(Published in Mint Lounge, March 14 2026)

In 1656 a senior courtier of the sultan of Golconda defected to the Mughals. Titled Mir Jumla, this Persian emigre was one of India’s wealthiest, most powerful men: he lent money to English traders on the coast, owned a merchant fleet of his own, controlled the kingdom’s diamond mines, possessed an army, and above all, steered the sultan’s government. It was a phenomenal achievement for an immigrant who had begun life as a shoe-salesman. So phenomenal, in fact, that eventually, the sultan smelled a threat. Salacious gossip—for instance, that Mir Jumla had taken a tumble in bed with the queen-mother—did not help. With things at a risky impasse, the minister chose to flee. But in the process the Persian also carted off to the Mughals a massive diamond, believed by some to be the Kohinoor—a gem that, less than a century later, another Persian, Nadir Shah, would seize for himself.

India’s links to Persia—much discussed in the context of the ongoing war in Iran—are old and fascinating. In the medieval Deccan, for instance, Persianate culture was fashionable, in the same way that American soft power prevails in our time. Local Muslim kings, therefore, actively sought to cultivate it. One Bahmani sultan, for instance, nearly wooed the poet Hafiz to India, while another imported Persian scholars, warriors, architects, artists, and other professionals by the shipload. At a certain level, this sparked remarkable interactions. Bijapur’s Adil Shahi dynasty, to cite one, was founded by a Persian warrior and his Hindu queen. Equally, however, it resulted in hostilities between local grandees and the foreign-born nobility. Around 1470, a Russian traveller was astonished that the Deccan’s ruling class seemed overwhelmingly Persian, and the Bahmani state was soon torn up by a sons-of-the-soil versus immigrants type of conflict.

Interestingly, while the Mughals occupy much imperial real estate in our imagination, the Shah of Persia also had some sway in India. For the Deccan sultanates looked not to Delhi but Isfahan for protection, openly declaring themselves its vassals. This flirtation was strategic: an insurance policy against the Mughals. But faith was a factor too. Many of the Deccan’s princes were Shia Muslims. Indeed, the rulers of Ahmednagar (descended from a converted Brahmin, funnily enough) routinely sent their bodies to be buried in Persian-held Karbala. In the early 1600s, there was talk of a marriage alliance between Shah Abbas and a Golconda princess (who’d have introduced some Telugu blood into the Safavid dynasty had the union materialised), while some decades later begums from that kingdom travelled to pay their respects to Shah Safi. Such advertisements of loyalty to Persia didn’t pan out in the end, though, for the Mughals swallowed up the sultanates. Interestingly the emperor who achieved this, Aurangzeb, had an Iranian mother.

But Persianate influence was not limited to Muslim courts, even if it was most pronounced in those settings. Architecture in Vijayanagara featured Persian flourishes, for example, and the court’s sartorial styles also absorbed foreign inspiration. The conical kullah hat became here, thus, the kullayi, or, in everyday Kannada, kulavi. Murals at Tiruppudaimarudur and Lepakshi, meanwhile, depict Hindu lords also sporting a tunic, the kabayi—an Indianisation of the Persian qaba. To be clear, embracing foreign fashion trends does not suggest a wholesale acceptance of Persianate political ideology or power. Krishnadevaraya, for instance, wore the kullayi. But in his poetry, he also delights at crushing the heads of Persians “like melons”, and of filling (proverbial) tanks with their blood. It is a little bit like present-day supporters of the Iranian regime. They may wear trousers and shirts, and yet rail against the West—in English.

Language, in fact, is another area where Iranian influences left a mark. On the one hand, under the powerful Muslim-ruled empires of the subcontinent, Persian itself became the lingua franca for transregional diplomacy and politics—a lot like the place English holds in our time, with its advantages and exclusions both. As late as the 1820s, therefore, Malayali royals writing to the British in Bengal did so not in their mother-tongue or the colonisers language, but in Persian. Equally, however, just as the legitimacy of English is questioned, Persian too had its critics. In a 14th century Vijayanagara poem, the “screeching of owls” is preferred to this language. Three-hundred years later, the Maratha hero Shivaji sought to replace “overvalued Yavana words” with Sanskrit. The project’s practical success was limited however: later Maratha rulers were known by a Persian title (Peshwa). Why, the surname of the incumbent Maharashtra chief minister too (Fadnavis) has Persian roots.

As odd as it may seem to us today, “during the early modern period,” to quote Arthur Dudney, “India—even compared with Iran—was arguably the world’s main centre for the patronage of Persian literature and scholarship.” Many took to the language for better employment but there was genuine passion too. One of the “great Persian prose stylists and poets” of the 17th century, thus, was a man called Chander Bhan, who proudly also flaunted his Brahmin roots. Translation of Sanskrit texts into Persian had their own impact, including in ways that might surprise us now. In the 1860s, for example, Kanhaiyalal Alakhdhari translated 52 Upanishads into Urdu, to popularise among Hindus their textual and philosophical traditions. Except that with Sanskrit sealed off from most, his work was based on the Sirr-i-Akbar—a Persian treatise on the Upanishads, made by a Mughal prince, Dara Shukoh.

The decline of Persian—and Persianate culture—coincided with the rise of colonialism in the country. People seeking upward mobility now began to prefer English to the old court language, while in dress and other respects too, Anglicisation became attractive. One exemplification of this new trend appears in portraits of a single figure. The Travancore rajah Uthram Tirunal (reigned 1846-60), like several of his ancestors, sat for portraits dressed in Persian robes. But towards the end of his rule, he did something unusual: he asked a durbar painter to depict him in the Englishman’s garb, resulting in perhaps among the earliest images of an Indian man in Western attire. His predecessor had already switched Persian with English when corresponding with the British. This transition to the white man’s clothes, however, confirmed something more sharply: the advent of a new age, and the passing of another.