The Black Stone and the City of Light: Devotional Cityscapes and the Poetics of “Idolatry” in Matan Lāl Āfarīn Persian Masnawī on Vārāṇasī (1778-9)

This paper explores an hitherto unstudied Persian masnawī in praise of the sacred city of Vāraṇāsī, the he Kāshī-stut (a phonetically Persianized variant of kāśī stuti, “Hymn to Vārāṇasī”) composed in 1778-9 by a little known Kāyastha scribe from Allahabad, Matan Lāl Āfarīn. The text, consisting of ca. 1200 lines in the hazaj-i musaddas-i maḥẕūf metre is an original poetic transposition of the Hindu religious landscape of Vārāṇasī in Persian verse, conjuring classical and post-classical Persian poetic conventions on the non-Islamic sphere and Sanskrit models such as the Kāśīkhaṇḍa, the Kāśīrahasya or other māhātmyas, and containing an impressive amount of descriptions (sometimes very technical) of idols, temples, pilgrimages, devotees, ascetics, the Ganges and so on. In view of the extraordinary value of the document (from the historical as well as from the literary side) the main aim of the article is not only to discuss the complex socio-cultural entanglements of the treatment of “idolatry” by a late eighteenth-century Hindu poet of Persian, but also, at the same time, to present, as far as I know for the first time, an important Persian document on early modern Vārāṇasī hitherto completely ignored by scholars. The study of the text against the background of contemporary trends in Persian poetry, in South Asia as well as in Iran, will, moreover, provide us with a proper set of interpretative tools for reading what we may begin to call, without further ado, the Hindu Persian literature of the eighteenth century