INDO-PERSIAN CULTURE

The course is one of the characterising courses of the Indian Subcontinent curriculum and one of the complementary and integrative training activities of the Near and Middle East curriculum of the Corso di Laurea in "Lingue, culture e società dell'Asia e dell'Africa mediterranea". The course contributes to the attainment of the teaching goals of the Corso di Laurea in the area of culture and humanities, paying attention as well to several historical-linguistic and socio-linguistic issues. As far as the main educational goals are concerned, the course, imagined as a bridge between the studies focusing on West Asia and those focusing on the Indian Subcontinent, aims at completing the training of the students who have chosen the South Asian curriculum by providing detailed information on the cultural and intellectual history of Muslim India and its trans-regional projection through the use of the Persian language; it also aims at allowing the students who have chosen a West Asian curriculum to widen up the spectrum of their knowledge on a very important yet often neglected context as that of Indian Islam. More specifically, the work on the cultural interactions between India and the Persianate sphere allows the students to observe, from a privileged point of view, the several contradictions and problems arising from traditional scholarly approaches, quite often rigidly monolingual and identity-oriented, integrating the training of the LICSAAM students with an occasion to develop a critical attitude towards notions only apparently immutable such as that of "border" or "tradition"

Students will acquire not only the fundamental knowledge about the cultural history of Persian language and literature in the Indian Subcontinent, but also a set of critical tools useful to analize and problematize the complex issues connected to the identitary walls constructed by modern nationalisms. Students will be encouraged to adopt a multidisciplinary approach, from linguistic anthropology to literary criticism, in order to acquire an innovative point of view on several aspects of the cultural history and the aesthetics of Eurasia. This will be useful not only to students of Persian, Hindi/Urdu, Turkic and Chinese languages and literatures, but also to anyone interested in Indian and Central Asian history, Indo-Islamic civilization and the social and linguistic history of Western and Central Asia.

No specific prerequisite is required. The knowledge of Persian language is NOT necessary. A basic knowledge of the political and cultural history of South and West Asia and the geography of the area is however advisable.

The first chapter of the history of Indian and Central Asian literary culture is to be located in the Samanid and Ghaznavid world (Eastern Iran, Transoxiana and Afghanistan, 10th-11th century) and it coincides with the very formation of the Persian literary culture as a whole. It is in this period that, on the north-western borders of what was perceived in the later Abbasid times as “al-Hind”, i.e. the "Indian" world, the New Persian language becomes a cosmopolitan literary medium beginning its diffusion both westwards (to Anatolia and the Balkans) and eastwards (to present day Xinjiang and the gulf of Bengal). As a matter of fact, it is in centers like Balkh, Bukhara and Ghazna that we assist to the first textualization of an already familiar idea of “India” and "China" in Persian and it is from here that we will start our survey of the history and the geography of Persian in South and Central Asia. Following a chronological order which will take into account some of the main historical turning points (the Ghaznavid shift from Afghanistan to Panjab, early Delhi sultanate as the main center for Persian worldwide, the Timurid tendency towards literary canonization and linguistic localization, the Mughal-Safavid koine, the socio-cultural novelties of 18th century) we will explore the processes through which Persian found, developed and re-shaped its place and role in a multilingual and multicultural milieu. We will pay special attention to the implied negotiation of multiple aesthetic, linguistic, religious and social identities and the strategies of inclusion, exclusion, translation and transition of cultural (from religious to rhetorical) items from a “vernacular” to a complementary “cosmopolitan” level and vice-versa. Through a guided reading and multi-layered interpretation of some of the most representative writings of Indo-Persian literature (in translation, to reach a wider audience), students will be induced to develop and discuss specific conceptual frameworks regarding debated issues such as linguistic cosmopolitanism in and around the Islamic world, the creation and dissolution of borders between literary traditions, the dialectic between localization and circulation, and the related issues of translation and re-writings.

General bibliography (compulsory):

- Entry “India” in Encyclopaedia Iranica (solo sezioni i, ii, v, vi, xiv, xvi). Available also online: http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/india
- Muzaffar Alam, “The culture and politics of Persian in Precolonial Hindustan”, in Sh. Pollock (ed.), Literary Cultures in History. Reconstructions from South Asia, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 2003,
pp. 131-198.
- Muzaffar Alam, The languages of Political Islam in India, Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004, pp. 115-140.Further bibliography will be indicated at the beginning of the course- Torri, M. (2000). Storia dell’India, Roma, Bari: Laterza.

Integrative bibliography on the history of South Asia (non compulsory):

- Avari, B. (2012). Islamic civilization in South Asia : A history of Muslim power and presence in the Indian subcontinent. New York, NY: Routledge.
- Bredi, D. (2006). Storia della cultura indo-musulmana, sec. VII-XX, Roma, Carocci.
- Morgan, David O, & Reid, Anthony. (2010). The early expansion of Islam in India. In The New Cambridge History of Islam (Vol. 3, pp. 78-99). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Morgan, David O, & Reid, Anthony. (2010). Muslim India: The Delhi sultanate. In The New Cambridge History of Islam (Vol. 3, pp. 100-127). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Morgan, David O, & Reid, Anthony. (2010). India under Mughal rule. In The New Cambridge History of Islam (Vol. 3, pp. 266-314). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Further bibliography will be provided at the beginning of the course

The final exam consists in a discussion with the teacher, relating to the subjects dealt with during the classes

Traditional, with the support of multimedia tools (powerpoint, etc.)

Italian

written and oral