Bare abbu had long decried the late servile attitude towards Persian, and it’s supposed Iranian ownership, which had made Indians feel inferior about their own Persian, and had degraded Urdu before Persian. This led to another story from the classical period about a Persian speaker who was befuddled by a particular idiom in Arabic. He then cited an example of the great Anglophone reformist Mohammed Husain Azad who travelled to Iran in the 19 th century and was bamboozled by the native speakers’ poor command over the polished idiom. The colonial encounter of the 18 th and 19 th centuries, and the colonial masters’ desperate quest to associate languages with communities, and religions, resulted in Persian becoming identified exclusively with Iran.
Until the 18 th century Persian was regarded as a cosmopolitan language, with no exclusive association with any particular country or place. Anybody, maintained Arzu, could master a literary language, which was different from one’s mother tongue. Arzu, as he had shown long ago, drew a distinction between literary language, particularly the language of poetry, and everyday speech. Then he began talking about Khan Arzu and the debate about Persian’s provenance in the 18 th century. He praised Dudney’s work, and said he had written the foreword to one of his books. Very likely Dudney had derived the inspiration for his thesis from Bare abbu’s path breaking article about Indian Persian, from more than two decades ago.
One day I mentioned I was reading Arthur Dudney’s monograph on Khan Arzu, the great 18 th century Indian lexicographer and intellectual.
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