How Persian became the language of colonial India’s religious surveys

The unusual encounter with a Persian text commissioned by European colonisers in India led him to seek out more such records documenting Indian religious groups. “Historians of colonial India have rarely used Persian sources,” claims Arzoumanov.

But there exists, he says, a large amount of Persian material written for local officers of the East India Company, such as histories of places in India and descriptions of social and religious groups. They were written, clearly with the intent of surveying and controlling a new and strange land and its people. “It seems like the colonial officials were instigating a certain type of literature,” says Arzoumanov.

The choice of Persian as the language of translation is telling of the linguistic dynamics of a period when the subcontinent was undergoing sweeping political changes.

Persian as the language of Indian elite

By the 18th century, Persian was the lingua franca of administration, high culture, and education in large parts of the Indian subcontinent. The roots of the high status enjoyed by the language can be traced back to the 11th and 12th centuries, when Muslim dynasties entered North India, including the Delhi Sultanate and later the Mughal Empire.

They were culturally tied to the Persianate world. Persian had already established itself as the language of governance, literature, and diplomacy across much of West and Central Asia, from where it came.

Major General Claude Martin (Wikipedia)

The Mughal rulers further institutionalised the use of Persian, establishing it as the language for official orders, revenue records, court chronicles, legal documents, and more. It did not replace the local vernaculars; rather, it interacted with them. “Persian was the language of anyone working in the administration,” says Arzoumanov.

So if the British wanted to tap into an existing administrative system, they had no choice but to go through Persian.

It is also interesting to note that the majority of the commissions for these translations were awarded to Hindu scholars. Arzoumanov says that to categorise various Indian religious sects, Hindu scholars would have appeared better suited. Persian by this time had been both embraced and adopted by the Hindu literati. He underlines that, from the 17th century onwards, they left their mark on the development of Persian literature in South Asia.

“In Lucknow, the Hindus’ ‘linguistic conversion’ to Persian reflected their intimate connection with Islam and Sufism. Notably, individuals such as the renowned poet Qatil, who belonged to the Khatri scribal caste, embraced Shiism,” writes Arzoumanov in ‘Translating Jain Philosophy at the confluence of Persianate Hinduism’, a research paper published in 2024.

He also notes that Hindus participated in Moharram ceremonies, composing Urdu and Persian marsiyas, a popular poetic genre in the form of elegies mourning the death of Hosayn at the Battle of Karbala.

From the 17th century and through the 18th century, Arzoumanov notes, Persian also became part of the Bhakti movement. “Persian, as a language, is being used by the Bhaktas to write on religious subjects. It becomes a Hindu language,” he suggests.

Munshi Nawal Kishore (Wikipedia)

This adoption of Persian by the Hindu literati reached an explosion by the 1850s. He cites the example of Munshi Naval Kishore, the famous Lucknow publisher, who published several texts on Hinduism in Persian. “It seems like Persian was one of the main languages through which people were consuming translations of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana,” Arzoumanov argues.

Describing Indian religious sects 

What was striking about these Persian texts commissioned by the British, says Arzoumanov, was that they were among the very first instances of a comprehensive survey of all religions, based on interviews and on what could be found on the ground. They were proto-ethnographic in nature. However, such a practice did have a few precedents, dating back to the 17th century in Mughal North India. The Sanskrit sources that documented religious groups focused more on their philosophy than on the people and practices.

Produced under colonial supervision, these new texts used an ethnographic and classificatory framework promoted by East India Company officials to understand and control people in their dominion.

Colonel James Skinner (Wikipedia)

Arzoumanov points to four such texts that his research focuses upon – Atmaram’s Dahira al-Fuah, Sital Singh’s Silsila-yi jungiyan, Mathuranath’s Riyaz-al-Madahib, and James Skinner’s Tasrih al-aqvam. In a new paper that is yet to be published, he notes that “motivated in part by the need to identify and control highly mobile and influential ascetic communities, these four texts had the clear objective of facilitating identification of sectarian affiliation.”

One of the most innovative aspects of these works was the inclusion of paintings for every group. Visible markers such as ‘tilaks’, clothing, or objects were presented categorically as identifiers of each group.

Among the sects presented, some were invented. “Take, for instance, the worshippers of Surya or the sun God. It is hard to say if they can be categorised as a separate sect,” says Arzoumanov.

Interestingly, the sects and subdivisions mentioned in the Persian sources would persist in later texts, including those written in English. For instance, H H Wilson, the famed 19th-century orientalist, would use Persian texts to compile his works, and he retained all the groups mentioned, even those for which there was insufficient evidence. And since they were in Wilson’s work, other scholars who would later refer to his work would retain them too.

The use of Persian, steeped in its own historical context, produced other kinds of anomalies. The word ‘firqa’, for instance, is used to designate religious and social groups. In the Islamic context, the word is used to refer to a prediction by the Prophet that the Muslim community would split into several subdivisions, each called a firqa. “Literally, it means a split, and the word ‘sect’ too literally means a split,” says Arzoumanov, adding that this word is then used to describe the Indian religious groups.

Yet another notable word is ‘mazhab’, which originally meant a school of law in Arabic. It came to mean a religious group in Persian, and the meaning was carried forward in the 19th-century colonial texts as well. The word ‘qaum’ also occurs frequently. While it was used to designate a caste, in the Iranian context, it referred to a people or a nation.

By the mid-19th century, Persian was almost completely replaced by English and the vernacular Indian languages. Persian hardly ever features in the narrative of modern India. In the contemporary world, the role of Persian as the language of administration and elite culture has almost disappeared anywhere outside of Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan.

“How does one make sense of its disappearance, when well into the 20th century, a large number of texts being produced in India on non-Muslim subjects were in Persian, and the fact that there emerged an entire community of people in India who were reading and writing only in Persian?” Arzoumanov asks, reflecting on this.