Marco Polo got the nickname “Millione”, not so much for the riches he brought back to Venice, but for the number of lies readers perceived in his description of distant Cathay. A man from Transoxiana named Ali Akbar gave himself the surname “Khatayi” (“Chinese” in Persian) after travelling there for six years and writing, in Istanbul…
Iranian tradition held that the first, ancient dynasty of kings had mastered all the useful sciences, from astronomy to medicine, and recorded them in books of wisdom. Some claimed the prophet Zoroaster himself to be the ultimate author. These books were well guarded in the great palace we call Persepolis. In one terrible night of…
The battle lines around Emperor Aurangzeb’s posthumous reputations are clearly drawn. On one side, the monumental five-volume history by Jadunath Sarkar over a century ago defined the last great Mughal as a bigot, a fanatic, a bloodthirsty tyrant, and the gravedigger of the empire. Moreover, some claim that the brother whom Aurangzeb defeated and executed…
When Ivan the Terrible received the English ambassador Jerome Edward Horsey in 1580, he showed him the Kremlin’s treasury room, full of gifts and tribute from sultans, beys and khans: scimitars, saddles, bridles and quivers, all covered in jewels and nielloed steel. Horsey could imagine he had been transported to Cathay, Tabriz, or Lahore. Viewing…
Classical Persian literature offers very few autobiographies. We tend to admire the works of great poets in that tradition, in this case Amir Khusraw, without knowing much about them as individuals. If Khusraw’s poems are like flowers, “Exquisite Things and Strange Wonders” shows the gardens where the flowers grew. Alyssa Gabbay’s fluid translation brings to…
The first book I ever read about India was Romila Thapar’s 1965 History of India, published by Penguin. That little book dazzled with its sprawling scope and storytelling magic, but one also felt the presence of the author’s critical mind tackling perennial questions: what is history; how do we understand it; what is the purpose…
As luck would have it, this year two important scholars of India published memoirs reflecting their nine decades of life and learning. One of these, Romila Thapar’s Just Being, will be reviewed in the NYRB by none other than Wendy Doniger, whose For the Love of Stories has just been published in India. These twinned publications…
In 1722, a war band of grizzled Afghans battled their way from Kandahar to Esfahan and, after a grim siege, overthrew the 200-year-old Safavid dynasty. For the next 70 years, Iran suffered from non-stop civil and foreign wars. Not until the Qajar dynasty took control did the exhausted and impoverished country know some measure of…
A young, aspiring actor joins an itinerant theatre troupe to perform on makeshift stages in remote villages, traveling from place to place by truck, or in the absence of paved roads, by bullock cart. Readers will recall scenes from The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha by Satrajit Ray, or Shakespearewallah, by James Ivory. There is…
“The Persian learned men,” wrote Herodotus in his Histories, “say that the Phoenicians were the cause of the feud.” Historians have been trying ever since to understand the series of wars that set Europe and Asia against each other, going back to the Trojan War. In The Race for Universal Monarchy, Ebru Turan argues that,…
Leading the vanguard of his armies across India, Genghis Khan suddenly encountered an uncanny animal, blue‑green in colour, with the body of a bull, the tail of a horse, and a single horn. The Great Khan declared this apparition inauspicious, turned his reins, and led his army back to Mongolia. In The Khan and the Unicorn,…
In London’s Victoria and Albert Museum a 16th-century Iranian carpet reigns over the Islamic collection and mesmerizes visitors. In Threads of Empire, Dorothy Armstrong writes, “The carpet transports us away from South Kensington to wherever our personal Arabian Nights dreams are located.” While the beauty of the pile side of her 12 rugs entrances her,…
A worldly Hungarian informed me in 1976, as I was leaving to take up a scholarship in Iran, “I was at the Shah’s 2,500 year celebration.” Astounded, I asked him what it was like. “Like something out of Buñuel”, he replied. Iran’s ruler had invited to him to the infamous coming out party because he…
Slavery underpins so much of the pre-modern Islamicate world, with its slave-sultans, eunuchs, elite dancing girls as well as household servants, and yet we don’t know much about this social institution and what we know is probably wrong. Perhaps because contemporary historians considered slavery so natural, we can glean little insight from their texts about…
Can grammar function like a machine? Can a set of mechanical procedures, or rules, generate perfectly correct sentences in a given language? This is a question that preoccupies linguists, but not language users. It is natural to assume that language is too sloppy, too idiosyncratic, too human, in the end, to be generated by a…