Author: Shamsur Rahman Faruqi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 211
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0195652010
Description
This pathbreaking work raises several new questions about Urdu literary culture and challenges a number of established myths built around this theme over the past 200 years.
This path breaking work raises several new questions about Urdu literary culture and traces the origins and development of Urdu literary thought from circa 1300 to 1850. Not only does it challenge a number of established myths built around this theme over the past 200 years, but also destroys the myth of Delhi’s hegemonic role in the development of Urdu literature.
For instance, it successfully questions the notion that Urdu developed as a result of the interaction between Muslim ‘invading armies’ and the local populace, giving instead dude credit to Gujarat, the Deccan, and other areas where Urdu literature developed earlier than in Delhi. In doing so, it restates the Urdu literary canon and puts in their place all the groups which had been marginalized by earlier historians.
This book also presents solutions to certain problems which have evaded resolution so far. For example, why did the Ustad-Shagird institution develop in Delhi in the eighteenth century, and not elsewhere at another time? How did the language, whose original names were Hindi Hindvi, Gujri, Rekhta, and Dakani at various times and places, come to be known as Urdu from around the second half of the eighteenth century?
An important intervention in the debate on issues relating to the origin and development of Urdu and modern Hindi, this book firmly places the two languages in the Indian context as vital components of the Indian creative mind.
This book will be of value to scholars of modern Indian history, Urdu and Persian literature and literary culture. Students of Indian literature, especially modern Hindi literature, social history and postcolonial literary theory will also find it a useful work.