Marking Boundaries and Building Bridges: Persian Scholarly Networks in Mughal Punjab

Dhavan, Purnima

doi:10.1525/luminos.64.f

The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca 2019

DOI: 10.1525/luminos.64.f

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Marking Boundaries and Building Bridges: Persian Scholarly Networks in Mughal Punjab

Purnima Dhavan¹

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2024

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“… 80 Dhavan 2019, 167–69; also early educational reports from Punjab, in Selections 1922, II, 278–312.…”

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confidence: 99%

Empires, Languages, and Scripts in the Perso-Indian World

Guha

2024

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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Sociolinguists study the valorization of specific languages as a ‘language ideology’. Contemporary nation-states frequently identify with and promote specific languages. Such linguistic nationalism is a language ideology, but not the only one. This article examines earlier millennia to uncover the dynamics by which imperial systems managed linguistic diversity and how and why they favored and disfavored particular languages and scripts. I analyze states and empires as coalitions of interest groups. I invoke the scribal masters of imperial chanceries and archives as one such group. I develop a heuristic framework (or “model”) to understand the interactions of language and power that unfolded across West and South Asia. I begin with a great empire, the Persian, that did not employ its founders’ ethnic speech but instead refined an older state language in governance. That choice entrenched an interest group that endured through a thousand years till displaced by Arab conquest after 660 CE. But a simpler ‘New Persian’ revived in the eastern Iranian lands. Turkish and Mongol conquest elites emerging from Inner Asia carried this language and its scribes into their growing domains in the Indian subcontinent. I then explain why the non-Persian Mughals in the 1550s selected Persian as their state language and rejected the constant pressure to use Urdu creole. Mughal rule left behind a tenacious Persian-writing elite that the early British empire employed. Finally, I explain the state processes behind the colonial-era decline of Persianate administration and the emergence of a new linguistic politics in colonial India.

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“… 80 Dhavan 2019, 167–69; also early educational reports from Punjab, in Selections 1922, II, 278–312.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Empires, Languages, and Scripts in the Perso-Indian World

Guha

2024

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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Knowledge as civilizational role play: China watching by its Southern neighbours

Shih

2019

Third World Quarterly

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Marking Boundaries and Building Bridges: Persian Scholarly Networks in Mughal Punjab

Cited by 2 publications

References 3 publications

Empires, Languages, and Scripts in the Perso-Indian World

Empires, Languages, and Scripts in the Perso-Indian World

Knowledge as civilizational role play: China watching by its Southern neighbours

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