Given the long history of the Persian language in the Indian subcontinent, one has to wonder if there were ever any Hindu hymns written in Persian. Evidently, there is at least one: “Humā Asli Maheshwar Būd” is a hymn to Lord Shiva attributed to a 17th century Mughal general named Ali Mardan Khan (more about him at the end of the post). It seems to be popular in Kashmir. Here is one rendition of it:

I was able to find a print version of the song in a hymn book called Sahaj Kosam, published in Kashmir in 1991. It is listed as the second-to-last song in the book (p. 225-226). The Persian lyrics are presented in Devanagari script, and each stanza is accompanied by Hindi translation. This is what the title and first stanza look like:

It is quite interesting to see Persian written in Devanagari script, and some basic words and phrases immediately pop out: बूद​ (būd, “was”), शब​ (shab, “night”), and मन दीदम (man dīdam, “I saw”).

Despite not knowing Persian very well, I will attempt a line-by-line translation of the hymn as it appears in Sahaj Kosam, using the Hindi translation as guidance along with the Steingass Persian dictionary. I admit that I did not understand everything fully. Also, note that the Sahaj Kosam version is slightly different than that of the YouTube video above. In fact, there seem to be many variants on this song - see, for example, this blog post.

humā asle maheshwar būd (It was the real kingly Maheshwara)
shab shāhe ki man dīdam (At night, the king that I saw)
ghazanfar charm dar bar būd (Wearing lion's skin)
shab shāhe ki man dīdam (At night, the king that I saw)

zi basmash jām-e bar tan (From ashes cup on [his] body)
junārash mār bar gardan (snake on [his] neck)
ravānash gaṅga bar sar būd (The flowing Ganga was on [his] head)
shab shāhe ki man dīdam (At night, the king that I saw)

seh cashmash bar jabīn dārad (Three eyes were on his face)
zi mehro māh roshan tar (That were more radiant than the sun and moon)
seh kāraṇ dast bastah būd (The three Karans were folding their hands)
shab shāhe ke man dīdam (At night, the king that I saw)

ba dastash āb-e-kosar (In his hand is the River of Plenty)
va bekha nākūsi nīlofar (A conch made of the base of a lotus)
hilālash tāj bar sar būd (A crescent crown was on his head)
shab shāhe ki man dīdam (At night, the king that I saw)

umā az soi-cap-biṅgar (Uma beholds from the left)
zi sad khurshīd tāban tar (A hundred suns shining on top)
savārash qulb-e-nar būd (A draught-ox for riding)
shab shāhe ki man dīdam (At night, the king that I saw)

ajab sanyāsī dīdam (Strange sanyasi, I saw)
namo nārāyanā guftam ("Namo Narayana," I said)
ba khāke pāy bosīdam (The dust of his feet, I kissed)
shab shāhe ki man dīdam (At night, the king that I saw)

nigāhe bar man-e-miskīn ([His] sight on poor me)
namūd az cashmi tābān tar (Glanced from radiating eyes)
makānash lāmkāntar būd ([His] abode was unparalleled)
shab shāhe ki man dīdam (At night, the king that I saw)

manam mardān alī khānam (I am Mardan Ali Khan)
gulām-e-shāh-e-shāhānam (I am the slave of the king of kings)
ajab isrār mebīnam (Persistent strangeness, I see)
shab shāhe ki man dīdam (At night, the king that I saw)

Who was Ali Mardan Khan?

Ali Mardan Khan (d. 1657) was the governor of Kashmir under the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan (who is famous for building the Taj Mahal). Evidently, this is why his Shiva bhajan is popular in Kashmir to this day. The circumstances that lead to his posting there are quite interesting. He was born to a Kurdish family in Safavid Persia. His father, Ganj Ali Khan, was a military officer under Shah Abbas I, who is often considered the greatest Safavid ruler. Ali Mardan himself went on to serve under Shah Abbas and his successor, Shah Safi, and was appointed as governor of Kandahar (in modern-day Afghanistan). In 1638, Kandahar was conquered by the neighboring Mughals of India under Shah Jahan. After surrendering the city, Ali Mardan switched his allegiance to the Mughals, and was given administrative roles in Kashmir, Punjab, and Kabul.

How did a Persian-born Kurdish military officer come to write a devotional hymn to the Hindu god Shiva? A brief story is described in Sahaj Kosam under the song lyrics (p. 226). Here is my translation of it from the original Hindi:

In the land that witnessed Amir Khusro, this Persian-language Shiva hymn is historical. This poem of Ali Mardan Khan (who was appointed as Mughal governor of Kashmir in the 17th century), is the gift of a mysterious vision that he experienced himself.

It is said that Ali Mardan Khan was going for a leisurely walk at night in the vicinity of Shalimar Garden, from where Mahadev Hill and its peak are clearly visible. He became entranced, and with soul roused and feelings surged, this Persian-language Shiva hymn was born.

In this hymn, the Khan has put forth those features of Shiva that were first found in the Puranas. It seems that the Khan was a devotee in the manner of Raskhan and Mir Muhammad Jayasi, and, like them, was thoroughly acquainted with the Hindu religion and its plethora of gods.

To this point, this hymn suggests that God’s kindness can be bestowed on anyone, and therefore that his religion is not bound to anyone. If God wishes, any boat can reach the shore without question, and [conversely], even if one struggles a lakh times with their hands and feet, they will get nothing.1

While I still have a long way to go, I can kind of understand some things now.

In this post, we will attempt to translate an adaptation of "Man Mast O Tu Divane," a ghazal by the Rumi, the famous 13th century Persian Sufi poet. The entire original poem can be found here1. We will be looking at a shortened version performed by the musical duo Tabla for Two2 (first verse starts 25 seconds in):

For the lyrics, we will rely on the original text and translation as written here3.

