the local universality of poetic pleasure khan i arzu ieshr-libre

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Indian Economic & Social History

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DOI: 10.1177/0019464612474168 2013 50: 27Indian Economic Social History Review

Prashant Keshavmurthyspeaking subject

an Arzu and the h- The local universality of poetic pleasure: Sirajuddin 'Ali K-

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The local universality of poetic pleasure:

Sirjuddin Ali K- h- n rzu and the speaking subject*

Prashant Keshavmurthy

Institute of Islamic Studies, Canada

The concept of the speaking subject that fundamentally underlay all Perso-Arabic discourses

on language came to be constituted as a problem in mid-eighteenth-century Mughal India when

a certain Persian ghazal stylistics called Speaking Anew (tza-goy) came to be criticised. In defending this stylistics against its detractors, Sirjuddin Ali n rzu, an Indo-Persian polymath of the period, responded in a variety of genres to this problematisation of the subject

of speech, retrieving in Persian traditionally authoritative Arabic theories of mimesis and re-

interpreting traditional Perso-Arabic ethico-aesthetic attitudes for his purposes. Central to the

older discourses on language that rzu interpreted was the category of linguistic purity. rzu marshaled his treatises, dictionaries, commentaries and poetry to demonstrate that the trans-

temporal and trans-spatial criteria of this category had always had local content peculiar to

pedagogically trained peoples in each period and across periods of Persian literary history. This

article discusses the motivations for rzus oeuvre and explicates its conceptual grid, focusing in particular on rzus historicisation of the concept of linguistic purity.

Keywords: Sirjuddin Ali n rzu, azn, tza-goy, Persian poetry, Persian literary theory, Mughal India

Among the impediments to a persuasive periodisation of classical Persian literature is the very temporality of this literature. From roughly 900 to 1900 its poets vari-ously responded to each other in a densely inter-textual tradition of shared aesthetic resources whose origins they believed were recounted in obscure and disputed legends relating New Persian to Arabic and, thence, to Syriac.1 They cultivated this shared and cumulative heritage of aesthetic resources to inhabit what often appears to us to be a temporality of contemporaneousness with each other across time and space. A way of shattering this image of timeless splendour has been to

*Dedicated to Satyanarayana Hegde.1 A relatively early account of the disputed legendary origins of New Persian poetry may be found in

the authors prefaces to the earliest extant prosopography of poets in New Persian, Muhammad Aw s Lubb al-albb (The Piths of Intellects), completed in 1221 at the court of the Ghurid vassal Nsiruddin Qabja in Sind and dedicated to his vizier Ain ul-mulk. Aw , Lubb al-albb, pp. 119. rzu recounted Aw s legendary transmissions in a brief chapter of his Musmir, suggesting the persistence of these legends of origin, however disputed. rzu, Musmir, pp. 1721.

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 50, 1 (2013): 2745

SAGE Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DC

DOI: 10.1177/0019464612474168


28 / PRASHANT KESHAVMURTHY


adopt a genealogical method that would look to traditional critical discourses on poetryto be found in poetry itself as much as in non-poetic genresfor signs of an indigenous periodicity. This is arguably why the Persian ghazal stylistics called Speaking Anew (tza-goy) that originated across the Indo-Persian world in the 1500s has come to be studied intensively in recent years.2 As the very phrase sug-gests, the newness in question was a renewal rather than newness ab initio. Among the most copious authors of critical discourses related to Speaking Anew and among the most useful to help us better understand the recursive temporality of this kind of literary newness was Sirjuddin Ali n rzu (16871756). The scholarship addressed directly to rzu broadly deploys two distinct methodologies. The rst methodology that characterises the majority of studies is a historico-biographical one that has neglected to ask what conceptual resources rzu drew on in the diverse oeuvre he authored over roughly 50 years. The second focuses on his use of concepts and categories that he shared with his contemporaries and has been motivated explicitly by the genealogical considerations mentioned earlier.3 The adumbrations and gains of this second methodology form the basis of this article.

I will attempt in this article, after limning the complex of political and institu-tional causes for rzus projects, to infer the conceptual coherence of his diverse oeuvre, characterising it as a response to and in ection of the problematisation of the speaking subject in a range of related disciplines and practices in Islamicate

2 I translate tza-goy as Speaking Anew to capture the recursive temporality of this corpuss relations with its own literary patrimony, a temporality of renewal rather than displacement. Paul Losensky translates it as speaking the fresh and Rajeev Kinra as fresh-speaking; both translations are also intended to capture this sense of renewal though the word anew has the advantage of signaling the recursive character in question by its very morphology. Losensky, Welcoming Fighani, pp. 195207; Kinra, Make it Fresh: Time, Tradition and Indo-Persian Literary Modernity.

3 The rst of the two methodologies, the historico-biographical one, is already in evidence in the earliest work of modern scholarship on rzu, Muhammad Husain zds b-i ayt (1880). zd says that As long as all logicians will be called the descendants of Aristotle, all Urdu-speakers will continue to be called the descendants of n-i rzu, not explaining this commendation except by observing that rzu was a teacher to many of the foremost Urdu poets of the period. zd, b-i ayt, p. 115. In the only book-length study in any language to be devoted exclusively to rzu, Rehana Khatun infers rzus biographical narrative from biographical dictionaries and presents a piecemeal summary of the contents of his individual works without abstracting the network of concepts that accounts for their unity of substance and method. Khatun, Awl o sr-i sirj al-din ali n-e rzu. The other studies of rzu that deploy variants of this method are: Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Historiography; Shamisa, Atiya-ye kubr wa mauhibat-e uzm; Rahimpoor, Sairi dar awl o sr-e sirj al-din ali n rzu-ye akbarbdi; Rahimpoor, Atiya-ye kubr wa mauhibat-e uzm; Rahimpoor, Nazariya-yi daryft: as sirj al-din ali n rzu-ye akbarbdi t Hans Robert Jauss-e lmni. (In its attempt to compare and contrast rzus views of reception to those of a selection of European hermeneuticians, this last essay leaves unexplained rzus debts to Islamicate hermeneutics.) The following texts by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, Sayyid Abdullah and Rajeev Kinra, however, constitute instances of the second method and form the basis of my own essay as they adumbrate rzus conceptual inheritances rather than only summarise his textual topics and relate his biography. For Faruqis lecture, The Need for a New and Comprehensive Persian Literary Theory, see http://www.columbia.edu/itc/


