Mana Kia. Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism

Abstract

The constructed nature of national identities emerged as a major topic of social science research in the late Cold War, and has dominated studies of the post-Soviet Persianate regions since 1991, but it is only in the past generation of scholarship that it has become a central concern of Iranian studies as such. A series of recent books have historicized the institutions of Iranian nationalism, while others have sought to recover prenational forms of belonging. Mana Kia’s book is the first to tackle this question of prenational identity directly and comprehensively, while avoiding the teleological temptation to find proto-national identity formations in early modern vernacularization and local or regional pride. With Persianate Selves, Kia has definitively brought the field of Iranian studies beyond the critique or deconstruction of such nationalist distortions of history, and into a constructive investigation of other frameworks for affiliation and imagined relationality, on their own terms.Persianate Selves considers a range of what Kia refers to as “commemorative texts”—autobiographies, chronicles, travelogues, and above all tadhkirahs—in order to explore the various ways that individual lives in the early modern Persianate lands were included in larger imaginative categories. These categories often relate to the person’s place of origin or habitation, or to political domains and affiliations, although lineage, variously defined, is also an important component of such identities. The book dispels any expectation that modern scholars might have that such identities were constituted by the exclusion of other identities. Rather, Kia uses Jacques Derrida’s conception of the aporia to argue not only that the categories under examination overlapped with each other, but that each category was constituted and defined through such overlaps. Local or regional forms of belonging did not delimit mutually exclusive territories, nor did lineages or the use of particular languages define groups that could be described as ethnicities.The study is Persianate in its geography and early modern in its chronology: it deals with the regions of West, Central, and South Asia where Persian was widely used, especially Iran and India, and runs from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. But the study reflects in profound ways on the meaning of both “Persianate” and “early modern” as categories for thinking about this space and period. Also acknowledged, although less fully articulated, are the class boundaries that define the book’s community of “educated Persians” (23). In moving away from an ethnic conception of early modern Persians, the book achieves its sense of a coherent imagined community by instead emphasizing adab. As an ethical-aesthetic form of cultivation, adab provided the core training that made all of the book’s protagonists Persians, regardless of their location, lineages, home language, or even confessional alignment. Despite the limited education of some of these writers, this book largely sets aside the lumpen-Persianate masses that have been emphasized by other recent social histories of the Persianate world: guild members in Sufi orders, low-level merchants, musicians, and folk healers. Kia is right to treat adab as a counterpart to “culture” in its pervasiveness and its explanatory power, but if used in this way, adab may not always involve the formal education that the book’s subjects assume it does.The book is formally divided into two parts, entitled “Place” and “Origin,” bracketed by an introduction and coda that establish the stakes of moving beyond nationalist teleology, and one stand-alone chapter about the commemorative genre of tadhkirah. In fact, though, place remains the book’s central concern throughout. Although Kia never uses the term geopoetics, this work is concerned with the kinds of cultural practices of place-making that have become associated with that term. Physical and political geographies contribute to the conceptual categories under examination, but the book repeatedly emphasizes the subordination of space to place, showing how the bounds and linkages of zones that we might think of as natural (such as the Indian subcontinent) have in fact been variable and contingent. The three chapters of the “Place” section focus on two writers, Ḥazīn Lāhījī and ‘Abd al-Karīm Kashmīrī, who reflected on the transregional turbulence of Nādir Shāh’s conquests. Moving between the scale of cities, provinces, regions, and the largest-scale domains of Iran, Turan, and Hindustan, the two authors make comparisons and connections that allow Kia to establish how they conceived of space and place.This is in itself a formidable contribution, but it also sets the terms that make possible the even more ambitious argument of the second part. Here, Kia rejects essentialist conceptions of early modern Persianate identity, showing that lineage and place of origin are both deceptively slippery categories. Furthermore, they are only two elements in a framework of identity that combines “inherited status, trajectory, station, and relative position,” defined in a dynamic social process (97). A larger cast of characters, who lived picaresque lives of travel and transformation, underline this point, and demonstrate the diversity of possible elective forms of kinship and contextual variations in self-presentation. In this light, Turco-Mongol lineages, castes, and categories such as Qizilbash and Mughal take on a variety of situational meanings, always implicated in the relationship between local particularity and “Persianate universalism” (101).This broader argument continually draws the reader’s attention from the conceptual plane back down to specific articulations in language, from both the participants and contemporary anglophone scholarship. Persianate Selves is in the tradition of Middle East historiography, established by Marshall Hodgson, which regards clearer terminology as the key to less distorted analytic categories. To that end, Kia, like Hodgson in The Venture of Islam, is willing to deploy terms not (yet) in general scholarly use. Where Hodgson preferred original coinages (e.g., Islamdom, Islamicate, and Persianate), Kia puts forward emic terms and categories, either left untranslated (Hindustan rather than India or South Asia) or glossed and then translated consistently (“domain” for mamlakat). In addition to the risk of fragmenting a scholarly conversation or diminishing the field’s comprehensibility to visitors from other fields, there is a deeper problem with the expectation that an emic vocabulary of place and identity will provide better analytic categories, since some of the most significant emic terms are used so inconsistently. Sometimes it is precisely this situational variability of function that gives us a full, rounded sense of the aporetic but unitary concept that the word expresses, as in a meticulous exploration of the various kinds of home or origin that can be expressed by the word vaṭan (6, 37–38). But in the case of mamlakat, discussed alongside vatan (38–43 et passim), it is harder to tell whether we are dealing with a word-concept whose historical transformations and situational contours require a begriffsgeschichte, or whether the range of usages of mamlakat are a family of resemblances with no conceptual center.Most importantly, these linguistic choices show the book’s laudable commitment to taking the past on its own terms. The book begins with a tadhkirah-like dramatis personae section consisting of short biographies of the main characters, which signal that the book itself is a sort of “commemorative text.” When, therefore, Kia writes, “Let us be modern for a moment, for comparison,” it is a thrill to realize how long all of these careful choices of language and narrative framing have allowed us to temporarily forget modern conceptual frameworks. Although Persianate Selves convincingly shows how its protagonists defined and distinguished between categories of filiation and affiliation, such collective identity categories turn out to be more our preoccupation than theirs. From the book’s title and dramatis personae onward, Kia invites us to look beyond the categories themselves, whether mutually exclusive or aporetic, and attend to the selves that experienced those categories and participated in their construction.