‘Bringing Spring to Sahbai’s Rose-Garden’: Persian Printing in North India after 1857

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century, significant numbers of Persian books were printed in north India. The posthumous printing of the collected works of Imam Bakhsh Sahbai, a Persian scholar killed by British soldiers in 1857, is taken as a case study to demonstrate the importance of ustad-shagird (master-disciple) bonds in ensuring the continued attention to Persian. This study highlights the shifting centres of Persian language activity as different groups entered the arena of Persian print to carve out cosmopolitan and multidirectional identities for themselves in a period when, it is usually assumed, such identities became hardened along ethnic, religious and class lines.