As we go along, I will note some basic elements of Persian grammar and also point out some intriguing similarities to Hindi4. To make these similarities explicit, I have sometimes translated phrases of the song into Hindi, indicated by the phrase “cf. H.” I want to convey how accessible Persian can be to people familiar with Indian languages. Admittedly, I may get some things wrong, and also I may not grasp all the subtle Sufi meanings in the lyrics. So take this translation with a grain of salt.

Note: The transliteration scheme I’m using is somewhat ad hoc. Rather than using one of the standard schemes for Persian, I kind of just started with IAST and changed a few things.

من مست و تو دیوانه، ما را که برد خانه؟
man mast o tu divāne, mā rā ke barad khāne?
I am drunk and you are crazy - who will carry us home?

• man mast = I am drunk (cf. H. maiñ mast)

• o tu divāne = and you are crazy (cf. H. aur tū dīvānā)

• mā rā = us (the suffix rā indicates that a noun is direct object)

• ke barad khāne? = who will carry home? (as per Wiktionary, barad is apparently the 3rd pers. sg. “aorist” of bardan, meaning “to carry”5 but I’m not sure exactly what that means here as this does not seem to be a past tense context)

صد بار تو را گفتم کم خور دو سه پیمانه
sad bār tu rā guftam, kam khur du-se paymāne
A hundred times I have told you, drink just two or three cups.

• sad bār = a hundred times (cf. H. sau bār)

• tu rā = you (dir. obj.)

• guftam = I told (1st pers. sg. past of guftan)

• kam khur = eat/drink a little (cf. H. kam khāo)

• du-se paymāne = two-three measures (i.e. cups)

—

در شهر یکی کس را هوشیار نمی‌بینم
dar shahar yaki kas rā, khushyār namibinam
In the city, I do not see a single sober person.

• dar shahar = in the city

• yaki kas rā = a single person

• khushyār = alert/sober

• namibinam = I do not see (neg. 1st pers. sg. present of didan6)

هر یک بَتَر از دیگر شوریده و دیوانه
har yek beter az digar, shuride o divāne
Each is worst than the last, frenzied and crazy.

• har yek beter az digar = every one is worse than the last (cf. H. har ek…)

• shuride o divāne = frenzied and crazy

—

جانا به خرابات آ تا لذت جان بینی
jānā ba kharābāt āy, tā lazat jān bini
O Love, come to the Tavern of Ruin, and you shall see the pleasure of the soul!

• jānā ba kharābāt āy = O Love, come to the Tavern of Ruin (I believe that āy is a poetic imperative form of āmadan, even though the typical form would be biyā)

• tā lazat jān bini = [and] shall see the pleasure of the soul (beni is apparently the 2nd pers. sg. aorist of didan, but again I am not sure what that means here)

جان را چه خوشی باشد بی صحبت جانانه
jān rā che khushi bāshad be-sahbat jānāne
What happiness would there be for the soul without conversation with the Beloved?

• jān rā = soul (dir. obj.)

• che khushi bāshad = what happiness would be there? (bāshad is, I believe, the 3rd pers. sg. subjunctive present of the “to be” verb bud, using its present stem bāsh)

• be-sahbat jānāne = without conversation with the Beloved

That’s it for the first three stanzas. If any Persian speakers come across this post, let me know how I did!

So, I thought it would be interesting to list out all of India’s scheduled languages, and reflect briefly on my current impression (or lack thereof) of each. Basically, I want to show what a “mental map” of Indian languages looks like, similar to what we in the West have for European languages (ex. an awareness of the Latin-derived Romance languages in the west/south, Germanic in the north, Slavic in the east, as well as an awareness of the historical prestige of French, German, and English).

To give some geographical context, here is the map that Wikipedia uses for the article “Languages of India.” To be clear, it does not include all 22 scheduled languages, and also shows languages that are not scheduled. Even so, it gives a rough idea of the geographical extent of Indian languages, in case you’re unfamiliar.

Note: For each language, I am including an estimate of its total number of speakers (both L1 and L2), according to Wikipedia. This will sometimes be many more than the number of speakers just in India, especially for Urdu and Punjabi (which are also spoken in Pakistan) and Bengali (which is also spoken in Bangladesh).

Let’s start with the “North Indian” languages:

1. Hindi/हिन्दी (~610 million) - The flagship language of India, and the 4th or 5th most widely spoken language in the world. Like many languages of India, Hindi is part of the Indo-European language family (specifically the Indo-Aryan branch), meaning that it is related to languages like Persian, Russian, Spanish, and English. This is readily seen in the pronouns maiṅ (I) and tū/tum (you), as well as in the numbers ek (one), do (two), tīn (three), etc. Like Romance languages (Spanish, Italian, French, etc.), Hindi has grammatical gender - all nouns are either masculine or feminine, which affects how modifiers connected to them are declined. Hindi has lots of loanwords from both Sanskrit and Persian, with the Sanskrit lexicon associated with Hindu contexts, and the Persian lexicon with Islamic contexts. Here is an example of highly Sanskritized Hindi from the B.R. Chopra’s Mahabharat TV series (1988-1990). Here is an example of more Persianized, Urdu-like Hindi from the film Mughal-E-Azam (1960). This brings us to the next official language…

2. Urdu/اردو (~250 million) - Essentially a heavily Persianized register of Hindi, and also the official language of neighboring Pakistan1. The name comes from the Turkic word ordu, the same source for English “horde,” reflecting the language’s association with the army camps, and later royal courts, of India’s Turko-Mongol Muslim rulers. Urdu is written in a Perso-Arabic script, making it visibly distinct from Hindi. Thus, an “Urdu speaker” and a “Hindi speaker” will be able to converse perfectly fine, but won’t be able to read each other’s writing2. Many Bollywood songs use lyrics inspired by Urdu poetry. Thus, many Indians, even if they aren’t Muslim, know a lot of Urdu (and by extension, Persian) vocabulary - perhaps more than they are consciously aware of.

