Postclassical Indo-Persian under colonial rule

This article reconsiders Indo-Persian prose narratologies under colonialism. Reading ʿAbdulhusain's diary against evolving textual and intellectual trends in British India, the study reveals how travelogues specifically, and first-person writing generally, transformed under Company rule. Moving beyond a historiography that has emphasized how Indo-Persian literary cultures declined under colonialism, the article argues that the bureaucratic consolidation of the Company state and the coeval rise of colonial Romantic ideologies in the early nineteenth century introduced novel forms and styles to Persographic culture.Footnote ⁸ A substantial scholarship has now shown how the Mughals and their Middle Eastern counterparts patronized Persian as an early modern lingua franca. A plethora of terms has in turn emerged to refer to a sphere of cultural exchange that spanned the Indian Ocean: the Indo-Persian “republic of letters,” the “Persianate cosmopolis,” the “Persianate ecumene,” the “Persianate world.”Footnote ⁹ As might be expected, travelogues have featured prominently in this historiography, and the “travel book” (the so-called safarnama Footnote ¹⁰) has been central to understandings of how Persian writing enabled cross-cultural connections. Yet, as Roberta Micallef and Sunil Sharma have pointed out, with only few exceptions the focus of such studies has remained on “classical Indo-Persian travel writing.”Footnote ¹¹

This bias for early modern texts is not difficult to understand, at least when looked at from South Asian historiography, which takes it as a truism that the decline of the Mughals as a paragon and patron of Indo-Persian culture led also to the decline of the “Persianate.” The rise of vernacular languages—Urdu especially, given its links to the late Mughal milieu—is usually regarded as a corollary of that process.Footnote ¹² Yet if a “linguistic monism,” to invoke a concept made famous by George Steiner's influential study of polyglossia, yielded thus to demotic diversity in the nineteenth century, the historiography further insists that it was colonialism which conclusively reduced to rubble an already teetering tower of Babel. In this regard, the Company's supplanting of Indo-Persian with English as the administrative language of judicial and revenue operations in 1831–7 is frequently cited, though Persographic traditions also persisted in South Asian courtly, educational, and scribal pockets until the end of the century.Footnote ¹³ Undoubtedly, the preference the British gave to English and Indic vernaculars precipitated Indo-Persian's eventual obsolescence. Declensionist teleologies, nevertheless, have resulted in studies that have betrayed much impatience for understanding how colonial-era tropes and trends might have also impacted Persographic culture. Until its removal as an official language, Indo-Persian had interacted with the Company's administration for over a century. And yet, as one recent work maintains, Company rule entailed only “the erasure of the precolonial,” the “wholesale rejection of all knowledge produced in the colony,” and the misappropriation of Indo-Persian texts for a “colonial knowledge-making machinery.”Footnote ¹⁴

Against such sweeping assertions, this article examines colonially contingent changes in Indo-Persian literature. By centering the study on a pilgrim's account from a post-Mughal polity, what follows intends to keep in view the interregional connections that once prevailed across the “Persianate world.” By taking travel writing as its focus, the inquiry, moreover, joins a nascent body of scholarship that has shown how an established precolonial corpus responded to the historic transition to colonialism. Scholars have already noted that Indo-Persian travelogues continued to create “trans-Asian” links between British India and the Indian Ocean, that they safekept the “intimate” thoughts of South Asians abroad, and that they reflected Indian understandings of the deeper implications of colonialism.Footnote ¹⁵ This article suggests that ʿAbdulhusain's pilgrimage diary resonated with many of these themes, yet its uniqueness as an ego-document simultaneously lay in how it drew on colonial genres and imaginaries. The result was a first-person travelogue that showed suggestive signs of transition to modern textual traditions, mixing as it did precolonial prose conventions, Mughal ideas of conduct, and Indo-Persian views on the humoral emotions with the East India Company's textual forms and colonial Romantic ideologies of affect. Said another way, the diary exhibited tensions that defy the historiography's stress on a sudden “loss” of Persianate traditions under colonialism.

The article addresses two interrelated problems. To begin, it analyzes the form of ʿAbdulhusain's travelogue, which he identified as a “day-to-day little diary” (ruznamcha-yi yaum ba yaum).Footnote ¹⁶ “To choose the form of a diary,” scholars of Indo-Persian have noted, is to align oneself with “modern travel literary culture.”Footnote ¹⁷ And to make sense of ʿAbdulhusain's choice, which may even have been a first in Persographic travel writing, his text's connections both to older Indo-Persian and to newer colonial bureaucratic genres are highlighted below.Footnote ¹⁸ Under Company rule, “new dispositions to writing and paperwork emerged in the early nineteenth century,” including new bookkeeping methods, procedures for determining veracity, and genres of official reporting.Footnote ¹⁹ The rise of this “document raj,” it is argued below, had important consequences for Indo-Persian writing, including notions of what constituted a “diary.” Next, the article considers the contents of ʿAbdulhusain's text. As a British ward and a member of a dynasty whose powers were fundamentally compromised by the Company, our diarist evinced an awareness of textual developments in his native Madras Presidency. Clearly, though, he was also cognizant of some of the more abstract intellectual currents—or countercurrents—that Company bureaucratization enlivened. For within colonial officialdom at Madras, liberal-utilitarian ideologies that otherwise dominated British Indian politics provoked powerful critiques of the apparent inflexibility and inapplicability of rule-bound governance with appeals to Romanticism. That Romanticism exerted itself substantively on the prince's narrative.

