Author: Kathryn Hansen
David Lelyveld/
Editor(s): Kathryn Hansen / David Lelyveld
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 316
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0195670205
Description
Over the past forty years the study of Urdu literature has played a dynamic role in contemporary discourses on culture and history, reaching out to a far-flung international community of scholars. The ten essays in this volume, assembled for Professor C M Naim, a pioneer of Urdu studies in the United States, exemplify the changing place of Urdu in the world today. They discuss diverse aspects of Urdu and Persian literature and poetry, between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. The focus is mainly on Urdu poetry offering a comprehensive introduction to the sociology, culture and politics of its enchanting and complex world but it also includes essays on travelogues, print journalism and a play.
In the first part, contributors explore the divergent social and political spaces that Urdu literature has occupied through the centuries. In the second, they critique the paradigms that have informed Urdu literary history and point to new methodologies of reading. Pillars of poetry like Ghalib and Iqbal, women writing from the zanana, popular dramatists, travellers to Britain, and modern novelists form the subjects of this wide-ranging collection. The contributors are specialists in the field, use combination of approaches: while some articles focus on well-known texts, others focus on individual poets and writers.
The book includes lucid new translations of texts not yet available to English readers. It will interest all scholars and students of South Asian cultural history and literary studies.
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
CONTRIBUTORS
INTRODUCTION
PART I: URDU LITERATURE AND THE POLITICAL IMAGINARY
Kumkum Sangari, The Configural Mode: Ag ka Darya
Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Afterlife of a Mughal Masnavi: The Tale of Nal and Daman in Urdu and Persian
Ramya Sreenivasan, Genre, Politics, History: Urdu Traditions of Padmini
Gail Minault, From Akhbar to News: The Development of the Urdu Press in Early Nineteenth-Century Delhi
Michael H Fisher, Britain in the Urdu Tongue: Accounts by Early Nineteenth-Century Visitors.
Barbana D Metcalf, Iqbal’s Imagined Geographies: the East, the West, the Nation, and Islam
PART 2: THE CRITICAL PROJECT AND ITS REVISION
Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, The Poet in the Poem or, Veiling the Utterance
Aditya Behl, Poet of the Bazaars: Nazir Akbarabadi, 1735-1830
Carla Petievich, Feminine Authorship and Urdu Poetic Tradition: Baharistan-I Naz vs Tazkira- Rekhti
Frances W Pritchett, The Meaning of the Meaningless Verses: Ghalib and His Commentators
Syed Akbar Hyder, to You Your Cremation, To Me My Burial; The Ideals of Inter-Communal Harmony in Premchand’s Karbala
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF C M NAIM
INDEX