3. Punjabi/ਪੰਜਾਬਿ (~150 million) - The language of the Punjab region, split between India (where it is written in Indic Gurmukhi script) and Pakistan (where it is written in Shahmukhi, a Perso-Arabic script like Urdu). Punjabi music, especially that associated with bhangra dance, has become highly popular both in Bollywood and in the Indian diaspora3, to the point where it has come to represent “stereotypical” Indian music in some contexts (for example, you might recognize the Punjabi-language songs Mundian To Bach Ke and Tunak Tunak). Punjabi is closely related to Hindi, but has a distinctive accent and is readily distinguished by some different postpositions (like vic instead of maiṅ for “in”), among other things.

4. Kashmiri/کٲشُر (~7 million) - Despite the region’s prominence in political discourse due to its unfortunate conflict and turmoil, the Kashmiri language itself has a relatively small number of speakers, and, as far as I can tell, relatively little impact on mainstream Indian culture. A popular Kashmiri folk song appears to be Hukus Bukus. Listening to this, I feel that Kashmiri sounds qualitatively distinct from the other Indo-Aryan languages.

5. Dogri/𑠖𑠵𑠌𑠤𑠮 (~3 million) - A language spoken in Jammu, which is next to Kashmir. However, it’s not closely related to Kashmiri. I don’t know much about it other than that.

6. Nepali/नेपाली (~32 million) - A language spoken in northern India and (obviously) Nepal. I haven’t really heard it spoken, but from judging from songs, I’d say that it sounds a lot like Hindi. As a heuristic for how similar Nepali is to Hindi, consider the first line of Nepal’s national anthem and see if you can pick out the meaning of each word: sayauñ thuñgā phulkā hāmi euṭai māla nepāli (“Woven from a hundred flowers, we are one garland of Nepal”).

Now let’s move on to the “western” languages (these are all still Indo-Aryan):

7. Gujarati/ગુજરાતી (~60 million) - Language of Gujarat state, i.e. the large peninsula that juts out of western India into the Arabian Sea. There are lots of Gujaratis in the Indian diaspora, and I definitely heard it growing up in the U.S. among my Gujarati friends. A quickly noticeable feature of Gujarati is its use of the “to be” verb che, corresponding to the hai of Hindi. Thus, the Hindi greeting kaise ho (how are you?) translates into Gujarati as kem cho. Incidentally, the che verb also makes Gujarati sound superficially like Bengali, because of Bengali’s use of -ch- in conjugations like jāche, giyeche, etc.

8. Sindhi/सिन्धी (~30 million) - Sindhi is closely related to Gujarati. There is no Sindhi-speaking state in India, with the majority of speakers living in Pakistan (which does have a Sindh state). I don’t think I have ever heard it spoken.

9. Marathi/मराठी (~100 million) - The language of the state of Maharashtra. I don’t know much about it, other than that it supposedly has had lots of influence from the Dravidian (i.e. South Indian) languages due to its geographic location. The few times I have heard spoken Marathi, I felt that it sounded very Dravidian to my ears.

10. Konkani/कोंकणी (~2 million) - A small language spoken in Goa and other parts of India’s western coast, that is closely related to Marathi.

Let’s move into South India now. For the most part, the languages spoken in South India are from the Dravidian language family, rather than from Indo-European. There are many theories trying to connect Dravidian with other languages in the world, including ancient Elamite, Uralic languages (ex. Finnish and Hungarian), and Japanese. None of these theories are widely accepted.

11. Kannada/ಕನ್ನಡ (~80 million) - The language of Karnataka state, whose capital city is Bangalore (Bengaḷūru in Kannada). As a Dravidian language, its base vocabulary is completely unrelated to Indo-European. Take, for example, the pronouns nānu (“I”), nīnu (“you”), and avaru (“he”), or the numerals ondu (“one”), eraḍu (“two”), and mūru (“three”). My favorite thing about Kannada is the way it sounds, especially in its poetic and lyrical forms. Morphemes are appended agglutinatively to form long multi-syllable words, which to me sound like a gentle stream flowing over smooth pebbles, like in the words maragaḷalli (mara + -gaḷu + -alli = “in the trees”) and śilegaḷella (śile + -gaḷu + ella = “all the idols”).

12. Tamil/தமிழ் (~90 million) - The language of Tamil Nadu state. Tamil and Telugu (which we will get to soon) have the largest film industries in south India, and so I have watched a fair number of Tamil movies. Here is an example of a Tamil song from the movie Jeans (1998)4. Within the Dravidian family, Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada are part of the southern subgroup, while Telugu is part of the south-central subgroup5. Thus, Tamil is closely related to Kannada, with some regular phonological changes: Tamil p vs. Kannada h, and Tamil v with Kannada b. Consider the Tamil-Kannada cognates puḷi-huḷi (“sour/tamarind”) and viṭu-biḍu (“to leave”). Also, Tamil has lots of words that end in consonants, while this is basically forbidden in written Kannada. Thus, the equivalent of the Kannada pronouns nānu, nīnu, and avaru are nān, nī, and avar in Tamil6. As of yet, I don’t know anything about Tamil verbs and their conjugations to make meaningful comparisons with Kannada.

