Levi Thompson
The Iranian author Ṣādiq Hidāyat (usually anglicized as Sadegh Hedayat; 1903–1951) penned the best-known example of modernist Persian prose, a short novel called Būf-i kūr ( The Blind Owl ) while living in Bombay in 1936. Critics writing in several languages have spilt barrels of ink attempting to make sense of the story, which presents readers with a narrative in two parts, told from the perspective of an opium-addicted pen-case painter living in squalor outside an unnamed city that may or may not be the ancient settlement of Ray, near modern Tehran, at an indeterminate time in history. This chapter briefly situates Hidāyat’s life and work within this historical moment before highlighting two relatively unexplored modernist facets of The Blind Owl : first, the elision of a key term, barzakh , from the earliest published manuscript when it was reprinted and, second, how both Hidāyat and his novel’s narrator situate themselves not between Iran and Europe but rather between Iran and India, thus redirecting our search for modernist beginnings in Persian literature.