Colonial-era Romanticism had diverse lineaments. Often couched in the more capacious concept of “improvement,” they ranged from agrarian concerns privileging the “ethnographic specificity” of peasant “custom”Footnote ²⁰ to naturalist narratives mixing “science and sentiment” in discourses of health and environment.Footnote ²¹ ʿAbdulhusain evoked a similar set of preoccupations as he traveled from Madras to Mecca, although he construed colonial-era themes through Persianate phraseology. His Romanticism, though, was most poignantly expressed in how his diary emphasized the first-person experience of travel by recording his manifold moods (mizaj). Conspicuous mainly by its absence in classical Indo-Persian prose, such an affective accent makes sense not only in the context of the investments that British Indian Romanticism made in “the emotions and the glories” of “individual introspection.”Footnote ²² It can also be understood by situating the prince within more fraught efforts then underway at Arcot to mediate values of political parity between a now-colonized Crown and the East India Company state.Footnote ²³ Beginning by outlining broader trends under Mughal and Company rule, the article moves to a close reading of ʿAbdulhusain's text. It then argues that, the newness of his diary notwithstanding, the prince's falling out from British favor mirrored the eventual fate of Indo-Persian under colonialism. Revealingly, though, Company-led reforms of the 1830s brought an “end” not just to the Persianate, but also to Romanticism.

Precolonial precedents

To grasp the distinctiveness of ʿAbdulhusain's text, a summary discussion of precolonial precedents is necessary. “Ego-documents,” meaning texts focusing on the lives of their authors, were not unknown among the Mughals.Footnote ²⁴ The first emperor Babur's sixteenth-century chronicle was here foundational. His daughter, Gulbadan, and his great-grandson, Jahangir, also wrote texts that are today regarded as “memoirs.” Tazkiras, anthologies of life histories, were ubiquitous, though such works were not autobiographies, but rather hagiographies exalting pious men or prosopographies detailing the vitae of poets or royals. Subaltern subjects also wrote about themselves. Tahmas Beg Khan, an enslaved Ottoman Turk who was gifted to the Mughal governor of Punjab, wrote an Indo-Persian chronicle of that province in the 1780s. Portions of his book verged on the “autobiographical,” and employed even a vocabulary suggestive of the genre (ahwal-i khud, “affairs of myself”; qissa-yi khud, “story of myself”). Among precolonial ego-documents, we may even include dream journals, kept not only for visions of prophets and Sufi masters, but also for political prognostication. It was the latter that interested Tipu Sultan when, in the small hours of 1 January 1797, the monarch woke from a revery about his arch-rivals: “The English have been defeated in Europe [wilayat] and are of their own accord leaving Bengal.” Letter writers also wrote in self-referential terms. The epistolography of the great Mughal scribe Chandar Bhan Brahman revealed much about his career trajectory.Footnote ²⁵

Explanations of why the Mughal era witnessed the proliferation of such texts await further research, but heightened awareness of the world in the early modern period might have brought with it greater self-awareness. We might, then, conjecture, after Jacob Burckhardt's thesis on Renaissance Italy, that the dual “discovery of the world and of man” was a process that also unfolded elsewhere, as some scholars of Indo-Persian travel writing have indeed intimated.Footnote ²⁶ We could also argue, after Norbert Elias, that a centralizing state meant “civilizing” behavioral norms, and that, even among the Mughals, “self-constraint” meant refining one's “self-image.” For Taymiya Zaman, Mughal memoirs hence usually had a “didactic” bent to them. Meanwhile, mirzanamas, “books of grandees,” instructed Mughal gentlemen on how to speak, read, eat, drink, dress, hunt, and ride. In the last analysis, however, precolonial ego-documents, whether embedded in a waqiaʿ (“annal”), told through a tarikh (“history”), or tucked into letters, hagiographies, or manuals, all still stopped short of the sovereign genre that was the “autobiography,” which is why scholars have labeled them, tentatively, “auto/biographies.”Footnote ²⁷ Precolonial works were more concerned with external events than with an author's life experiences. Even the travelogue, that very first-person of “genres,” usually saw travelers being diffident about their own significance. They achieved this through literary conventions like hamd (praises to God) or other self-effacing formulae. A Delhiite who traveled to the Middle East in the 1740s was characteristic in his travelogue when he referred to himself as “flawed,” “poor,” and “the least among the faithful.”Footnote ²⁸

So we are forced to return to the problem: why did classical Indo-Persian writers show an aversion to ego-documents? The question, of course, is rendered moot when we approach it in global historical terms. Even in Europe, it is only Rousseau's Confessions (1782) that is regarded as seminal. But scholars have also offered explanations that were purportedly peculiar to Islamic worldviews, as for example “the necessity of humility and the suppression of the human ego in order effectively to worship god [sic].”Footnote ²⁹ Such ideas were not confined to the ʿulama. Antinomian Sufis strove for fana, “self-annihilation.” The irreverent poet Mir Taqi Mir—credited by some with having written a late Mughal “autobiography,” but which on closer inspection turns out to be a miscellany of anecdotes with only glimpses of the author's lifeFootnote ³⁰—likewise idealized “travelers on the road to fana.”Footnote ³¹ To the Islamic–Sufistic, we can add the “Persianate” (including its Greco-Roman heritage). Seema Alavi's work on Mughal medicinal culture—tibb—drew attention to its connections to the ethics (akhlaq) of “aristocratic virtue.”Footnote ³² Care of the humors per Aristotelian, Galenic, and Avicennian notions of temperament was vital. Excessive speaking and writing were thus considered base behaviors. Gentlemanly discourse was “brief and concise.”Footnote ³³ The leading ethical treatise of Mughal India pronounced similarly that “disease”—of the body, of the “soul”—was linked to emotions like “fear, sadness, envy, desire, passion.”Footnote ³⁴ All this in turn would appear to corroborate arguments regarding the emotive “restraint” shown by classical Indo-Persian travelogues. Someone like Mirza Iʿtisamuddin of Bengal was struck by the “wonders” of eighteen-century Britain. True to Mughal form, however, there was little affective excitement in his travelogue. Iʿtisamuddin was dazzled by Britain, but “his emotions retained their balance.”Footnote ³⁵

A defining feature of the modern intellectual history of the Indian Ocean, Nile Green has argued, was the traveler's amplified awareness of the ascriptive cultural differences they encountered. South Asian hajj travelogues, Green adds, were no exception.Footnote ³⁶ Yet if greater awareness of the world was on the ascendant in the nineteenth century, was there also a greater awareness of the “self”? Due to the European travelogue's colonial connections, scholarship on the genre has been much concerned with how its “gaze” surveilled “Others.” Much less, by contrast, has been said about the ways in which its authors viewed themselves. Barbara Metcalf was among the first to discern a nascent narratological trend in mid- to late nineteenth-century Urdu pilgrimage accounts, wherein “the hajji and not the hajj,” she claimed, became central.Footnote ³⁷ Still, Metcalf's explanation for this subjective turn was overly monocausal, as she attributed it entirely to print culture. As ʿAbdulhusain's diary shows, the turn to narrating individual experiences pre-dated the proliferation of Indo-Persian incunabula in the 1820s (though this is not to deny that print and its mediations of a reading “public” and a discrete “private” realm might have fast-tracked the subsequent expansion of autobiographical narratives).Footnote ³⁸ Not simply that, but the reasons why that turn took place, at least in ʿAbdulhusain's case, had much to do with the evolution of Indo-Persian under Company rule and the emergence of colonial Romanticism.Footnote ³⁹

Madras to Mecca

How, then, was ʿAbdulhusain's diary different?

