The Introduction situates the issues discussed in the manuscript within the existing historiography of Iranian and South Asian Studies and provides an overview of the "Persianate" framework, focusing on Persian and Urdu languages and literatures. The central arguments of the book are presented: that Urdu should be seen as a continuation of the Persian tradition in India, and furthermore that Urdu played a crucial role for Iranians seeking to modernize the Persianate heritage. Therefore, Urdu is vital to the story of the emergence of Persian literary history. This argument disrupts the conventional, dominant view that Persian heavily influenced Urdu, but Urdu had no impact on Persian. The chapter concludes with an outline of the rest of the book.

The introduction pursues three aims: it examines the problems of representing beginnings in literary history in general; it explains the value of a literary history that focuses on the beginnings, rather than the subsequent development, of vernacular literatures in medieval Europe; and it describes the advantages of a comparative approach. In respect of the first aim, it argues that we should neither posit a unitary beginning for literature in any language nor think in terms of causes and effects: every literary tradition passes through multiple moments of incipience and opening, and their study reveals conditions of possibility, not mechanistic causes. Second, a concentration on beginning obliges us to define what begins, thereby bringing to light the distinctive features of each vernacular literature. Third, the comparative perspective reveals the matrix of defining characteristics that the nascent European literatures of the Middle Ages all share: their manuscript materiality, their institutionalization in systems of textual practice which confer stability and persistence in space and time, and, finally, their linguistic vernacularity, which defines them over against their respective ‘parental’ literacies in Latin, Greek, or Church Slavonic.