Sirjuddin Ali K- h- n rzu and the speaking subject / 29


India of the early to mid-eighteenth century. In thus explicating the conceptual matrix that traverses rzus oeuvre and the social circumstances under which this oeuvre was produced, I hope to retrieve for scholarship an understanding of rzus analytical and rhetorical labour by which, for the rst time in Persian literary his-tory, he gave the practices surrounding literary authorship an explicitly conceptual and historicist formulation, an achievement eclipsed not long afterwards by the fading of Persian in India as a prestigious literary medium and, still later, by the consolidation of a nationalist literary canon in early twentieth-century Iran and an essentialist politics of the mother-tongue in both countries. The universality of this articles title thus refers to the framework of Aristotelian-Islamicate ethical and aesthetic concepts that rzu elaborated in Persian on the basis of his Arabic sources while the locality in question pertains to the literary and linguistic phenomena submitted to these concepts. What follows will be an explication and explanation of this articulation of locality with universality.

Before colonialism, the systematic study of language in Persian and Arabic was underwritten by two co-related premises: the meaning of any linguistic utterance originates by convention in waa, the actdivine or humanof positing or coin-ing meaning; and poetry is the most prestigious instance of such utterance humans are capable of.4 This is not to suggest that pre-colonial Perso-Arabic discourses on language were stable across all periods before colonialism but only that these premises of Arabic philology, dating in their earliest extant formulations to the tenth century, constituted the stable foundations of one particular Arabic-language

mealac/pritchett/00fwp/srf/srf_persianlittheory_2009.pdf (last accessed on 4 March 2012); Abdullah, Dd-i suan, pp. 14247; Abdullah, Mab is: Doctor Sayyid Abdullah ke ta qqi o tanqdi maamn, pp. 4295; Kinra, This Noble Science: Indo-Persian Comparative Philology, 10001800 C.E.; Kinra, Make it Fresh: Time, Tradition and Indo-Persian Literary Modernity.

4 The earliest Arab Muslim interest in the nature of the relation between signi er (dall) and signi ed (madll) was already premised on the conventional rather than natural origin of this relation. Debates over signi cation (dallat) related to whether the agent who rst laid down the convention in question was divine or human. Thus, see Al-Farabi, The Book of Letters, pp. 57. This premise became an axiom of the Arabic language discipline called ilm al-wadha or the science of linguistic coining that was taught in seminaries wherever Arabic was studied in the Islamic world. This is not to imply that systematic knowledge in pre-colonial Islamic societies remained stable and unchanged across time but only that the foundational premise of this particular discipline remained stable and constituted the shared ground on which disagreements could take place. That this premise informed analyses of the Persian language and the pedagogy of Persian poetry even as late as the early 1800s is evident in Mirz Muhammad Qatls (d. 1817) Nahr al-faat (Stream of Linguistic Purity), written in north India to instruct a noblemans son in Persian grammar and poetics and widely printed and published in the nineteenth century. Here is a passage from this text that draws without acknowledgement from Al-atb al-Qazwnis Tals al-mift and its related corpus of Arabic balagt, attesting to the persistence of linguistic coining as a foundational pedagogical premise of Persian literary culture even in this late period: Metaphorics [bay n], according to scholars of bal gat, designates the enunciation of a word that refers to a meaning other than the one stipulated by its coiner [gair-i waa-i w zi]. In his exposition of the kinds of metaphor, Qatl paraphrases in Persian passages on wadha that were current in Arabic language textbooks of the period and earlier such as Al-atb al-Qazwnis Tals al-mift. Qatl, Nahr al-faat, p. 36.




discipline of long institutional duration, namely ilm al-wadha or the science of linguistic coining that was taught and studied in madrasas or Islamic seminaries in Mughal India as elsewhere in the Perso-Arabic world. For reasons I will presently relate, rzu reformulated these already familiar Arabic-language premises in his Persian writings when the requirements for the ideal speaking subject became a topic of controversy.

The historically local reasons for this new problematisation of the subject of speech in Persian lay, among other reasons, in the eighteenth-century dispersal of formerly centred courtly power and patronage that had thus far been the main institutional basis for the determination of literary canonicity. Not only was this an issue of diminished possibilities for patronage, it was also one of a loss of authoritative courtly centres for the arbitration of literary value.5 Absent by rzus period was the politically and nancially powerful Mughal court of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries whose institution of the malik al-shuar (literally king of poets and guratively court poet) and whose patronage of courtly authors of biographical dictionaries or prosopographies (takiras) of Persophone poets pow-erfully if not exclusively determined the Persian literary canonicity of the period. The dispersal of political power across provincial efdoms from the early 1700s onward, even though under the of cial carapace of the Mughal imperium, was paralleled by the dissolution of Safavid power in Iran with the ascension of Ndir Shh Afshr in 1737. Sheikh Ali azn, a famous Iranian migr intellectual and poet with familial and personal ties to the deposed Safavid regime, left Iran for India as Ndir Shh rose to power, eventually settling in India though he was loath to do so.6 azns disparagements of Indias Persian philology and poetry were crucial provocations to rzu in the composition of some of his major texts, as will be noted ahead.7 Also contemporary with these developments was the pervasive rise across north India and the Deccan of Braj Bhsh to the status of a language worthy of courtly presentation and patronage.8 This complex of causes resulted in increasing numbers of claimants of increasingly diverse social and religious identi-ties and linguistic competencies to membership in the Persian literary community, a fact attested to by the burgeoning number of prosopographies composed across this century to the early decades of the nineteenth that valourised disparate ideals of Persian literary community and contained frequent references to the Braj tradition.

5 For an account of diminishing state resources, the loss of central courtly authority and the formation of factions centred on powerful noblemen in this period, see Chandra, Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court: 17071740, pp. 27892. I thank Mana Kia of the Max Planck Institute, Berlin, for alerting me to this point.