Before venturing into the Indian Ocean with his text, it is worth locating it within developments in colonial Madras, which in turn can help us situate the author in context. Now, the historiography's focus on Indo-Persian's decline after c.1800 certainly seems in need of qualification when viewed from a kingdom like Arcot, whose rise as a post-Mughal state at the southernmost edges of the Timurid empire owed both to the weakening of Delhi's authority and to British expansion in the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁰ As Kevin Schwartz has shown, until the Company terminated its position as the ruling house of the Karnatak Payanghat region in 1855, the Walajahi dynasty successfully patronized in the Tamil country “a bustling environment of Persian literary activity.”Footnote ⁴¹ Emerging as a haven for “out-of-work cadres of litterateurs” from north India—and, it may be added, some out-of-luck Mughal royals, tooFootnote ⁴²—Arcot's reputation as a neo-Mughal center for Indo-Persian was furthermore captured in its nickname, “Shahjahanabad [Delhi] the small.”Footnote ⁴³ But Arcot fell under direct Company dominance in 1801, and colonial influence loomed over the polity long before that. As Edmund Burke contended in a diatribe against the Company's abuses of its powers in India, by 1785 the British had already turned the nawab, Muhammad ʿAli Walajah (r. 1752–96), from a “real potentate” into “a shadow, a dream, an incubus of oppression.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Even as Indo-Persian literary culture continued at Arcot, colonialism therefore brought to it significant institutional, administrative, and intellectual changes.

In this regard, the Company's patronage of Indo-Persian deserves mention. Until 1812, the madrasa at Fort St George, Madras, offered lessons in Persian.Footnote ⁴⁵ As early as 1710, the Company hired local munshis (Persographic clerks) and encouraged its servants to learn the language, promising to “give them the preference to such as do not think it worth their while to take the same pains.”Footnote ⁴⁶ By 1814, with the establishment of Haileybury College, a new system for teaching Persian to Company recruits of course emerged in England itself. But if efforts to streamline “civilian” recruitment at the metropole made for a more reformed and rational bureaucratic culture at the Company's Persian secretariats, it appears not to have checked the enthusiasm of local litterateurs regarding the prospects of colonial-era Indo-Persian.Footnote ⁴⁷ “Truly,” one Madras munshi wrote of John Holland, governor of Madras (1792–4), “he was a person of wisdom and experience and spoke the Persian tongue with rhetorical eloquence” (Farsi ba-fusahat wa ba-laghat mi-kard).Footnote ⁴⁸ Another Persian panegyrist lavished praise on Governor Stephen Rumbold Lushington (1827–35):

And yet exchanges between the Company and Persographic culture did not just result in Georgian imperialists being recast as heroes of classical verse. British bureaucratic hegemony also impacted Indo-Persian genres, as it did scribal forms in regional languages like Tamil.Footnote ⁵⁰ Due to its famously rigorous insistence on auditable genres or “forms” of official documentation, the Company's clerical culture moreover brought new orientations not only to Indo-Persian writing, but also to the social worlds of Indo-Persian writers.Footnote ⁵¹

At Arcot's chancery, communications with the Company meant exposure to documentary forms whose colonial provenances were unambiguous. The kingdom's scribes read daily Company memoranda, “ishtihar-nama, which in the English tongue is called niyus-pipar.” They also heard the “twangs” (tarang) of spoken English at court.Footnote ⁵² Far from just being force-fed a diet of English texts and chatter, it is evident that many of Madras's literati themselves “eagerly grasped the new opportunities” that were being afforded by Company rule. Sylvia Vatuk thus illustrated how the regional ʿulama learned English to teach Indians seeking employment both as Company munshis and as nawabi scribes. In fact, Arcot eventually established a Department of English Correspondence, an opposite number to the Company's Department of Persian Correspondence.Footnote ⁵³ As one history of newspapers in southern India clarifies, it was, moreover, from such Anglo-Persianate exchanges that commensurable notions of textual genres evolved. Aʿzam al-Akhbar, published from 1848 as Madras's first Persographic “newspaper” (akhbarat), crystalized conceptions of a genre that in fact had its preprint roots, both in Europe and in India, in the “journal” (ruzana).Footnote ⁵⁴ Surely such generic transformations set one context for categorizations of the kind, as I show presently, that eventually cast the “diary” as a textual artifact of agentive authorship, and so distinct from “newspapers” and other forms of rote reportage.Footnote ⁵⁵

Colonial-era Persian also created new ways of assembling knowledge, as well as new ways of assembling intellectual labor. The Company's zeal for “improvement”—which, “like the romanticism with which it is so intimately associated,” David Arnold showed, “was one of the foundational influences of the period”Footnote ⁵⁶—led to translations of scientific treatises between Arcot and Fort St George. In 1852, one sirishtadar (superintendent) at Arcot's English Department helped a Company surgeon translate a key English text on midwifery. But again, it would be incorrect to assume that Arcot's men of letters simply worked at British behest. That European scientific epistemologies brought new taxonomic methods and empiricist outlooks to Indo-Persian is certain. Yet, as a nawabi survey of the Karnatak's flora shows, they also arrived from Arcot's selective appropriations of British intellectual trends.Footnote ⁵⁷ Meanwhile, colonial demands for deskbound discipline clearly impacted the day-to-day agendas of munshis, as implied by a set-piece conversation in a Company textbook for Indo-Persian. “Moonshy, I expected you three or four days,” a British cadet complains, “you did not come even one day.” The munshi replies that he was ill. “Pas chara az khana bar amadid—Then why did you stir from home?” “Lest someone might slander me,” says the munshi, “by saying, that I was staying away under a pretence.”Footnote ⁵⁸ ʿAbdulhusain's choice of the diary form for his travelogue—with its carefully organized daily entries—makes sense when situated within such trends in Persographic culture, colonial developments in diktats and documents that impacted travelers too.Footnote ⁵⁹

