نشریه مطالعات شبه قاره
سال چهارم شماره 10 (بهار 1391)

Sikhism is a religion that tries to keep alive the teachings of its founder. This religion has been able to maintain its position, not only in India but also among the other countries. The question is; Why the Sikhism, unlike the other religions of India, is known as a great religion in the world? In a comparative study of various aspects of Indian religions- Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism- we understand that the teachings of these religions have been effective in shaping the structure of the Sikh religion; particularly in the four fundamental teachings: Gods, Caste, Holy Book and Samsara. This article attempts to study the Sikhism religious and historical transformations in the light of the history and teachings of the great religions in India

The present paper deals with simile and classification of its varieties in Saeed Khan Multani’s divan. Representation of the literary and artistic value of any work depends on its aesthetic. Simile is considered one of the important and fundamental elements of the science of rhetoric; moreover, investigation and analysis of its varieties from the viewpoint of structure and content can be indicative of the poet’s particular style and language as well. Thus, investigation of Saeed Khan Multani’s work, from the aspect of employment of simile, will be the subject of the present article.In the paper, using the information obtained from the accurate and perfect analysis of the similes in Saeed Khan’s divan, we try to identify varieties of simile and its employment in his poetry so that the poet’s orientation towards this artistic skill and its role in the literary aspect of his speech will be revealed. The overall result of this research shows the poet’s tendency towards simile in the representation of sentiment which is of the characteristics of the Khorasani style. The research method is the text analysis of the work and description of the similes as well as the presentation of the frequency of their employment.

During the Timurids dynasty, the Indian subcontinent was the cradle of nurturing the Persian poets. At that time, a group of the Iranian poets moved to that territory, settled down and passed away there. The reputation of some is widespread, but some are less known. One of these eloquent poets is Toqra-ye-Mashhadi, who is unfortunately almost unknown among people.He was a very talented Indian style poet in the 11th Century A.H. who traveled to India during the monarchy of Shah Jahan and was an attendant of Prince Moradbakhsh. He spent his final days in Kashmir where he passed away and was buried. He was an expert in poetry and prose and used many Indian words in his works. Toqra was a theme-creating poet; however, in spite of his ambitions, he did not reach his deserved position. In the present study, we are trying to introduce Toqra and his works, in particular, the manuscript of his divan, paying attention to Toqra’s two manuscripts and also his relationship with the Indian subcontinent. The method of the study is thematic and the purpose is to provide help for more knowledge on the Indian style and on a period of the history and culture of the Indian subcontinent.

Mirza Abdul Qader Bedil (1054_1133) is one of India’s well-known poets of the same rank as Amir Khusraw Dihlavi and Qalib Dihlavi. There may be more than a thousand of Bedil’s manuscripts in poetry and prose in the libraries, museums, and private libraries in India. We will attempt, in the present article, to briefly introduce some of these copies which are being kept in the city of Hyderabad’s Library and Oriental Sciences Museum. It should be mentioned that there is a manuscript of Bedil’s lyric poems (ghazals) in this library where Bedil has written some of the lyric poems in the margins in his own handwriting; thus it is considered to be among the very valuable copies of Bedil’s lyric poems. In this article we will merely deal with introducing the copies of the poet’s poetic works. Of course, there are prose works besides the poetic works in this collection which will be introduced in another article.

The caste system as a system of social relations has been one of the important issues in the Indian society for centuries. There have been lots of assumptions, discussions, and explanations on its origin, nature and role in the Indian Society. It has been claimed that this system is an ideological system which controls all other relations within the society, and its central idea, in fact, lies in a hierarchy based on “purity” and “pollution”.The purpose of this paper is to investigate the caste system in India and to elaborate the resulted problems and difficulties. The importance of covering the issue is so clear because some of the socio-economic disparities have their roots in the very system. The methodology of this article is documentary- library based, and in different sections of it we will cover the definition of caste, caste dynamics, caste as an ideology, caste and class, and changes in the caste system besides discussing the caste system in the ancient, medieval, and the British colonialism periods.

This paper is a discussion and description of the biography and ideas of Monir Lahouri, the 11th Century’s powerful writer of poem and prose in India. Criticizing the Indian style and taking advantage of the predecessors of the speech, he consciously rejected the Indian style, and for the first time he severely criticized the Persian- speaking figures of Iranian origin who, through following the new approach, were the creators and promoters of the Indian style, and two centuries before Ghaem Magham Farahani, in order to show the potentiality of the language of the masters of the speech, he changed, in India, his prose style into simplicity and pure writing based on the language and eloquence values. Moreover, we can remember Monir as the lost ring of the simple writing movement_ the literary movement which started in India with Abolfazl Alami in the 10th century and reached its zenith in Iran with Ghaem Magham Farahani at the beginning of the 13th century.The present research has been carried out according to strategic library studies and through comparison, analysis, and collation of the manuscripts of Monir’s prose works in Iran and India. The works include epistolary writings, letters, arguments, prologues, and the historical- literary text of Karestan.

What have remained of our ancestors in the form of manuscripts are treasures that must be preserved, revived, and identified. Despite great attempts in order to identify these precious treasures in recent years, there are still many efforts to be done because there are lots of poetic divans and prose texts still in the corners of libraries under the dust of oblivion and forgetfulness. One of these unknown, yet valuable, works is a divan of the unfamiliar poet, Seyed Mohammad, the son of Mirza Sadra, known as Hasrat Mashhadi, the Persian-speaking poet of the Indian subcontinent in the second half of the 11th century A.H., who wrote the original copy in 1144 A.H. This copy in the poet’s own handwriting is being kept in the Central Library of Tehran University. This research paper tries to introduce the poet and the themes of his divan for the first time based on the above mentioned manuscript.