Trade, language, and shared identities: How an ancient world linked India and Iran thousands of years ago

Shared linguistic and religious heritage

Distinguished Parsi archaeologist J M Unvala, in his study of the longue durée (long duration) history of Indo-Iranian ties, pointed to archaeological parallels uncovered at Susa (Shush, in the Kuzestan province of Iran) and at the Indus Valley sites of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, noting similar painted pottery, polished tools, and seals.

Unvala advanced the view that the pre Aryan Indus Civilisation showed affinities with Elamite and Sumerian cultural repertoires. Accordingly, trade links brought Afghan and Iranian metals and semi-precious stones into the Indian subcontinent, underpinning an integrated Asian trade network as early as the third and fourth millennia before Christ.

Proto-Aryan languages were spoken in the steppes of southern Russia around early 3000 BCE. Indo-European linguistic forms that emerged in the region retained loanwords that can be traced to Proto-Aryan forms. For example, as pointed out by eminent Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola, the Finno-Ugric word for ‘hundred’ is ‘sata,’ close to the Proto-Aryan ‘shatam’. Proto-Finno-Ugric people were dispersed by about 2500 BCE; hence, Indo-Iranian languages were present in southern Russia even earlier.

Besides, since the earliest evidence for horse domestication comes from the Srednij Stog culture of the Ukrainian steppes, around about 4200–3500 BCE, and the Yamnaya culture, of about 3500–2800 BCE, these pastoral cultures with their horse-dependency circulated Euro-Indo-Iranian languages and Indo-Iranian populations across a vast region. Both the Rig Veda and the Avesta (the Zoroastrian religious text-corpus of ancient Iran) contain representations of horses as key elements of military and aristocratic living.

As Romila Thapar adds, Indo-Aryan and Old Iranian cultures are part of a broader ethno-lingual Indo-Iranian phase of common ancestries, whose evidence is found in the Rig Veda and Avesta, in that “the cult of soma/haoma and the emphasis on the worship of fire were common to Iran and India”. Notably, this cult “does not occur elsewhere in the Indo-European speaking world,” according to Thapar. They may well have had roots in Central Asian shamanistic traditions.

Besides, as Unvala notes, Indo-Iranians shared natural cults and solar and lunar divinities. The composition of the Gathas and parts of the Avesta had a shared substratum of cultural wellsprings, potentially around 2000 BC. By this time, Indo-Iranians formed a culture known as Sintashta, whose language was Proto-Indo-Iranian.

This was followed by the Andronovo culture, which marked the first recognisable splits between Indian and Iranian oral traditions. Around 1650 BC, the Mittani Empire, which was established around modern-day Syria, is known to have used an Indo-Aryan language that resembled Sanskrit—albeit written in Mesopotamian cuneiform. In fact, a treaty between the Mitanni and the Hittites is even known to have invoked Indo-Aryan gods like Varuna, Indra, and Mitra. Even the royal names of Mitanni rulers resembled Sanskrit and Iranian names.

No Aryan invasion

When the Vedic and Iranian religious traditions diverged, the Avesta’s supreme deity, Ahura Mazda, emerged as a conceptual doppelganger to the Vedic notion of Asuras—originally meaning powerful and of divine origins. In the earliest Rig-Vedic nomenclatures, some deities, including Varuna and Mitra, are referred to as Asura—a trait that would be strongly disavowed in later Vedic traditions wherein Asuras would stand as the opposite of Devas or godheads. In the Zoroastrian tradition, however, the word daeva would come to signify demons, especially those antagonistic to Ahura Mazda. And these new emergences very likely date back to before the time of the Persian prophet, Zoroaster, who is believed to have lived between 1500 and 1000 BCE.

Regardless of the religious divergences, around this time, Persians began regarding the Indus region as part of their extended Asiatic domicile, and later, Persian palatial inscriptions even recorded tributes from Indian provinces. Accordingly, Thapar challenges the notion of  Indo-Iranian culture as a fixed ethnic identity, as it was far more likely a dynamic network of communities connected by mobility and exchange—challenging politicised theories of Aryan invasions disseminated by colonial elites.

