Faarsi — six centuries of high prose in the Deccan

Persian arrived in the Deccan in the saddlebags of the Khalji and Tughluq armies. Alauddin Khalji's general Malik Kafur passed through Devagiri and Warangal in 1308–1310 carrying with him the entire diplomatic and administrative idiom of the Delhi sultanate, which was Persian. The pattern was unbroken across two centuries: at every Indo-Islamic court from Lahore to Bengal, the official language was Persian. The Deccan, brought into the same political world by Tughluq's conquest of the Yadava and Kakatiya kingdoms in 1318 and 1323, inherited the same chancery.

When Alauddin Bahman Shah broke from Delhi in 1347 and founded the Bahmani sultanate, he kept what he had been trained in. Persian was the language of the diwan, the language of the farman (royal decree), the language of taxation, of the courts of law, of diplomatic correspondence, and of the higher religious sciences. The chancery's official copyists, the munshis, were either immigrants from Iran or Central Asia or Indians trained in the Persianate tradition. The Bahmani inscriptions at Gulbarga and Daulatabad — many still legible — are in Persian.

What the new sultanate could not import was a native Persian-speaking population. Persian in the Deccan was always an élite language — written, recited, prayed in, but rarely spoken in the household even by the men who used it professionally. That gap between high written language and everyday speech is the structural fact that, three centuries later, would make room for Dakhni and then for Urdu.

When the Bahmani sultanate fragmented after 1490, the two greatest of its successor states — the Adil Shahis of Bijapur and the Qutb Shahis of Golconda — both declared themselves Shia and turned their faces, religiously and linguistically, toward Safavid Iran. The first Adil Shahi sultan, Yusuf Adil Shah (r. 1490–1510), claimed Aq Quyunlu Turkmen descent; the first Qutb Shahi, Sultan Quli (r. 1518–1543), was a Persian-speaking Qara Quyunlu nobleman from Hamadan. Their courts spoke, wrote and prayed in Persian from the day they were founded.

The result was the largest single Iranian immigration to the Deccan. Scholars, jurists, calligraphers, doctors, astronomers, gunners and ulema arrived in steady stream from Khorasan, Mazandaran, Gilan, Astarabad and Isfahan, drawn by salaries, jagirs and the prestige of two functioning Shia courts in the same plateau. The chief minister of every Adil Shahi reign was, by tradition, a recent immigrant from Iran; the chief judges (sadr) of both courts were Iranians. The cultural style of the bureaucracy, the architectural taste of its buildings (the Persian pointed arch, the muqarnas, the tile-work of Gol Gumbaz), the food of the kitchens and the rituals of Muharram — all of it was set in Persian terms.

The Persian poetry of these courts is the unread half of Indo-Persian literature. Zuhuri of Tarshiz, who came to Bijapur around 1580 and was court poet to Ibrahim Adil Shah II until 1616, wrote prose and verse considered by Indo-Persian historians on a level with Faizi and Urfi of the Mughal court. Ghawasi at Golconda, Nusrati at Bijapur (later in his career), Mu'jiz Khan at Bidar — each left Persian divans worth several hundred ghazals apiece. Most have never been published.

The Deccan owes to its Persian historians what the medieval Mediterranean owes to its Latin chroniclers. Almost every fact we can verify about the Bahmani sultanate, the Vijayanagara wars, the founding of the five successor states, and the religious and administrative history of the Deccan up to 1700 is preserved in Persian prose written between roughly 1590 and 1700.

The greatest of these is Muhammad Qasim Firishta, a Persian historian from Astarabad who lived at Bijapur from c. 1590 and worked there under Ibrahim Adil Shah II. His Tarikh-i-Firishta (also called the Gulshan-i-Ibrahimi, completed c. 1611) is a multi-volume Persian history of the Indo-Islamic world that devotes long, careful chapters to each of the Deccan sultanates. It became, in the next two centuries, the standard reference for European Orientalists; John Briggs's English translation of 1829 made it the founding text of Anglophone Deccan historiography.

Around Firishta stand a small Persian library of Deccan chroniclers. Sayyid Ali Tabataba wrote the Burhan-i-Ma'asir (c. 1595) — a Persian history of the Bahmani and Nizam Shahi sultanates. Rafi-ud-din Shirazi compiled the Tazkirat-ul-Muluk at Bijapur. The author of the Tarikh-i-Sultan Muhammad Qutb Shah (c. 1617) gives us most of what we know about the early years of Hyderabad. After 1687, Mughal historians like Khafi Khan and Bhimsen Saxena recorded the Deccan in the same Persian register. The Deccan's modern historians have spent two centuries reading these books.

By 1947 Persian had ceased to be a living language anywhere in South Asia. But it had not vanished — it had migrated. Forty per cent of standard Urdu vocabulary, perhaps more in literary registers, is Persian; almost the entire grammatical apparatus of polite Urdu correspondence — the izafat construction (shahr-i-Dilli, dast-i-shafqat), the honorifics, the diplomatic formulae — is borrowed unchanged from Persian. To learn Urdu is to learn, by stages, the better part of a Persian education.

The libraries of the Deccan are where the language is most visibly preserved. The Asafia State Library (now the Telangana State Central Library) holds some 9,000 Persian manuscripts; the Salar Jung Museum, perhaps 8,000 more; the Osmania University Oriental Manuscripts Library, the Madrasa-i-Aliya at Hyderabad and the Khuda Bakhsh Library at Patna together preserve the bulk of the surviving Indo-Persian textual tradition. The Tarikh-i-Firishta exists in dozens of beautifully copied Deccani manuscripts. The Iranian government, as part of a long bilateral programme, has digitised much of this collection over the last two decades.

Persian survives, too, in inscriptions. The walls of the Charminar, the gates of Golconda, the dome of Gol Gumbaz, the entrances of every major Bahmani, Adil Shahi, Qutb Shahi and Asaf Jahi monument, the gravestones of the Qutb Shahi and Paigah tombs — all carry Persian. A Hyderabadi who learns to read his own city's stones is, without quite intending to, learning Persian. The language is no longer spoken; it remains, in this strict sense, the writing on the wall.