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A Safavid Poet in the Heart of Darkness: The Indian Poems of Ashraf Mazandarani

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Stephen Frederic Dale
Stephen Frederic Dale*
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
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Extract

Har kih az Īrān beh Hind āyad taṣavvur mīkunad

Īn kih chūn kaukab bih shab dar Hind zar pāshīdeh ast.

Whoever comes from Iran to India imagines,

That in India gold is scattered like stars in the evening sky.

Ashraf Mazandarani

In his Provocative Work The Continent of Circe, The Anglicized Bengali Writer Nirad Chaudhuri recasts the legend of Circe and Odysseus as a metaphor for India's relation to her “European” conquerors. In his version Aryan tribes who migrated into and/or invaded the Indian subcontinent in the second century B.C. were the first such conquerors to be ensnared by the allure of India's wealth. Once there they utterly forgot their Eurasian homelands, abandoned their vigorous steppe culture and degenerated into the colonized Hindus of whom Chaudhuri spoke with caustic contempt during the Indian nationalist movement in the twentieth century:

They stood at the gate of the goddess with flowing tresses, and heard her, Circe, Sweetly singing before her loom, as she walked to and fro weaving an imperishable web, gorgeous and dazzling, such as only goddesses can make.

Type
Research Article
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , June 2003 , pp. 197 - 212
Copyright
Copyright © 2003 Association For Iranian Studies, Inc

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Footnotes

*

I am indebted to my colleagues Dick Davis and Alam Payind, both poets and translators of poetry, for their help with the translations in this article. Professor Muzaffar Alam of the University of Chicago was also kind enough to read the entire manuscript and suggest changes as did Paul Losensky of Indiana University. The anonymous readers of the manuscript for Iranian Studies were exceptionally meticulous and helpful in their critiques.

References

1. Chaudhuri, Nirad C. The Continent of Circe (New York, 1966), 306.Google Scholar

2. Chaudhari, Continent of Circe, 136.

3. The term Timurid-Mughal is used for the name of the dynasty usually identified as Mughal for two reasons. As is well known Mughal means Mongol and thus fundamentally misrepresents this patrilineal Timurid dynasty. However, the founder of the dynasty, Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur (1483–1530) was a matrilineal descendant of Chingiz Khan and respected and patronized his Chaghatai Chingizid relatives only second to those of Timurid descent. Therefore, Timurid-Mughal reflects this dual heritage and the respect Babur gave to both his patrilineal and matrilineal lines.

4. This was the father of Muhammad Baqir al-Majlisi the well-known Safavid cleric. See Nasr, S. H. “Spiritual Movements, Philosophy and Theology in the Safavid Period,” in Jackson, Peter and Lockhart, Laurence eds. The Cambridge History of Iran, (Cambridge, 1986), 6: 693–94.Google Scholar

5. For Mazandarani's early life see Sayyidan, Muhammad Hasan ed., Dīvān-i ash˓ār Ashraf Māzandarānī (Tehran, 1373/1994), 17–21.Google Scholar

6. Ahmad Gulchin-i Ma˓ani, Kārvān-i Hind (Tehran, 1369/1970), 2 vols.Google Scholar

7. Ahmad, Aziz “Safawid Poets and India,” Iran, 14 (1976): 129–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. Browne, E. G. A Literary History of Persia (Cambridge, 1953), 4: 26.Google Scholar

9. Ghani, Muhammad Abdu’l A History of Persian Language and Literature at the Mughal Court (Allahabad, repr. 1972), 2, 168.Google Scholar

10. Quoted by Safa, S. in “Persian Literature in the Safavid Period,” in Jackson, and Lockart, ed. Cambridge History of Iran, 6: 954.Google Scholar

11. Ahmad, “Safawid Poets and India,” 118.

12. Dale, Stephen Frederic Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600-1750 (Cambridge, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chapter 2.

