How Asia Found Herself by Nile Green;

Author:Nile Green;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2022-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

By way of the emperor of China, the central personage of his text was thus called the faghfur-i Khata, “the Faghfur of Cathay,” a label that stretched back to romantic depictions of the “fabulous east” in the tenth-century Shahnama of Firdawsi and other medieval Persian works. It was an enduring image that also passed into popular Urdu romances that flourished in the age of print when, a quarter century after Corcoran’s work was published, a retelling of these old tales was printed in Bombay, recounting how the faghfur renounced his throne to become an ascetic.40 Fanciful as it was, the Qissa-i Faghfur-i Chin (Tale of the Chinese Emperor) was still one of the earliest Indian-language books on China to enter the public sphere, showing how older conceptions of the region survived attempts by the likes of Patell and Corcoran to provide more accurate depictions. Around the same time, another Urdu literary text invoking these old poetic associations was published as Munshi Debi Prashad’s Arzhang-i Chin (Picture Book of China).41 A book of writing exercises in Urdu calligraphy, its title referenced the legendary depiction by medieval Persian poets of the prophet Mani as a great painter from China.

Nonetheless, terms like faghfur and the more general lexicon taken from India’s Mughal Empire were Corcoran’s linguistic wherewithal, making his depiction of a quite different imperial polity intelligible to an Indian readership. Though written by a middle-ranking Irish imperial administrator, the Tarikh-i Mamalik-i Chin was therefore an “Islamicate” text, in the sense of using language, idioms, and cultural references drawn from Islamic tradition to depict a non-Muslim society. Reinforcing this Islamicate character were the series of earlier Persian and to a lesser extent Arabic texts to which Corcoran also referred. These comprised the handful of medieval Arabic and Persian manuscript accounts of China from the relevant sections of the travelogue of Ibn Battuta (1304–1368 or 1377), the Jami‘ al-Tawarikh (Compendium of Histories) by the Persian vizier Rashid al-Din (1247–1318), and the similarly Mongol-era history by Fakhr al-Din al-Banakiti (d. 1330), itself derived from Rashid al-Din. In view of the age, brevity, and limitations of these medieval accounts (only Ibn Battuta had actually visited China—if indeed he did), Corcoran made far less use of them than of European sources. But he did make considerable use of Persian histories of Mughal India and Safavid Iran, such as Habib al-Siyar (Friend of Biographies) by Khwandamir (d. 1537) and Tarikh-i Nigaristan (Picture Gallery of History) by Ahmad Ghaffari (d. 1567).

Though these works weren’t about China, they allowed Corcoran in his second volume to make various commensurable comparisons between Chinese and Indian history, as well as between biblical and Quranic history. A key part of this endeavor was his attempt to reconcile the antiquity of China’s recorded past with the shared Christian and Muslim scriptural tradition of Noah’s flood and the peopling of the planet by Noah’s descendants.42 To do so, however, required a degree of interpretive license and, indeed, criticism, which led Corcoran to explain that when the

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