6 For a summary and study of azns travel-account, see Alam and Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discovery: 14001800, pp. 22642.

7 azin, Takirat al-muirn, pp. 9295; azin, Risla-i wqit-i irn wa hind, in Rasil-i azn-i lhj, pp. 22831.

8 For an exposition of this rise of Braj to courtly prestige, see Busch, Hidden in Plain View: Braj Bhasha Poets at the Mughal Court, pp. 267309.




rzu, like some of his contemporaries, responded to the resulting competition by stipulating the quali cations for the ideal speaking subject in Persian. However, he did so by simultaneously universalising and historicising these quali cations in modes that distinguished him from his contemporaries, modes that form the main topic of this article.

The Aristotelian-Islamicate sense of the universalism in question here will become apparent in the course of the following interpretation of rzus arguments. Here is his opening account of his theory of linguistic representation in his Atiya-yi kubr (The Great Gift):

Metaphorics [bayn]: is the discipline in which is discussed the representation [ikyat] in words of a thing by another thing. It is evident that humans are naturally disposed to representations for they delight in them. This is why you see that people delight in seeing and contemplating the forms and images of unpleasant animals although they nd seeing the thing itself unpleasant. And it is evident that a complete visual image too is not cause for such pleasure because seeing the visual images of unseen animals does not give much pleasure. Thus the pleasure human natures take in representations is neither in visual images nor in their referents. Therefore linguistic utterances comprising representations are more pleasurable and delightful. Thus it is that representation is the foundation of poetic utterance for it is founded on the imagination, not knowledge that is certain [mukat ass-i kalm-i shirst, zr ke ban-yi n bar tayl ast na taqq ke yaqn ast]. Thus linguistic utterances containing representations cast a spell on hearts and are wondrous to them, especially poetry [shir] because rhythm has much to do with this.9

Appealing directly to the factuality of experience as aesthetics allows him to do, rzu asserts that humans take pleasure in linguistic representations more than in visual ones and that this pleasure derives from the uncertainty of the knowledge they are based on. Does the we here cover all humans or only some? Let us suspend answers to this question till attention to another of his passages lets us answer it, noting for now that certain knowledge, implicitly, would not give us the kind of pleasureif any at allthat the uncertain knowledge of the imagination does. And of the pleasures we derive from linguistic representations based on imaginary or uncertain knowledge, poetry gives us the most intense because meter has much to do with this.

However, these are not just any representations but representations in words of a thing by another thing. They entail the verbal formulation of a thing as another thing. rzu does not tell us explicitly whether this being-as is substitutive or imita-tive. That is, he does not say whether representing a thing in language by means of another thing is to picture the referent in its representation or to present a proxy

9 rzu, Atiya-yi kubr, p. 51.




for it.10 That it is a proxy rather than a picture becomes apparent to us when we read in the same text that:

Humans have faculties named the imagination [mutaayyila] and the intel-lect [mutafakkira] among whose distinctions are the combining of forms and meanings, their elaboration and appropriation and the invention of things that in actuality do not exist. And this either occurs by means of the faculty of fantasy [quwwat-i wahmiyya]in which case it is called imaginaryor by means of the faculty of the intellect [quwwat-i aqliyya], then being called intellectual [mutafakkira]. Thus a non-existent [thing] that is composed by the imagina-tion out of matters it has comprehended by the external senses belongs to the sensiblesAnd a thing invented by the intellect out of itself belongs to the intelligibles.11

The pleasure taken in poetry is pleasure, not in what is, but in the invention of sen-sible or intelligible thingsor various combinations thereofthat could possibly be inasmuch as they constitute elaborations of what we know to be actual. We take pleasure in such elaborations in language of uncertain knowledge of hypothetical stand-ins or proxies for things certainly known to exist. Such uncertainly existing beings, composed of both the imaginary and intellectual, participate in the nature of those that certainly exist. And we delight in rhythmic or metrical speech of that halo of possibilities surrounding actualities. Certain knowledge does not yield the kind of pleasure the uncertain knowledge of imaginatively or intellectually elaborated possibilities does because it limits itself to the observation of what is, not ventur-ing to imagine or intellectualise in language what could therefore be. If it is a trait among the members of a literary community to take pleasure in such reality testing, poetry is the most pleasurable kind of reality testing, entailing an actualisation in the second-order reality of metrical language of what is potential in the rst-order realities of the sensible and the intelligible. rzu does not explain why he thinks such elaboration in metrical language of the hypothetical on the basis of the actual yields a peculiar pleasure. His silence on this point here, however, only left unsaid what did not need explication in a pragmatically oriented text since prosody, as he explicates in his historical and structural study of the Persian language, Musmir (The Fruition), had long formed a part of the Persian litterateurs training in virtue. This is where it becomes apparent that rzus universalism belongs to the tradition of Islamicate interpretations of Aristotlein particular the Aristotelian treatise transmitted under the name The Nicomachean Ethicsaccording to which reason

10 I am indebted for the formalisation of this distinction to Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? This essay distinguishes between representation as portrait and as proxy. Hans-Georg Gadamer formulates the same distinction differently in his Truth and Method, citing Neo-Platonism and then Christian canon law as the locus classicus for the idea of representation as proxy. Gadamer, Truth and Method.