Hafiz Muhammad ʿAbdulhusain, Raʾis al-Umara, departed from Madras for the Middle East on a British vessel in February 1814. He was traveling with his mother, Sultan-un-Nisa Begum, sister of Nawab ʿAzim-ud-Daula (r. 1801–19). The Company was then in the habit of dissuading Muslim nobility under its “protection” from leaving India for pilgrimage.Footnote ⁶⁰ But in this instance, for reasons that need not take up space here, the authorities decided to “afford every proper assistance and attention to her Highness Sultan Oon Nissa Begum, during the performance of her pilgrimage.”Footnote ⁶¹ The Company issued the travelers rahdaris (passports) for use abroad. Madras instructed Bombay to receive the ship carrying the patrician passengers during its layover at the latter city, and the Company's agent at Bushehr in the Gulf was informed also of their imminent arrival. It appears that the royals planned eventually to “return towards the Carnatic.” But Sultan-un-Nisa eventually died in Karbala in 1821. Later ʿAbdulhusain also died in Baghdad.Footnote ⁶² Nonetheless, before her departure, Sultan-un-Nisa made certain that her colonial pension would continue to be disbursed in her absence.Footnote ⁶³ A court chronicle taking note of the royal pilgrims likewise mentioned these arrangements.Footnote ⁶⁴ So it was after they made landfall at Basra in the Gulf, and after they completed their “visitations” (ziyarat) to the shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala in Iraq, that ʿAbdulhusain began his diary.

A diary amid colonial genres

The diary's exordium retained many classical features. Following praises for God (hamd), His prophet (naʿt-i paigham-bar), and the Shiʿa imams (nʿat-i aʾimma), ʿAbdulhusain elaborated, in one of the remarkably few examples of verse in the text, his “reasons” for writing an account of the caravan journey between Karbala and Mecca:

Though the style of the introduction (muqaddamaʾ) was consistent with older conventions of stressing an author's insignificance, it nonetheless contained an aristocratic flair that pointed to ʿAbdulhusan's proud pedigree as a member of a royal dynasty:

Introducing then his mother—his main travel companion—ʿAbdulhusain expanded on the broader circumstances of his travels between India and the Indian Ocean. In the process, he gestured even to the specific nature of his text:

The detail regarding the “attacks” suffered at the hands of the Wahhabis of Arabia, and the fact that ʿAbdulhusain was traveling with a mainly Shiʿa hajj caravan that included Qajar and Ottoman notables, are both key to unraveling the political context behind the diary, as will be discussed later. But beyond serving up mise en scène, what is interesting here is that the muqaddamaʾ was a piece of polished prose. Clearly composed after the diary itself was completed, it contained besides typical poetic flourishes and an author who stressed his own triviality against the foreordained logics of “events” (ahwal) and “occurrences” (waqiʿa). In all this, ʿAbdulhusain was conforming to inherited patterns. Like precolonial ego-documents, his diary also recorded his dreams. “I was very happy,” he wrote after dreaming of a Shiʿa imam on the night of 20 March 1816.Footnote ⁶⁷ And yet, pushing against received literary conventions was his own latent awareness of the uniqueness of the genre he was engaging in. As we shall see, even as he recorded the experiences of fellow pilgrims, it was thus the diary form that led ʿAbdulhusain to turn to his own experiences of travel, his own quotidian and even numbingly ordinary activities, and, ultimately, to his own moods and musings. All this, in turn, was written in an unornamental style that frequently slipped into something like shorthand note taking, which similarly was suggestive of the spontaneity of a personal “diary.”

The Indo-Persian ruznama (“daily book”—ruznamcha is the diminutive form) and the European “diary” (or “journal”) have analogous etymologies due to similar historical roots. Both emerged from bureaucratic and bookkeeping traditions.Footnote ⁶⁸ Under the Mughals, scribes called waqiʿa-nawis (“events writers”) and akhbar-nawis (“news writers”) used ruznamas, among other forms, to record daily court activities.Footnote ⁶⁹ Yet these were highly stylized texts with “no explicit intrusion of the voice of the akhbar nawis.”Footnote ⁷⁰ This, moreover, was reflected in the organizing units of “events” or “news” that punctuated such accounts, empirical clusters that supplied grist also to the mill of the annalistic methods of Indo-Persian historiography (tarikh), but which were quite distinct from the autobiographically focused contents usually associated with modern diaries.Footnote ⁷¹ A mid-eighteenth-century Mughal lexicographer's definition of ruznama likewise indicated roots in bookkeeping: “A text [kaghazi] in which each day's incomes and expenses [madakhil wa makharij] are written.”Footnote ⁷² Colonialism brought new meanings, however, and the nineteenth century saw even the anglophone genre in British India becoming linked to travelogues, with titles like Diary of a Tour through Southern India (1823) or Diary of a Journey from Madras to Masulipatnam (1831). The Romantic tradition, which influenced both perception and policy during early colonialism, encouraged the keeping of published and private diaries among Company servants.Footnote ⁷³ But so did bureaucratic forms that arose from a demand for auditable records in British India.

