Taliban in Jane Austen’s London

The first three decades of the 19th century were bad for the Persian Empire. At the start of the century, Karabakh, Shirvan, Quba and Baku were lost to the Russian Empire. By 1828, Persia had lost all its possessions in the Caucasus including the Khanate of Erivan—modern day Armenia—and the Khanate of Nakhichevan. These humiliations were cemented by the Treaty of Turkmanchai that year. The reverberations of that incident can be felt even today— from Baku to Ankara and from Tehran to Aden.

The response to these unfolding disasters was predictable, to an extent. Geo-strategically, Persia found some help from Britain, which, in turn, was alarmed at this—pre-Great Game—expansion of Russia. Military advisors were dispatched to the Qajar court. Like many other Eastern rulers— Tipu Sultan and Ranjeet Singh being two notable examples— who employed military experts from a rival power, the Qajars, too, took the same step. The enterprise of modernising the army was entrusted to Abbas Mirza, the prince who, as governor of Azerbaijan province— then a part of the Persian Empire—had witnessed Russian military prowess. But he was much more than that. This prince not only wanted to modernise his army by borrowing mercenary men but wanted his countrymen to be trained in a host of subjects—from weaponry to medicine.

To that end, and while relations with Britain remained warm (they were to cool later when the British warmed up to the Russians), he dispatched a group of five students to be trained in Britain. There they joined another of their countrymen who was the surviving member of an earlier group of two students. They were, in a literary twist to the tale, chaperoned by a British military officer, a Captain Joseph D’Arcy. The year was 1815.

Almost two centuries after this extraordinary journey by these five students, Nile Green, a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, has retraced the steps of these pioneers of modern Iran. In The Love of Strangers: What Six Muslim Students Learned in Jane Austen’s London (Princeton University Press, 416 pages, $35), he paints an admiring—almost affectionate— portrait of these students, their adventures and their travails in the England of Jane Austen.

Even by standards of modern historical research, two centuries is a sufficiently distant period for any historian to trace the lives of specific individuals. What helped Green’s quest is a remarkable diary that one of the students, Mirza Salih, maintained. This document, which has the quality of an ethnographic record, carefully outlines the life of its writer and his other companions. When the diary begins, England is an alien country for this high-born person from Shiraz; by the end of his stay, he is almost English:

‘I wake up at seven in the morning, and remain at the house of Mr. Belfour till ten o’clock, studying French with him. Then, after taking lunch, I set again to my studies and read more French books until two o’clock. Then, after changing into English clothes, I go to the house of the master printer. Until four-thirty, I remain in his printing workshop. Then I go to an inn to eat supper and return home. There I read about the history of Rome, or Greece, or Russia, or Turkey, or Iran, or else read stories in English, and finally write down some pages of translation from French into English.’ (Page 227).

Now this might seem unremarkable as all students and apprentices follow a similar routine everywhere. But this was a student from Persia in England in the second decade of the 19th century, culturally very distant and different from his native land. How did this mirza end up being an Englishman? For one, Mirza Salih was a very tenacious and gifted individual who was intent on learning new things. His selection also testifies to Abbas Mirza’s keen eye for talent. For another, he had a set of generous and influential English friends who helped him and the other students in the group out of nothing but kindness and empathy.

This transformation was not easy, particularly for Mirza Salih. His companions had a much easier—and better defined—educational programme. Two members of the group were admitted to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich; another two were attached to surgeons for medical training; the fifth student was apprenticed to a gunsmith. That left Mirza Salih. Green’s book is a story with twists and turns of how this talented and inquisitive student finally settled on an interesting choice: the art of printing books and periodicals.

Hoping to learn the ‘new sciences’ that his homeland needed to adopt, Mirza Salih tried to gain admission to Oxford and then to Cambridge. While that did not work, that experience opened the doors for him to ultimately settle on learning printing and publishing. Strange as it may sound, it was a group of evangelical Christian professors at Oxford and Cambridge—who had close links with one of the biggest publishers of that age, the Bible Society—that ensured Mirza Salih’s apprenticeship to a celebrated London printer Richard Watts. Watts, who was once the university printer at Cambridge, worked closely with the Bible Society and was one of the earliest printers of Persian texts in England. Mirza Salih’s apprenticeship to him was a unique two-way trade of learning and giving. He learnt the nuts and bolts of printing in Watts’ workshop while simultaneously helping the latter develop better Persian type and catch mistakes in what was printed.

In many ways Mirza Salih’s journey is similar to modernisers and early nationalists across the world—the unsettling experience of living in a country with a dominant culture, the slow and painful process of learning and adopting that culture, admiring it and the equally unsettling discovery of domination by an alien culture on one’s return. The journey ends in the faint beginnings of nationalism. José Rizal, the ‘first Filipino’ (The Philippines-Spain); José de San Martin (Argentina-Spain) and Jawaharlal Nehru (India-England) are among several examples of such pairings. Mirza’s Salih’s case was a bit different in that England did not colonise Persia. His experience on his return home and the course of Persian history, too, has taken a different path. Because of Persia/Iran’s complex geopolitical situation—and it remains a cockpit for intrigue right till the present—its history has not been one of straightforward colonisation followed by the emergence of nationalism. Religion has added another twist to its complicated story.

On his return to Persia, Mirza Salih founded two newspapers, one of which—Akhbar-i-Vaqaa—lasted for five years. This was one of the earliest newspapers to be published in Iran. His experience, his ideas and his love for England added to the crowded bazaar of ideas in modern Iran. Later on, he even served as a diplomat and returned in triumph to London as an envoy for a while. But in the end, he died in obscurity, and were it not for his diary in an Oxford library, this fascinating chapter of his country’s history would have been lost. The picture that Green has sketched speaks of a tantalising moment in time when the love for a strange Western country was not derided as gharbzadegi (‘Westoxification’) in Iran. It is also a testament to Green’s love of a culture to which he does not belong. What began as a quest to learn the ‘new sciences’ that Persia needed to modernise itself ended in something that made Mirza Salih a pioneer of modern Iran.

booksJane AustenLondonMuslim StudentsNile GreenThe Love of Strangers