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On Equal Terms: The Equivocal Origins of an Early Mughal Indo-Persian Vocabulary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2014

WALTER N. HAKALA*
Affiliation:
University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, walterha@buffalo.edu

Abstract

The Qaṣīdah dar Luġhāt-i Hindī (‘A Qaṣīdah on Hindī Terms’), composed in the early sixteenth century, is an unusual example of the niṣāb genre of multilingual vocabularies in verse, providing Persian glosses for various terms drawn from a language the text labels Hindī. The author of the vocabulary, Yūsuf Ḳhurāsānī ‘Yūsufī’, was a physician who followed the first Mughal-Timurid emperor, Bābur, from Afghanistan to India. This paper examines the content and the arrangement of Yūsufī's vocabulary, paying particular attention to the means through which ‘Yūsufī’ was able to assert semantic equivalences between lexical terms and the materials with which they correspond. It concludes by contrasting the Hindi to Persian glossing directionality of this work with the Persian to Hindi directionality prevailing in later examples of the niṣāb genre, arguing that the Qaṣīdah reflects a period when practitioners of the Persianate yūnānī system of medical knowledge engaged with Indic counterparts in dynamic and especially fruitful ways.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2014 

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References

1 I was able to access this manuscript (Nuruosmaniye MS 0003495, folios 86b-87b), listed under the title Kaside der Luğat-ı Hindi, in a digital photographic reproduction made available by the Süleymaniye Kütüphanesı. In transcribing the original text, I have reproduced the Arabic-script orthography that appears in the manuscript (for further details, see note 18 below). In representing Hindi and Persian in the Roman script I have adapted with some modifications the system used by Platts, John T. in A Dictionary of Urdū, Classical Hindī, and English (London, 1884), pp. vivii Google Scholar. No modifications, however, are made to transliterations contained in English translations of Urdu or Persian texts quoted from other sources. I have followed the Indian pronunciation of Persian texts. In sum, I have striven to remain faithful, first, to the orthography of original texts, and, second, to pronunciation (hence my occasional use of ĕ for i and ŏ for u, following Platts). Unless otherwise indicated, years are given as Anno Domini (AD) and dates are written according to the Gregorian calendar.

2 Jacobi, Renate, “The Origins of the Qasida Form”, in Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa, (ed.) Sperl, Stefan and Shackle, Christopher (Leiden, 1995), p. 21 Google Scholar. For a critical and somewhat controversial evaluation of the role of monorhyme on the development of Arabic poetry, see Lyons, M. C. and Cachia, P., “The Effect of Monorhyme on Arabic Poetic Production”, Journal of Arabic Literature, I (1970), pp. 313 Google Scholar. Historians of Arabic and Persian lexicography have argued that the arrangement of terms by final letter (or ‘rhyme order’) in many early comprehensive dictionaries of the Arabic and Persian traditions served a useful function for poets needing to identify rhyme words in the composition of qaṣīdahs. Haywood, John A., Arabic Lexicography: Its History, and its Place in the General History of Lexicography (Leiden, 1965), p. 71 Google Scholar; Baevskii, Solomon I., Early Persian Lexicography: Farhangs of the Eleventh to the Fifteenth Centuries, trans. Perry, John R. (Honolulu, 2007), pp. x, 174CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Brief outlines of ‘Yūsufī’'s contributions may be found in Verma, R. L., ‘The Growth of Greco-Arabian Medicine in Medieval India’, Indian Journal of History of Science, V (1970), pp. 355 Google Scholar; E. Berthels, ‘Mawlanā Yūsufī’, in E.J. Brill's First Encyclopaedia of Islam, VIII (Ṭāʾif-Zūrḳhāna), (ed.) M. Th. Houtsma, et al. (Leiden, 1987), pp. 1179–1180; Bosworth, C.E. and Berthels, E., ‘Yūsufī’, in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Edition, XI (W-Z), (ed.) Bearman, Peri (Leiden, 2002), p. 362 Google Scholar; Siddiqi, Tazimuddin, “Unani Medicine in India”, Indian Journal of History of Science, XVI, no. 1 (1981), p. 23 Google Scholar. A slightly more detailed biographical description of ‘Yūsufī’ (in Farsi) appears in Ḥabībī, ʿAbdul Ḥayy, ‘Ḥakīm Yūsufī Haravī Ṯabīb o Munshī Darbār-i Bābur o Humāyūn’, Aryana, VII, no. 3 (1948), pp. 14 Google Scholar. A comprehensive catalogue of MSS attributed to ‘Yūsufī’ appears in Storey, C. A., Persian Literature: A Bio-Bibliographical Survey (London, 1971), ii, pp. 235240 Google Scholar. The best overview in English of the life of ‘Yūsufī’ may be found in Azmi, Altaf Ahmad, ‘Unani Medicine during Babur's Reign’, Studies in History of Medicine and Science, XIX, no. 1/2 (2003), pp. 39 Google Scholar. Neither of the these last two works, however, include the Qaṣīdah dar Luġhāt-i Hindī among their extensive lists of works by ‘Yūsufī’.

