Limning the land: Social encounters and historical meaning in early nineteenth-century travelogues between Iran and India

Abstract

This article considers the importance of place of origin in two Persian travelogues that span a critical historical moment, the first three decades of the nineteenth century. At this time, the Persianate world was fractured and shrinking. British presence in the South Asian subcontinent was becoming unmistakably dominant, and, though newly unified under the new Qajar state, Iran was embroiled in wars that would bring British and Russian imperial pressures to impinge on its sovereignty. Scholars have shown this period as a critical moment when indigenous discourses began to shift. In Bengal, elites began to adopt the terms of colonial discourse.2 The most studied example is Raja Rammohan Roy, who first worked for the British as a classically trained Persian monshī before making a name for himself as a social reformer. Lata Mani has shown how as the discursive terrain of his exhortations changed, so too did the languages he chose to write in – abandoning Persian first for Bengali, and then also English.3 These changes in elite discourse in the subcontinent took place as a split in literary aesthetics was being formalized between Irani and Hindustani Persian from the early nineteenth century.4 In Iran, a new awareness of European scrutiny and Orientalist evaluations of society and culture began to