Indo-Persian culture

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"Indo-Persian culture" refers to the Persianate aspect of Indian culture. Indo-Persian literature spans almost a millennium of a flourishing literary culture in South Asia. As such it is a part of the larger production of Persian literature, but specifically refers to those authors who were native to or wrote in India. With Persian becoming the lingua franca of the region, Indo-Persian literature took on a cosmopolitan and often secular nature. Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians and Zoroastrians in India have written works in Persian. There were several causes for the decline of Indo-Persian literature: the waning of Mughal courtly traditions, the end of Safavid immigrants to India, the rise of Urdu and other vernacular literatures that preserved the Persianate ethos in them, and finally the establishment of English as an official language in 1835.

With the presence of Muslim culture in the region in the Ghaznavid period, Lahore and Uchh were established as centers of Persian literature. Abu al-Faraj Runi and Masud Sad Salman (d. 1121) were the two earliest major Indo-Persian poets based in Lahore. The greatest Indo-Persian poet was Amir Khusraw (d. 1325) of Delhi. The last major poet writing in India was Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938).

[edit] Further reading

• Waris Kirmani. Dreams Forgotten: An Anthology of Indo-Persian Poetry. (Aligarh, 1984)
• Nabi Hadi. Dictionary of Indo-Persian Literature. (New Delhi, 1995)