4 For a discussion of the social spread of poetic composition in Persian during the Timurid-Turkmen period, especially in Herat, see Losensky, Paul E., Welcoming Fighānī: Imitation and Poetic Individuality in the Safavid-Mughal Ghazal (Costa Mesa, 1998), p. 142 Google Scholar. Compare with Maria Eva Subtelny, The Poetic Circle at the Court of the Timurid, Sultan Husain Baiqara, and its Political Significance (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1979), pp. 28, 32, 37–8, 77–8, 92.

5 Dale, Stephen Frederic, “Steppe Humanism: The Autobiographical Writings of Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur, 1483–1530”, International Journal of Middle East Studies, XXII, no. 1 (1990), p. 52 Google Scholar; Khan, Iqtidar Alam, “State in the Mughal India: Re-Examining the Myths of a Counter-Vision”, Social Scientist, XXIX, no. 1/2 (2001), pp. 2021 Google Scholar.

6 See Babur, The Baburnama: Memoirs of Babur, Prince and Emperor, trans. Thackston, W. M. (New York, 2002), pp. 214217 Google Scholar.

7 See, for example, Bābur's description of a letter he sent to Ṣulṯān Ibrāhīm in which he “laid claim to the territories that had belonged to the Turk” (i.e., Tīmur) in Ibid., p. 274.

8 Storey, Persian Literature, ii, p. 235.

9 al-Faẓl, Abū, The Akbarnama of Abu’l Fazl, trans. Beveridge, H. (Calcutta, 2000), i, p. 280 Google Scholar.

10 Ibid ., pp. 280–281.

11 Sachau, Eduard and Ethé, Hermann, Catalogue of the Persian, Turkish, Hindûstânî, and Pushtû Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library (Oxford, 1889), i, p. 836 Google Scholar; Storey, C. A., Persian Literature (Oxford, 1990), iii, p. 270 Google Scholar. For the dispersion of this text, see also Tauer, Felix, “Persian Learned Literature from its Beginnings up to the End of the 18th Century”, in History of Iranian Literature, (ed.) Rypka, Jan and Jahn, Karl (Dordrecht, Holland, 1968), p. 434 Google Scholar; Rajeev Kumar Kinra, Secretary-Poets in Mughal India and the Ethos of Persian: The Case of Chandar Bhan Brahman (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2008), pp. 58–60. A recent bibliography gives 1543 as the year of his death, see Munzavī, Aḥmad (ed.), Fihrist-i Nusḳhahʾhā-yi Ḳhuṯūṯ-i Fārsī (Tehran, 1969), p. 265 Google Scholar. This date, however, is not supported by any contemporary source. See Azmi, “Unani Medicine”, p. 15 n.26.

12 Elgood, Cyril, A Medical History of Persia and the Eastern Caliphate from the Earliest Times until the Year A.D. 1932 (Cambridge, 1951), pp. 378379 Google Scholar; Verma, “The Growth of Greco-Arabian Medicine in Medieval India”, p. 355; Storey, Persian Literature, ii, p. 235; Siddiqi, “Unani Medicine in India”, p. 23.

13 Maḥmūd Sherānī, Ḥāfiẕ, ‘Dībācah-i Awwal [‘First Preface’]’, in Ḥifẕ al-Lisān (Maʿrūf Bĕnām-i Ḳhāliq Bārī), (ed.) Sherānī, Ḥāfiẕ Maḥmūd (Delhi, 1944), p. 8 Google Scholar.

14 Ḥabībī, ‘Ḥakīm Yūsufī’, p. 3.

