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BadAtNamesWasTaken t1_ja4dtnv wrote

Reply to comment by Ozymandias808z in I've never read any books(actual serious literature), i wanna start now, any advice on how to? by Ozymandias808z

Yes, I am!

Though I have actually never read Premchand - my Hindi reading skills are abysmal (I'm Bengali). I keep meaning to find a good translation - will get around to it one of these days.

If you don't mind answering, where exactly in India are you from? Not too many people speak/read Farsi these days in my experience - though almost every well-educated man in my grandparents' generation did.

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Ozymandias808z OP t1_ja6v2yk wrote

Well, I live in Hyderabad and my dad's family is also from around here. I can speak/read/write Farsi because my maternal grandfather was actually from Iran, from a place called Mazandaran he then came to India during the independence and married and settled here later onwards. My mother ended up adopting Farsi as her first language/mother tongue and hence I know Farsi fluently because of it.

Apart from my mother and her siblings, I've literally never seen anyone who knows Farsi, here in Hyderabad even though in Pre-independence era Farsi was the lingua franca in the Nizam ruled Hyderabad state. Farsi literature is the toughest one to crack, especially the classics. One cannot even comprehend the difficulty of the original works of Rumi and Saadi Shirazi in Farsi. Most of the translated works of Rumi just takes away the soul of that work.

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BadAtNamesWasTaken t1_ja88e6e wrote

Ah, I was wondering if there was a recent Iranian immigrant in your family, when recommending Parsepolis (it's set in late '70s Iran)! But then figured maybe there's some pocket of India left where Farsi is still spoken as a first language.

Yes, pre-British colonial rule, Farsi was the lingua franca between all the various Indian kingdoms (probably thanks to the Mughal influence). It remained extremely popular as a second language for the Bengali elite (& the Awadhi elite, probably others too) throughout colonial rule - and my family still has some Farsi books from my grandfather's collection. But in the past 40/50 years the popularity has fallen off a cliff (right alongside the rise of English as the lingua franca I guess). There are still colleges in Bengal that have Farsi departments, but they're dying out for lack of funding and interest.

It's a shame, Farsi sounds beautiful to my ears. Hopefully you and your cousins can pass down Farsi to the next generation!

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