13. Malayalam/മലയാളം (~40 million) - The language of Kerala state on the southwestern coast of India. Malayalam is even more close to Tamil than Kannada, and is thought to have diverged from Tamil about a thousand years ago. I’ve watched a handful of Malayalam movies, and can occasionally make out a few words from the subtitles, based on analogy with Kannada. I feel like Malayalam has a distinctive intonation style, almost (bear with me here) like Tamil with a Punjabi accent. I’d have to study the language in more detail to figure out why I get this impression.

14. Telugu/తెలుగు (~100 million) - The most widely spoken Dravidian language, and the official language of two Indian states: Andhra Pradesh and Telangana7. It is generally considered to form a distinct subgrouping within Dravidian, compared to the subgroup that contains Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam. Despite this, the script used for written Telugu is almost identical to that of Kannada, which leads many people to say that these two languages are similar in general. To be fair, I think that pronunciation and some grammatical elements between Telugu and Kannada are quite similar. I think this is due to the fact that the literary forms of both languages were cultivated in the court of the Vijayanagara Empire (1300s-1600s), leading to aesthetic similarities, although I have to read more about this. My water-ripple imagery for how lyrical Kannada sounds also holds for Telugu, as can be seen in the beautiful song Sirivennela from the film Shyam Singha Roy (2021).

We now move into eastern India, which takes us back to languages of the Indo-Aryan family:

15. Bengali/বাংলা (~280 million) - Also known as Bangla, this is the language of the Bengal region, which is partitioned between the Indian state of West Bengal and the country of Bangladesh. I would say that Bengali is to South Asia what French is to Europe. Just as French sounds noticeably distinct from its Romance siblings Spanish and Italian, Bengali phonology immediately sets it apart from Hindi and many other Indian languages. The main distinctive features of Bengali phonology are the replacement of a with o (and thus ai with oi), v with b, and y with j, as well as the collapse of the sibilants s/ś/ṣ into just ś. The interaction of these sound changes lead to some pretty drastic deviations in how Sanskrit-derived words are pronounced: sarasvatī becomes śorośoti, sūrya becomes śurjo, etc. I think that these phonological features are why Indians think of Bengali as a “sweet” language - it kind of sounds like your mouth is always stuffed with rasgullas (or rośgollas, as Bengalis say). The other reason that Bengali is like French is the great prestige that the language had during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries - a period that is sometimes called the Bengali Renaissance8. Briefly, Bengali religious, philosophical and literary developments during this time had a great influence on mainstream Indian culture and thought, which is still evident today.

16. Maithili/मैथिली (~20 million) - The language of Mithila, a region west of Bengal that straddles Bihar, Jharkand, and southern Nepal. Maithili, along with Magahi, Bhojpuri, and a few others, form the western part of the Māgadhan subfamily of Indo-Aryan (the eastern part is Bengali, Assamese, and Odia). From what I understand, Maithili has a rich literary history, which is probably why it has official status in the Indian consitutiton while the other languages of Bihar do not.

17. Odia/ଓଡ଼ିଆ (~40 million) - The language of Odisha state, south of Bengal and in the east-central part of India. It sounds quite similar to Bengali, and is in fact closely related.

18. Assamese/অসমীয়া (~25 million) - The language of Assam state. It is also closely related to Bengali, but is distinguished by further sound changes. People who think that Bengali sounds weird are going to think that Assamese sounds really weird. For example, the Sanskrit word bhāṣā (“language”) is pronounced in Assamese as bhaxa.

The really eastern languages (neither Indo-Aryan nor Dravidian):

19. Santali/ᱥᱟᱱᱛᱟᱲᱤ (~8 million) - This language is spoken by the Santal people of eastern India across several states. It belongs to the Austroasiatic language family of Southeast Asia, meaning that it is distantly related to Vietnamese. It is thought that Austroasiatic-speaking peoples (specifically from the Munda branch that includes Santali) have been in South Asia since prehistory. From what I’ve read, Santali has been greatly influenced through contact with Indo-Aryan languages like Bengali. Santali is a relatively obscure language in India, and I’ve never heard it spoken. But 8 million speakers is a lot! To put into perspective - there are more people in India who speak a language related to Vietnamese than there are Danish speakers in the entire world.

20. Meitei/ꯃꯩꯇꯩꯂꯣꯟ (~3 million) - Meitei, also known as Manipuri, is the official language of Manipur state in Northeast India, right on the border with Myanmar. It belongs to the Tibeto-Burman branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, which, as the names imply, means that it’s related to Tibetan, Burman, and more distantly to Chinese. I have never heard it spoken. Interestingly, the famous Indian playback singer Lata Mangeshkar apparently recorded two Meitei songs in 1999 for a Meitei-language film called Meichak. One of these songs is Pamuba Nungshiba. The Meitei language has its own script, derived from Brahmi and attested as early as the 6th century AD. It may also be written using the Bengali script.

21. Bodo/बरʼ (~1.4 million) - Another Tibeto-Burman language from Northeast India, especially in parts of Assam. Unlike Meitei, Bodo seems to be primarily written in Devanagari script.

And finally:

22. Sanskrit/संस्कृतम् - Basically, Sanskrit is to India what Latin is to Europe. However, while today Latin is mostly dead even as a liturgical language, Sanskrit prayers are recited every day by Hindus in their homes or in temples. While nobody really speaks Sanskrit colloquially, it lives on in the lexicon of essentially every Indian language. As one of the oldest attested Indo European languages, the grammar, vocabulary, and phonology of Sanskrit can be directly compared to Greek and Latin.9

Well, there you have it! - My attempt to succinctly describe the 22 languages scheduled by the Constitution of India. I’ve always been fascinated by India’s linguistic diversity and the way that Indians use their languages as vehicles for artistic and religious expression. One could spend many lifetimes learning about the cultural heritage that is collectively held in the Indian languages.