11 rzu, Atiya-yi kubr, pp. 5455.




or the rational part of the soul was universal in the sense of being a trans-human potential even as only some humans (variously determined by gender, class and ethnicity) were afforded the opportunity to actualise this potential. Training in prosody was one of an ensemble of practices by which the subject cultivated his potentiality of reason. That is, it was integral to the formation of a sound or balanced nature (tab-i salm, tab-i mauzn) capable of taking and displaying a balanced pleasure in poetry, capable of a shared self-control in ecstasy that re ected the control exercised over poetic rhythm and was thus a condition for participation in literary community. Thus, rzu says in his Musmir:

Metrical harmony between the two hemstitches of a distich, in fact the con-cordance [tawfuq] of every one of the distiches of a ghazal or a qada [i.e., a genre of panegyric], is necessary. Balance in a matter of ecstasy is necessary because the ear of every person of balanced nature [mauzn tab] recognizes it and does not depend on knowing scansionIn fact, scansion is intended to instruct an unbalanced nature.12

In his account of linguistic representation, its concomitant faculty psychology and his explication of the value of prosodic training, rzu was thus formulating what he considered universally applicable truths of cognition and evaluations of linguistic practice. That the afore-quoted passage on metaphorics opens with lines that are almost direct translations into Persian of an Arabic passage from a text already widely known and long authoritative across the Perso-Arab world, Al-Sakkkis Mift al-ulm (Key to the Sciences, 1229), signals the universalism of the human subject intended here.13 rzu historicised the universalism he inherited by arguing that this universal structure of cognition, linguistic representation and prosody was always and everywhere articulated with conventions that were local to peda-gogically trained peoples in a period and across periods. What follows are three illustrations of this localising historicisation.

The rst, in evidence in his discussion of the rhetorical category of comparison, is a passage on comparative poetics that had precedents going back to eleventh-century Ghaznavid Persian topography and similar discourses in thirteenth-century post-Mongol Arabic historiography but assumed a new signi cance in late Mughal India when Persian was only one of the several other languages invested with lit-erary prestige in courtly settings and when ethnographic and topographic texts in Persian came to be composed in increasing numbers.14 Here is rzus discussion of the cultural relativism of the category of comparison (tashbh):

12 rzu, Musmir, p. 68.13 In his Mift al-ulm, composed in 1229, Al-Sakkki glosses it as the knowledge of signifying a

single concept [man] in a variety of ways []. Quoted in Smyth, The Making of a Textbook, p. 110. 14 We nd the Ghaznavid historian Baihaqi (d. 1077) deploying the kind of comparative topography

Tarif Khalidi has discussed in the context of Mongol-period Arabic history-writing in his Tr-i Baihaq




Although a comparison is the similarity of two things under a certain descrip-tion, this is not just any description but that which is conventional among that people. For example, the poets of Iran [shuar-yi prs] compare the color of gold to a lovers face in contrast to the poets of India. The latter compare the eye to a sh in contrast to Persian speakers [prsyn] while Arabic speakers [tzyn] compare a lock of hair to a nger in contrast to Persian ones. These distinctions become apparent after a study of the books of masters.15

Although comparison and its sub-categories had been a standard category of metaphor since the earliest twelfth and thirteenth century Persian manuals on rhetoric, it had not been opened thus to geographical and ethno-linguistic variations of content, in this case to an itemthe comparison of the eye to a shrecognisably drawn from the poetic conventions of Braj. rzu retains a category familiar to his readers from the Perso-Arabic traditions of rhetoric as a trans-human constant. But having thus con rmed their expectations of a treatise/epistle on the discipline of metaphorics, he asserts, as his predecessors had never done, the local variability of this categorys content. By this double procedure, he authorised himself by consistency with an already accepted category of comparison even as he authorised practices of comparison peculiar to the aesthetics of peoples not covered by the earliest formulations of this category.

The second illustration of rzus localisation of a universal topic may be seen in the marginal note he added to his student Bindrban Ds wushgus entry in his prosopography of Persian poets, Safna-i wushgu, on Rdaki (d. 945), the blind and lute-laying Central Asian poet conventionally considered everywhere in the Persian world to have been the rst Persian poet. Noting the improbably large number of poetic compositions attributed to him (thirty thousand or twenty eight thousand, amounting to a hundred and twenty thousand distiches), wushgu interrupts his entry to quote rzus note or subtle point on the margin of his text:

The humble rzu says: The equivalent of the master Rdaki in Hindi [i.e., Braj] poetry and compositions is Sr [Ds] who composed a hundred thousand Bishnu Pads and named it Sr Sgar. Every Bishnu Pad which is a kind of Hindi composition is around six to eight hemistiches long or more. The aforemen-tioned Sr composed three or four new [tza] rgas [i.e., musical modes] and

where he states that the people of each place is distinguished by excellence at a particular science: the people of India at astronomy, those of Arabia at poetry, those of Persia at kingship and those of China at strange writing. Baihaqi, Tr-i Baihaq, p. 4. This association of a places people with excellence at a discipline of knowledge within a system of disciplines shared by all the worlds peoples was part of the pre-history of the kind of comparative topography and ethnography that ourished in rzus milieu. For a discussion of such comparative topography in the context of Mongol period or thirteenth-century Arabic history-writing, see Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period, pp. 21922.

15 rzu, Atiya-yi kubr, p. 65.




his compositions are innumerable, as has been noted, and contain strange and remarkable topoi [mamn]. As Miyn Tn Sen Kalwant the like of whom they do not nd in this last half millennium and who was appointed his [i.e., Srs] teacher in fact said: In whichever direction I go, I nd a blind man with cane in hand.16

By explaining the hyperbolically in ated numbers of compositions attributed to Rdaki by analogy with Sr Ds, one of the sixteenth-century masters of Braj poetry who was also blind and was imagined in Braj literary legend as having authored copious numbers of texts, rzu was treating the Persian poetic tradition on par with the Braj as peculiar to a locality in the world. Equally, he was elevating the Braj tradition within Persian literary culture to a status comparable to the Persian, a comparability not restricted to biographical equivalences but also applicable to poetic categories, such as, mamn-frn or topos-creation or topos-elaboration, a category central to the Persian ghazal practice of Speaking Anew that rzu championed: Sr created strange and remarkable tropes.17 Furthermore, rzu who oversaw wushgus prosopography and added a laudatory preface to it evidently validated this texts tripartite distinction between the old, middle and recent poets and the further tripartite division of each again into old, middle and recent, a chronological frame bespeaking a sense of the temporal distance from the literary past and the newness or temporal locality of the present. The memory of Rdaki had grown distant enough in time to be understood on an analogy with the Ur-Braj poet Sr Ds as an amalgam of history and legend.

