Just like every Indian office or school has a picture of Gandhi, every Iranian one had a picture of the emperor, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. To our childish eyes, the Shah was marvellous, perched on his golden Naderi throne, his glittering Pahlavi crown almost too brilliant to look at, smothered with what I later discovered were 3, diamonds , not to mention egg-sized emeralds.
And then suddenly, it all came to an end. In , we began to hear rumors of unrest in Tehran. We were so far away in rural Zahedan that it took us some time to realize that Iran as we knew it was collapsing.
In August , the Cinema Rex theatre in Abadan was destroyed by unknown arsonists, killing hundreds. The Shah was blamed, and this was the trigger of revolution. Before we knew it, all flights from Tehran were cancelled. There was no way, it seemed, to get out of Iran. A friend of my father pulled strings, and got us out on the last plane out, a Pakistan Airlines flight, with a layover in Karachi.
It was not a flight we would have chosen, but eventually it got us back home. But my father had not finished his contract, or received his wages.
He went back to serve out his contract. By this time Ayatollah Khomeini was in power. There were no women anywhere. One young boy, brandishing a Kalashnikov, came up to me and asked me what I thought of the change of guard. Death to America! He returned only a few months before the American embassy was taken hostage by revolutionaries, in Iran seemed like a dream as we settled back into an Indian school.
The Iran of our times faded rapidly. Googoosh stopped giving public performances, after women were banned from singing solo in public. The Shah died in exile in , and his family was dogged by tragedy , two of his children committing suicide. Kolkata does not show its reality to a tourist who only goes to the Victoria Memorial or Birla Mandir — the real Kolkata is on its streets. Part of this reality is also buried in the South Park Street Cemetery.
This is where people like Sir William Jones , the founder of the Asiatic Society and the father of Orientalism, and Henry Louis Vivian Derozio have been laid to rest. I went to this cemetery in the heart of the city, on a weekend, along with a group of Persian language students who were attending the Summer School held in Lady Brabourne College.
They recount the life and death of people like Willian Hamilton, the surgeon who served the Mughal emperor Farrukh Siyar in Delhi. Persian was a major language in the subcontinent for about several hundred years. Despite Bengali having many words in common with Persian, in Bengal, there are no longer any native speakers of Persian.
Persian is still taught in a few schools of Kolkata as an optional subject. Hearing the Persian words coming out of their classrooms, it seems as though the Bengali tongue has forgotten how to pronounce Persian words. At a two-week summer school in Lady Brabourne College, organised by the Institute of Indo-Persian Studies, 54 students from various colleges in Kolkata had the chance to learn Persian from native speakers for the first time.
Some students could recite Persian poems but as a native Persian speaker, I could not grasp anything they said. Next, they moved on to the formation and usage of simple and complex Persian words, and reading out Persian text in a proper Persian accent. On the fourth day, they began memorising the ghazals of Hafez and Khusro and Iqbal.
They also glimpsed the magnificent worlds of Firdausi, Rumi, Hafiz, Khusro and others. Considering things from a wider perspective, I wondered how this poetry might change their lives.
Would an understanding of Sufism in Persian poetry create better human beings? The literature may change their world outlook. It is said there were more than ten thousand Indians in Isfahan and there existed even a crematory specially reserved for them on the shore of the Zayanda river in the latter half of the seventeenth century A number of Iranian people possessing sophisticated Persian culture emigrated from Iran to India seeking honour and fortune, while many Indian merchants moved from India to Iran looking for economic profit.
At least until the collapse of the Timurids at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Iran and Central Asia regularly had a common political and cultural background. People moved easily from one to the other. It is, however, generally believed that Iranian emigration to Central Asia after the rise of the Safavids was limited to those who were religiously persecuted. If so, the Mughal empire and the Uzbek regime might be thought to have had different attitudes towards immigrants.
This would not just be a question of the attitudes of the two states, for the view of the Iranian people towards the two countries should also be taken into account. What was the reason for this difference? Why did Iranian people immigrate to India rather than to Central Asia? These questions remain unanswered. The actual situation of human interchange between Iran and Central Asia after the sixteenth century needs to be studied in order for these important questions to be clarified It is known that the Mughal dynasty came from Central Asia and there was an influential Turani group a group of people from Central Asia at its court.
However, no serious study has yet been done on the movement of people between India and Central Asia, at least at the political and cultural level Much more work remains to be done. Beveridge, revised, annotated and completed by B. Prashad, 2 vol. There is sometimes mention of more than two persons in the same item. That is why the number of items included in the English translation is different from the number of persons discussed in the present study.
British Library, Add. See lists at the end of The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb. I did not do so here, however, because, although at least one reference is quoted in his huge list of notables in The Apparatus of Empire , it does not mean that one can get access to the exact reference to the place of origin of the notable concerned.
We must look elsewhere to confirm the origin of the person concerned. Due to a lack of time and the inaccessibility of some of the sources, I decided against doing this.
Athar Ali regards people receiving over 1 zats as notables, while in the other two-aforementioned studies, people receiving over zats are included in this category. Bahram Mirza, brother of Shah Tahmasp, living in the Qandahar region.
See MU , vol. II, p. III, p. Although it is obvious that we have to modify this dualistic view to some extent, as being too simple and not precisely reflecting the historical reality, I think such a classification still has some meaning. For a recent study on the Tajiks and the Turks, see for exemple, J. See M. Canfield ed. There is an interesting argument on the question of the Tajiks and the Turks at the Mughal court in the recent study of Stephen Blake on Shahjahanabad.
See S. Concerning the respect expressed by Mongol Ilkhans to sayyids, see Lambton, Continuity and Change , p. Bernier MU , vol. Quiring-Zoche, Isfahan im Jahrhundert , Freiburg, , p. See TAA , p. He ought to have been executed, but his life was spared and he was blinded. VIII, p. IX, p. The same story, a little less clear, is found in MU as well.
Irvine, London, , vol. VII, p. Gaube et E. Wirth, Der Bazar von Isfahan , Wiesbaden, , p. I thank Charles Melville for informing me of the existence of this valuable book and allowing me to refer to his own copy. Melville ed. The figure was drawn mainly based on the description of Isfahan by Jean Chardin and on the result of field work by Gaube and Wirth, Der Bazar von Isfahan.
See R.
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