I thought it would be fitting to end with a clip of the closing song of B.R. Chopra’s Mahabharat television series (1988-1990). The episodes always ended with the word “Mahabharata” typed out in the script of 11 Indian languages. Play the clip below, and see if you can identify each language from its script!10

I like to think of Ahmad Zahir as Afghanistan’s Kishore Kumar - a great singer and icon of his country’s 70s-era music. In fact, I was intrigued to learn that Zahir apparently also sang in Hindi.

For the most part, though, Zahir sang in Dari, i.e. eastern Persian, which is the variety of Persian spoken in Afghanistan.1 A closely related version, called Tajik, is spoken in Tajikistan. The western variety of Persian, also known as Farsi, is the official language of Iran. All three of these varieties are mutually intelligible, with some differences in accent and pronunciation.

Over the years, I’ve wanted to learn Persian in order to understand and appreciate the lyrics of Ahmad Zahir’s songs. From a linguistics point of view, I’m also just interested to find out how similar Persian is to Indian languages, since the languages of Iran and much of India originate from the same Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European. In addition to this ancient connection, modern Persian has also deeply influenced Indian languages like Hindi and Bengali through centuries of Islamic rule in the subcontinent. As we will mainly be approaching the Persian language from an Indic perspective, let us briefly recap the historical ties between the two cultures.

Persia and India: Sister civilizations across the ages

Although Indians and Iranians may not think about it much today, their two civilizations have been in direct or indirect contact for over three thousand years. A long time ago, a group of pastoralists on the Eurasian steppes spoke a language that we refer to as Proto Indo-European. Gradually, some of these people broke off and ventured into Europe, where their language split and evolved into Latin, Greek, Old Slavic, and the Celtic languages. One of the last subgroups to leave Eurasia were the Proto Indo-Iranians, who split further into the Iranians and Indo-Aryans. The former migrated into what is modern-day Iran, and the latter into the Indian subcontinent. We know about the languages of these groups from relatively early times, thanks to the religious texts that they preserved orally. On the Iranian side is Avestan, the language of the Zoroastrian texts. On the Indian side is Vedic Sanskrit, the language of the early Vedic literature, especially the Rig Veda. Both texts date to roughly 1500-1000 BC, likely a few centuries after the two groups split.

In addition to the similar religious traditions of these two communities, these old texts demonstrate that Avestan and Sanskrit are incredibly similar languages - probably as similar as modern-day Spanish and Italian, or German and Dutch. To get a sense of this, we refer to the Old Avestan module from the UT Austin’s Linguistics Resource Center.2 The module starts with Yasna 29 rendered in Roman script:

xšmaibyā gə̄uš urvā gərəždā kahmāi mā θwarōždūm kə̄ mā tašaṯ
The cow's soul lamented to you, [the gods]: ‘For whom did you create me? Who fashioned me?’

If you know some Sanskrit, you may already recognize some of the cognates. Let’s list them out:

• xšmaibyā (Av.) = yuṣmabhyam (Skt.) - “to you all” (2nd person dative plural)

• gə̄uš (Av.) = goḥ (Skt.) - “of the cow” (fem. o-stem genitive singular)

• kahmāi (Av.) = kasmai (Skt.) - “for whom” (masc. dative singular)

• mā (Av.) = mā (Skt.) - “me” (1st person accusative singular)

• kə̄ (Av.) = kaḥ (Skt.) - “who” (masc. nominative singular)

As we can, Avestan is so close to Sanskrit that even case endings for noun and pronoun declensions are quite similar!

While Avestan is the liturgical language of Zoroastrianism, it is actually not the ancestor of the modern Persian language. Persian is actually one continuous language with Old, Middle, and Modern stages, and Old Persian was the language of the great Achaemenid Empire (550 BC - 330 BC). The names of the Achaemenid rulers that we use in English (like Cyrus, Xerxes, and Darius) are filtered down to us via Greek and Latin, and are thus distorted from their original forms. In Old Persian, Darius is dāraya-vahuš. With the Greco-Latin veil removed, this name has a familiar Indic feel to it. Indeed, the corresponding Sanskrit calque would be dhāraya-vasu (“holder of the good”).

Also intriguing is the etymology of the Persian title for an emperor, Shahenshah. The word originates from the Old Persian term:

xšāyaθiya xšāyaθiyānām

If you think that the ending -ānām looks familiar from Sanskrit, you are correct! The equivalent Sanskrit phrase would be:

kṣatriya kṣatriyānām

That is, a warrior of warriors, or king of kings! Not only are Shah and Kshatriya cognates, but the genitive plural noun ending -ānām is evidently the same in both Old Persian and Sanskrit.3

In the early centuries of the first millennium, various Iranic groups like the Kushans, Indo-Parthians, and Indo-Scythians conquered parts of northern India. Their languages - Bactrian, Parthian, and Scythian - were all eastern Iranian languages, and not direct ancestors of modern Persian.4 Ultimately, these groups from antiquity do not seem to have had a huge impact on Indian languages and culture, as the ruling classes seem to have pretty much assimilated to Indian traditions.

The rise of Islam in Arabia during the 6th century onwards had major downstream consequences for Persia and India. The Arab conquest of Persia ended Zoroastrianism’s run as a major world religion. While many Persians converted to Islam, some fled to India between the 7th-10th centuries, where they could maintain their Zoroastrian practices. Their descendants came to be known as the Parsis, who continue to be a small yet influential community in India to this day.5 Over the centuries, Sanskrit translations of the Avestan scriptures were produced, and you can easily find audio recordings of modern Indian Zoroastrians chanting in Avestan. Today, there are about twice as many Zoroastrians in India than in Iran.