There were thus the “diaries” kept by the Company's “residents” or agents at Indian kingdoms, which, due to deliberate colonial bureaucratization, began to displace the munshi-mediated, “flowery” records of courtly events with, as the British saw them, “routinized” reports.Footnote ⁷⁴ Arcot's resident when ʿAbdulhusain's grandfather was nawab, one Richard Sullivan, argued in 1779 that “political wisdom” necessitated the establishment of residencies. Company residents would be “tenaciously watchful,” he ventured, “not only of all public actions, but of all private machinations,” including “the personal or domestic circumstances of the Princes.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Nawab Muhammad ʿAli himself kept a ruznama, “to write down,” as its munshi was instructed, “the discussions of every moment, and inventory of the letters.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Here we have the continuation of a Mughal form, with the notable exception that an “important feature of the diary was the record of the nawab's interviews with Europeans.”Footnote ⁷⁷ One such European, a powerful British courtier at Arcot, also kept what he called a “private diary of my own which I never mean should see the publick eye.”Footnote ⁷⁸ This particular diary served as an accounts book, a “confidential record,” a document of “important conversations,” and “a companion to which he confesses his hurts and disappointments.”Footnote ⁷⁹ All such colonial-era resonances of the “diary”—by turns a travel account, a record “political” and “personal” and, most pertinently, an ego-document where writers submitted their emotive ideations—were to be found in ʿAbdulhusain's ruznamcha.

The most obvious way in which Suffering Pilgrims was a diary was in its diligent adherence to daily entries. Suggestive of the format's roots in accounts keeping, ʿAbdulhusain often checked, and rechecked, “the account of the calendar” (hisab-i taqwim) to situate his activities temporally, as, for example, when meeting acquaintances (“He had only seen me some evenings of the month. By the account of the calendar, those evenings were evenings last month”), or when determining the start of a month (“The month's new moon came into view, but it was high [in the sky]. Last night was the month's end. The calendar said the same. It rained that night”).Footnote ⁸⁰ As is evident, chronological coordinates remained fixed to the Islamic Hijri calendar. As for hours of the day, ʿAbdulhusain divided them per the “traditional” schedule of daily prayers. Even as such specifics demonstrated continuity with past patterns, it bears repeating that slotting entries into a set calendrical schema was novel for Indo-Persian travel writing, where dates usually appeared within the body of a narrative. The innovation can be historicized with some precision, however, when considered alongside colonial-era textual trends. ʿAbdulhusain's diary might have been influenced by European bookkeeping, which during the Company's expansion had become intricately entangled with Indo-Persian accounting (siyaq), and which the prince would have been aware of given both his complicated financial dealings and his dynasty's infamously dense relations with British creditors.Footnote ⁸¹ ʿAbdulhusain certainly used his diary to keep track of his financial transactions, including his expenditures on food, rent, and transportation.Footnote ⁸²

It is, of course, unlikely that ʿAbdulhusain himself ever pored over English travelogues or diaries.Footnote ⁸³ Yet as a member of a colonized kingdom in close and constant contact with the Company, he would have been sufficiently acquainted, through osmotic exchanges with Arcot's English-literate munshis and scribes, for example, with the changes described so far in this article. Doubtless these transformations were far-reaching enough to have touched Persographic culture more generally. As C. A. Bayly noted, by the 1840s munshis “knew English and kept European clock-time and had mastered, or had been mastered by, the disciplines of diary writing and empirical description in sciences.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Such colonial-era complexities force us to rethink assumptions regarding any sudden retreat of Indo-Persian culture after the Mughals. Indeed, long after vernacular literature came into its own and Indo-Persian was displaced as an official administrative language, it is telling that a fin de siècle dictionary for its main successor language in the subcontinent should have thus alluded both to “Mughal” and to “British” definitions for the “diary,” describing thus the Urdu (or Hindustani) ruznama as a ledger book (hisab kitab), a book of “day-to-day states and events” (hal ahwal), and in a creolized lexicalization that only too likely drew on colonial forms, “a daily ‘report’” (ruzana ripurt).Footnote ⁸⁵

Suffering Pilgrims as Indo-Persian Romanticism

“Specifying every mortifying or ridiculous situation within which he continued to place me,” the Company's agent at Baghdad wrote in late 1820, “would have required a regular diary of our intercourse and such things I am by no means desirous of recollecting.”

The agent was referring to ʿAbdulhusain, whose complaints of being snubbed had prompted inquiries from India. But to Bombay's requests for further information, the resident in Ottoman Iraq detailed his own jeremiads against the “Nuwaub's general conduct during his residence in Bagdad, which induced me after much forbearance to intimate to him that I could no longer consider him under my protection.”Footnote ⁸⁶ We shall return later to ʿAbdulhusain's rift with the British, a turn of events which, while to do with the prince's personal predicaments, reflected the eventual fate of Indo-Persian culture under Company rule. But first, this section will delve into the contents of his diary, for which it is worth clarifying that ʿAbdulhusain was neither the first South Asian to travel abroad under British patronage, nor the first to write about it. Mirza Abu Talib, who went to Europe from Lucknow in 1799 with a Company official, left a celebrated account of his travels. From ʿAbdulhusain's hometown, mention may also be made of Turab ʿAli, a munshi who had taught the British at Calcutta and Madras, and who toured the Middle East with a Company “linguist” between 1810 and 1828. He wrote a travelogue titled Risala dar Masir-i Turab ʿAli Nami ba-Taraf-i Iran wa ʿIraq wa ʿArab (Account of the Travels of Turab ʿAli to Iran, Iraq, and Arabia).Footnote ⁸⁷

Suffering Pilgrims, nevertheless, distinguished itself from its predecessors by how its author documented his reactions to “events” by conscientiously recording his mizaj, meaning his mood, temperament, humor, and, more broadly, “health.” For example, on the twenty-ninth of Shauwal, 1230 (4 October 1815), ʿAbdulhusain was indisposed, and “on account of this I felt anxious in my heart and was not at ease.” On the twelfth of Rabiʿ al-Sani, 1231 (12 March 1816), he was at Jannat al-Baqiʿ, the great cemetery of Medina. There he discovered that the Wahhabis, who were “zealous” (muʿtassib) in their Sunnism, had destroyed many tombs to dissuade Shiʿa and Sufi veneration at the grave sites of saints and imams. “My heart exploded.” More melodramatically—though perhaps here also predictably, given it was a day in the religious calendar designated for mourning—on the tenth of Muharram the pilgrim traveler detailed the emotions provoked by the commemoration of the Shiʿa martyrs. “The hearts of the faithful roast like kababs [dilha-yi muʾminin kabab shuda], their livers smoke [jigar-ha gudakhta], and their eyes become mournful streams of tears [chashman silab-i ashk-i jari ast].”Footnote ⁸⁸ At times it was others who stirred an emotional response from the diarist, at times the elements did, at times a mix of all those factors did:

Epigrammatic entries like these often gave an impression of the immediacy of personal experience, and the diarist showed a proclivity for a plain prose style largely eschewed in earlier travelogues. However, the genre and the unpremeditated penmanship it might have elicited do not in themselves explain ʿAbdulhusain's emotional forthrightness. For all the originality of form, we also find in this text the abiding influence of older Indo-Persian ideas.