15 On the dates of the latter, see Ethé, Hermann, Catalogue of Persian Manuscripts in the Library of the India Office (Oxford, 1937), ii, p. 1261 Google Scholar. On both, see Ḥāfiẕ Maḥmūd Sherānī, ‘First Preface’, p. 7. Sherānī, however, gives a later date for the Jāmiʿ al-Fawāʾid, corresponding with the MS described in Sachau and Ethé, Catalogue, i, p. 960. This is the date accepted by Ḥabībī, ‘Ḥakīm Yūsufī’, p. 3. Ḥabībī also gives Herat as the provenance. For dates and MSS of both works, see also Storey, Persian Literature, ii, pp. 237–239.

16 Subtelny, Maria Eva, ‘Persian Manuscripts in the Libraries of McGill University: Brief Union Catalogue (review)’, University of Toronto Quarterly, LXXVI, no. 1 (2007), p. 341 Google Scholar.

17 On his father's Jawāhir al-Luġhat (‘Jewels of Words’), an Arabic-Persian medical dictionary, see Sachau and Ethé, Catalogue, i, p. 959.

18 I follow the orthography of the original manuscript here. The text lacks the retroflex diacritics that come to be de rigueur in the nineteenth century. It also maintains the earlier practice of not differentiating between ك kāf and the Persian-Indic gāf (with an additional diacritical bar). The verse is composed in meter ramal musamman maḥżūf with fifteen syllables per miṣraʿ (hemistich), represented paradigmatically as fāʿalātūn fāʿalātūn fāʿalātūn fāʿalā or = - = = / = - = = / = - = = / = - =).

19 A fascinating example of voiced palato-alveolar fricative ʒ ( ) orthographically replacing a voiced palato-alveolar affricate, .

20 See, for example, Gommans, Jos J. L., The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire, c.1710–1780 (Leiden, 1995), pp. 1621, 68–103Google Scholar; Levi, Scott Cameron, The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and its Trade, 1550–1900 (Leiden, 2002), pp. 5460 Google Scholar.

21 This bidirectional transfer of knowledge has been ably documented by Fabrizio Speziale, who, comparing the Mughal period with the an earlier Abbasid époque of great translation projects, remarks that “grâce à la contribution d’auteurs non-musulmans. . .[l]’adaptation en persan du savoir médical indien accomplie en Inde eut certes, une portée plus grande et plus durable”. For examples of original and translated scientific works in Persian commissioned by non-Muslims, see ‘Les Traités Persans sur Les Sciences Indiennes: Médecine, Zoologie, Alchimie’, in Muslim Cultures in the Indo-Iranian World during the Early-Modern and Modern Periods (Paris, 2010), p. 407.

22 Michael Glünz, “Poetic Tradition and Social Change: The Persian Qasida in Post-Mongol Iran”, in Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa, (ed.) Sperl and Shackle, pp. 183–203.

23 As in the 1582 Persian translation of the Mahābhārata. See Truschke, Audrey, “The Mughal Book of War: A Persian Translation of the Sanskrit Mahabharata”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, XXXI, no. 2 (2011), p. 518 Google Scholar.

24 Cf. Talattof's extensive overview of modes in which the term suḳhun is applied in classical Persian poetry, particularly ‘Niẕāmī’'s meditations upon the “Beginnings” and “Virtues of suḳhun” in his Maḳhzan-i Asrār (c. 1176–8 AD). Talattof, Kamran, “Nizāmī Ganjavi, the Wordsmith: The Concept of sakhun in Classical Persian Poetry”, in A Key to the Treasure of the Hakīm: Artistic and Humanistic Aspects of Nizāmī Ganjavī's Khamsa, (ed.) Bürgel, Johann-Christoph and von Ruymbeke, Christine (Leiden, 2011), pp. 227229 Google Scholar.

25 See Manjhan Shaṯṯārī Rājgīrī Manjhan, Mīr Sayyid, Madhumālāti: An Indian Sufi Romance, trans. Behl, Aditya, et al. (Oxford, 2000), pp. xxx, 244Google Scholar.

26 Zamānī, Mahnūr, “Maṡnawī, Taʿāruf Irtiqāʾ aur Tadrīs”, in Urdū Aṣnāf kī Tadrīs, (ed) Koul, Omkār and Sirāj, Masʿūd (New Delhi, 2003), p. 50 Google Scholar.