It was not until a few centuries after the Parsi migrations, when the Islamic invasions reached India itself, that the Persian language really took hold in the subcontinent. Interestingly, almost none of the Islamic conquerors of India were actually of Persian ethnicity. Rather, they were Turkic or Afghan nomads whose own ancestors were relatively recent converts to Islam. Nevertheless, they all adopted Persian language and culture as they became established rulers. This is because Persian was the prestige language and lingua franca of Central Asia and the eastern Islamic world.6 The Indo-Persian culture which developed over the subsequent centuries lead to many Persian literary works, such as the poetry of Amir Khusrau (1253–1325) and the Akbarnamah (biography of Akbar). In the 18th century, the Sikh Guru Gobind Singh wrote a letter in Persian verse to the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb. This letter, the Zafarnamah, is now considered a canonical text in the Sikh religion, and you can listen to a modern rendition here. As late as the 19th and 20th centuries, Urdu poets like Ghalib (d. 1869) and Iqbal (d. 1938) also wrote in Persian. By this point, however, English had replaced Persian as the language of administration.

Today, no one in India really learns Persian anymore. However, Indian languages (especially in the North) have borrowed extensive vocabulary from Persian - a good analogy would be the influence of Norman French on English in the centuries following the Norman invasion. The most obvious example is Urdu, the highly Persianized register of the Hindustani (i.e. Hindi-Urdu) language which continues to use the Perso-Arabic script in its written form. Languages like Hindi, Punjabi, and Bengali also borrow heavily from the Persian lexicon, even in everyday contexts.7 The Persian language itself does still occasionally come up in modern Indian and Pakistani culture. For example, famous Qawwali singers (like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan) have sung Persian devotional poetry, and there are at least two recent instances of Persian songs being featured in Bollywood movies - Boro Boro8 from Bluffmaster (2007) and Jamal Jamaloo9 from Animal (2023).

If you’re Indian, you probably already “know” some Persian

Of course, you should first gain some familiarity with the Perso-Arabic script. I started doing this when I was trying to read Urdu (see these two posts). Now, let’s look at some lines from Vatanam, the national anthem of Qajar Persia (I’ve provided both the original text and Romanization):

همه‌ی جان و تنم
ham-e-ye jān-o-tan-am
All my body and soul,

وطنم وطنم وطنم وطنم
vatan-am, vatan-am, vatan-am
My country, my country, my country

همه با یک نام و نشان
ham-e ba yek nām o nishān
All with one name and symbol

به تفاوت هر رنگ و زبان
be-tafāvat har rang o zabān
With different colors and languages

Hindi speakers will recognize almost every word in these lines: jān-o-tan, vatan, yek, nām, nishān, har, rang, zabān, and maybe tafāvat. We also recognize some of the grammar: the conjunction -o- (“and”), which is used in Hindi phrases like jan-o-tan, as well as the prefix be- (“without”) present in Hindi words like bekhabar, beśaram, and bedard.10

As we see more and more examples of this shared vocabulary, we will start to get an appreciation for Persian’s role as a great historical lingua franca - a linguistic highway connecting the cultures of modern-day Iran, India, Central Asia, and even Turkey. As an aside to illustrate this point, consider some lines from Ceddin Deden, an Ottoman-style Turkish marching song:

Orduların, pek çok zaman
Vermiştiler dünyaya şan
…
Kahret vatan düşmanını
Çeksin o mel'un zilleti

All of the bolded words entered Turkish from either Persian or Arabic, and are also part of the Hindi lexicon through analogous cultural interactions in the East.

Starting to translate

Let’s circle back to the song from the beginning of this post - Merawi Az Man (full lyrics can be found here, and a forum post with translation is here). The first line is:

می روی از من و لبريز فغانم، چه کنم
miravi az man, o labrez feghānam - chi konam?
“You go away from me, and my despair is overflowing - what should I do?”

Now, I’ll do my best to break this down word-for-word based on my current understanding:

mi-rav-i (“you are going”) - This is the 2d person singular present tense of the verb raftan (“to go”). The dictionary form of Persian verbs are infitives, which are formed with the past tense stem (in this case raft). The present stem of a Persian verb is often different than the past stem. The present stem of raft is rav. For present tense, the prefix mi- is required to be in front of the stem. Lastly, the ending -i indicates 2nd person singular. Hence, miravi.11

az man (“from me”) - One way in which Persian is more similar to European rather than Indian languages is its use of pre-positions instead of post-positions. Thus, the word az (“from”) goes before the word it modifies, which in this case is the first person pronoun man.

o (“and”) - This conjunction is familiar to Hindi speakers in set phrases like jān-o-tan.

labrez (“brimming”)

feghān-am (“my laments”) - The suffix -am plays a dual role in Persian. Sometimes, it functions as the enclitic (i.e. short) form of -e-man, the possessive form of the first person pronoun - think of the phrase jān-e-man. But -am is also the ending for verbs conjugated in first person singular - just as miravi means “you go,” miravam would mean “I go.” Here, I believe -am is being used as a possessive suffix for the noun feghān.

chi (“what”) - in Persian, the interrogative pronoun starts with ch rather than Indian k.

kon-am (“should I do”) - The verb here is kardan (“to do”). Compare this to Hindi karnā or Bengali korā - very similar indeed! In Persian, its present stem is kon. We just learned that the prefix mi- is used for the regular present tense, but if it is omitted, it means that the verb is being used subjunctively. The ending -am is the first person singular conjugation for verbs.

