Persian and Indo-Persian for Reading

Harvard FAS

South Asia has been a major center of Persian language and literature for nearly a millennium. This course is an introduction to the Persian literary writings from South Asia, often referred to as Indo-Persian. We will focus on different genres of Indo-Persian writing, including formal letters, imperial biographies, personal memoirs, scriptural commentaries, Sufi hagiographies, poetry, and literary criticism. We will explore Indo-Persian’s relationship to other South Asian languages such as…