Friendship, Love, Loyalty: Persianate Ethics of Self and Community Before Nationalism

This project focuses on how notions of friendship, love and loyalty were formulated and expressed in the period just before and during the early phases of colonial expansion in South Asia (1739-1835). Shifting social relations and political loyalties in this period have often been considered from perspectives that assume ahistorical protonationalist sensibilities. By contrast, I argue that a particular type of basic education among Persians contained a notion of ethics that created modes of practicing affiliation, conceiving of difference, and imaging community.

This ethics of proper conduct (adab) structured perceptions and practices of affiliation and difference and can elucidate loyalties in the intertwined interpersonal relations of society and politics. The perception and expression of virtuous and ignoble emotions were bound up in the perception and expression of ethical conduct. Ideas of ethics, virtue and the emotions serve as a starting point for understanding what animated notions of loyalty and friendship in prescriptive texts. This project then analyzes the ways these ideas play out in social practice by examining letters, poetry, travelogues, memoirs and biographical texts. Many socially and politically significant relationships were called friendships, highlighting the way in which the ideals of friendship were considered the model for relations in multiple social and political contexts. An understanding of loyalty based on a valorized notion of homosocial love cemented these relationships between rulers and their subjects, patrons and clients, and teachers and students.

Since the ideal virtuous Persianate self was male, Muslim and of Middle East descent, this project also explores the way in which people who did not fit this ideal were able to negotiate differences of gender, place of origin and religion using the ethical language of adab. As such, this project also historicizes concepts of difference and their role in the conception and practice of social and political affiliation in this pivotal period between the decentralization of Mughal imperial power and British colonial domination of South Asia.