Multilingualism in Mughal India before and after c.1800: Ṭahmās Khān and Rangīn Dihlavī
Ṭahmās Khān (d. 1217/1802) was born in Anatolia but was captured in his infancy by Nādir Shāh’s Uzbak troops and subsequently taken to India. After serving under Muʿīn al-Mulk (d.1167/1753-4), a viceroy (ṣūba-dār) in Lahore, he joined Aḥmad Shāh Durrānī (r. 1747-73), was promoted to a ‘khān’ by him, and then moved to Delhi and served as a warlord in Mughal army. Shāh ʿĀlam (r.1760-88) entitled him as Muḥkim al-Daula Iʿtiqād-jang. Ṭahmās recorded his memoirs in the Ṭahmās-nāma, completed in 1193/1779, which relates many of the events of his lifetime.[1]
Despite being separated from ‘Rūm’ in his infancy, he informs the reader of the Ṭahmās-nāma before this Persian version, Ṭahmās had written his life in a ‘Turkish’ version entitled Aḥmadnāma.[2] Ṭahmās does not specify the type of Turkish (turkī) he means, but this is presumably revealed by Delhi Persian 1224; a copy of the Thabāt al-ʿĀjizīn, a collection of Chagatai poems of Ṣūfī Allāh-yār Samarqandī (Bukhārī) (d.1133/1720-21 or 1136/1723-4) a Ḥanafī and Naqshbandī mystic,[3] which he commissioned. In the colophon, the scribe asserts that the work was commissioned by Ṭahmās Khān Rūmī and [perhaps via?] a certain Allāhyār Bayk Khān Rūmī. So Ṭahmās must have learned Chagatai Turkish during his childhood years as a military slave, and in spite of Persian being dominant in the Mughal India, kept reading and writing in it.
Delhi Persian 1224 is also of interest as an elaborate manuscript, with an illuminated polychrome headpiece and careful fine calligraphy, completed on 21 Ramażān 1188/4 December 1774 by one Muḥammad Ismāʿīl Qādirī. The scribe’s name suggests that he was from a family employed in the Mughal imperial library.[4]
Ṭahmās Khān appears more than once in the Delhi Persian collection, and not always as a direct contributor. In one case, MS Delhi Persian 904 was given to a member of cavalry, Ḥusayn Yak-savār by a head officer Ṣamad Khān Māmūzay for his valuable service (naukarī) in repelling Ṭahmās’s attack. The manuscript is a copy of the Anwār-i Suhaylī transcribed by Saturday 4 Dhu al-Ḥijja 1095/11 November 1684 in Peshawar and is most likely to have been gifted in the same region when Ṭahmās Khān led an unsuccessful march north.
Ṭahmās Khān wrote his Persian memoirs for his children, one of whom was a well-known poet and author himself. Saʿādat Yār Khān, aka Rangīn Dihlavī (1757-1835), a multilingual litterateur who composed in Persian, Urdu, Punjabi, Pashto and apparently a few other languages of the region, although not in Turkish.[5] Rangīn practiced warfare from his early ages under his father and became an equestrian specialist, which is underscored in his Farasnāma, of which a Persian version in prose and an Urdu version in verse exist. He also has an anthology titled Majālis-i Rangīn in which he evaluates, and sometimes criticises and mocks his contemporaneous Indian poets. Lyric, often erotic poems constitute the majority of his works. Rangīn is particularly credited with the creation of Rekhti/Rīkhta, which expresses love from women’s viewpoint, and so is sometimes labelled as ‘feminist’ poetry.[6]
MS Delhi Persian 1226 finished on 17 Rajab 1248/12 December 1832 sheds a new light on Rangīn’s life and literary production. It is a mystical mathnawī full of anecdotes and advice, deliberately planned to be a reminiscent of Rumi’s Mathnawī-yi Maʿnawī. Evidently, some friends in Chhāvnī (perhaps a town near Kanpur) wanted to test him, so Rangīn, as a response, composed 600 couplets in 10 days, particularly for a certain Shamshīr Khān’s sake. The scribe, both at the beginning and the end of the work, calls this mathnawī ‘the fourth “prototype” (nuskha) of Rangīns “Quintet” (Khamsa). As far as I know, nowhere else a Khamsa has been ascribed to Rangīn. Since the manuscript was copied in Rangīn’s lifetime and in Bānda Chhāvnī, apparently the same place in which the work was composed, this testimony is important and suggests that apart from the name ‘nine jewels’ (nav ratan) which Rangīn chose for his entire oeuvre, he had at least aimed to compose five works in couplet verses and name them a Khamsa, or five of his Persian works were labelled as his Khamsa.
Because of his Turkish background, Ṭahmās was considered a ‘Tūrānī’ by his contemporaries,[7] while his literary output makes today’s audience see him as a ‘Persian’.[8] One generation later, his son was a ‘Dihlavī’, already composing in Persian and Urdu hand in hand, and was destined to become one of the important founders of newly emerging Urdu literature.
[1] For him see Storey Online, 12.3.8. §800; For an English translation of his memoirs see Tahmas nama, the autobiography of a slave, trans. Setumadhava Rao Pagdi (Bombay, 1967).
[2] This name suggests that it had been written years before the Persian version, presumably with the intention to be dedicated to Aḥmad Shāh Durrānī.
[3] The Thabāt al-ʿĀjizīn was published in Gonbad-e Kavus in 1995. For the author see Storey Online, 1.1. § 82 and 4. § 668; Rasūl Jaʿfariyān, ‘Du Risāla dar Ḥajj’, Mīqāt 91 (1394/2015), 134-47.
[4] He is ‘son of Muḥammad Masʿūd, son of Ḥāfiẓ Muḥammad Maʿṣūm, one of the apprentices of Muḥammad Ḥafīẓ Khān’. The epithets from the root ح ف ظ could be related to treasury, but also libraries; cf. Delhi Persian 918, in which three Mughal librarians are mentioned as Muḥāfiẓ Khān, Muḥammad Ḥāfiẓ and Muḥammad Aḥfaẓ. All three of these persons worked in Mughal rulers’ treasuries, as Delhi Persian 918 was possessed by Mughals by 1154/1741. This Muḥammad Ḥāfiẓ was active in 1167/1753 and could be our scribe’s (or less likely his father’s) master.
[5] For his life and works see Fāṭima Mihrī, ‘Rangīn Dihlavī, Saʿādat-yār Khān’, Dānishnāma-yi Jahān-i Islām (retrieved 11 August 2024).
[6] For example see Atifa Haroon, Rekhti: The Feminist Movement in Urdu Literature Initiated by Men – Urdu Poetry, Urdu Shayari | Rekhta Blog (published on 20 June 2023; retrieved on 9 August 2024); Rekhti – Wikipedia (retrieved on 11 August 2024); cf. Anvi, ‘How feminist is Rekhta after all’ (Published 3 March 2021; retrieved 11 August 2024).
[7] See Mihrī, ibid, who cites Majālis-i Rangīn’s 1264/1848 Lucknow lithograph, as well as Muṣḥifī Hamadānī’s Taẕkira-yi Hind and the Ṭahmās-nāma itself, and Garcin de Tassy, Histoire de la litterature Hindouie et Hindoustanie (New York 1870-71), 560 who, following the same sort of sources, refers to Rangīn’s father as ‘originaire de Túrán’.
[8] For example, Nagendra Kumar Singh,Encyclopaedia of Muslim Biography (New Delhi, 2001), 568 calls him son of a ‘Persian’ noble.
