Returning Gifts: Poems, Things, and Dissatisfaction in Persian Correspondence

In the late sixteenth century, the Iranian poet ‘Urfi Shirazi—who was working at the time at the Mughal court of Akbar, in what is today northern India—received a gift that he did not particularly like. In lieu of returning the ornate shawl he had received, he sent a satirical poem to its sender, the poet Zuhuri Turshizi, to express his dissatisfaction. This proposed paper focuses on customs of gift exchange between elite men employed as Persian writers in early modern South Asia. Building on secondary literature on both epistolary writing in Persianate courts and gift exchange across Eurasia, it highlights the connected nature of luxury goods and literary artifacts. In instances of dissatisfaction with a gift, I suggest, writers favored the use of poetic speech to express this emotion in an opaque rather than straightforward manner. They often sent works of satire, the exact meanings of which can be difficult to discern, through which they conveyed negative emotions—such as disdain or dislike—that fell outside of the conventional bounds of epistolary discourse in this particular elite context. Through an analysis of ‘Urfi’s letter to Zuhuri and accounts of the event in later biographical and historical texts, I observe that in instances of Persian correspondence between elite men, luxury goods and poems served similar purposes. Both could be sent and exchanged, elicit feelings of like or dislike, or be used to mediate in delicate political situations. Examining the relationships between gifts and poems in instances of dissatisfaction sheds light on public practices of performing elite male friendships in Persian court culture.