a number of Indian words were introduced into the language through the process of tafris (Persianisation). Also, Indo-Persian was distinct in style.
Decline of Indo-Persian began in the 1830s, when the British East India Company stopped utilizing it as an official language. The works of Allama Iqbal (d 1938) show the end of significant Indo-Persian writing in the subcontinent.
Indo-Persian is an integral part of India’s history
After the 1857 War of Independence, all students of the arts were required to learn a classical language as a result of the new educational system that the British introduced in the first modern universities in India. The students of madrasas across India still study Persian as part of their education in India. They follow variants of the Dars-e-Nizami syllabus. Moreover, Sa’adi’s (d.1292) prose work, Gulistan as well as readings from other works like Qabusnama are the prescribed texts in the madrasa system. They are considered as instructional texts that are designed to train students in ethics and formal literary writing and conventions.
Mohammad Taqi Bahar and many other modern literary critics had a low regard for Indo-Persian writing and believed that it does not have high quality– with a few exceptions. The Iranians do not consider Indo-Persian worth reading, maybe with the exception of Amir Khusrau Dehlavi and a few Indian poets. They, for centuries, think that it is derivative and unoriginal. Indians have lost fluency in Indo-Persian for a long period. In spite of this, recognizing that Indo-Persian is an integral part of India’s history is important.
Source: Scroll.in
