Indo-Persian Culture

"Indo-Persian culture" refers to those Persian aspects that have been integrated into or absorbed into the culture of the Indian subcontinent, and in particular, into North India and modern-day Pakistan.

Persian influence was first introduced to the subcontinent by Muslim rulers, especially with the Delhi Sultanate from the 13th century, and in the 16th to 19th century the Mughal Empire. There are, however, scattered traces of pre-Islamic Persian influence in the subcontinent.

Persian was the official language of the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire, and their successor states, as well as the cultured language of poetry and literature. Many of the Sultans and nobility in the Sultanate period were Persianised Turks from Central Asia who spoke Turkic languages as their mother tongues. The Mughals were also from Persianized Central Asia, but spoke Chagatai Turkic as their first language at the beginning, before eventually adopting Persian. Persian became the preferred language of the Muslim elite of north India. Muzaffar Alam, a noted scholar of Mughal and Indo-Persian history, suggests that Persian became the lingua franca of the empire under Akbar for various political and social factors due to its non-sectarian and fluid nature. The influence of these languages on Indian apabhramshas led to a vernacular that is the ancestor of today's Urdu, Hindi, and Hindustani.