We may draw the third instance from the third of the three introductions rzu wrote to his Dd-i suan (Justice to Poetry, composed between 1741 and 1743).18 Here, he declares The meaning of a distich may be understood in many manners [wajh] and then distinguishes between seven types of readers corresponding to

16 wushgu, Safna-i wushgu, p. 11. 17 The most famous precedent to rzus forays into Braj here and in his Braj/Harynvi/Khadi-boli/

Urdu to Persian dictionary, Nawdir al-alfz (Novel Words) that he created by emending Abdul Vsih Hnsvis Garyib al-lugt (Strange Words), was Mirz n Ibn Faruddins Tu fat al-hind (Gift from/to India), composed in the early 1670s, possibly for the Emperor Aurangzebs son, Muhammad Azam, as an exposition of Braj, its grammar and the related arts. A pervasive feature of this work and others like it in Persian is an analogisation, taken to the smallest scale of analysis possible, of Braj-related phenomena and categories with already familiar Perso-Arabic ones. By adopting the conceit operative in the Tu fat and works like it of a reader who was literate only in Persian and its literary conventions, rzu was adopting an imperial and trans-local gaze precisely when such a gaze was in question in the political dispersal of Mughal authority in his time. Mirz n lists the Bishnu Pad as the second of the eight kinds of musical composition he considers current among the recent musicians, also mentioning Sr Ds as its inventor. Whether rzu knew the Tu fat directly or knew of the legends surrounding Sr independently or both, what is pertinent is the ethnographic and comparative gaze available to rzu because of earlier Mughal Persian discourses on the local. rzu, Nawdir al-alfz; Faruddin, Tu fat al-hind.

18 rzu, Dd-i suan, pp. 913.




seven manners or interpretative attitudes. The rst method is that of the commoners of a linguistic community whereby simple and composite utterances are construed in the familiar and well-known senses that they have heard from their elders. In this, the learned elite and commoners are no different from each other although if a commoner learns the abstruse points of an utterance from a member of the learned elite, he will be more eloquent than someone who has learnt them from a commoner. So, rzu opens his classi cation at the level of ordinary language where differences in hermeneutic sophistication corresponding to differences in class are only incipient. This level includes all the following kinds of interpreters, being the most general. The second manner is the understanding of Mulls, this class of interpreter focusing exclusively and pedantically on a poems grammatical niceties. The thirdand here rzu draws on the tripartite distinction he inherited from Al-Sakkkis afore-mentioned Mift al-ulm and its famous systematisation by Al-atb al-Qazwini called Tals al-mift (Resume of the Key, 1338, Damascus)is that of one of the three types of scholars of the three respective sub-disciplines of linguistic ef ciency. (I will discuss the signi cance of this term ahead, con ning the discussion here to rzus Dd-i suan.) This manner is that of a scholar of the discipline of semantics (ilm-i mani) who focuses exclusively on the syntactical order of clauses, their conjoining, separation, compression and expansion. He does not know what the next and fourth type of scholarthat of metaphorics (ilm-i bayn)attends to exclusively, namely metaphors. The fth manner, expectedly, is that of scholars of gures of speech (badiyn) who, being defective with respect to the other two methods of linguistic ef ciency, focus only on a poems gures. The sixth interpretive attitude is that of the school headmaster who, ignorant of linguistic ef ciency, linguistic purity and authoritative poetic precedent, insists on a grammatical point without seeing that it would ruin the uency of a poetic text if deployed. The seventh and last manner is the comprehension of poetry in keeping with the taste of poets. And this depends on knowledge of the composition of phrasal compounds of apposite words, in keeping with the spoken idiom [roz-marra] of ones own language and that of the poet and the observance of the technique [tarq] a poet has in mind. rzu then lists the poetic techniques in question and notes that understanding such observance is extremely dif cult because some of the recent poets insist on avoiding certain word-formations despite ample evidence that such formations were deployed by authoritative poets.

While the rst interpretative attitude is too commonplace to grasp the subtler meanings of a poetic text, the following ve are each defective by being too special-ist and partial in their foci. The seventh, that in keeping with the taste of poets, is the most comprehensive and requires a reader to be to attentive to the differences between the spoken idiom of his own language and that of the poet. However, this attitudealready historicist in its mindfulness of linguistic differences resulting from temporal localityis impeded by poets own ignorance of literary history.




And this is where rzus role as a pedagogue who adduced exempla from the various ages or temporal localities of Persian literary history becomes apparent.

These three illustrations of how rzu conceived the locality of universal concepts presuppose his more radical historicisation of the poetic speech-act itself. What follows is a reading of selected passages from rzus Musmir, Mauhibat-i uzm, Sirj-i munr and Atiya-yi kubr with an attention to this historicization. We may preface this reading by noting that in the Persian literary tradition, authoritative or exemplary poetic innovations by reference to exemplary precedent had been termed taarruf,19 In ghting to champion the stylistics of the Speaking Anew ghazal, rzu marshaled the conceptual criteria that had previously received explicit formulation only in Arabic in defense of the kinds of taarruf current in Speaking Anew. The two co-related criteria that any act of taarruf had to ful l were faat or linguistic purity and balgat or linguistic ef ciency. Offering an account here of either term that would be satisfactory on its own is beyond the compass of this article because both terms form the topics of entire books in the Persian and Arabic traditions of rhetoric. I will, therefore, explain these terms in ways not unlike the authors of the earliest Persian manuals of balgatwith a pragmatist brevity they put in the service of the pleasures of poetic performance and I put in the service of argumentative speci city. Bearing an evident etymological relation to bulg or organic maturity, balgat designated something like a mindfulness of how the social situation in which you were deploying linguistic and non-linguistic signs could in ect how you were understood, an ability to take into consideration the social context of what you were saying in order best to achieve your purpose. In line with the Aristotelian understanding of the word ethos, it is worth noting, balgat was then an adequation of act and circumstance, of meaning-making and the contingencies of the moment. We might thus gloss it as a communicative tact. However, for the sake of adherence to already current English scholarly translation, I will translate it by linguistic ef ciency. Cognate with fa or linguistically pure, faat or linguistic purity referred to a three-fold requirement internal to balgat. We could gloss this requirement by reference to rzus own oft-cited medieval Arabic exemplar, al-atb al-Qazwn (d. 1338, Damascus) whose Tals al-mift (Resume of the Key) was the most famous textbook of Arabic rhetoric before, during and after rzus life. The rst component of the requirement of linguistic purity was that the words of an utterance (kalm) be pure or free of the mutual repellence of letters (tanfur-i urf), a defect that makes it hard to pronounce because the word/words is/are extreme in heaviness upon the tongue.20