27 For a concise overview of the different macrostructural divisions attributed to the classical Arabic qaṣīdah, but with specific reference to the qaṣīdah in Urdu, see Hussein, Ali, “Classical and Modern Approaches in Dividing the Old Arabic Poem”, Journal of Arabic Literature, XXXV, no. 3 (2004), pp. 297328 Google Scholar. What must be the definitive account of macrostructural form in the qaṣīdah appears in Julie Meisami, Scott, Structure and Meaning in Medieval Arabic and Persian Poetry: Orient Pearls (London; New York, 2003), pp. 55110 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Variations from Sherānī's printed text (see note 44 below) appear enclosed in braces.

29 Though orthographically represented as (tʃ), it is pronounced with aspiration (tʃʰ) and scanned as if written mū-ca.

30 (z, voiced alveolar fricative) orthographically represents voiced postalveolar affricate (j).

31 Shērānī, Ḥāfiẕ Maḥmūd, ‘Baććoṅ ke Taʿlīmī Niṣāb’, in Maqālāt-i Ḥāfiẕ Maḥmūd Shīrānī, (ed.) Shīrānī, Maẕhar Maḥmūd, viii (Lahore, 1985), p. 25 Google Scholar.

32 Alam, Muzaffar, ‘The Culture and Politics of Persian in Precolonial Hindustan’, in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, (ed.) Pollock, Sheldon I. (Berkeley, 2003), p. 142 Google Scholar.

33 The standard references for this history remain Vogel, Claus, Indian Lexicography (Wiesbaden, 1979)Google Scholar, and Patkar, Madhukar Mangesh, History of Sanskrit Lexicography (New Delhi, 1981)Google Scholar On the Amarakośa (c. 6th-10th century), the most famous Sanskrit antecedent to the niṣāb genre, see, e.g., Sinha, Amera, Cośha, or Dictionary of the Sanscrit Language, trans. Colebrooke, H. T. (Serampoor, 1808)Google Scholar. Recent scholarship has examined ways in which the arrangement of the text assists with recall, thus enabling this document to be preserved through oral transmission for so many centuries: see Nair, Sivaja and Kulkarni, Amba, The Knowledge Structure in Amarakośa (Berlin and Heidelberg, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Ṣafdar Āh, Amīr Ḳhusrau baḥaiṡiyat-i Hindī Shāʿir (n.p., 1966), p. 66.

35 Badruddīn Farāhī, Abū Naṣar Muḥammad, Niṣāb al-Ṣibyān (Tehran, 1923), p. 3 Google Scholar.

36 The poor (faqīr) in Islamic law are quite literally “those who do not own a niṣāb of property, or who own a niṣāb of unproductive property, which is entirely destined for the satisfaction of first necessities, or of debts”. See Aghnides, Nicolas P., Mohammedan Theories of Finance (New York, 1916), p. 440 Google Scholar.

37 Ḥāfiẕ Maḥmūd Sherānī, ‘Dībāćah-i Duvum [‘Second Preface’]’, in Ḥifẕ al-Lisān (Maʿrūf Bĕnām-i Ḳhāliq Bārī), (ed.) Sherānī, Ḥāfiẕ Maḥmūd (Delhi, 1944)Google Scholar.

38 See Āh, Amīr Ḳhusrau, p. 81.

39 Tajallī, Allāh Ḳhudāʾī (Lucknow, 1875), p. 3 Google Scholar.

40 Ḥusain, Mumtāz, Amīr Ḳhusrau Dihlavī: Ḥayāt aur Shāʿirī (Karachi, 1975), p. 363 Google Scholar; Amīr Ḳhusrau Dihlavī Amīr Ḳhusrau kā Hindawī Kalām: maʿ nusḳhahah-yi Barlin, Żaḳhīrah-yi Ishpringar (Chicago/Delhi, 1987), pp. 129–131. See also Walter N. Hakala, “The Authorial Problem in the Ḵẖāliq Bārī of ‘Ḵẖusrau’”, forthcoming in Indian Economic & Social History Review LI, no. 4 (2014).

41 For the development in the Urdu literary tradition of a specific association of the maṡnawī form with romantic topoi, see Jain, Gian Chand, Maṡnawī Shamālī Hind Meṅ(Alīgaṛh, 1969)Google Scholar; Suvorova, Masnavi: A Study of Urdu Romance, trans. Faruqi, M. Osama (Karachi, 2000)Google Scholar; Zamānī, ‘Maṡnawī, Taʿāruf Artaqāʾ aur Tadrīs’.