For instance, the traveler often correlated emotions, both his own and others’, with physical health and weather conditions, an approach entirely meaningful within the principles of tibb. “Janab Begum Sahiba, from the weariness of yesterday and today, caught fever,” ʿAbdulhusain wrote of his mother after a taxing leg of their caravan journey through the desert. There was a dearth of potable water on the road, which is why a stopover at the oasis town of Haʾil proved convalescing weeks later. “The climate was very nice and relieving. Janab Hazrat Begum Sahiba became well.” Climactic conditions, ab-o-hawa (“water-and-air”), explained no less the character of Haʾil's inhabitants, who were “of a cheerful disposition, pleasing, and beautiful.”Footnote ⁸⁹ ʿAbdulhusain accordingly paid much attention to the desert's heat. “Last night and today it was very very hot” (bisyar bisyar garm bud), he wrote of the midsummer torridness of the Hijaz in 1816. “A sultry hot wind blew, and the sky filled with clouds.” All this had deleterious effects on his health. “Today I have a headache. Last night was extremely hot,” he noted again days later.Footnote ⁹⁰ Being under the weather meant being ill-humored, literally. Exponents of tibb in India therefore argued that “emotional well being [sic]” required an “Aristotelian stress on proper environment.”Footnote ⁹¹

Written by Arcot's court physician, a late eighteenth-century treatise on the effects of heat on physical (jismani) and spiritual (ruhani) health is here instructive. Noting that heat-induced illness (buhran) had been known since Jalinus (Galen), the Indo-Persian text listed among its symptoms fever, sweating, and diarrhea. Indicative of the links between health and emotions, the treatise further observed that symptoms could be identified via physiognomy, as when a patient showed outward signs of fear.Footnote ⁹² This explains why ʿAbdulhusain was diligent—hypochondrial, even—about monitoring his health and moods under the heat of Arabia. Yet his self-diagnoses were also demonstrative of self-awareness. They hinted at what Foucault, with reference to regimes of care in Greek antiquity, dubbed “technologies of the self.” Moreover, it should be emphasized that the kinds of detail ʿAbdulhusain put down regarding his somatic or spiritual state were altogether absent in classical travelogues, where their inclusion would have been considered highly inappropriate, not to say intemperate. “Today I caught diarrhea,” he wrote in Medina in March 1816. “Glory be to God I [only] caught diarrhea once in India and once here. Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds.” “Today in the morning I caught diarrhea,” he noted again in July that year. “I had fourteen bowel movements.” A fever came and went. “I slept little by little. Thank God, thank God.”Footnote ⁹³

Indo-Persian medical theories supplied one basis for ʿAbdulhusain's cathexis on “health,” but his emotionalist associations resonated also with British Indian neo-Hippocratic narratives. In his study of the writings of itinerant Company physicians and naturalists, Arnold described the profound “influence of Romanticism on scientific as well as scenic ideas of representation.” British anxieties regarding death and disease in the tropics, coupled with the broader colonial desire to imaginatively “annex” Indian landscapes, produced travelogues suffused with “emotional qualities.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Arnold deemphasized the role Indians played in this “Empire of Emotions,” but in Madras it was clearly coproduced with local actors. As noted, Arcot's scholars engaged British medical and botanical treatises. Before it abandoned “subjectivity” for “governmentality” in the mid-nineteenth century, colonial science also relied on Arcot's medical corps to draw causal connections between health and environment.Footnote ⁹⁵ British epidemiologists in the 1810s, for example, cited Arcot's physicians to argue that monsoons triggered seasonal cholera.Footnote ⁹⁶ Given these intermediations, it is unsurprising that ʿAbdulhusain's diary was strongly evocative of Company narratives, not to mention some of the political motivations that underwrote them.

As Assam's jungles, Nepal's summits, and Rajasthan's dunes exhilarated contradictory colonial sentiments of “delight” and “horror”; as Mughal ruins and derelict temples conjured “contemplation” of antique splendor yet also “condemnation” of Eastern “despotism”; and, as subcontinental landscapes and flora aroused “nostalgia” for British hamlets and highlands even as they drove ideas of agrarian “improvement,” ʿAbdulhusain's diary summoned similar Romantic vistas from the Middle East.Footnote ⁹⁷ Arabia could be a “desolate place” (wilayat-i kharab), he wrote, referring repeatedly to how death shadowed travelers through the desert. But the desert could also be “attractive” (qasim), with oases that echoed with the “pitter-patter” (pir-pir) of spring water. Rice, fowl, dates, and pomegranates in the Hijaz were satiating. The diarist, nevertheless, dreamt of home, of savoring the “sour soup” (sambar?) of Madras.Footnote ⁹⁸ At Baqiʿ, he contemplated iconoclasm's ruins. “All the cupolas, tombstones are in poor state.” That wreck underscored for him Wahhabism's “tyranny” (zulm). At one oasis, with its well-planned gardens and roads, he likewise lamented, “pity, it is in Wahhabi hands.”Footnote ⁹⁹ If the prince had internalized the narratological conceits of Romanticism, they were not simply serving stylistic ends. Company-era Romanticism had political objectives. Those too were being mobilized by his diary.