19 Kinra, This Noble Science: Indo-Persian Comparative Philology, 10001800 C.E., Ibid. pp. 36364.

20 This is an internal quotation from al-Qazwinis Tals al-mifth in Jenssen, H. The Subtleties and Secrets of the Arabic Language, pp. 35. Qazwinis exposition of balgat was the rst to expound the discipline as a tripartite one composed of the sub-disciplines of metaphorics (bayn), syntax (mani) and tropology (badi) and, from the sixteenth century onward, was the principle conduit for




The concept of heaviness (thiql), Herbjorn Jenssen observes, is an old one in Arabic morphology, frequently used to explain forms which were considered to be irregular. The second called for an utterances freedom from contrariness (mulafat al-qiys) to the rules of word formation or a words morphological pattern. A con ict with such morphological rules resulted in the third kind of defect an utterance was required to avoid, namely strangeness (garbat) or the appearance of outlandishness to the listener and a consequent failure to convey the intended meaning. Linguistic purity was thus a negative rather than a positive requirement. If an utterance contains no faults of a phonological, grammatical or semantic nature, neither on the word level nor on the level of syntax, then it can be described as fa.21 The positive requirements of utterances were the ones stipulated by the criterion of linguistic ef ciency that demanded a concordance between utterance and social context (maqm). As such, all linguistically ef cient utterances were necessarily linguistically pure though not all linguistically pure utterances were necessarily ef cient.

So, when Sheikh Ali azn and other Iranian detractors unnamed by rzu criticised poets in India for an inability to practice taarruf, they were implicitly pointing to the lack of the kind of poetic training in Mughal India that would allow such poets to participate in Persian literary community by an avoidance of outlandish or historically unprecedented linguistic usage, a negative requirement of linguistic purity that was a necessary though not suf cient condition for membership. Poets who were perceived not to have ful lled the criterion of linguistic purity could not be understood to have ful lled its dependent one of linguistic ef ciency and thus risked exclusion from literary community. In this sense, the criteria for literary membership were conservative in that innovations were acceptable only if they authorised themselves by appearing to conserve the authority of prior exempla. rzu responded to azns charges explicitly in his Tanbh al-g ln (Censure of the Complacent) by criticising his selection of six hundred of the latters distiches. It is worth noting here that while several of his criticisms point to azns unprecedented and thus unacceptably strange formulations, some also appear motivated by no more than malice and envy over his local stature. In one of his entries, rzu accuses azn of the literary theft (saraqa) of a topos (mamn) from Sadis The Rose Garden (1258) even when Sadis formulation of this topos is differently worded, thus in fact satisfying rzus own condition that innovation be based on authoritative precedent.22 In any event, that a debate crystallised around rzus response to azn bespeaks the general and heightened sense of poetic innovation at the time as well

the transmission of early Arabic balgat across the Islamicate world, including Mughal India. Smyth, The Making of a Textbook, pp. 99115. I owe the translations linguistic ef ciency and linguistic purity to this study by Jenssen.

21 Jenssen, The Subtleties and Secrets, p. 35.22 rzu, Tanbh al-g ln, pp. 13940 (for an instance of criticism on grounds of outlandishness);

and p. 141 (for rzus charge of the literary theft of a topos from Sadi).




as the communitarian risks of exclusion such innovation incurred. Some of rzus criticisms of azn were taken up by his polymath contemporary from Bilgrm, Gulm Ali zd Bilgrmi (d. 1786), who, in the course of his entry on azn in his prosopography azna-yi mira (Bountiful Treasury), defended azns criticised distiches by adducing exemplary precedents from the work of generally accepted masters as well as Speaking Anew poets.23 azn had been anticipated in his criticisms of unacceptable poetic innovations by Munr Lahori (d. 1644), a poet from seventeenth century Lahore. In his Krnma (Chronicle), Munr had selected distiches by four poets of the Speaking Anew style who he argued were being unjustly exalted in his milieu and criticised these distiches mainly though not exclusively on grounds of the unprecedented and therefore improbable character of their poetic conventions.24 For Munr, the resulting strangeness of poetic formula-tion put in doubt the worthiness of the claims on behalf of its poets canonicity. In his Sirj-i munr (Bright Lamp or Lamp for Munr) rzu responded to each of Munrs criticisms, taking up the apparently unprecedented formulations in each distich to defend it by reference to poetic, scienti c and historiographical prec-edents unknown to or overlooked by Munr.25 So, for instance, the rst of rzus defenses of a distich Munr criticised led him to expound the astronomical context implicit in its apparently strange formulation and then to a discussion of whether or not this poet had stolen his topos from an earlier poetic iteration of the same astronomical metaphor and thus then to a history of the discussion of literary theft that had praised such theft as improved on what it stole. The implication here was not only that Ur had authoritative precedent but also that he had improved on such precedent and had thus derived (az) his topoi on the basis on competitive response (min ais al-jawb) to his model rather than on the basis of weakness (min ais al-ajz) with respect to it. In such references to authoritative precedent, therefore, rzu was hardly novel. However, it is to his less confrontational and more systematic work, Musmir, that we must turn to appreciate how his innovation lay in taking his historicisation of language to the smallest scale of analysis available to him, that of the strangeness ingredient in linguistic purity.

Looking closely at the three-fold requirement for linguistic purity, we notice that mispronunciation and contrariness to the rules of word formation may be construed as effects of historically local and variable conditions. If an educated listener found an utterance unintelligible, this strangeness may arguably result from his unfamil-iarity with the educated usage current in the speakers milieu or the chronologically distant milieu of a poetic text. However, heaviness on the tongue resulting from the mutual repellence of letters seems an ahistorical or timelessly applicable criterion,

23 Bilgrmi, azna-yi mira, pp. 196.24 A fairly representative instance of Munrs criticism is his observation of a distichs comparison

and predication that the dust of your fames skirts was not a formulation anyone with an attention for detail had ever seen. Munr, Krnma, pp. 11.

