Accounting for Difference: A Comparative Look at the Autobiographical Travel Narratives of Hazin Lāhiji and 'Abd-al-Karim Kashmiri

Abstract

This paper examines the mid-eighteenth century historical memoir of Mohammad Ali Hazin Lāhiji and the auto-biographical travel narrative of 'Abd al-Karim Kashmiri as a way to understand a shared tradition of cultural conceptions and textual borrowing, even in the midst of different attributions of historical meaning and valuations within that culture. Hazin often serves as an iconic figure, representative of the changing relationship between Iran and Hindustan in the eighteenth century. Reading Hazin's memoir in relation to Kashmiri's travels with Nadir Shah's army from Delhi to Iran on his way to hajj problematizes this dominant reading. Underneath diverging and sometimes conflicting claims in these texts, history is represented in a way that evinces similar ideas of home, country, and ideal political rule in the context of travel and exile.

India in the Persian World of Letters

“…Ārzū claims Á Hākim as a friend, citing a difficult-to-translate verse by him on their friendship: "zi dunyā wa z māfī-hā, zi dunyā wa z māfī-hā / hamīn yār ārzū dāram, hamīn yār ārzū dāram" (MN 2004, 1:396) ¹⁷ Perry 2003;Khatak 1944;Kirmani 1986, 30. Mana Kia has argued convincingly that Á Hazīn's apparent dislike of India needs to be seen through the lens of his personal experience, and should be understood not as indicting Indian culture so much as lamenting his inability to return to his devastated native land (Kia 2009). Faruqi on the other hand points to Á Hazīn's "pure malice" (Faruqi 2004b, 17).…”

The languages of Indian Ocean studies: Models, methods and sources

“…While so far, Muslims have largely been the default literate groups under investigation, the emergence of new work with Buddhist sources has begun to widen our sense of the Indian Ocean's variety of intellectual networks, including the emergence of Japanese Buddhist contacts with India in the nineteenth century (Blackburn, 2017; Frasch, 2016; Jaffe, 2019). However, with the exception of legal documents related to cross‐cultural trade and travel writings (Khazeni, 2020; Kia, 2009, 2017; McDow, 2018), few of these sources documented interactions with followers of other religions or comprised detailed investigations of other linguistic communities. Again, this suggests the existence of intellectual barriers, even cultural fractures, around the ocean; or, at the very least, the challenges of researching and documenting the truly cross‐cultural exchange of complex ideas across the ocean's linguistic and orthographic boundaries.…”