To demonstrate how colonialism disrupted the “balance” of classical Indo-Persian emotive thought, Margrit Pernau pits the 1857 sepoy rebellion as pivotal. As the anticolonial revolt breached “trust” between the British and their subjects, it also saw South Asian Muslims repudiating temperamental equilibrium for “fervor,” a turn that moreover facilitated the development of Islamic reformist ideas, she asserts.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ But of course, the rebellion was itself a reaction to colonial reforms. For the pre-1857 setting, liberalism and its adjacent ideologies thus provide another prism through which to refract our analysis of Suffering Pilgrims. Liberalism's links to Romanticism are here especially relevant. As William Reddy argued, after the perceived paroxysms of the French Revolution, European intellectuals sought to stabilize affective mores with liberal politics, on the one hand—which subordinated passions to reason—and Romantic art, on the other—which provided a counterpoint or vent, “a superior realm of the sublime” meant for “inner exploration.” Between liberalism and Romanticism, thus, there also emerged a modern “normative emotional management regime.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ For the present analysis, the takeaway should be that colonialism did not just bring reform to South Asia. There, too, liberalism had its counterpart in Romanticism. But with a quirk. “In European art and literature this opposition is well known,” Dirk Kolff noted. “But in the colonies these two schools of thought were almost immediately translated into forms of government.”Footnote ¹⁰² And it was in Madras that Romantic governance reached its apotheosis.

Romanticism hence did not just entail in diary keeping among wide-eyed “griffins,” as new Company hands were called. Until the 1830s, when the reformists raced ahead, the almost wholly subjective opinions of colonial Romantics on South Asian history, society, nature, and morality also informed policy. This “knot” of Romantic officials, Eric Stokes masterfully argued, had “a strong introspective bent, a sensibility for natural beauty and for historical associations, with an imaginative urge for release and adventure.” They brought an “emotional objection” to what they regarded as the “cold” policies of limited government based on the rule of law and property rights in provinces like Bengal. Against those Whiggish aspirations, they forwarded that a personalized rule predicated on putatively precolonial practices best suited India. As it happened, partisans of these ideas betrayed a special “anxiety to see them adopted in the Madras territories.”Footnote ¹⁰³ They realized that ambition. Under Thomas Munro, later governor of Madras (1820–27), from around 1800 the province saw the implementation of a crowning “Romantic” policy, the ryotwari agrarian tax regime, which privileged cultivating peasants (ra‘iyat), and not landlords (zamindars), as primary holders of rights in land.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This was “to take the peasant in all his simplicity,” “to rule him with a paternal and simple government, and so to avoid all the artificialities of a sophisticated European form of rule.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ For similar reasons, the likes of Munro tended to defend the Company's upkeep of the Walajahs, even as opportunities arose to do away with the fiction of nawabi authority.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Did the “brooding” and “melancholic” Romantics, as Stokes described them, influence ʿAbdulhusain's diary? While there is no evidence of direct connections, given how Arcot was wholly beholden to the Madras Presidency, the prince likely had more than a passing familiarity with the ruling ideology of the regional Company state. Certainly, he claimed knowledge of the revenue administration of British India (jihazat-i Angrezi), or “the numerical arrangement of the country.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Moreover, from Muhammad ʿAli onwards, Arcot showed a keen enthusiasm for British arts and aesthetics. The kingdom patronized British portrait painters. Its neo-Palladian palace was designed by a British architect (Figure 1). Even the palace's interiors were filled with “English furniture, pictures, and ‘novelties’.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ One nawab was, moreover, known to wear British clothing (libas-i ahl-i wilayat) on occasion.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Modern scholars, meanwhile, accept Romanticism's influence on nineteenth-century Persian travelogues.Footnote ¹¹⁰ However, no study has yet explored how that literary turn might have actually occurred.Footnote ¹¹¹ Munro, an epitome of colonial Romanticism, certainly held strong opinions regarding Indo-Persian. He advocated language learning among Company officials.Footnote ¹¹² But in ways that incidentally anticipated the plain exposition of ʿAbdulhusain's diary, he also complained of Indo-Persian's excesses.

Figure 1.

The neo-Palladian Persianate: interior of Chipak Palace, Madras. Built for the Arcot nawabs by the English engineer Paul Benfield in 1768, the structure stands as an early example of both British Romantic neoclassical and “Indo-Saracenic” architecture in South Asia. Photograph by Nidhi Mahajan.

“I have been for some years past amusing, or rather plaguing, myself with the Hindoostanee and Persian languages,” wrote Munro in around 1788. His letter to a compatriot was a sardonic send-up of numerous aspects of Indo-Persian writing, from its tricky syntax and treacherous calligraphy to its apparent penchant for pedantic aphorisms. Yet it was the purple prose that bore the brunt of Munro's sarcasm. “Long, pompous periods” made also for “ridiculous” language among Indo-Persian letter writers, who habitually claimed, wrote Munro, that they remained in “corporeal and spiritual meeting” with their correspondents—“Molakali Jismania Bohani [sic!].” “I never write to a Mussulman without telling him,” Munro then added in a way that suggested how he sought to persuade new practices among Persographic interlocutors, “that notwithstanding our spiritual meeting, unless the Cause of causes, God, shall cause a cause, that shall be the cause of our corporeal meeting, it will be altogether impossible for me to remain longer in the vale of tears.”Footnote ¹¹³

Romanticism's introspectiveness, combined with its critique of Indo-Persian's supposed vacuity, might then have prompted ʿAbdulhusain's decision to document his travels as a diary. There is, moreover, evidence to suggest that ʿAbdulhusain might have had in mind a British readership for his text, as we shall see. The plausibility of a Romantic influence becomes more tenable when considering how the prince documented the places, peoples, and polities he encountered during his travels. Again, that gesture was not new.Footnote ¹¹⁴ But again, it was redolent of Romanticism. Colonial paintings, prose, and poetry in this era highlighted exotic environments, archaic pasts, and savage customs as tropes of difference, to be sure. That orientalism, however, served also to intensify the quintessentially Romantic aesthetics of the “sublime” and “picturesque” (Figure 2).Footnote ¹¹⁵ As much as ʿAbdulhusain relied on Indo-Persian ideas of climate or geography, his reflections on Arabia's atmospherics thus still came very close to British meditations on Madras's landscapes (“It is a romantic country, and every tree and mountain has some charm which attaches me to them”Footnote ¹¹⁶) and weather patterns (“We have a hot land wind, day and night, and I wish myself in one of your airy bungalows … Your description is enough to make a plain man romantic”Footnote ¹¹⁷). “Until its ends,” ʿAbdulhusain wrote similarly from the Arabian interior, “the space of this country was beautiful.” “And there was thunder and lightning, and the tall palm trees of this mountainous region were like so many Pahlavi ramparts.”Footnote ¹¹⁸

Figure 2.

