In decades past, it was common for students of Persian to learn that the middle of the eighteenth century marked a watershed in literary history. The conventional narrative used to run that, starting with the literary society instituted by the poet Mushtāq (d. 1171/1757), the so-called Bāzgasht (Return) poets of Isfahan broke with the sclerotic conventions of the verse composed during the preceding two centuries and rediscovered the simplicity and limpidity of the earliest poets of the corpus, such as Rūdakī (d.329/940–41 or later), Manūchihrī (d. after 432/1041), and Farrukhī (d. c. 429/1037–38) The repudiation of Safavid–Mughal style – so the story went – defined the boundaries of the national literature of Iran, placed eighteenth-century Iranian poets in a line of direct descent from the earliest practitioners of the art, and paved the way for modern Persian literature.
This narrative has been under implicit critical fire for some time now, as scholars have embarked on the detailed reassessment of poetry written in Persian between c. 1500–1750, emphasized points of contact and continuity between Iran and the broader “Persianate” world, and contextualized the thinking of the modern critics who first divided the history of Persian literature into overly simplistic styles and schools. However, the field has lacked studies which might document how poets and critics from the second quarter of the eighteenth century onwards conceived of the Bāzgasht, and which might interrogate the very concept of literary “return” itself. The goal of Kevin Schwartz's Remapping Persian Literary History is to fulfil exactly these two tasks, by recasting literary activity in eighteenth-century Isfahan as a phenomenon that found parallels in Afghanistan and South Asia.
The book is divided into four chapters. Chapter 1 offers an overview of literary historiography on the Bāzgasht written by scholars active in Iran, Afghanistan, South Asia and the West. Schwartz discusses but largely rejects the framing of the Bāzgasht as a turning point in poetic style, preferring instead to see eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary production in terms of entanglement, transregional connections, circulation, and marketization. Chapter 2 delves into the historical circumstances surrounding the formation of the Bāzgasht in Isfahan between c. 1722–1801, and offers the revisionist contention that the movement was largely not created by intellectual or aesthetic contempt for Safavid–Mughal poetry but rather by the deleterious state of war-ravaged Isfahan and the demise of patronage in the city.
Chapter 3 turns to Afghanistan c. 1839–42, and to a series of ballads about the first Anglo-Afghan war which were modelled on Firdawsī's (d. 410 or 416/1019 or 1025) Shāhnāma (Book of Kings). Schwartz is clear that the circulation of these texts throughout Afghanistan and South Asia cannot be considered a direct parallel to the Iranian Bāzgasht movement, but emphasizes what he deems to be a common characteristic: the significance of modelling a text on the work of an earlier, canonical poet. Finally, Chapter 4 is concerned with the literary circle that flourished in the middle of the nineteenth century under the last Nawwāb of Arcot, in modern-day Tamil Nadu, India, and uses the numerous tazākir (biographical anthologies of poetry) produced by the poets and critics of the region to chart how polyphonic debates about style played out. While the materials studied in chapter 3 do not offer themselves to comparison with literary activity in Isfahan in the preceding century quite so easily, chapter 4 and its focus on criticism form a more convincing parallel, and raise a whole series of useful questions about how literary communities have historically defined and reformed themselves.
There are admirable aspects to this book. Schwartz's chosen time period is understudied anyway, but literature from nineteenth-century Afghanistan and South India particularly so, and the case studies presented here go some way to showing quite how diverse and geographically expansive textual production still was at a time when the boundaries of the Persian literary world were supposedly shrinking dramatically. Another innovative aspect of this volume is the presence of node diagrams which connect the representation of networks in tazākir with historical data on the membership of literary societies, showing how the participants were linked to one another.
There are, however, some features of Remapping Persian Literary History which one might wish the author had developed in more detail. It is not quite apparent whether Schwartz entirely rejects the Bāzgasht as a conceptual tool or accepts it as a meaningful term which elucidates a series of literary genealogies and allegiances that were constructed in Iran over the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A comparison between the early Bāzgasht writers and the texts of their contemporaries elsewhere, such as Āzād Bilgrāmī (d. Awrangābād, India, 1200/1786), much of whose Persian work is about sifting through the archive of literary history, could potentially have added a greater sense of contrast to this study.
As it is, the broad framework of circulation and entanglement which the author seems to offer in place of the theory of literary return is often too dependent on a slightly vague idea of intertextual borrowing from the “masters of the past”. It is stated, for example, that the Afghan war ballads undermine “any notion that the non-Iranian Persianate world of the nineteenth century remained uninterested in engaging with the ancient masters in any meaningful way” (p. 156). But an engagement with the corpus defines Persian literature, as all literature, from its earliest eras to the present day. The question is about how the corpus was used, rather than whether it was used at all. A similar critique could be made regarding the mechanisms which Schwartz identifies: discussions of depression and inflation in the literary “market” are not new to Persian sources of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and appear as far back as the thirteenth century.
Adopting the view of the longue durée makes one wonder to what extent the three case studies presented in this book should be considered in the relational terms which the author suggests. If we are to ignore labels like the Bāzgasht – and Schwartz adduces some compelling reasons why we should – then continuing to group the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries together in scholarship may mask some of the more dynamic aspects of literary production in this period.
