The emergence of Persian literature as the national literature of Iran, like that of national literatures elsewhere, has been marked ‘by the assertion of the national literary language as superior to its cosmopolitan antecedents, better suited to contemporary circumstances, or more accessible to a larger public’. Large quantities of information – ill-fitting within an account of Persian literary history and retro-fitted for the purposes of the Iranian nation – remain obstructed, obscured and elided. The idea of ‘literary return’ has been the most effective tool in achieving such ends.

The idea of ‘literary return’ – that some poets in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Iran revived Persian poetry by returning to the styles of the classical masters, while poets outside of Iran did not – has left much historiographical debris in its wake: the conflation of the writing of Persian literary history with that of Iran's own; the assertion of a greater proprietary right by Iran over the classical ‘masters’; and the erasure from history of many facets of Persian literary culture occurring outside of Iran's borders. Most crucially, the idea of ‘literary return’ has served as an interjection in Persian literary history seeking to revitalise literature in Iran on a national basis while effectively dismissing aspects of Persian literary history occurring elsewhere. Recognising the historiographical problem of ‘literary return’ in writing about Persian literature and addressing what can be done to rectify it has been the major aim of this book.

The preceding chapters have sought to challenge this conceptualisation of ‘literary return’ by re-depicting Persian literary culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through an emphasis on different literary communities in operation across a fracturing Persianate world. The poetic assemblies of the Safavid–Qajar interregnum in Isfahan, the Book of Kings-inspired war ballads of the first Anglo-Afghan War and the literary activity of a court in South India all represent episodes of historically contingent literary communities engaged with the classical canon of the masters in order to better understand and depict their place within the shifting landscape of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Persianate world. Rather than being a time defined by the grandiose revival of poetry in Iran and its stagnation elsewhere in Central and South Asia, the literary climate of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Persianate world remains ripe for the comparison and exploration of shared and divergent literary practices and orientations on a multi-regional basis.

The poet and anthologist Azar Baygdili (d. 1781) must have written the above lines with a sense of relief. Isfahan in 1770 was no longer the seat of splendour it had once been under the Safavids (r. 1501–1722), but neither was it the constant target of raids and attacks by various parties in search of political or material fortunes, at least for the time being. The reign of Karim Khan Zand (r. 1751–79) brought relative stability to Iran, as did his mayoral appointee for Isfahan, Mirza ʿAbd al-Wahhab (d. 1770–1).

Azar was born into a family of officials who dutifully served the Safavids. His birth in Isfahan in 1722 nearly coincided with the city's fall. His first decade of life was spent travelling with his father, who went in search of employment opportunities amid the shifting political tides of the day. This sojourn would later be replicated by Azar himself as he moved in search of his own employment at the hands of various factions and aspirant rulers. His early life reflected the socially chaotic and politically fluid times. No wonder he rejoiced at the stability of Isfahan in 1770. The dust of destruction and uncertainty had settled. Isfahan under the rule of Mirza ʿAbd al-Wahhab, whose ‘command’ Azar praised as the ‘soul’ of Isfahan, could be recast anew. Azar's tribute continues throughout the ode (qa‚īda) in which the above lines appear, portraying the presence and rule of Mirza ʿAbd al-Wahhab as the source of Isfahan's re-emergence as an ‘abode of happiness and security’ and ‘envy of the garden of paradise’.

Azar's enthusiasm for the mayor's leadership and the city's revival is not the first association made with the poet. First and foremost, Azar is the author of one of the most famous biographical anthologies (tadhkira) of Persian literary history. His Firetemple (Atishkada) served as the template for many later anthologists in Iran and elsewhere, and has been equally valued by modern authors who codify classes of poets and trends in poetry. Yet little attention has been paid to the circumstances under which this text was written.

Amid the historical works, diaries, journals and other depictions of the British invasion, occupation and eventual withdrawal from Afghanistan in the mid-nineteenth century is a series of Persian war-ballads (jangnāmas). These works narrate the various events of the first Anglo-Afghan War (1839– 42), modelled on the Book of Kings (Shahnama) of Firdawsi (d. 1019 or 1025), and provide information on the war from an Afghan perspective. Composed in the mid-nineteenth century in the years immediately following the war – at the same time as a ‘literary return’ was in full flower in Iran – these war-ballads occupy an intriguing place within Afghanistan's literary and national history. Located at the juncture of interpretations of war, Afghan nationalism and the legacy of the Book of Kings in Persianate societies, the war-ballads of the first Anglo-Afghan War highlight the dialogical process in which texts narrating Afghanistan's history emerged through engagement with geographically far-reaching genres, patronage networks and modalities of power.

Multiple war-ballads in Persian of the first Anglo-Afghan War are known to exist, and still others may come to light. The focus here is on the three texts that congealed in nationalist historiography as products meant to shape a sense of shared Afghan history and collective memory: the War Ballad ( Jangnama, c.1843) of Muhammad Ghulam ‘Ghulami’ Kuhistani, The Book of Akbar (Akbarnama, 1844) of Hamid Allah Kashmiri and the variously titled The Victory Book of Kabul (Zafarnama-yi Kabul, c.1844–7) by Qasim Ali.

Like other texts recording elements of Afghan modern history, the war-ballads of the first Anglo-Afghan War ‘can only be understood through the recognition of cross-border networks, dialogical developments and deep regional dynamics’ governing their production, circulation and reception. Understanding the war-ballads in this way recognises both how Afghan literary products were shaped by transregional processes and the manner in which engagement with the ‘masters’ remained a purposeful and productive endeavour outside of Iran in the nineteenth century. Before turning to such developments through a close appraisal of the texts, an account of their location and reception within Afghan nationalist historiography is in order.

The first two of these texts, War Ballad and The Book of Akbar, were brought to life for an Afghan audience in the mid-twentieth century and rendered as national accounts of ‘the Afghan struggle for liberation from a colonial power as an image for the Afghan quest for self-determination’.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a historiographical overview of some of the major shifts and developments in Persian literary culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Iran, Afghanistan and South Asia. It highlights the formation and consolidation of the ‘literary return’ narrative in Iran, trends and debates in Afghan literary historiography and the narrative of ‘decline’ of Persian in post-Mughal South Asia. Exploring side by side the general matrices of Persian literary culture in these three locales elucidates the far-reaching impact of the idea of ‘literary return’ upon national, regional and global renderings of Persian literary culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While the narrative of ‘literary return’ remains the overarching frame for truncating the historiography of the Persianate world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is not the only one. Abetting it are the separate historiographies of Persian literary culture in Afghanistan and South Asia that have followed their own more circumscribed paths. Charting the major ongoing debates in Persian literary history writing points to the various shortcomings of these frameworks and highlights the gaps into which the topics of the three subsequent chapters will be placed. Inessence, the three literary historiographies presented here serve as the roadmaps for navigating the corresponding individual chapters that follow.

‘Literary Return’ and the ‘Indian Style’

The idea of ‘literary return’ was given its name, and most prominently for-mulated, by the poet and literary historian Muhammad Taqi Bahar (d. 1951) in the early part of the twentieth century. Starting in the 1930s, Bahar began articulating some of the characteristics of ‘literary return’ and, alongside it, developed his criteria for evaluating ‘good’ poetry. But it was most notably in his groundbreaking work Stylistics or the History of Evolution of Persian Writing (Sabk-shinasi ya tarikh-i tatavvur-i nasr-i Farsi) that Bahar devised a schematic for understanding Persian literary history by dividing its evolution into four distinct categories, which included ‘literary return’.