Persian Studies in The Asiatick Miscellany and The New Asiatic Miscellany, Two British Periodicals of the Late Eighteenth Century

Abstract

In the late eighteenth century, the efforts of the British East India Company agents to learn Persian to consolidate their dominance in India, led to the flourishing of studies in the fields of Persian language and literature, codicology, and the history of Iran. In this paper, the role of two pioneer periodicals published in Calcutta by Francis Gladwin, The Asiatick Miscellany (1785-1788) and The New Asiatic Miscellany (1789), is examined in the progress of Persian studies. To this end, the archives of these two periodicals were gathered and accurately studied to discover the motive for their establishment and identify the process of selecting, translating, and describing the excerpts of Persian literary works of Iranian and Indian writers. Afterward, the formation of the first research works in The New Asiatic Miscellany is discussed and the impact of these two publications on the familiarity of the British with the Persian language and literature is studied. The correspondence related to the two periodicals reveals that despite their considerable popularity, the commencement of the attempts to reduce the status of Persian, the administrative and literary language of the Mughals, paved the way for the closure of the two periodicals. But the wave of translating and imitating the Persian literary works launched with the help of these publications flourished the Persian language and literature studies in nineteenth-century Britain.

Keywords

• the asiatick miscellany
• the new asiatic miscellany
• francis gladwin
• persian studies in britain
• anglicism in india