Urdu And Indo Persian Thought, Poetics, and Belles Lettres

2.4 MB·English

by  Alireza Korangy

Urdu and Indo-Persian Thought, Poetics, and Belles Lettres
Brill’s Indological Library
Edited by
Johannes Bronkhorst
In co-operation with
Richard Gombrich, Oskar von Hinüber,
Katsumi Mimaki, Arvind Sharma
VOLUME 51
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bil
Urdu and Indo-Persian Thought,
Poetics, and Belles Lettres
Edited by
Alireza Korangy
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: Petal. With courtesy of FreeImages.com/Mario Alberto Magallanes Trejo.
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
isSn 0925-2916
isbn 978-90-04-25188-5 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-34157-9 (e-book)
Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi
and Hotei Publishing.
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This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.
To Shamsur Rahman Faruqi
for his unparalleled scholarship
in Urdu and Indo-Persian literary studies and
an unselfish scholarly source for not only
every contributor in this volume
but hundreds more
⸪

Contents
Introduction ix
Acknowledgements xiv
Part 1
Indo-Persian
1 K̲h̲ushgū’s Dream of Ḥāfiz̤: Authorship, Temporality, and Canonicity in
Late Mughal India 3
Prashant Keshavmurthy
2 Notes on ʿAbdul Nabī Fak̲h̲rul Zamānī and Other Indo-Persian
Storytellers of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 23
Pasha M. Khan
3 Ḥāfiz̤ in the Poetry and Philosophy of Muḥammad Iqbāl 73
Natalia Prigarina
Part 2
Urdu Literary Theory, Urdu Dāstān, Creative Writing,
Urdu Philology
4 Revisiting that Earth(l)y, Glorious Tradition 87
Carla Petievich
5 Continuing the Tradition: A Commentary on the “Neglected” Verses
of G̲h̲ālib 101
Mehr Afshan Farooqi
6 Voyeur Candle, Tattler Candle: The Semiotics of nāyikābheda in G̲h̲ālib’s
Urdu Dīvān 39.1 117
Satayanarayana Hegde
7 Mīr as Suffering Curmudgeon: A Historical Hatchet Job 167
Frances Pritchett
viii CONTENTS
8 “I am a Ruby Wrapped in a Rag”: Zay K̲h̲ay Sheen and the Possibility of
Poetry as Autobiography 179
Gail Minault
9 “The Tide and Flow of Islam”
Musaddas by Ḥālī as a Poetic Memorial of the Muslim Enlightenment
in the Last Third of the Nineteenth Century 192
Ludmila Vasilyeva
10 Jūtē haiṉ jāpānī kaprē inglistānī: Sayyid Ross Masood’s Passage
to Japan 217
David Lelyveld
11 From a Slave Garden into Cyberspace: Mirza Athar Baig’s Novels
G̲h̲ulām Bāg̲h̲ and Ṣifr Se Ek Tak 229
Christina Oesterheld
12 A Translation of Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s Prem Kumar Nazar 250
Baidar Bakht
Index of Subjects 269
Index of Names 275
Introduction
As introductions are merely occasions where a book’s aim is stated, I will be
doing literally that here as anything else would make this a long-winded pre-
face to themes that require much more discourse than allotted in an introduc-
tion. The aim of this volume is to encourage more dialogue on Urdu poetics
and Indo-Persian and facilitate a platform for further discussions that engage
both of these wonderful studies comparatively—and without prejudice. This
volume engages a few of the many themes Urdu poetics and Indo-Persian
studies encapsulate. The complicated and often-enigmatic nuances of Urdu
poetry and poetics have not received the attention they deserve in earnest.
What is much worse: they are (specially Urdu poetry) sometimes dismissed
as mere offshoots of works in Persian—and by extension Arabic (although less
implied)—under the rubric of its close relationship with the two languages
(specially Persian), and some of the individuals known to be responsible
as influential figures in its fledglings as a literary force and more importantly
a poetic phenomenon. Although Urdu literature stands on its own rhetori-
cally and thematically there is no doubt, as any other literature, it has been
influenced by an array of other productions—both thematically and linguis-
tically diverse as is the case with most rich literatures in the world. As will
be seen the essays herein present both a challenging channel for understan-
ding Urdu’s modern and diverse literary production and its historical past; and
bring to purview the importance of Indo-Persian not merely as a literary conti-
nuum but indeed as a singularly rigorous genre of thought and hermeneutic to
reckon with: one that demands more investigation.
The contributions fall under two categories of (1) Indo-Persian; and (2) Urdu
Literary Theory, Urdu Dāstān, Creative Writing, and Urdu Philology. Under the
auspices of the first category, Prashant Keshavmurthy’s “K̲h̲ushgū’s Dream of
Ḥāfiz̤: Authorship, Temporality, and Canonicity in Late Mughal India” reads
“K̲h̲ushgū’s dream of Ḥāfiz̤ as a manifold response to three analytically dis-
tinct needs that may be formulated in terms of the following questions: what
were the social functions of K̲h̲ushgū’s memory of his vision of the poet he
experienced at twelve years old? What relations did this dream vision bear to
his multiply periodized temporality in the Safīnah of Persian literary history?
And how were both these questions complicated in the question of his rela-
tions with Sirājul Dīn ʿAlī K̲h̲ān “Ārzū” (d. 1756) and ʿAbdul Qādir K̲h̲ān “Bīdil”
(d. 1720–21), his two most revered teachers and among the greatest Persian
litterateurs of the age?” Interesting aspects of K̲h̲ushgū’s dream of Ḥāfiz̤ are
employed by the author to answer the broader questions regarding K̲h̲ushgū’s