When Persian served in Bengal as the language of power and culture

An interesting Bengali proverb, dating back to the era when Persian served as the administrative language, writes academic Ratul Ghosh in his email interview, is Ārśi ārśi ārśi/ Swāmī yena bale phārsi, meaning, ‘Mirror Mirror Mirror/ May my husband speak Farsi’. Ghosh explains that it calls back a time when proficiency in Farsi would secure employment in the administration.

“This long cohabitation with the Persian language and a courtly culture rooted in Turko-Persian traditions played a pivotal role in shaping the middle Bengali language, literature, and culture, which eventually entered into the complex trajectories of colonial modernity in the nineteenth century”.

Persian in Mughal political culture

Although Persian was present in regions such as Sind, Multan, and Punjab before the twelfth century, it was the Turkish conquests in northern India and the rise of the Delhi Sultanate that enabled the language to assume a far more prominent and sustained role.

“Despite the considerable cultivation of Persian in pre-Mughal India,”  notes historian Kumkum Chatterjee in The Cultures of History in Early Modern India (2009), “it was undoubtedly the Mughal imperial state which presided over the ‘most productive — perhaps even incomparable — efflorescence of Persian literary culture’ in India.”

A religious assembly at Akbar’s court (Wikipedia)

The centrality of Persian to Mughal political culture was firmly established under Akbar who declared it the official language of governance. Chatterjee further argues that Persian possessed a unique capacity to function as an effective medium of governance. Sanskrit, though prestigious and sacred, was not considered suitable for a Muslim ruling elite, while regional vernaculars were often viewed as too limited in scope for imperial administration.

Persianate Bengal through the ages

Persian did have a fair presence in pre-Mughal Bengal. Academic Thibaut d’Hubert notes in The Persianate World (2019), “What can be gathered from the sultanate period shows that Persian was mainly used in urban centers — that is in Gaur, Pandua (near Malda in today’s Indian state of West Bengal)…There is no doubt about the fact that Persian was used at the court as a language of communication, as well as in the chancery’s administration, if perhaps not to the same extent that it was used in the neighboring kingdom of Jawnpur and in later, Mughal times.”

Chinese travellers too, notes d’Hubert, observed the use of Persian at the Bengal court, identifying it as the second language of the kingdom after Bengali. Court protocol, titulature, and architectural forms further indicate the influence of Persian models in the political idiom of the period.

With Bengal’s formal incorporation into the Mughal Empire in 1576, these influences converged with existing regional traditions. Notably, Bengal’s integration into the empire brought an influx of migrants of Iranian and Central Asian origin, many of whom served as bureaucrats and officials appointed by the imperial administration. These individuals acted as important carriers of Persianised culture in eastern India.

Murshid Quli Khan (Wikipedia)

Within this milieu, Mughal courtiers were expected not only to be conversant with Persian literature but also to compose poetry and cultivate a taste in music. The early-eighteenth century marked a further evolution with the rise of Murshid Quli Khan, who asserted autonomy from the Mughals and established a polity encompassing Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa.

The Nawabs of Murshidabad now devoted much of their energy to consolidate a financially stable state while balancing autonomy with nominal allegiance to the Mughal centre.  At the same time, they actively fostered a cultural environment rooted in Mughal traditions.

“This culture, with its Islamicate character, was also strongly coloured by a Persianized ethos. The nawabs of Murshidabad welcomed and honoured Muslim holy men and scholars, made visits to tombs of pirs, and showed an appreciation for Persian poets and writers…” Chatterjee notes.

Persian as cultural capital

Persian came to function as the dominant language of public administration, revenue accounting, and courtly communication, and it was widely used on coins and inscriptions. As epigraphist Mohammad Yusuf Siddiq notes in Epigraphy and Islamic Culture (2016), “Nowhere was Islamic culture in Bengal expressed more vividly or distinctly than in the region’s rich tradition of public inscriptions, recorded either in Arabic or in Persian.”

In this administrative order, proficiency in Persian became indispensable for upward mobility. As Chatterjee observes, “Persian proficiency was in fact the necessary first step for a person with ambitions in administrative service at all levels. The nawabi administration in Murshidabad and its subordinate administrative headquarters at Dhaka, Patna, and Cuttack required employees who could create, maintain, and oversee records of various government departments that were in Persian…” Zamindars too were required to maintain accounts in Persian, creating further demand for scribal and clerical expertise.

