Midway through his Urdu biography of a famous Persian author, a nineteenth-century Indian intellectual encountered a problem. Altaf Husain Hali (d. 1914) had begun his book by observing that although “Islam’s ancient authors” included greater names, the most popular Muslim author in India was Saʿdi of Shiraz (d. 1291). But as Hali discussed Saʿdi’s writings, he worried that a grave charge could be levied against them: their frequent references to amrad-parasti (the desire of men for male youth).[i] Other Muslim intellectuals of the time also expressed concerns about the erotics of classical Persian literature. To historians, such concerns constitute evidence of a broader rupture from an early modern tradition of engaging Persian literature.
Articulated in the early 1990s by Frances Pritchett and Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, this argument has become a mainstay in histories of colonial India, as seen in recent works by Pasha Khan and Alexander Jabbari. According to this view, Muslims in colonial India internalized Victorian sexual norms and distanced themselves from classical Persian texts. This argument has received credence from scholarship on other Muslim-majority regions, where Iranian and Arab intellectuals are said to have made similar critiques of their religio-literary heritage.[ii] The passage to modernity for Muslims in India, then, appears to follow the same route as that taken by Muslims in other regions. The driver, in each case, remains the West, whose dominant sexual mores—prudery in talking about sex and rejection of homoeroticism—are absorbed by Muslims.
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.
More than a hundred Indian editions of the Gulistan from the nineteenth century are preserved today; many more have either been lost or await cataloguing in dusty private collections across South Asia.[iii] These Gulistan editions—some of these were reprints—included varying paratextual materials: marginal commentaries, interlinear translations, variant readings, and visual illustrations. Some editions contain a publisher’s statement explaining the rationale for producing another edition of the Gulistan. Others have colophons in Persian verse written by those associated with the press. The Gulistan prints thus reveal a whole world of Indian popular publishing that has received little attention from historians. This was a world populated by scribes and scholars, poets and painters. Significant numbers of Hindus (and Sikhs and Parsis) participated actively in this Persianate tradition alongside Muslims. Even “reformist” ʿulama such as Deobandis—considered by some scholars to be hostile to “secular” Persian literature—played a key role in disseminating Persian literature. By attending to the various actors and the hermeneutic apparatus associated with different editions of the Gulistan, this paper reveals important continuities between colonial and pre-colonial Indian engagements with Persian literature.
I argue that Indian scholars in the nineteenth century built upon an early modern Persianate tradition by engaging the erotic themes of the Gulistan under an overarching ethical framework, a paradigm that I call the ‘ethics of erotics.’ As part of this paradigm, colonial-era commentators on the Gulistan frankly discussed topics such as male same-sex desire and the sexual satisfaction of women. Histories of South Asian Islam have largely ignored these commentators, but their Gulistan editions were among the most widely circulating printed books in the nineteenth century. The positive reception of these texts demonstrates that the older Persianate tradition not only survived the tumultuous transformations of colonial modernity, it remained the more popular mode—more widely consumed by readers—compared to the ‘modernist’ tradition. Moving beyond printed books to discuss the lived experiences of Indians from a range of backgrounds, I conclude by outlining key features of a larger Persianate milieu in colonial India. Even in the colonial era, I suggest, many Indians continued to be at home in the broader ethical and erotic world of Persian literature.[iv]
[i] Altaf Husain Hali, Hayat-i Saʿdi [The Life of Sa‘di] (Lahore, 1938), pp. 6, 126. All translations from Arabic, Persian, and Urdu sources are my own. For this proposal, I have omitted all diacritics.
[ii] Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley, 2005); Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago, 2007).
[iii] Arif Naushahi, A Catalogue of Saʿdi’s works printed in the Subcontinent (Rawalpindi, 1984), pp. 73–94.
[iv] My broader dissertation project contests the thesis of an alleged elitism of Persianate culture in early modern and colonial India. Shifting focus away from elite courtly networks that have dominated previous studies, I attend to the circulation of manuscripts of the Gulistan and its commentaries in small towns and villages whose engagements with Persian literary culture have been marginalized. The interpretive labor of scholars and the production, circulation, and materiality of their commentaries’ manuscripts reveals the importance of these texts as sources for constructions of Islam, gender, and sexual norms in early modern India. The print histories of these texts, in turn, reveal new insights into histories of colonial India, some of which I discuss in this paper.
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.