When Hindus Wrote in Persian

Raziuddin Aquil

There was a time in Indias medieval and early modern history when some of
the finest masterpieces in Hindi were written by Muslims and some of the
most fascinating Persian compositions were produced by Hindus. Those
vibrant strands of literary cultures were somewhat suddenly discarded with
the violent transitions in political, social and cultural lives during the colonial
period, roughly starting from the 1830s onwards though fault-lines were
beginning to be seen from the latter half of the 18 th century when the older
world began to crack. Political processes in these past couple of centuries
have further ruptured the connections between the old world
cosmopolitanism with multiple idioms of political and intellectual discourses
and current crises borne out of widespread ignorance about pre-colonial
Indias cultural achievements.
I have previously written in these columns about the exquisite literary
production in a variety of forms or genre in medieval Hindi by a large number
of Muslim authors to the extent that the history of classical Hindi literature
would have been so much poorer if such huge corpus as Sufi poetry of love,
premakhayan, were to be excluded just because they were composed by
people who happened to be Muslims. Such has been the poisoning of the
mind of sections of people that they might wonder that Muslims could not
have produced this literature and perhaps would not know how to handle
such formidable text as Padmavat of early 16th century Sufi enthusiast Malik
Muhammad Jaisi.
Such a communal mindset can also not make sense of the fact of a vast
production of a fine Indo-Persian prose and poetry by Brahmins, Kayasthas
and a host of other non-Muslim learned writers, intellectuals and officials in
Mughal India, emerging as part of a longer process of political formation and
dynastic rules of Turko-Afghan empire builders since the 13 th-14th centuries.
There were big moments such as Sikandar Lodis attempt to use Persian as
the language of administration as well as late 16 th and early 17th century
Mughal attempts, under the patronage of Akbar and later Dara Shukoh, to
know Indian culture in its own terms leading to sponsorship of translations
and study of various domains of knowledge embedded in classical texts,
either directly from Sanskrit or through Hindvi vernaculars such as Braja or
Awadhi. However, as it often happens in these times of political uncertainties
and abuses of past violations if any, the ignorant skeptics might be surprised
to know that the golden period of the history of Indo-Persian literature, with
Hindus contributing immensely to literary excellence, is the period beginning

the latter half of the 17th century when Aurangzeb reigned roughly the whole
of the subcontinent from his base in Delhi and the Deccan.
The latter half of the 17th and generally the whole of the 18 th century saw a
large number of Persian texts being produced by Hindu men of the pen
officials, poets, intellectuals, philosophers and religious figures. In his
magnum opus written in Urdu, Adabiyat Farsi mein Hinduon ka Hissa (reprint,
New Delhi: Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu Hind, 1992), Syed Abdullah has discussed
the lives and works of a large number of poets, historians, officials
composing letters and documents (insha-writing), biographers as well as
writers of theological texts and philosophical treatises; several rich
dictionaries, books on mathematics, theoretical texts on music and
compositions on social and political norms were also produced during this
period.
Following the tarikh tradition of Persian historiography, quite a few richly
textured historical texts were written by such stalwarts as Munshi Sujan Rai
(Khulasat-ut-Tawarikh), Bindraban Das (Lubb-ut-Tawarikh) and Bhim Sen (Dil
Kusha). Collections of official correspondence and other documents and
farmans, both original and as samples, were penned by such veteran Hindu
officials as Chandrabhan Brahman and Pindi Das. The likes of Lakshmi
Narayan Shafiq and Anand Ram Mukhlis carved out a niche for themselves as
first rate Persian poets in their own right, in a world of cut-throat competition
doubly-redoubled by a continuous tirade by recent Iranian immigrants who
questioned the ability of Indians to write in Persian and dismissed IndoPersian writings, which they often failed to comprehend, as sabke-hindi, or
the Indian style.
One of the reasons why books in Indian Persian generally and compositions
by Hindus in particular were criticized by the purists was the preponderance
of Indian words, phrases and themes in these writings. Just as Muslim Sufi
texts sought to appropriate and combine themes from Indian mystical
traditions, religious thinkers and philosophers like Beghum Bairagi (Swami
Bhupat Rai Bairagi of Khatri antecedent in Punjab) responded to such critical
themes as the idea of God and Unity of Being. For Bairagi, the usual Muslimdebate around kufr (infidelity) and iman (faith) were meaningless theological
contestations, for according to him everything emanated from God, the
secrets of whom were not known to ordinary mortals: Hich kas az jood-e-haq
mehroom nist # Sirr-e in mani be-kas mafhoom nist