Madras as a beachhead of British Indian Romanticism: William Daniell's Madras, or Fort St George, in the Bay of Bengal – A Squall Passing Off (1833) captured in a colonial seascape the “awfully magnificent and sublime” views the artist had earlier also sought out in an illustrated travelogue of Britain. William Daniell, A Voyage Round Great Britain, undertaken in the summer of the Year 1818, and Commencing from Land's-End, Cornwall, with a Series of Views, Illustrative of the Character and Prominent Features of the Coast, vol. 4 (London, 1820), 36. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

As for people, ‘Abdulhusain relied on established categories from the “Persianate world” to grapple with cultural heterogeneity. An old distinction between Arab and Persian (ʿArab wa ʿAjam), for instance, he maintained throughout, if also because his caravan was made up of many pilgrims from Iran. Himself evidently a Shiʿa, ʿAbdulhusain identified strongly with his fellow travelers, and so frequently decried the sectarian pushback they faced in Arabia, where it had reached intense levels with the advent of the Wahhabis. With their uncompromising interpretation of Hanbali Shariʿa, the Wahhabis, led by the al-Saʿud clan, were in the midst of a serious insurgency against Ottoman rule. Their maritime satraps in the Persian Gulf had meanwhile become an issue for the British in India. For ʿAbdulhusain, the problem, however, remained the sectarianism that Wahhabism had unleashed, in the face of which he not only documented a further array of emotions, but also hinted at the sort of “vernacular” differences one finds in hajj travelogues from the late nineteenth century.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Crossing “Wahhabi country,” he claimed, he and his fellow pilgrims were subjected to violence, deprived of water, denied Shiʿa rituals, and fleeced for undue tithes. All this produced much fear, crying, and “hoo-ha” (hai-o-huyi). But if their actions made the Arabs “evil,” “wicked,” and “hypocritical,” the effects of sectarianism could also be discerned in how ʿAbdulhusain parsed his own identity. At one point, he felt compelled to clarify to a sentry that he was not Persian, but rather Indian.Footnote ¹²⁰

Sectarian strife clearly set a tone for the “suffering” in ʿAbdulhusain's diary.Footnote ¹²¹ Considered alongside its affective ruminations, what also emerge are suggestive similarities with contemporary British travelogues, which were often “expressly organized around the sufferings of travelers.” “Dangers” and “distress” in such accounts roused the romance of adventure and misadventure; their authors’ emotional turmoil against backdrops of rugged beauty evoked the sublime.Footnote ¹²² For ʿAbdulhusain, the Romantic imaginary meant that older Indo-Persian understandings of difference jostled against new valuations of alterity. “The romantics,” to quote Kolff once more, “sought completeness, the colourfulness of history, of contemporary nations and customs, the surprises of the landscape and the animal realm, the wisdom of peasants, the cultured ways of the aristocracy.”Footnote ¹²³ As though working through such a checklist, ʿAbdulhusain touched on many such themes, and for each he stressed the foibles of regional culture or supplied his own eccentric opinions on them. At times, he employed timeworn Indo-Persian conventions. In a quizzical language consonant with the traveler's trope of “wonder and strangeness” (ajaʾib-o-gharaib), he thus spoke of “wondrous houses” at one Arabian town. They had “neither head nor feet,” “neither dimness nor openness.”Footnote ¹²⁴ However, such observations also exceeded classical conventions to take note, as the Romantics might have, of the “customs” (qaʿida) of Bedouin society, the “manners” (taʿaruf) of Arabia's tribal elders, and the ways of refined and rustic, “city-dwelling [shahri] and desert-dwelling [barri] Arabs.”

Yet it was the political motivations behind Romanticism, and how ʿAbdulhusain rallied and redeployed their presumptions, that perhaps best exemplified how his diary should be read as a product of the colonial era and its ambiguities. Historians have persistently drawn attention to how Arcot clung to its powers in the teeth of British subjugation. Susan Bayly noted that, even after signing away its sovereignty, the Crown continued to behave in ways that suggested that “the nawabi was still active, still carrying out the functions of sovereignty.”Footnote ¹²⁵ Natasha Eaton added that its adoption, and subversion, of the Company's diplomatic protocols reflected Arcot's “obstinate resistance” to colonialism.Footnote ¹²⁶ But surely resistance is not the only relevant rubric here. Even as they reinforced Arcot's claims to power, the cannibalization of colonial ideas within such asymmetrical circumstances was an intrinsically ambivalent act. The paradoxical consequences it generated were certainly evident in the case of our prince. Romanticism let him cast Arabia, its landscapes, and its inhabitants as beautifully benighted. Those projections contrasted markedly with his representations of himself and his fellow Qajar and Ottoman aristocrats (aʿyan) as genteel bearers of “reverence” (tauqir) and “civility” (taʿaruf). Yet the irony was that his internalization of Romanticism's deeper political implications also made the prince's assertions of authority appear utterly absurd to British officials.

After his hajj, ʿAbdulhusain was thus pilloried for assuming the same forms of personal power the Romantics so valorized in Madras. In Baghdad, he had evidently corralled some emigrant Indians, given them titles, and formed a court around his person. But this drew loud protests from the Company's resident, who argued that the prince was thus in “competition” with his office, and that “such a system once tolerated could only tend to compromise government.”Footnote ¹²⁷ For the colonized, Romanticism had its limits. Its political aspirations in such a setting hence also appeared to become, as Romanticism's severest modern critic put it in another context, “fantasy.”Footnote ¹²⁸