Persian Language from Classical to Foreign Language: (East India Company Language Policy and Their Encounter with Persian Language in Indian Sub-Continent)

This article is an academic exploration, based on primary historical sources, of the language policy of the British East India Company in India from the 1780s to the 1830s. Persian was a well established language of court, administration and literary creation in India at this time, and much of British colonial knowledge of India was based on their exploration of Persian sources. This article argues that colonial knowledge is created as a process of dialogue between colonizers and the local literati. Indian 'Munshis', or scribes, were the ones who were well versed in Persian and the knowledge - specifically historiography - that they produced became the basis for the British to base their theories about India. The article explores the various debates among colonial policy makers - the 'Orientalists' and 'Anglicists' - over the issue of an official language for India that finally resulted in the replacement of Persian with English as the official language of court and administration in 1837. Persian continued, however, to be a language of literary creation and very much a part of the cultural life of people in India. The decline of Persian came, it is argued, not in its battle with English, but in the space that it conceded to vernacular languages in a slightly later period. Urdu, for example, was a language that had the capacity to provide a specific marker of identity for Muslims in India, and its popularity was at the expense of Persian. This article attempts to look at the rich history of the Persian language and literature in India in the context of a colonial situation. It traces the process by which a language that was widely considered to be one of the 'classical' languages of India was termed a 'foreign' language by the British and replaced with a language that suited their colonial agenda more.