In the coming months, I hope to do some full translations of Persian songs and poems as I slowly improve my grasp of the language. Stay tuned!

Let’s begin…

2nd Century BC: When in India, do (coins) as the Greeks do

In 326 BC, after conquering the Persian Achaemenid Empire, Alexander the Great reached Punjab’s Jhelum River, where he defeated an Indian king named “Porus” in battle. Alexander died just three years later, and his short-lived empire split into multiple successor states stretching from Greece to India, ushering in the Hellenistic Age. Greek presence in Central and South Asia persisted for the next three centuries, in the form of the Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek Kingdoms, the latter of which likely controlled territory as far east as Mathura. While it’s hard to see any remnants of ancient Greek influence on modern Indian culture, the rich legacy of the Indo-Greeks is preserved in the statues and coins that they left behind.

Here is an example of such a coin. The obverse side is on the left, and the reverse side on the right:

On the left are two lines of Greek text:

ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ
ΑΓΑΘΟΚΛΕΟΥΣ

Transcribed into Roman script, this reads BASILEUS AGATHOKLEOYS, i.e. “King Agathocles.”

On the right are two lines in Brahmi script. Remember, Brahmi was the first writing system in ancient India and the progenitor of all modern Indic scripts, first appearing on the rock edicts of Emperor Ashoka in the 3rd century BC. The coin here reads:

𑀭𑀚𑀦𑁂
𑀅𑀕𑀣𑀼𑀼𑀓𑁆𑀮𑁂𑀬𑁂𑀲

That is, rajane agathukleyasa, which is just an Indianized version of “King Agothocles.” Agathocles of Bactria, who seems to be almost exclusively known from coins like these, was a Greek king who ruled in Bactria and India from around 190-180 BC.

An interesting feature of this coin are the figures depicted on it (you’ll have to tilt your head to the left, or look at the coins again here). The figure on the Greek side is thought to be Balarama, holding his mace in his left hand and plough in his right hand. The figure on the Brahmi side is thought to be Krishna (also known as Vasudeva), holding his conch in left hand and Sudarshana Chakra in right hand. This coin, issued by a Greek king, is thought to feature the earliest known depiction of the Hindu deity Krishna.1

4th Century: Gold coins from the “Golden Age of India”

We now fast-forward five centuries and find ourselves in the heyday of the Gupta Empire (AD 240-579). The Gupta Era is often called the Golden Age of India (although one could easily argue that India has had multiple Golden Ages, in particular the Mauryan and Mughal periods). This was the time of the great Sanskrit poet Kalidasa, the mathematician Aryabhata, and the founding of Nalanda University.

Below is a gold coin issued by Emperor Samudragupta (c. 335-375):

The script used on these coins is considered to be Brahmi, although we see some clear deviations from the original Brahmi of the Ashokan Edicts. Under the Guptas, Brahmi eventually evolved into the Gupta script, which in turn gave rise to most modern Indic scripts.

On the left side, the (vertical) text below the king’s left arm reads:

𑀲 𑀫𑀼 𑀤𑁆𑀭​

In modern Devanagari, this is स मु द्र​ (samudra2), the name of the Emperor. Note how on the coin, the shapes of sa and dra are blockier than in old Brahmi, and somewhat closer to their Devanagari versions. The da part of dra is flipped about the vertical axis.

On the right side, the text is rotated 90° clockwise and reads:

𑀧 𑀭𑀸 𑀓𑁆𑀭 𑀫𑀂

The Devanagari equivalent is प रा क्र मः (parākramaḥ3). Again, note how the pa and kra are blockier than in old Brahmi, and are starting to develop features that anticipate the horizontal line at the top of most modern Devanagari letters.

10th Century: Cholas rule the waves

The Cholas were an ancient Tamil dynasty who, in the 9th-13th centuries, brough all of South India under their rule and exerted influence over the entire eastern coast of India (including Bengal), as well as overseas territories in what is now Myanmar, Malaysia, and Indonesia.4 Thus, the Cholas were a true maritime empire, controlling trade on all sides of the Bay of Bengal.

Here is an example of a Chola coin:

On the left, we see the emblems of the Chola dynasty - a seated tiger and two fish.

On the right are two lines in Nagari script, which looks remarkably similar to modern Bengali. Transcribed into Bengali script, it reads:

উত্তম
চোল

That is, uttama cola5, i.e. the name of the Emperor Uttama Chola, who ruled from 971-985. It’s interesting to see that the Cholas, despite being a Tamil dynasty, used Nagari script on their coins, which is not a direct ancestor of the modern Tamil script (although both are ultimately derived from Brahmi). This goes to show that language and writing system are not eternally coupled - the groups who use them can change over space and time, based on the contemporary cultural and political context.

11th Century: The Sultan’s Sanskrit coins

While the Cholas were expanding their empire in the east, the Ghaznavids were making headway into the subcontinent from the west. The Ghaznavids, who ruled over much of what is now Iran and Afghanistan, were a Turkic clan that had adopted the Muslim faith and Persian culture.6 Mahmud of Ghazni, the second Ghaznavid Sultan (ruled 998-1030), conducted several raids deep into India - notably in Mathura, Kannauj, and Somnath - and is known for his iconoclastic looting and destruction of Hindu temples.7 Despite his many raids, Mahmud never gained a permanent foothold in the subcontinent - it was not until two centuries later, with the founding of the Delhi Sultanate, that Muslim rule in India truly took root and spread.

We see that this coin has two sides: Arabic (left) and Indic (right). The Arabic side is the Muslim Shahada, or profession of faith: 'lā ʾilāha ʾillā -llāh' / 'muḥammadun rasūlu llāh', which may be translated as “There is no god but God. Muhammad is the messenger of God.”

