In this article, I discuss the vilification of Kṛṣṇa as a deceitful sorcerer in the Mughal poet-laureate Shaikh Abū'l Faiḍ bin Mubārak, or ‘Faiḍī's Mahābhārat and his correspondent apotheosis as the ‘essence of the True God' in the Shāriq al-maʿrifat, a treatise also ascribed to Faiḍī. As I argue, this inconsistency, or ambivalence, is a common and overlooked facet of the elite Islamicate engagement with religious diversity and difference in early modern Hindustan. In the case of the Mahābhārat, however, Faiḍī's portrayal of Kṛṣṇa as a deceitful illusionist reflects not only an Islamic discomfort with Vaishnavite theology, but Faiḍī's own performative insecurities as a Hindustani writer of Persian poetry and literary prose. Kṛṣṇa's so-called ‘magic’ lies in large part in his way with words: the verbal and social manipulation he uses to stoke the flames of conflict. The character thus becomes a kind of shadow or double of Faiḍī himself-a demiurgic author of the Mahābhārat upon which the poet can displace the classical Islamicate association of poetry with sorcery and deceit.

This article examines the chapter on īhām (literary amphiboly) in Ḥadāʾiq al-Siḥr by Rashīd Vaṭvāṭ (d. 1182). Ḥadāʾiq, a treatise on stylistics with Persian and Arabic examples, is the oldest extant document to define īhām. Vaṭvāṭ's definition of īhām sheds light on the mechanism and function of this literary technique. This article argues that īhām, according to Vaṭvāṭ, operates through the creation of semantic fields and defamiliarization. Previous scholars who examined this chapter of Ḥadāʾiq, oblivious to this point, have made a number of misinterpretations. However, by analyzing the name he prefers for this figure of speech, the definition he gives, and the examples he cites to explain it, this article demonstrates that Vaṭvāṭ had this function of defamiliarization in mind.

This article examines twentieth-century Persian translations of Urdu-language works about Persian literature, focusing on two different Persian translations of an influential Urdu-language work on Persian literary history, Shiʿr al-ʿAjam (Poetry of the Persians), by Shibli Nuʿmani. The article offers a close, comparative reading of the Afghan and Iranian translations of Shiʿr al-ʿAjam in order to understand why two Persian translations of this voluminous text were published within such a short time period. These translations reveal how Indians, Afghans, and Iranians were invested in the same Persianate heritage, yet the emergence of a “Persianate modernity” undergirded by a cultural logic of nationalism rather than cosmopolitanism, along with Iran’s and Afghanistan’s differing relationships to India and Urdu, produced distinct approaches to translation.

This article considers style in Persian literary history and its critical rhetorical and hermeneutical roles for poets and critics in the medieval and Safavid-Mughal eras. It explores how tarz (manner) emerged as a hermeneutical term in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and achieved a central position in sukhansanjī (evaluating speech) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This account of tarz—grounded in its historicity and multivalent implications—offers new insights into language for early modern Persian literary history, which is often periodized as sabk-i hindī (Indian style) or tāza-gūyī (fresh-speaking). Through a close reading of Safavid-Mughal tazkiras (literary compendiums), this contribution examines tarz as an operating concept deployed by a number of prominent tazkira writers. Finally, the article concludes by discussing this legacy's impact on twentieth-century scholarship.

Zāl is the embodiment of the heroic culture which shapes and determines the conduct of the Shāhnāmeh heroes from Manūchihr through Rustam's death. For Zāl to attain that level of moral authority, the poem semiotically endows him with innate wisdom symbolized by his white hair at birth. By the end of the story, when he is still a relatively young man, he has gained the authority to change the ruling dynasty by choosing and crowning kings at will (e.g. his crowning of Zav and Kayqubād). Zāl's story is thus a tale of transformation that seamlessly fits into the overall narrative of the Shāhnāmeh. It helps the poem's narrative make the transition from the age of ancient kings in whom heroism, royal authority, and magical potency are combined, to the era of a different line of rulers who govern by royal authority alone. This process moves in two parallel lines: the transfer of the magical wisdom of the primordial kings to the person of a sage who functions as the embodiment of sagacity and prudence, and the transfer of their heroic aspect to a great warrior who serves as the country's “chief hero,” its jahān pahlawān. With the exception of Kaykhosraw, whose character has very strong supernatural and religious dimensions, every important legendary king after Manūchihr has a sage on whose advice he depends (e.g. Zav, Kayqubād and Kaykāvūs have Zāl, Gushtāsp has Jāmāsp, and Alexander has Aristotle). The king also has a warrior who holds the office of the jahān pahlawān (Kaykāvūs and Kaykhusraw have Rustam, Luhrāsp has Zarēr, and Gushtāsp has Isfandiyār).

In the last years of the eighteenth century, an Indian woman authored a work in Persian intended for the entertainment and guidance of students of that language. Entitled Miftāḥ-i Qulūb-i Mubtadiyān (‘The Key of the Hearts of Beginners’), the work comprised of stories from vernacular oral traditions as well as extracts from well-known Persian poetic, historical and ethical works. Although the work was translated into English in 1908 by Annette Beveridge, it has received no serious scholarly attention. Drawing upon recent scholarship offering new ways of thinking about India's multilingual literary past, this article examines the intersection of multiple vernacular and generic traditions as translated and manifested in Miftāḥ-i Qulūb al-Mubtadīyān. While vernacular languages followed different, and in relative terms, more limited routes of circulation and exchange in comparison with cosmopolitan languages such as Persian, their paths of movement were no less significant. Through a close reading of this work and its context, this article seeks to understand how Bībī Ḥashmat al-Daula crafted a distinct, cosmopolitan voice for herself through her deployment of both Persianate and regional Indian traditions.

This study employs keyword searches of literary databases such as Literature Online (LION) in an attempt to map the image of “Persia” in nineteenth-century English poetry as it was molded by a proliferation of thoughts and ideas in a variety of contexts. Completeness is not possible, of course, but the article aims to identify and explore some of the major categories within which the image of Persia was formed and disseminated in the nineteenth-century. The scope of the study is not confined to a corpus of poetic works that were written specifically on or about “Persia,” but takes account of a broader range of poems, and attends to the structure, texture and variations of the presence of “Persia” in nineteenth-century English poetry.