42 Due to the great variation in the manuscript evidence, it is impossible to state the precise number of verses that comprise the Ḳhāliq Bārī. Sherānī, in his faulty 1944 edition of the Ḳhāliq Bārī, presents some 235 verses. Others have proposed the work to be a condensation of a much larger work of several thousand verses, a claim that the manuscript evidence and the generic conventions already mentioned do not support. See, for example, Khusro, Amīr, Khālik Bārī, trans. Sharmā, Shrirām (Vārāńasī, 1964), pp. 12 Google Scholar.

43 Sherānī, ‘First Preface’, pp. 28–29.

44 This article was later reprinted in Sherānī's collected works as ‘Baććon ke Taʿlīmī Nisāb’, pp. 24–6. While Sherānī does not identify the source from which he was copying, it is likely the same Qaṣīdah dar Luġhat-i Hindī, MS 4466/1416/5 (listed as catalogue #2134), in Rasāʾil-i Yūsufī, a collection of treatises by ‘Yūsufī’ copied out in 1835–6 and preserved in the Sherānī Collection in Lahore. For details, see Ḥusain, Muḥammad Bashīr (ed.), Fihrist-i Maḳhṯūṯāt-i Sherānī (Lahore, 1969), p. 394 Google Scholar.

45 Ḥaqq, ʿAbdul, Qadīm Urdū (Karachi, 1961), p. 199 Google Scholar. For the full edited text of this work, see Aḥmad, Nażīr, ‘Ajay Ćand Nāmah’, in Maqālāt-i Nażīr (New Delhi, 2002), pp. 121157 Google Scholar. I am grateful to Prof. Mohaiyuddin G. Bombaywala, Director of the Dargah Hazrat Pir Muhammad Shah Library in Ahmedabad, for sharing with me his personal facsimile copy of the Bhopal MS upon which Aḥmad's text was based.

46 The classic work on this remains Frances Yates, Amelia, The Art of Memory (Chicago, 1966)Google Scholar.

47 In some versified vocabularies, especially those copied or lithographed in the nineteenth century, these markers had been added to the original text as an aid to the reader. They do not appear in this particular manuscript, and have been added by me in the Roman-letter transcription.

48 Throughout this verse the final quiescent (sākin) consonant of hindawī terms become movent (mutaḥarrik) to conform with the meter: e.g., ank [= modern āṅḳh] is pronounced ān-ka and nāk as nā-ka.

49 s.m. The root of the Costus speciosus or Arabicus (it is used medicinally)”. See Platts, Dictionary of Urdū, p. 813.

50 Serjeant, R. B., ‘Notices on the ‘Frankish Chancre’ (Syphilis) in Yemen, Egypt, and Persia’, Journal of Semitic Studies, X, no. 2 (1965), pp. 241252 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Verma, ‘The Growth of Greco-Arabian Medicine in Medieval India’, p. 355.

51 For a masterful survey of the literature surrounding the debates regarding the New World origins of syphilis, consult Baker, Brenda J., et al., “The Origin and Antiquity of Syphilis: Paleopathological Diagnosis and Interpretation [and Comments and Reply]”, Current Anthropology, XXIX, no. 5 (1988), pp. 703737 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. DNA sequencing carried out since 1998 has differentiated the Treponema pallidum subspecies responsible for venereal syphilis from other related treponematoses, adding weight to the so-called “Columbian thesis”. See Harper, Kristin N., et al., “On the Origin of the Treponematoses: A Phylogenetic Approach’, Public Library of Science Neglected Tropical Diseases, II, no. 1 (2008), p. e148 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 Ḳhusrau, Ẓiyāʾal-dīn, Ḥifẕ al-Lisān (ma‘rūf bĕnām-i Ḳhāliq Bārī), trans. Sherānī, Ḥāfiẕ Maḥmūd (Delhi, 1944), p. 87 Google Scholar.