These Indo-Iranian ties are strongly attested by archaeological findings. The cultural complex that the above timelines refer to—sometimes known as the Greater Iran Bronze Age—was likely dominated by a nomadic military elite, whose relics are found in excavated weapons, chariots, and aristocratic burials, whose descriptions match Indo-Iranian textual evidence on their warrior elites.

Shared funerary architecture, metalworking, fortified settlements, and above all, the early evidence for light, horse-drawn, two-wheeled chariots, are decisive technological markers of a continuous early Indo-Iranian complex. The Greater Iran Bronze Age complex probably migrated towards the Indus Valley around 2000 BCE.

Excavations at Mehrgarh, Sibri Damb, and Nausharo in Balochistan have unearthed cemeteries and burial practices indicating that Greater Iranian cultural groups entered north-west India during late-3000 BCE or early 2000 BCE. In the process, Harappan societies seem to have undergone decentralisation of urban life and long-distance trade by about 1800 BCE. Iranian immigrants also spread to the Deccan and the Gangetic plains.

Pre-Islamic, early modern, and Mughal ties

During the Sassanian dynasty’s rule over Persia, between 300 CE and 651 CE (until the Arab Muslim conquests), Persian political contacts extended to southwest India. As Unvala demonstrated, inscriptions and literary traditions suggest Sassanian knowledge of Indian polities, besides evidence of diplomatic and cultural transactions between Persian and Indian courts.

Persian literary and medical manuscripts, including translations of Panchatantra-like texts, entered Iranian intellectual life, while Sassanian aesthetic and administrative influence left imprints on northwest Indian monuments and iconography in Buddhist cave complexes. This was also the period of increased mobility of clerics and merchants who sustained intellectual and religious ties across the Arabian Gulf and the Arabian Sea.

Iran—then Persia—began adopting Islam around 700 CE, and by 1000 CE, most Iranians were Islamic. Many fled Iran for fear of persecution and due to the prosperous conditions in the Indian subcontinent. In 1501 AD, Iran officially adopted Shia Islam as its national religion—under Shah Ismail I, the founder of the Safavid dynasty—leading to another wave of Parsi and other ethno-religious immigrations to India.

One recalls here the traditional Kisseh-i-Sanjan, written by Mobad Bahman Kaikobad around 1600, versifying the experiences of Zoroastrian migrations to Gujarat. Parsis settled in India retained their attachments to ancestral Iranian rites and cities even as they integrated into Indian civic life, while remaining a living conduit of ancient Iranian traditions in modern South Asia.

According to the American scholar of Middle-Eastern history, Juan R I Cole, the parallel rise of the Persian Safavid dynasty and the Indian Mughal Empire elicits how political transformation shaped literary and clerical networks between the two cultures. While India had about 170 million inhabitants during the early modern era, Iran had only about five million. Urban concentration of Muslims in India, and the alacrity of Hindu scribes in adopting Persian, totalled up to make a substantial Persophone readership in the subcontinent. “There were perhaps seven times more readers of Persian in the subcontinent,” says Cole, “than in Iran at the height of the Mughal Empire”.

Persian became embedded in chancery practices and court etiquette in India, producing a large scribal class—something that Thomas Babington Macaulay later attempted to do with English. Persian became a vessel for poetry, philosophy, mysticism, and technical manuals across long distances, including the vehicle in which translations of the Upanishads—and even commentaries on Yoga Vashistha (thanks to the Mughal Prince Dara Shukoh)—would reach Europe, where they were read in Latin translations by the likes of Goethe and Schopenhauer.

The Mughal Empire’s decrees and court rituals reinforced the use of Persian in imperial records as well as popular culture, including among Hindu scribal castes (like Kayasth and Khatri) that embraced Persian and became its accomplished prose stylists and clerks. Persian prevailed within the Mughal bureaucracy’s expanse from Lahore to Bengal until about the end of the eighteenth century.

