The four-storey building with the expansive lawn in front is in the heart of Calcutta. It is on what is still referred to as Kyd Street and not very far from the more famous MLA Hostel. While driving past, you might have noticed its stained glass windows and the name on the semi circular arch over the grille gate — Iran Society.
The last time I visited Iran Society was six years ago. That day, the seminar hall was reverberating with a scholar’s recitation of Bani Adam (Children of Adam), immortal Persian verses by Saadi Shirazi.
This poem is also inscribed on a carpet that adorns the walls of the United Nations headquarters in New York. The English translation on the plaque beside it reads thus:
All human beings are members of one frame,
Since all, at first, from the same
essence came.
When time afflicts a limb with pain,
The other limbs cannot at rest remain.
If thou feel not for other’s misery,
A human being is no name for thee.
But last week, when I stepped onto the unkempt lawns, the building looked forlorn to me. The gate was shut and so were the windows. A security guard told me the place remains closed during the month of Ramzan. For the rest of the year, it opens for just two hours in the evening.
Persian or Farsi was introduced in the Indian subcontinent by the Persianate rulers of Central Asia in the 13th century. The Iran Society is India’s oldest functioning centre
for Persian studies and an archive of rare Persian books and journals from the medieval period. The institution preserves Persian classics such as Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi’s Mathnawi, Hafez’s Divan and Saadi Shirazi’s Gulistan.
Written in medieval Farsi, the language of these books defies all orthodox religious boundaries and eventually became the vehicle of Sufi mysticism. There was a time when liberal and strong cultural moorings helped Farsi survive theocratic influence.
The Iran Society had regular cultural exchanges with Iran until Mohammed Reza Pahlavi Shah of Iran was overthrown by the Shia cleric Ayatollah Khomeini. The Iranian government, led by the Shah, used to send Persian language teachers to Calcutta’s Iran Society. That was until 1979.
But regular Persian language classes are no longer held here, though the occasional seminar and scholarly exchanges continue.
Iran today doesn’t speak the language of Rumi either, rich in metaphors and mystical concepts, peppered with Turkish and Greek.
Fundamentalist influences on modern Iranian have been significant since the 1979 Revolution, manifesting through the state-sanctioned infusion of Arabic terminology and the rigid redefinition of existing words to align with religious ideology.
The Iran Society seems like an island frozen in time, unplugged from the world around it. Some of the books under its guardianship are handwritten with distinctive calligraphy, a fast disappearing art. Six years ago, when I walked amidst the bookshelves, I had felt transported to an era when Bengal had strong links with Persia.
Many Persian books were printed in 18th century Calcutta. A section of Bengal’s elite, especially the Hindu gentry, appropriated aspects of Persian culture, such as the style of dressing, social practices and literary taste.
Rammohun Roy wrote treatises in Persian and even started India’s first Persian newspaper Mirat-ul-Akhbar in 1823. It is preserved at the Iran Society alongside weeklies and monthlies such as Shamsul Akhbar and Gulshan-i-Naubahar published from Calcutta.
Rabindranath Tagore held a deep, lifelong admiration for the 14th-century Persian poet Hafez. In this, he was influenced by his father Debendranath who could recite Hafez’s ghazals from memory.
Tagore was invited to Iran by Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1932. He visited Hafez’s tomb in Shiraz and expressed a spiritual bond with the poet in his travelogue Parasya Jatri.
The Iran Society’s link with Iran has weakened over the years except that the institute occasionally publishes Indo-Iranica, as a member of the
society told me. The official journal was established to promote the study and appreciation of Indo-Iranian cultural, historical, literary and linguistic connections.
The society also organises lectures and seminars for scholars from Persian-speaking nations, such as Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and for Persian scholars from various Indian universities.
The society now barely preserves the bygone glory of Persian culture in the city and maintains a tenuous link with the Iran of the past. Those were the days of peace and harmony when a language connected faraway Iran with Bengal, in tune with Saadi Shirazi’s message of equality and empathy towards all.