Late Eighteenth Century Persian Language Education and the Pull of the Vernacular

Mirza Qatil was arguably the most influential Persian teacher in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century India. He was a Hindu who converted to Shi‘ah Islam, a fact which the Urdu and Persian poet Mirza Ghalib noted in anger as a reason not to trust his judgement in Persian. Qatil’s works, which were among the most copied primers of Persian in his time, distinguish between Indian Persian and the Iranian Persian that Qatil considered standard. This particular prescriptive approach was a new development and it was influential in the later Indian (and colonial) understanding of the relationship between Iranian Persian and Indian Persian. Qatil assumes that incorrect usage came into Indian Persian because of interference from Indian vernacular languages, a claim which is worth examining in light of the insights of modern linguistics. This paper seeks to understand the rhetoric Qatil uses in categorising correct and incorrect usage, as well as his defence of himself as a user of what he considers proper Persian despite his not being a native speaker.