Vernacular Conquest? : A Persian Patron and His Image in the Seventeenth-Century Deccan

The idea that the Persian language integrated courtly elites and social groups into the Mughal empire raises a number of questions on the capacity of a “high” language to exclude those who did not know it.¹ How are we to understand the Persian cosmopolis, its social world in the Deccan sultanates of south India and in Mughal Hindustan? For instance, in vernacular histories should we look for “Iranians,” a diverse social group with many subcategories,² who are generally presumed to know, speak, and write Persian? Or should we look for “Iranians” only in Persian chronicles, since presumably they had nothing to do with the regional languages of South Asia? The interface between Persian and its derivative vernacular, Dakkani, offers a starting point to answer these questions, especially during the period from 1636 to 1687, when an uncertain process of conquest began to unfold in the Deccan region.³

Before turning to local Deccani matters, we may look at kindred cases in the Islamicate world to understand how a complex set of linguistic interfaces evolved after military conquest. After Ottoman imperial incorporation of Arab lands in the sixteenth century, Arabic-speaking and Turkish-speaking Rumi scholars debated each other in literary salons. The Ottoman conquest of the Mamluks was by no means a contest between political and military unequals. Nonetheless, an asymmetry existed between the newly arrived Turkish-speaking Rumi officials who sought to emulate and outdo Arabic-speaking interlocutors who were already well established in recently incorporated territories.⁴ Farther east, we may draw close parallels between migrant elites in the Deccan frontier and Bengali Muslim patrons in the court of Mrauk-U in Arakan. Here, too, patronage circuits of a regional vernacular and Persian intersected, and bilingualism among poets was the norm rather than the exception.⁵ The movement of literati, intertextuality across genres in different languages, and the dispersal of texts evince persistent circulation inherent across early modern literary cultures.⁶

Unlike the cases of the Ottomans in Arab lands and the Mughal empire’s eastern fringes in Bengal, the Deccan frontier is unique for the prolonged nature of its conquest, as well as for its long and shared history of cohabitation and borrowing with Safavid Iran and Mughal Hindustan.⁷ Between 1636 and 1687, an uncertain and contradictory set of processes unfolded when the Deccan region was not fully incorporated into the Mughal empire. Regional sultanates reached their greatest territorial extent while an empire attempted to establish itself in an area where preexisting structures of governance and courtly patronage already existed. By the seventeenth century, region and empire came to resemble each other, not just militarily but also through their artistic, literary, and textual production.⁸ For instance, Abu al-Fazl’s Akbar Nāmah was, by the mid-seventeenth century, a standard reading in the Deccan’s literary circles.⁹ The renown and emulation of this text was an obvious consequence of writers, poets, military commanders, and patrons who moved between Indo-Islamic courts. An absolute opposition between the Deccan sultanates and Mughal north India did not exist in the seventeenth century, given the circulation of migrant elites and their circuits across these polities in a period of nested conquest.¹⁰

Within this layered historical context, Dakkani, or “proto” Urdu,¹¹ occupies a curious position in studies of regional languages in early modern South Asia. In 1978, Richard Eaton pointed to Dakkani’s role among Sufi households that adopted it to spread Islam in south India. Others have looked at Dakkani’s distinct adaptations of Perso-Arabic forms such as ghazal (a type of lyric poem).¹² One tendency in historiography, although well meaning, reads back notions of tolerance and syncretism into the “character” of this premodern literary idiom. In the case of the panregional vernacular, Dakkani, and its social world, this problem is particularly acute. Dakkani stands in contrast to Persian as more “authentic,” a carrier of the composite, secular, or “feminine” ethos of the vernacular.¹³ Stemming from this, an often repeated cliché about Dakkani, almost entirely misleading, is that it has extensive...