The Making of Persianate Modernity

Tracing the emergence of literary history, Alexander Jabbari shows how Iranians and South Asians drew from their shared literary heritage to produce a 'Persianate modernity' in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Using both Urdu and Persian-language sources, Jabbari examines how intellectual exchange across the region made national cultures.

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From the ninth to the nineteenth centuries, Persian was the pre-eminent language of learning far beyond Iran, stretching from the Balkans to China. In this book, Alexander Jabbari explores what became of this vast Persian literary heritage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Iran and South Asia, as nationalism took hold and the Persianate world fractured into nation-states. He shows how Iranians and South Asians drew from their shared past to produce a 'Persianate modernity', and create a modern genre, literary history. Drawing from both Persian and Urdu sources, Jabbari reveals the important role that South Asian Muslims played in developing Iranian intellectual and literary trends. Highlighting cultural exchange in the region, and the agency of Asian modernizers, Jabbari charts a new way forward for area studies and opens exciting possibilities for thinking about language and literature.