Over the last week, the Islamic Republic of Iran has seen its most devastating protests—and repression—in years, with some commentators arguing that this may be the end of the regime. We must remember the deeper worlds that once bound India and Iran together.
The countries have much in common today, as they have had for at least 3,000 years—from languages to notions of state, from immigrant histories to culture and architecture. India and Iran were the great civilisational poles of South, Central, and West Asia.
Shared migrations
In the last centuries of the Bronze Age, c. 1500 BCE, clouds of dust followed herds of cattle and caravans of wagons and chariots as people moved between the steppe and the settlements of the Iranian plateau and the Punjab plains. In the edited volume, Indo-Iranian Languages and Peoples (2003), historians, archaeologists, and linguists show that these early peoples spoke a common ancestor of Sanskrit and Persian. Their notions of ritual and kingship, too, had much in common: the words ṛta and aša for cosmic order, deva and daeva for divinity, yajña and yasna for sacrifice.
As early states developed in the Iranian plateau and northern India, ideas continued to circulate along this vast cultural and spatial zone. Their shared inheritance would shape all empires in the region that would draw from shared ancient roots, cultures, and symbols to speak to many diverse audiences. Take, for example, the Kushans, Central Asians who ruled a chunk of Afghanistan and the Gangetic Plains from the first to the third centuries CE. The Kushans used the Persian imperial title of Shahenshah alongside its Sanskritic equivalent, Rajadhiraja, as well as Devaputra, an Indianisation of the Roman title ‘Divi Filius’. They venerated gods with Zoroastrian aspects, such as Mitra and Nana, while building Buddhist monasteries and anthropomorphising Hindu gods. More generally, the motif of the king as a great hunter, accompanied by a royal parasol or chhatra, could be found both further East (under the Gupta Empire, third to sixth centuries CE) and to the West (under the Sassanid Shahs, third to seventh centuries CE).
Soon after, this system was shaken by the expansion of Arab armies bearing the flag of Islam. While Iran quickly lost its Zoroastrian political culture, ties to India very much persisted. The Barmakid dynasty, famous viziers of the Muslim Abbasid Caliphate, were the former administrators (pramukha) of the Nawbahar Buddhist monastery in Balkh. Think about it: quite early in the history of Islam, the Arab world was plugged into the older Indo-Iranian network. And this resulted in a dynasty of former Buddhist administrators carrying Iranian and Sanskritic intellectual culture directly into the heart of a new Muslim empire.
All this suggests that we should think of India, Iran, and beyond as one world evolving across a vast zone.
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Conquest and assimilation
Over the following centuries, speakers of various Turkic languages began to migrate into the Iranian plateau, some establishing their own kingdoms—as the Kushans, Huns, and other peoples did before. On the very edge of this world were parvenu raiders such as the Ghaznavids and Ghorids. They were frontier elites, Persianate in culture, Afghan in social base, and Muslim holy warriors in propaganda. While their brutal expansions into North India command the modern imagination, historical facts show that even as these kings claimed to be ghazis slaughtering infidels, they retained some of the sensibilities of the older Indo-Iranian world. As we have seen in an earlier edition of Thinking Medieval, they adapted Indian titles such as avatara, srimad, and rajadhiraja, and had a fascination with royal elephantry.
Islam, then, did not erase the Indo-Iranian world; the religion merely entered it. Sultanate conquests reinvigorated contacts between the Iranian plateau and northern India. Sanskritic knowledge, borne by Kashmiri monks, briefly spread deep into Iran. Meanwhile, Sufi mystics of various ethnicities participated in a larger circulatory network stretching from Anatolia to Egypt to Bengal. By the 13th-14th centuries CE, Arabic translations of Sanskrit yoga manuals were already being debated in Cairo, while texts such as the Chandayan conveyed Sufi notions of divine love into Indian popular epics. About two centuries later, with the rise of new Persian-speaking Sultanates in North India and the Deccan, the stage was set for India to decisively shift the gravitational centre of this world eastward.
From the 1500s to the 1800s, Persian became one of the most important languages in the subcontinent. From crucibles in the war-torn Iranian plateau and Central Asian caravan-cities, waves of Persian-speaking bureaucrats, historians, teachers, engineers, and warriors found welcoming patrons, relations, and positions in Indian courts. This remarkably paralleled the expansion of Sanskritic culture into the Indian Ocean world many centuries prior.
In Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400-1800 (2007), historians Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Muzaffar Alam have shown that Persian, like Sanskrit, was a ‘political technology’, offering a universal but adaptable idiom of kingship. Through Persian, the Mughals and the Deccan Sultans could simultaneously address Iranian, Central Asian, and Indian audiences. For example, when founding Hyderabad, the Qutb Shahis of Golconda called the city “New Isfahan”—while simultaneously designing the iconic Charminar to echo the towering temple gateways of medieval Warangal.
Irrespective of ethnicity, Persian speakers also had a shared vocabulary of revenue accounting, diplomatic protocol, and courtly etiquette, which could quickly be used to build states, legitimise dynasties, travel and trade, or simply obtain royal favour. The result was a remarkable Indo-Persianate world, where Rajputs bore Persian firmans, Iranians wrote poetry in Indian languages such as Dakhani, and Brahmin bureaucrats amassed revenue figures in Persian.
To be clear, this was not necessarily a just, equal, or peaceful world—whatever the high-minded concepts of the royal courts. But it was a shared world: while part of the wider Islamic ecumene, it was distinctively Indian, and its notions of identity and culture relied on circulation and mutual benefit.
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Paused circulations
The Indian Ocean added a maritime dimension to these connections. Even as Persian bureaucrats expanded into India from the 1600s to the 1700s, Indian merchants dominated the western Indian Ocean. As we saw in an earlier column, a third of the houses in the Persian port of Bandar Abbas belonged to Indians. Hindu temples and processions marked their ritual presence there, and Persian officials negotiated with them over taxation and public order. Indian capital underwrote Persian Gulf commerce.
This world did not survive the rise of modern nation-states. While the British Raj allowed for new forms of mobility, it also imposed colonial intellectual systems and borders, which led to new nationalisms and hard religious identities. Colonialism froze a world that had always been in movement. Persian declined as a state language in India; Indo-Iranian repertoires fragmented; the steppe and mountains became a playground for European great-power balancing. India and Iran became separate geopolitical entities, each with its own modernising project. After the Iranian Revolution in the 1970s, the country insisted on a narrow ideological interpretation of its history and culture. India is now doing something similar.
A once-intimate historical relationship has been reduced to a limited strategic engagement under the shadow of American tariff bullying. Simultaneously, profound debates of justice and rulership, the concern of so many Indo-Persian texts, have faded. Iran’s history shows that even the most pluralistic regions can harden into brutally ideological states when circulation stops, and regimes lose accountability.
Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of ‘Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire’ and the award-winning ‘Lords of the Deccan’. He hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti and is on Instagram @anirbuddha.
This article is a part of the ‘Thinking Medieval‘ series that takes a deep dive into India’s medieval culture, politics, and history.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)