This environment also shaped formal systems of education. Although distinct ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ educational traditions existed, there was a shared sphere of career-oriented learning that both Hindu and Muslim elites actively participated in. This form of education was closely tied to acquiring literacy, often proficiency, in Persian.

Local elites supported this through land grants for the establishment of schools. Elite family histories reflect this sustained investment in Persian. A zamindar from southern Bengal, Raja Pratapaditya’s lineage demonstrates how for at least two generations prior, male members of his family cultivated education in Persian, alongside Bengali and Nagri.

Persian literacy also enabled gentry families to build networks with aristocratic and even royal households.  Chatterjee further notes that the largest number of Bengali Hindus associated with Mughal administration came from the Baidya and Kayastha jatis. “But there were other upper-caste Hindu jatis in Bengal, Brahmins included, who also participated in this kind of bureaucratic culture based on Persian literacy.”

Persian loanwords in Bengali

A significant number of Persian loanwords entered Bengali during this period. According to Ghosh, the predominance of Persian is particularly evident in domains of judiciary and administration. He lists: Āin ‘law’; Nāliś ‘complain’; Peẏādā ‘bailiff/peon/foot-soldier’; BarꞋkhāsta ‘to suspend’; Bājeẏāpta ‘to confiscate’; Bakhśis ‘tip/alms’; and in registers of nobility and lifestyle, (Ātar ‘perfume’; Jāmā ‘garment for upper-body’; Khuśi ‘happiness’; RojꞋgār ‘income’ etc.).

“Another way to trace Persian influence is to study the folk literature of Bengal, particularly that composed by Sufi/Muslim authors, or by the followers of heterodox folk religions such as the Bāul/Phakirs. These texts vividly demonstrate how Persian and Arabic loanwords have been absorbed into the Bengali lifeworld.”

Interestingly, he adds, there are some hybrid words in Bengali with Persian roots, such as: Phi-bachar (every year), where ‘phi’-is from Persian, and ‘bachar’ is derived from Sanskrit.

Persian among other languages

However, the status of Persian in Bengal was shared, to varying degrees, with other languages as well. Under the pre-Mughal sultans of Bengal, vernacular literary production — particularly in Bengali — received significant patronage. The results of this are visible in the composition of several Bengali Mahabharatas associated with authors such as Kavindra Parameshwar.

Arabic, too, served specific administrative and symbolic functions, appearing on Hussain Shahi coinage and inscriptions, and occasionally in bilingual Arabic–Persian epigraphic forms.

Chatterjee summarises in her work, “[Persian] did not supplant the regional Brahminical culture and its practices. Instead, Persianization coexisted with Bengal’s own variant of regional Brahminism as a complementary cultural trajectory, each with its own perceived functions and domains.” She argues that Persianate culture, expressed through dress, speech and literary taste, belonged largely to the public sphere inhabited by aristocrats and service gentry. In contrast, more domestic settings tended to adhere to Sanskritic-Brahminical norms.

Yet Persian proved so entrenched as a language of governance that the East India Company, after assuming sovereign control over parts of India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, continued to use it in much the same administrative capacity.

Kazi Nazrul Islam (Wikipedia)

“To talk about the influence of Persian literary and philosophical traditions in Bengal,” says Ghosh, “one may name stalwarts such as Raja Rammohun Roy (who was also the founder editor of the Persian weekly Mirat-ul-Akhbar) and Maharshi Debendranath Tagore (Rabindranath’s father), two trailblazing figures of Bengali modernism, who were also the founding fathers of the Brahmo Samaj. The influence of Persian poetry (particularly the ghazal) played an important role in shaping the literary idiom of many modern Bengali poets, most important among whom was Kazi Nazrul Islam, the national poet of Bangladesh…”

The decline of the status of Persian language historically, he notes, began under British colonial rule, particularly through the efforts of administrators, missionaries, and intellectuals such as Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, Henry Pitts Forster and of course William Carey. “They regarded Persian influence on Bengali as artificial or imposed…The decisive moment came with the 1837 legislation that replaced Persian with the vernacular and English in judicial and revenue proceedings.”

“In conclusion, as a Bengali,” Ghosh writes, “I can only say that the Bengali identity in the present — shaped simultaneously by the colonial modernity, postcolonial cultural negotiations, and a deep connection to our unique heterogeneous, layered, and multilateral past — remains indebted to the Persian linguistic, literary, and cultural heritage.”