13. Rogers, Alexander translated and Beveridge, Henry ed., The Tūzuk-i Jahāngīrī, or Memoirs of Jahāngīr (Delhi, reprint 1978 of 1909–14 edition), 1: 37.Google Scholar

14. Dughlat, Mirza Haydar Tārīkh-i Rashīdī ed. by Thackston, W.M. (Cambridge, MA, 1996), ff. 61b–62a.Google Scholar

15. See Alam, Muzaffar “Akhlāqī Norms and Mughal Governance,” in François ‘Nalini’ Delvoye, and Garborieau, Marc The Making of Indo-Persian Culture (Delhi, 2000), 67–95.Google Scholar

16. Alam, Muzaffar “The Pursuit of Persian: Language in Mughal Politics,” Modern Asian Studies 32 (1998): 320–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. Browne, A Literary History, 4: 259.Google Scholar Browne is quoting the Urdu poet and literary critic Shibli Nu˓mani for whom see Haywood, J. A. “Shiblī Nu˓mānī” in Bosworth, C. E. et al, The Encyclopaedia of Islam New Edition (EI 2), (Leiden, 1996), 9: 433–34.Google Scholar

18. Annemarie Schimmel discusses this imagery with her typical erudition in “Turk and Hindu: A Poetical Image and its Application to Historical Fact,” in Vryonis, Spero Jr. ed., Islam and Cultural Change in the Middle Ages (Wiesbaden, 1975), 107–26.Google Scholar

19. Gulchin-i Ma˓ani, Kārvān-i Hind, 1: 72.Google Scholar Unless otherwise indicated Ashraf Mazandarani’s verses cited here are from this work. Page numbers will be given following each verse.

20. One of Amir Khusraw's favorable contrasts is between the cold of Khurasan and Arabia and India's warmth. Muhammad Wazid Mirza edited the Persian text in his book, The Nuh Sipihr of Amir Khusrau (London, 1949)Google Scholar, and R. Nath and Faiyaz Gwaliori have published an annotated translation of the third section of the poem in which Amir Khusrau praises India. See India as Seen by Amir Khusrau in 1318 A.D. (Jaipur, 1981).Google Scholar

21. See Mahmud Hasan Sayyidan's affecting discussion of Mazandarani's reasons for returning to Iran, including especially his separation from his family in Dīwān-i ash˓ār-i Ashraf Māzandarānī, 29–31.

22. Many Iranians still feel this way, but recent scholarly assessments of Indo-Persian verse have tried to examine the verse on its own terms, although not always without an implicit bias. That bias is evident in Ehsan Yarshater's essay, “The Indian Style: Progress or Decline,” in Yarshater, Ehsan ed., Persian Literature (Albany, NY, 1988), 405–21.Google Scholar Jan Marek offers a far more sympathetic assessment in “Persian Literature in India,” in Rypka, Jan History of Iranian Literature (Dordrecht, Netherlands, 1968), 713–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar A fine study of an individual poet that makes this debate seem irrelevant is Losensky’s, Paul E. Welcoming Fighānī, Imitation and Poetic Individuality in the Safavid-Mughal Ghazal (Costa Mesa, CA, 1998).Google Scholar

23. See Fr. Buhl, “Hind bint ‘Utba,” EI 2 3: 455.

24. Sarkar, Jadunath “The Romance of a Mughal Princess: Zeb-Un-Nisa,” Studies in Aurungzeb's Reign (Calcutta, repr, 1989), 90–98.Google Scholar

25. The entire poem is given by Sayyidan, Dīwān-i ash˓ār Ashraf Māzandarānī,, 95–100.

26. Mano, Eiji ed., Bābur-Nāma (Vaqāyi˓) (Kyoto, 1995), f. 145a–b.Google Scholar

27. Mano, ed., Bābur-Nāma, f. 291a.

28. Mano, ed., Bābur-Nāma, f. 300a.

29. Mano, ed., Babur-nama, f. 290b.

30. Stebleva, I.V. Semantika Gazelei Babura (Moscow, 1982), no. 119.Google Scholar For a modern Turkish transcription of Babur's Chaghatai see Yücel, Bilal Bābur Dīvānï (Ankara, 1995), no. 124.Google Scholar For exile poetry of another kind and as a genre see Sharma, Sunil Persian Poetry at the Indian Frontier, Mas˓ūd Sa˓d Salmān of Lahore (Delhi, 2000)Google Scholar, especially chapter 2.

31. Mano, ed., Bābur-Nāma, f. 359a.

32. Kipling, Rudyard Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads (NY, 1912), 126.Google Scholar

33. Ibid., 114.

34. This is a literal verbal echo of a line in Amir Khusrau's poem Nuh Sipihr in which he describes India as an earthly paradise. See above n. 20.