The Homeless Texts of Persianate Modernity

This article explores modernity as an ethos, rather than a historical period, allowing us to reconstruct joint Indian and Iranian ‘stories vanished from memory’. The story this article traces is the flourishing of the sciences in Persian during the first three decades of the 19th century at a time when Mughal India was seen to be in a state of decline. This article argues that the texts were rendered ‘homeless’ by their lack of inclusion into either Indian or Iranian nationalist accounts of modernity. I also extrapolate from the Foucauldian notion of heterotopia as alternate site of the ‘real’ as a ‘ countersite’ to explore the production of modernity. Heterotopias thus mark sites of crossing between peoples, cultures, and knowledge systems, in this case, between Indian and Iranian translations and readings of Persian texts.