53 Hyman, Mary and Hyman, Philip, “Long Pepper: A Short History”, Petits Propos Culinaires, vi (1980), pp. 5052 Google Scholar; Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556–1707 (New Delhi, 1999), pp. 51–52; Wright, Clifford A., “The Medieval Spice Trade and the Diffusion of the Chile”, Gastronomica, VII, no. 2 (2007), pp. 3543 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Cultivated as far from the equator as 30˚ N (versus the 12˚ N limit for black pepper), the Piper longum continues to be available in South Asia, however, and it is now known as much for its medicinal qualities as for its culinary contributions. See Crawfurd, John, “On the History and Migration of Cultivated Plants Used as Condiments”, Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London, VI (1868), pp. 188190 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 For more on assessments, see Goodwin, M.H. and Goodwin, Charles, “Assessments and the Construction of Context”, in Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, (ed.) Goodwin, Charles and Duranti, Alessandro (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 147189 Google Scholar.

55 “A bahman, The root of a plant resembling a large radish; it is crooked, red and white, and is used medicinally”. Francis Joseph Steingass, A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary, including the Arabic words and phrases to be met with in Persian literature (London, 1892), p. 212. “Centaurea Behen, Linn. Compositæ. Dr G Watt in his dictionary of the ‘Economic Products of India’ gives this as the plant from which is obtained the root bahman, or buhman safed, the white bahman root, and that the plant is a native of the Euphrates valley; Boissier gives Bunge as his authority for the plant, as also from the hills of Khorasan, J. E. T. Aitchison, “Notes to Assist in a Further Knowledge of the Products of Western Afghanistan and of North-Eastern Persia”, Transactions of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh (1891), p. 36. Elsewhere in this same work, the following definition appears: “Buhman, bahman a medicine imported into India from Cabul, Centaurea Behen; intelligent, acute, adroit” (p. 29).

56 “H s.m. A small red and black seed used by goldsmiths as a weight, Abrus precatorius (syn. ghuṅgćī)”. Platts, Dictionary of Urdū, p. 865.

57 “H s.f. The seed of Abrus precatorius (syn. ghūṅgćī)”. Ibid., p. 926.

58 “H s.f. The small red and black seed of Abrus precatorius (syn. ratī or rattī, q.v.)”. Ibid., p. 937.

59 Speziale has gone so far as to characterise Mughal-era physicians involved with the dissemination of Indian systems of medicine in Persian as a “movement”. See “The Circulation of Ayurvedic Knowledge in Indo-Persian Medical Literature” (Paper presented at the Ayurveda in Post-Classical and Pre-Colonial India, Leiden, 2009), p. 5. The coherence of this group comes into sharp relief in the course of later debates during the colonial period about the applicability the label yūnānī (‘Ionian’, with its implied pre-Islamic origins) to their occupation, as summarised by Speziale in “Linguistic Strategies of de-Islamisation and Colonial Science: Indo-Muslim Physicians and the Yûnânî Denomination”, International Institute for Asian Studies Newsletter, XXXVII (2005), p. 18.

60 Alam, ‘The Culture and Politics of Persian in Precolonial Hindustan’, pp. 158, 160, 162.

61 Mushtaqui, Shaikh Rizq Ullah, Waqiʿat-e-Mushtaqui of Shaikh Rizq Ullah Mushtaqui: A Source of Information on the Life and Conditions in the Pre-Mughal India, trans. Siddīquī, Iqtidār Ḥusain (New Delhi, 1993), pp. 139, 201Google Scholar.

62 Siddīquī, Iqtidār Ḥusain, “The Afghans and Their Emergence in India as Ruling Elite during the Delhi Sultanate Period”, Central Asiatic Journal, XXVI (1982), pp. 250253 Google Scholar. See especially the quotations from Āmir Ḳhusrau and ʿIsāmī on p. 253, n. 47.

63 Alam, Muzaffar, citing evidence by the chronicler Firishtah, in “The Mughals, the Sufi Shaikhs and the Formation of the Akbari Dispensation”, Modern Asian Studies, XLIII, no. 1 (2009), p. 138 Google Scholar.

64 Babur, Baburnama, p. 275.

65 Ibid ., p. 317.

66 Ibid ., pp. 323–324.

67 Dale, Stephen Frederic, The Garden of the Eight Paradises: Bābur and the Culture of Empire in Central Asia, Afghanistan and India (1483–1530) (Leiden, 2004), p. 461 Google Scholar.

68 Alam, “The Culture and Politics of Persian in Precolonial Hindustan”, p.149.

69 Kinra, Rajeev, ‘This Noble Science: Indo-Persian Comparative Philology, c. 1000–1800 CE’, in South Asian Texts in History: Critical Engagements with Seldon Pollock, (ed.) Bronner, Yigal, et al. (Ann Arbor, 2011), p. 370 Google Scholar.

