by ALEXANDER JABBARI
Cultural exchange is often assumed to be progressive, but it has neither an inherent politics nor an inevitable outcome. As nationalism rises across the globe, many see ‘cultural exchange’ as the antidote to nationalist xenophobia. Such exchange was, in fact, an integral part of the emergence of national literatures, cultures and identities in Iran and South Asia. Rather than resulting in greater cosmopolitanism, Indo-Iranian exchange fostered modern nationalism.
Today, Persian is the national language of Iran. Although it has a long history there, its national status and close association with the country depend on events in the 19th century. As the Russian Empire swallowed up swathes of Iranian territory in the 1810s and ’20s, and the sclerotic Qajar dynasty ruling Iran proved incapable of resistance, Iranian nationalism emerged to challenge both foreign imperialism and local despotism.
By the end of the 19th century, Iranian intellectuals were transforming Persian from the lingua franca of a centreless Persianate world spanning much of Asia into the language of national identity in the nation-state of Iran. Nationalist modernisers made reforming the Persian language a central project, whether they were democratic revolutionaries of the Constitutional Revolution (1905-11) or the authoritarian shahs of the Pahlavi dynasty (1925-79). Drawing on modern literary histories of Persian written by both Iranians and Indians, they refashioned Persian into a national language, and Persian literature into national heritage, positioning Iran as the proprietor of the Persianate tradition.
The Persian language we know today was born out of interaction with Arabic and Islam. Its precursors parsig and dari – now identified together as ‘Middle Persian’ – had been used by Zoroastrian priests and by the Sasanians, the Iranian dynasty that fell to the 7th-century Arab-Islamic conquest of Iran. Within a couple of centuries after the rise of Islam, the Persian language took on a new identity. It developed a new Arabic-derived script; large amounts of Arabic loanwords; a literature heavily indebted to Arabic forms, metres and imagery; and a new name, farsi, also influenced by Arabic. (The word farsi reflects, in part, the Arabic pronunciation of the earlier parsig.) Linguists call this Arabised form of the language ‘New Persian’. In the 9th century, Muslim empires began patronising New Persian as a vehicle for Islam, and spread it to the Indian subcontinent.
Modern literary histories offered a different narrative of Persian. Twentieth-century Iranian nationalists sought to distinguish the Persian language from Arabic. For them, the language was part of a continuous Iranian civilisation stretching back to the Achaemenids (the dynasty that ruled c700-330 BCE), encompassing the ‘Old Persian’ of the Achaemenid inscriptions, the ‘Middle Persian’ of the Sasanian court (c225-650 CE), and the ‘New Persian’ that followed the rise of Islam and endured to the present day. Iranian nationalists like the great literary historian Muhammad-Taqi Bahar (1886-1951) emphasised the continuity of Persian over time, uninterrupted by Islam – and, by extension, Arabic – which they saw as belonging to a distinct civilisation.
Bahar’s civilisational paradigm, predicated on the notion of linguistic integrity and the association of a people with its language, came from European philology. His efforts to show Iranian continuity before and after the rise of Islam were a nationalist project, shaped by European Orientalism, especially its new philological knowledge of ancient Iranian languages. These 19th-century European philologists, and Bahar and many others who learned from their work, grouped Persian with the Indo-European family of languages distinct from Semitic languages like Arabic. Rather than considering New Persian as a mixed language with Arabic elements, they built a narrative that emphasised the independence and continuity of Persian over the course of centuries. In doing so, they followed a paradigm established by 19th-century Germanic linguists whose scholarship classified ‘Old English’ (what had been known as the Anglo-Saxon language) and ‘Middle English’ as precursors to modern English.
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