Iranian Migrations in the Durrani Empire, 1747–93

A series of works has been dedicated to analyzing the migration of soldiers, intellectuals, litterateurs, religious figures, and administrators from Iran to India in the early modern period. However, comparatively few studies have been dedicated to the continued eastward migration of Iranians in the latter half of the eighteenth century. This despite the fact that the dissolution of the Safavid dynasty gave rise to a lengthy period of political upheaval and led many Iranians to migrate to, and settle in, new centers of power that emerged at the time in post-Safavid Iran, post-Mughal India, and the hitherto frontier region between the two empires—or what in this article is termed Indo-Khurasan.

As a modest contribution to the growing literature on the topic of Iranian migration to South Asia, this article examines the presence of Iranians in Indo-Khurasan in the reigns of the Durrani-Afghan rulers Ahmad Shah Durr-i Durran (1747–72) and his son and successor, Timur Shah (1772–93).¹ Studies of the Durrani polity tend to focus on the ruling elite and their tribal Durrani support base, and while its diversity is often acknowledged in passing, relatively little attention has been given to non-Durrani groups who served important social and political functions in the formative years of Durrani rule. Seeking to address this neglect, I examine the community of Iranian soldiers, administrators, intellectuals, and litterateurs who contributed to the consolidation of Durrani authority and who are largely credited with the Persianate cultural orientation of the Durrani state but whose history remains poorly understood. I propose that while the Afghan-Pashtun identity of the Durrani Empire is undeniable, when we consider the growing impact of Iranian personnel and Irano-Islamic models of statecraft, the Durrani state may be more appropriately classified as an “Irano-Afghan” polity.

Iran and Indo-Khurasan in the Eighteenth Century

The geographic focus of this article is a historically Persianate region that was known by various names throughout the early modern period and therefore escapes easy definition. In the absence of any clear consensus on this topic, scholars have tended to resort to referring to this frontier using various more recent territorial designations such as “Afghanistan” and the like. But rather than deferring to the use of names of modern nation-states for the sake of convenience, instead I employ Indo-Khurasan. This term was used by Joseph T. Arlinghaus when describing the predominantly mountainous region located south of the Hindu Kush and west of the Indus River that encompasses much of today’s south-eastern Afghanistan, northwestern Pakistan, and the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir.² In premodern times, Indo-Khurasan served as a political frontier between Safavid Iran and Mughal India, with the province of Qandahar marking an artificial boundary between the two empires.³ The frontier status of the province was altered significantly in 1747, when the Afghan monarch Ahmad Shah Durrani founded the transregional Durrani polity with Qandahar serving as capital. At its height, the Durrani domain included the core lands of Arlinghaus’s Indo-Khurasan but extended farther east into the north Indian region of the Punjab to Sirhind and farther west into the eastern Iranian province of Khurasan to Mashhad. Given this history, Indo-Khurasan is better suited to the analysis of the region in question than labels like “Afghanistan.” This country was, after all, a distinct territorial entity that took shape with the emergence of nation-states in modern Asia, and applying the term Afghanistan to what was in early modern times an amorphous frontier region that lacked clearly delineated borders presents many historical problems and often leads to more confusion than clarity.⁴ Further, Indo-Khurasan accurately reflects the geographic lexicon found in the local historiography of the eighteenth century where the terms Khurasan and Hindustan or Hind preponderate. Indo-Khurasan thus combines two terms frequently used by contemporary authors when referring to the lands connecting premodern Iran and India.

The growth of Iranian migrations in the second half of the eighteenth century was closely tied to the Safavid dynasty’s collapse, and so a brief...