70 By Shaiḳh Asḥaq Lāhorī, completed around AH 1057. Tajallī, Allāh Ḳhudāʾī; Āh, Amīr Ḳhusrau, p. 72.

71 By ʿAbdul Wāsiʿ ‘Hāṅsawī’ during the reign of Aurangzeb. See Fārsī Nāmah, Wāḥid Bārī, Ṣamad Bārī, and Allāh Bārī (Lahore, 1845); Āh, Amīr Ḳhusrau, p. 72.

72 For extensive—if incomplete and occasionally inaccurate—lists, compare Sherānī, ‘First Preface’, pp. 26–7, and Āh, Amīr Ḳhusrau, pp. 71–2.

73 Habib, Agrarian System of Mughal India, p. 331. See also his discussion of the role of the qānūngo in maintaining an archive on “revenue receipts, area statistics, local revenue rates, and practices and cultures of the pargana” (pp. 332–335).

74 Saiyid ʿAbdullāh, Adabiyāt-i Farsī meṅ Hindūʾoṅ kā Ḥiṣṣah [The Role of Hindus in Persian Literature] (n.p., 1967), pp. 233–4; Alam, Muzaffar, The Languages of Political Islam: India, 1200–1800 (Chicago, 2004), p. 129 Google Scholar. The vast number of works penned by Hindus in Persian, beginning in the sixteenth century, supports Muzaffar Alam's assertion that “Hindus—Kayasthas and Khatris in particular—joined madrasas in large numbers to acquire excellence in Persian language and literature, which now promised good careers in imperial service”, in his ‘The Pursuit of Persian: Language in Mughal Politics’, Modern Asian Studies, XXXII, no. 2 (1998), p. 326.

75 Examples of Punjabi-Persian niṣābs include Razzāq Bārī (AH 1071 [1660–1 AD]) by ‘Ismāʿīl’ and Īzid Bārī (AH 1105 [1693–4 AD]) by Khatr Mal Pasar Sā Mal Dās. See Ṣafdar Āh, Amīr Ḳhusrau, p. 72. Compare with Sherānī, ‘First Preface’, p. 46. For a comprehensive overview of Persian-Sanskrit vocabularies, see Audrey Truschke, “Defining the Other: An Intellectual History of Sanskrit Lexicons and Grammars of Persian”, Journal of Indian Philosophy XL, no. 6 (2012), pp. 635–668.

76 The extended meanings of luġhat as ‘dictionary’ and ‘language’ derive from its primary signification as ‘something spoken’, i.e. a ‘vocable’ or ‘word’.

77 Ahmadi, Wali, Modern Persian Literature in Afghanistan: Anomalous Visions of History and Form (London, 2008), p. 45 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78 See, for example, Mishra, Pandit Braj Vallabh, An English-Hindi Vocabulary in Verse (Calcutta, 1902)Google Scholar; Khan, Ahmed-uddin, The East and West Khaliq Baree (Moradabad, 1906)Google Scholar.

79 I was not able to consult the rest of the codex, and so could not determine if the colophon is extant or whether it provides a date of completion.

80 In addition to his difficulty in graphically indicating unfamiliar Indic consonants, e.g., retroflex, aspiration, the author frequently represents vowel length in ways that would be unrecognisable to modern readers.

81 Other collections of ‘Yūsufī’'s treatises are preserved at the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, the Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library in Patna, and elsewhere, but the catalogues do not mention the Qaṣīdah dar Luġhāt-i Hindī among their contents. See Ivanow, Wladimir, Concise Descriptive Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the Collection of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (Calcutta, 1924), pp. 719720 Google Scholar; Ḥusain, Fihrist, ii, p. 494; Storey, Persian Literature, ii, pp. 35–240. Fabrizio Speziale mentions another manuscript copy of the work at the Library of the University of Teheran (MS 2569/3, ff. 22v-24r). See “Les Traités Persans sur Les Sciences Indiennes: Médecine, Zoologie, Alchimie”, p. 413; “The Circulation of Ayurvedic Knowledge in Indo-Persian Medical Literature”.

82 The author gratefully acknowledges James Bono, Jerold Frakes, Rebecca French, Aaron Hughes, Mark Nathan, Erik Seeman, Ramya Sreenivasan, and the anonymous referees of this journal for their comments and corrections.