New Scholars Program: Moving Stories: The Indo-Persian Romance

Fort William College, founded in Calcutta in 1801 to teach Indian languages to English East India Company officers, employed local writers and scribes to produce teaching materials, resulting in a flurry of literary production as they adapted extant stories to the demands of Company patrons. The College published their efforts as moveable-type textbooks, but also maintained a manuscript library, now scattered between Delhi, Kolkata and London, whose contents offer the writers’ perspective on their output and its patronage, omitted from the textbooks. Their prefaces, alongside the material features of Indo-Persian manuscript culture, show how the authors situate the texts in an established literary tradition, a link severed in the print editions.

Hallie Nell Swanson is a PhD candidate in Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on Islam in South Asia. Her dissertation, ‘Moving Stories: The Indo-Persian Romance, 1650-1850’ examines the circulation of Sufi ideas through the romance genre in Persian, Dakhni, Urdu and Punjabi. She is research assistant on the ‘Hindustani Airs’ project at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, which spotlights a multilingual illustrated manuscript of songs from late eighteenth-century Lucknow.