The Ethics of Erotics: Engaging Persian Literature in Colonial India

It is a common view among scholars of South Asian Islam that Muslims in colonial India internalized Victorian sexual norms and distanced themselves from classical Persian texts due, in large part, to their erotic and homoerotic content. This paper challenges this ‘derivative discourse’ of social and religious change by exploring a parallel tradition of engagement with Persian literature. While some “modernist” Muslim intellectuals, mostly those with close ties to the colonial state, sought to discredit the sexual norms of classical Persian and Urdu literature, commercial publishing houses continued to circulate these texts widely, often with interpretive frames that signaled their enduring relevance to a broad readership. An early modern tradition of engaging Persian literature not only survived but reached new audiences through the medium of print. I demonstrate the point by drawing on the Indian reception of a thirteenth-century Persian text that became one of the most printed books in nineteenth-century India: the Gulistan (Rose-Garden) of Saʿdi.