Parsing the Nation

This chapter contextualizes Muḥammad-Taqī Bahār’s largely overlooked writings in early twentieth-century periodicals that forged the critical vocabulary for an emerging literary discipline called adabiyāt . It shows how adabiyāt ’s institutionalization in the 1930s and 1940s was marked by the erasure of its semantic multiplicity, rendering it a singular and standalone concept. This erasure is the last step in the mythologization of Persian literature as a historical construct. The realignment of adabiyāt as literature entailed discussions and debates about the role of language and literature in a nationalizing society where intellectuals such as Bahār were being socialized in a new national reality. Linking these individuals and conversations were voluntary and state-funded associations or anjoman s, which laid the foundation for a modern discourse of literature in late Qajar and early Pahlavi Iran. The chapter argues that if scholars, students, and admirers of Persian literature are to create more socially responsible and inclusive ways of celebrating and understanding Persian literary works, we cannot afford to romanticize its pasts.