25 rzu, Sirj-i munr, pp. 3336.




the tongue being a trans-human physiological constant. And this is indeed what the Arabic philologists cited by rzu said. However, let us consider rzus subtle but radical modi cation of even this apparently unproblematic physiological and thus, surely, timeless criterion. In Chapter 16 of his Musmir, entitled On Knowledge of the Linguistically Pure [fa], rzu cites two scholars of Arabic, saying:

The basis of the linguistic purity of an utterance lies in its frequency of usageThe opinion of recent Arabic rhetoricians is that it is not possible for an individual to know the entirety of a language because of its antiquity. Therefore, they said linguistic purity is an utterances freedom from the mutual repellence of letters, unfamiliarity [garbat] and contrariness to the rules of word formation [qiys-i lugaw]The mutual repellence [of letters] is because of their heaviness on the tongue and dif culty in pronunciation, this matter depending on time, not on the proximity to or distance from the organ of pronunciation [i.e., the tongue], as some Arabic scholars have said [my italics].26

That is, even dif culties in a words pronunciation vary with its frequency of usage by a languages educated speakers, the human tongue thus accommodating itself to the historical vagaries of cultivation and habit. Thus, in his treatise on semantics, Mauhibat al-uzm (The Great Gift), rzu reiterated the conclusions he arrived at in his Musmir to argue that all the three categories of linguistic purity contained historically local content. The dif culties of pronunciation experienced by a sound or trained nature as a result of the mutual repellence of letters depended on experience or taste rather than on proximity to or distance from the organ of pronunciation.27 As to the morphological rule concerning contrariness to the rules of word formation, such contrariness was practised to adjust a word in a poetic line to metrical requirements. And some of these adjustments too, rzu notes, had historically local authority. Among his examples is the use of the vowel ye for rhyme that, he observes, is permitted especially among the recent poets.28 Finally, words that were strange or unfamiliar to educated usage occurred frequently, implying, on the basis of his explication in Chapter 19 of his Musmir that is devoted to the [linguistically] outlandish and strange,29 that such transgressions were not contrary to linguistic purity provided they were poetically necessary. rzus examples of poetically necessary and thus linguistically pure strangeness in Chap- ter 19 of Musmir qnis Armenian words unknown to the educated Persian of his time and Mull Tugrs Hindavi words unknown to the educated Persian of hisare also amenable to being interpreted as cases of the mutual repellence of letters and contrariness to the rules of word formation. This is to say that, although

26 rzu, Musmir, pp. 6162.27 rzu, Mauhibat-i uzm, p. 96.28 Ibid., p. 98.29 rzu, Musmir, pp. 8083.




he does not explicate this, strangeness could include the other two categories of linguistic impurity.

In this implicit but technically possible sense strangeness by itself includes the other two kinds of linguistic impurity and becomes, in rzus thought, an alienation that haunts all literary languageand every one of its partsas a fate. Thus does rzu observe that a words strangeness means that its meaning is incom-prehensible. This accords with most cases in Persian since, with the passage of ages, they [i.e. meanings] are transformed. For example, some words that were current in the age of Rdaki [d. 941] and others were not so among [poets] of the middle and recent ages. In this case, a dictionary becomes necessary (my italics).30 His dictionaries and commentaries were largely responses to this sense of the increasing and inevitable estrangement over time of the language of the tempo-rally distant authorities. rzus iybn shar-i gulistn-i sadi is, as the title suggests, a commentary on Sadis Gulistn (The Rose-garden, 1258, Shiraz) and his Shigufa-zr (Field of Buds) and Shar-i sikandarnma commentaries on the rst and second parts of Nizmi Ganjavis Sikandarnma (Alexander Book, 1202) respectively.31 However, his fourth commentary, on the panegyrics of the Speaking Anew poet Ur Shirzi (d. 1590), was addressed to the work of a poet considered a contemporary in the sense of having been a progenitor of Speaking Anew. The reason for this apparent anomaly becomes apparent when we consider that Ur s panegyrics were the focus of wide spread commentarial attention in India of this period either because they were admired for their dif culty or, as we have seen in the case of Munr, discredited for their lack of precedent.32 If the language of the old ones grew strange over time that of the recent ones must logically also have been strange from the viewpoint of literary precedent. Ur s panegyrics were an instance of such ambivalent strangeness in the language of a recent master and rzus commentary largely seeks to defend such strangeness either by adducing authoritative precedents for his innovations or justifying them as exemplary for the new period. In this connection, his dictionary Chirg-i idyat (Lamp of Guidance) must thus be read as an attempt to authorize poetic phrases he consid-ered peculiar to poets of his age, particularly to those who practised the Speaking Anew ghazal.33 This sense of the linguistic foreignness of old authorities meant for him that his own poetry was articulated with a sense of contemporaneousness not with the old poets but with the linguistically familiar and thus historically recent

30 rzu, Musmir, p. 62.

31 rzu, iyban shar -i gulistn-i sadi. And Nizami, rzu, Sikandarnma.32 Ibid. Shar -i qayid-i ur , Catalogue No. 1765, Hyderabad, Salarjung Museum and Library.

Some of the other late seventeenth and eighteenth century littrateurs to comment on Ur s panegyrics were the author of Tu fat al-hind, Faruddin, Shar -i qayid-i ur , Catalogue No. 1763; Razauddin alias Sheikh Rju Sambhali, Krnma-i faiz, Catalogue No. 1764; and Qutbuddn, Shar -i qayid-i ur , Catalogue No. 1766. The catalogue numbers given here are of A Concise Descriptive Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the Salar Jung Museum and Library.