Besides, courts in the Deccan, among others, adopted Shi’i symbols and liturgies resembling Safavid forms. Bijapur and Golconda, in particular, were known to host Safavid courtiers and jurists. The Shi’i nawabs of Awadh made Lucknow a key site of Iranian clerical and cultural presence, leaving enduring footprints in the everyday lives of Indians even until contemporary times.

Even the British administration valued Persian, and a large number of Persian histories and printed books about India were produced in British Indian presses and 19^th-century Iran, respectively.

India’s principled postcolonial goodwill

In postcolonial times, Indo-Iranian diplomatic ties carried forward the civilisational goodwill into the Cold-War-era. A Treaty of Friendship signed in 1950 established rhetorical goodwill between the two nations, even though deeper strategic divergences remained. The Cold War imposed structural pressures on both that pushed Tehran and New Delhi towards incompatible security alignments and competing economic networks.

Tehran moved closer to the Western bloc in the 1950s and ’60s, while New Delhi embraced a principled policy of non-alignment and strategic autonomy. Towards the latter part of the 20^th century, the two governments tried to balance their energy needs with regional influence and their complex relations with superpowers. The rhetoric of warmth of shared civilisational ties remained. However, it was permeated by cautious transactional attitudes on the part of both nation-states.

Although Tehran was initially sympathetic towards India, following the attacks by China in 1962, its reassurances were short-lived and eventually inadequate, especially after the outbreak of Indo-Pakistan conflicts in 1965, when Iran publicly tilted towards Karachi, the then Pakistani capital.

The 1979 Iranian Revolution transformed Tehran’s domestic order, profoundly reorienting its ideology, with the ascent of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—whose family traced its lineage back to Barabanki in Uttar Pradesh. Khomeini even used ‘Hindi’ as a takhallus or pseudonym in his poems.

Following the end of the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq war in 1988 and the end of the Cold War era, the ground for pragmatic reassessment for Indo-Iranian ties was paved. Iran’s new era of reconstruction under President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani prioritised economic openings and regional reintegration, coinciding with India’s economic liberalisation in the 1990s, which renewed proximity between New Delhi and Tehran over energy supplies and transit states in Central Asia.

Despite the strong antagonistic views of Khomeini’s successor, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, on Kashmir, energy remained a tangible strategic engine of Indo-Iranian cooperation. Diplomatic doctrines, like the Tehran Declaration (2001) signed with Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, formalised bilateral interests, notwithstanding limits imposed by third-party sanctions. Indo-Iranian bilateral cooperation during this period focused on counterterrorism, maritime exercises, and strategic defence collaborations, occasionally in discreet capacities.

Twenty-first century Indian firms have pursued stakes and projects in Iran, including investments by ONGC Videsh and upgrades to Chabahar port as a corridor to Afghanistan and Central Asia. Other shared interests include joint naval drills in the Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal, and the Indian Ocean.

Concerns about Iran’s atomic stance and the imposition of Western sanctions have repeatedly tested bilateral resolve and complicated the public perception of the two nations’ bilateral position. Nonetheless, to India’s credit, it has maintained high integrity in its partnership with Iran in pairing its energy and strategic interests while managing relations with its Western partners in the 21^st century. India has also acted as a strategic intermediary between Iran and India’s other Asian partners, through consular channels, even though New Delhi has maintained a righteous distance from Tehran’s nuclear approach.

References

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interactions in culture and cultural politics, 2002, 15-35.

Parpola, A. (1988). The coming of the Aryans to Iran and India and the cultural and ethnic

identity of the Dāsas. Studia Orientalia Electronica, 64, 195-302.

Thapar, R. (1996). The theory of Aryan race and India: History and politics. Social scientist,

24(1/3) 3-29.

Unvala, J. M. (1947). Political and Cultural Relations Between Iran and India. Annals of the

Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 28(3/4), 165-189.