January 19, 2003

The Perso-Islamic culture in the subcontinent was fundamentally the culture of those who ruled — men of Arab, Iranian, Turkish, or Afghan descent, writes Francis Robinson

From the eleventh century the elites of India came increasingly to share in the high culture, which we shall term Perso-Islamic culture, fashioned by the Iranian and Turkish peoples of Central and Western Asia. Men in Lahore and Delhi, in Jawnpur and Bijapur, came to speak the same languages, read the same books, delight in the same verses, follow the same laws and cherish the same values as men in Herat and Samarqand, in Shiraz and even Istanbul.

But from the eighteenth century it began to become less likely that such men would have things in common. In India, as elsewhere throughout the Perso-Islamic cultural region, this shared culture came either to be transformed as it interacted with local cultures or to be overwhelmed by a new elite culture imposed from outside....

Perso-Islamic culture formed the second great cultural nexus of the Islamic world. As Arab-Islamic culture covered, at various times, the regions of Spain, North Africa, the Fertile Crescent, Arabia and South-East Asia, so the Perso-Islamic covered the remainder of Muslim Asia, reaching at its furthest stretch from the Aegean and the Euphrates in the west of Sinkiang and the Bay of Bengal in the east, from the Russian steppe in the north to the Indian Ocean in the south.

The ingredients of this culture came together between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries when several cities, for instance Bukhara, Isfahan, and Baghdad, became great centres of government and the civilized arts. Islam provided a common framework of law and values; sweet and sibilant Persian became the language of the courts; the Turkish, and later the Mongol, genius for warfare and administration upheld state power; the Iranian genius in matters of intellect and the arts oiled the wheels of government and nourished courtly cultivation....

This Perso-Islamic culture was fundamentally the culture of those who ruled. It was not, for instance, that of all Muslims in India, but that of the ashraf, the honourable people, those whose ancestors came, or those who were in a position to claim that their ancestors had come from outside the subcontinent: men of Arab, Iranian, Turkish, or Afghan descent. The ashraf shared a well-defined vision of themselves.

They had come from abroad to rule; the wielding of power was their birthright. They cherished what they felt were the international Perso-Islamic standards of cultivation and behaviour. They were prepared to accept as part of their world those Hindu castes — Kayasths and Kashmiri Brahmins — who joined them in the business of government and absorbed their culture. They were not, by and large, prepared to accept those low-caste Hindus who were slowly being drawn into the Islamic milieu, that is, converting to Islam, as having anything to do with their world.

Perso-Islamic culture was also the culture, as we might expect, of the town-dweller. Indeed, one way in which we might see this cultural region as having some unity is to see it in terms of the world of the towns and that of the countryside. Throughout the region, most large towns were places of Perso-Islamic culture, whether great capital cities, seats of provincial government, or centres of Muslim pilgrimage. So, too, were many small towns, those qasbahs whose world and whose significance in the context of northern India Chris Bayly has done so much to alert us to.

It may help to see these towns as islands of international Perso-Islamic civilization set in countrysides dominated by local cultures, some barely Islamic, others not Islamic at all. As Zand Shiraz subsisted amidst the territories of nomadic Iranian tribes, as Janid Bukhara subsisted amongst the Uzbek tribes of Transoxiana, so the Indian qasbahs subsisted amongst the bazaars, gullies, and villages of a mainly Hindu countryside.

In these towns, great and small, the work of government was conducted, Islamic arts and letters were cultivated, Islamic knowledge was preserved and transmitted. Their existence as the bases of a great regional cultural system was affirmed by the way in which soldiers and administrators, scholars and artisans, were able to travel from one to the other to gain patronage and employment, and to feel at home.

Pillars of Perso-Islamic culture in Mughal India
In 1700 Perso-Islamic culture had never been so well placed or so influential in India. Behind it lay a century or more of the highest achievement in art and architecture, thought and letters, which had been sustained both by magnificent and discerning patronage and by a constant flow of men and ideas from Central Asia and Iran. To consider the fate of this cultural system in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we need a sense of what it primarily consisted of, or where its great strengths lay.

The first pillar of the culture was the Persian language and the literature which it expressed. Persian had been the language of government everywhere except the far south for at least a century, in some areas for several centuries. Through it, Hindus as well as Muslims had come to explore the riches of Perso-Islamic civilization; it became the main language of their intellectual and artistic life.

Moreover, through those Indians who came to use it in their work and in their art, it came to lay its impress on the various regional cultures: on the forms of Bengali verse, on Marathi vocabulary and grammar, on the script, the vocabulary, and the literary content of Pushto, Sindhi, Balochi, Kashmiri, and above all, Urdu. The major forms of Persian literature had also come to be widely cultivated.

For much of the high Mughal period there was a strong tradition of historiography. Notable too was the writing of biographical dictionaries, or tazkirahs, the recording of the alleged sayings of Sufi shaykhs, malfuzat, and the art of official letter-writing, insha’, which was so vital to the diplomatic prestige of courts in the Perso-Islamic world. Most important, as in all Muslim societies, was poetry.

In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries poets from Iran and Central Asia had created a golden age at the courts of both Mughal emperors and Deccan sultans. At the beginning of the eighteenth century one outstanding representative of this period of achievement still lived, Mirza ‘Abd al-Qadir Bedil (d. 1721), who was to have great influence in India and even greater influence in Afghanistan and Central Asia.

The second pillar of the culture was Islamic knowledge, both formal and mystical. In formal knowledge the rational sciences, ma’qulat, had gained increasing attention. Their study had been greatly encouraged by the leading intellectual at Akbar’s court, Fadl Allah Shirazi (d. 1589), who promoted the philosophical traditions of his countryman Jalal al-Din Dawwani (1427-1502/3), which led to great interest in the contemporary philosophers Mir Baqir Damad of Isfahan (d. 1631) and his distinguished pupil Mulla Sadra of Shiraz (1571-1640).

The interest had been strengthened by the arrival of scholars from Central Asia who found the growing orthodoxy of the Shaybanid state increasingly hostile to their rationalist thought. Then, in the seventeenth century, both Siyalkot and Jawnpur had become leading centres of scholarship in the field; scholars began to explore non-Islamic philosophical traditions, Hindu, Zoroastrian, and European; and influential work was produced, most notably Mulla Mahmud Jawnpuri’s al-Shams al Bazigha.

Some scholars, however, were disturbed by the increasing prominence of rationalist studies; they feared the free thinking and free behaviour of the emperors Akbar and Jahangir with which these seemed to be associated. This led to new interest in the revealed sciences, manqulat, in particular the study of Hadiths. The study was firmly established by Shaykh ‘Abd al-Haqq of Delhi (1551-1642) who had fled to Hijaz in 1587 to escape the lax atmosphere of Akbar’s court. Here he benefited from that powerful school of Hadith scholarship which was to have such widespread influence in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Islamic world.