A Persian Hymn to Varanasi: Preliminary Notes on the Poetics of "Idolatry" in Matan Lal Afarin's Kashi istut (1778-9)

This paper deals with a little-known late 18th-c. Persian mathnawi by a Hindu munshi from Allahabad, Matan Lal Afarin, whose historical figure remains completely obscure. The poem, entitled Kashi-stut "Hymn to Varanasi", is a lenghty description of Varanasi as a sacred place of pilgrimage: a sort of textual circumambulation of the city, filtered through the Persian literary conventions. Thus, the Hindu devotee becomes, in the conventional codified metaphorical space of the mathnawi, an "idolater" (butparast) bowing to the "idols" (but), at the same time embodying the specific "identity" of Indic religious traditions and the sufi approach to devotional reality, where "idolatry" becomes, in an antinomistic perspective, synonimous with true religion.