The Indic side is written in the Sharada script of northwestern India. Today, Sharada is apparently still in limited use by the Kashmiri Pundit community, and the modern Dogri script is descended from it. The Sharada script is supported in Unicode, although the letters don’t look exactly the same as on Mahmud’s 11th century coin. We can type out the coin inscription using the Sharada input tool on a website called Aksharamukha. The letters are arranged in a 5×4 grid:

𑆃 𑆮𑇀𑆪 𑆑𑇀𑆠 𑆩𑆼  𑆑 
𑆩𑆶 𑆲 𑆩𑇀𑆩 𑆢 𑆃
𑆮   𑆠  𑆫  𑆤𑆸  𑆥 
𑆠𑆴 𑆩 𑆲   𑆩𑆶  𑆢

Transliterated in Devanagari, this is:

अ व्य क्त मे क
मु  ह  म्म द अ
व  त   र  नृ  प
ति  म  ह  मु द

Writing this out with proper word breaks and punctuation:

अव्यक्तमेक | मुहम्मद अवतर | नृपति महमुद
avyaktameka | muhammada avatara | nṛpati mahamuda 
"The unmanifested is one | Muhammad is the incarnation | Mahmud is King"

The first two sentences are a Sanskrit translation of the Muslim profession of faith! We see that there are a few interesting choices made in the translation. In the first sentence, the word for “God” is avyaktam, which literally means “unmanifested.” In the second sentence, the word used to describe Muhammad is avatara8, meaning “incarnation” rather than “messenger.” From my (admittedly limited) understanding of Islam, Muhammad is very much not an incarnation of God. Perhaps the intention of the coin was to imply congruence with Hindu beliefs (in which God frequently incarnates on Earth), thus making Mahmud’s rule more palatable for a Hindu populace.

15th Century: Hindu interregnum in Muslim Bengal

By the 1400s, Bengal had already been under Muslim rule for two centuries. The Ilyas Shahi dynasty, originally from Sistan and of Turkic ancestry, ruled the region as an independent state called the Bengal Sultanate. Amidst some political turmoil in 1414, a powerful Hindu landowner9 named Raja Ganesha took control of the throne. Unsurprisingly, he found himself at odds with the Muslim establishment, in particular the religious clerics who objected to being ruled by a Hindu. This conflict was resolved in an interesting way: Raja Ganesha’s son, Jadu, would be allowed to inherit the throne, on the condition that he converted to Islam. Jadu was renamed as Jalaluddin Muhammad Shah and ruled for around 15 years, after which his own son ruled briefly. Thus, three generations of Ganeshas ruled Bengal, although for only a total of two decades, after which the Ilyas Shahi dynasty was restored.

Here is a coin from this time period (specifically, 1417):

The inscriptions on these coins are in medieval Bengali script and relatively easy to read. Transliterated into the modern script, the obverse (left) side reads:

শ্রী শ্রী দ
নু জ ম র্দ্দ 
ন দে ব​​

That is, শ্রী শ্রী দনুজমর্দ্দন দে ব​​ (śrī śrī danujamarddana deva), i.e. a king named Danujamardana.10

The reverse (right) side reads:

শ্রী চ ণ্ডী 
চ র ণ প 
রা য ণ​

That is, শ্রী চণ্ডী চরণ পরাযণ (śrī caṇḍī caraṇa parāyaṇa), which means “devoted to the feet of the Goddess Chandi.” ​

Who was King Danujamarddana, and how is he related to the story of Raja Ganesha? One theory, described by historian Richard Eaton, is that Danujamarddana was a ruler from the Deva dynasty southeastern Bengal who briefly asserted independence from the Sultanate during the political turmoil of the 1410s.11 The explicitly Hindu message on his coins, proclaiming devotion to the Goddess Chandi, suggests that Danujamarddana wanted to be seen as a restorer of Hindu kingship in Bengal. However, the Deva dynasty revolt seems to have been put out by Jalaluddin within a few years.12

Aside from the political intrigue, it’s interesting to see tangible evidence of Bengal’s strong Shaktism tradition (i.e. worship of the Mother Goddess in various forms including Chandi, Durga, and Kali) from six centuries ago.

19th Century: The last of the Mysore coins

In 1799, British forces, allied with the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Marathas, defeated and finally killed Tipu Sultan in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War. Tipu Sultan’s father, Hyder Ali, was originally a commander of the Mysore army who had usurped power from the ruling Wodeyar dynasty in 1761. Upon Tipu’s defeat, and under British supervision, the Wodeyar dynasty was restored under Krishna Raja Wodeyar III.13 Apparently present at the five-year-old boy’s coronation was a major hero (on the British side) of the war, Colonel Arthur Wellesley.14 Krishna Raja III reigned from 1799-1868, during which time Mysore became a “princely state” of the British Empire (i.e. the glorified term for a puppet state in British India).

Here is a coin of Krishna Raja III:

The English numerals on the left side indicate that this coin was issued in 1839. The multilingual inscription on the right side is three words, each on a separate line:

ಕೃಷ್ಣ​ 
میسور
ضرب

The first word is in Kannada script, and simply read kṛṣṇa (“Krishna”), the name of the king. The second word is Persian, and reads mysur (“Mysore”), the name of the kingdom. The third word, also Persian, is zarb, literally meaning “beat/strike,” but in this context “mint (of coins).” Thus, the Persian part of the inscription indicates that the coin was minted in Mysore. The three languages on this coin (Persian, Kannada, and English) reflect three general trends in 19th century Indian politics: the waning influence of Persianate court culture, the partial reassertion of regional Hindu rulers, and the increasingly absolute nature of British power that would dominate India for the next century.