33 rzu, Chirg -i hidyat, Volume 3 of Giys al-lugt.




ones as his community of literary interlocutors. This is why four of his seven Diwns or collections of poems were written as jawbs or competitive responses, not to the old masters, but to the Diwns of Bb Figni (d. 1519), Muham-mad Quli Salm (d.1657), Seb Tabrizi (d. 1677) and Sha Asar (d. 1702), practitioners of Speaking Anew he considered contemporaries or recent ones.34 The alienating unintelligibility that came to literary language from the outside and that had be resisted, recorded and philologically repaired could also be conceptu-ally authorised, appropriated and prescribed in trans-historically or universally valid terms as a historically local and consciously new poetic practice. This work of conceptually authorising, appropriating and prescribing in universal terms the historical locality or strangeness of Speaking Anew fell to large portions of his Musmir, Atiya-yi kubr and Mauhibat-i uzm. If poetic innovation had to be authorised by reference to exemplary precedent, Speaking Anew spoke anew the heritage of what was understood as the pre-eternal heritage of topoi (mamn, mani).35 In thus speaking such primordial topoi anew, such poetry pleasurably estranged them through techniques local to the age. This is why, in his Atiya-yi kubr, rzu aestheticizes the strange historical newness of meaning resulting from the encryption of primordial topoi:

Some of the recent [poets] do not deploy the technique of exempli cation [tarz-i tamsl] in their poetry and do not like it that of others. This is because in this way the meaning becomes clear and obvious whereas they seek abstruseness and subtlety going so far as to use improbable and abstruse comparisons so that the mind comprehends the topos [mani] after much contemplation and endless thought, the meaning being unknown to those who know poetry. The recent [poets] call those distiches in which subtle comparisons and dif cult meanings occur and which do not deploy the technique of exempli cation distiches in the technique of the imaginary [tarz-i ayl]. This kind is extremely pleasant to natures provided it is not carried to the point of meaninglessness.36

34 Only one of rzus seven Diwns, four of which he wrote as jawbs or competitive responses to the Diwns of four Speaking Anew poets, has been published. My reference here is based on the editors introduction to and main text of Diwn-i rzu, ed., Sayyid Muhammad Asghar (Ph.D. dissertation, Aligarh Muslim University, 1990). The dissertation has since been published as Diwn-i rzu: Tadwn b muqadimma, Aligarh, 2011. rzu composed this Diwn around 1720 in competitive response to that of the Speaking Anew poet from Iran, Sha Asar (d. 1702), who never traveled to India but whose Diwn was reportedly very popular there.

35 This azali or Pre-Eternal character of tropes may be illustrated by this distich by Ghani Kashmiri: Meaning [mani] cant be refractory under Ghanis inner nature [or: under a spiritually rich inner nature] / He [i.e. God] handed him topoi [mamn] bound at Pre-Eternity [roz-i azal]. Ghani, K., Diwn-i gani, pp. 82. As such, the primordial or God-given topos was a literary analogue to the Pre-eternal and therefore recurrent character of patterns or myths of spatial organisation in Persian miniature painting. See Minissale, Images of Thought, pp. 13076.

36 Arzu, Atiya-yi kubr, p. 67.




rzu follows this passage by quoting a distich by Nir Ali Sirhindi (d. 1697), a famous poet of the Speaking Anew mode, that helps us grasp what he understood by the preference he shared with some others for a kind of poetry whose topoi were recognised and meanings comprehended only after much contemplation and endless thought. The distich: His dark [sabz] cheek-down drove the world mad.Lord, what fairys shadow is this?37 The distich depends for the intelligibility of the logic relating its two hemistiches on the listener or readers foreknowledge of the topos of a fairy, conventionally imagined as green, driving a person mad by casting her shadow over her or him. It also assumes the readers foreknowledge of the topos by which a boy-beloveds cheek-stubble was eroticised. Finally, it requires the reader to recognise the pun on the word sabz that translates both as dark and green and thus applies to the stubble and the fairy at once. Taking the pleasure this distich promises thus demands that the reader explicate both inexplicit topoi to himself, recognise the pun on sabz and then the combination of topoi and pun to delight in Nir Alis complex and novel iteration of all three. This technique of the imaginary was one of an array of techniques cultivated by Speaking Anew and aimed at such a time-taking and contemplative arrest of hermeneutic atten-tion. In validating such techniques by his taxonomical expositions of them, rzu considered himself to be validating against its detractors in universally authoritative terms aesthetic and hermeneutic experiences that were only as peculiar to his age as others had been to earlier ages.

In conclusion, the political fragmentation of Mughal power in the course of the eighteenth century and the consequently dispersed and multiple bids for authority in the determination of literary value and canonicity assigned strangeness that was a constituent of the trans-temporal and trans-spatial Perso-Arabic concept of linguistic purity the signi cance of a new problem. Sirjuddn Ali n rzu par-ticipated in this competitive bid for literary prestige by seeking to demonstrate the lack of authoritative precedent for the poetry of those who, like Sheikh Ali azn, charged the Persian poetry practised in late Mughal India with lacking precisely such precedent. Furthermore, he marshaled his commentaries and dictionaries to demonstrate that literary language conformed to concepts of linguistic purity and ef ciency even as it was susceptible to shifts from place to place and period to period. It was, therefore, not geographical or political af liation, as azn had claimed, but a hard-won pedagogical training in these universal or trans-temporal and trans-spatial criteria and their spatio-temporally local constituents, a training he showed himself to have undergone and himself offered, that quali ed a balanced and linguistically pure speaker. If Speaking Anew was practised by such an aesthetically and ethically cultivated subject, it was as legitimate a literary practice and as worthy of esteem as the older exemplars of the tradition. The pleasurable strangeness by which the traditional heritage of topoi was spoken anew was, he acknowledged,

37 Ibid., pp. 68.




local to his age. However, it was only as local as the poetic conventions of every previous age had been, a temporal locality that necessitated dictionaries and com-mentaries such as he had authored and that was maintained in its exemplarity and intelligibility by the philological cultivation of the universally rational soul.

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the local universality of poetic pleasure khan i arzu ieshr-libre

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persian literary theory

indopersian polymath

sirjuddin ali n rzu

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persoarabic discourses

sirajuddin ali

concept of linguistic

category of linguistic