Suchergebnisse

Pasha M. Khan, The Broken Spell: Indian Storytelling and the Romance Genre in Persian and Urdu. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2019, 312 pp.

Pankaj Jha, A Political History of Literature: Vidyapati and the Fifteenth Century, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019, 272 pp.

AbstractThe cultural memory of Awadh is almost exclusively identified with Urdu poetry and courtesan culture, and already in the colonial period it came to stand as the epitome of the "last phase of Oriental culture" ('Abdul Halim Sharar). But if instead of taking a retrospective, nostalgic view we approach literary culture in Awadh prospectively and multilingually and broaden our lens to consider not just the capitals, Faizabad and Lucknow, but also the qasbas (small towns), the small rural courts, the nearby growing city of Banaras, and the colonial capital of Calcutta, a different set of literary dynamics and shifts comes into view. The prevalent image of Awadh as identified with Urdu and Lucknow is not wrong, of course, but it does obscure the other stories, trajectories, and languages. This essay considers some of them. A multilingual and prospective approach helps us consider the circulation of literary tastes across the colonial divide and recognize the production of forgetfulness and ignorance that accompanied modern narratives of languages and literary histories, both colonial and Indian, and that made a host of texts "homeless" (Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi).

The debate over the impact of British colonialism and "colonial modernity" in India has hinged around questions of epistemic and aesthetic rupture. Whether in modern poetry, art, music, in practically every language and region intellectuals struggled with the artistic traditions they had inherited and condemned them as decadent and artificial. But this is only part of the story. If we widen the lens a little and consider print culture and orature more broadly, vibrant regional print and performance cultures in a variety of Indian languages, and the publishing of earlier knowledge and aesthetic traditions belie the notion that English made India into a province of Europe, peripheral to London as the centre of world literature. Yet nothing of this new fervour of journals, associations, literary debates, of new genres or theatre and popular publishing, transpires in Anglo-Indian and English journals of the period, whose occlusion of the Indian-language stories produced ignorance, distaste, indifference— those "technologies of recognition" (Shu-Mei Shih) that produce "the West" as the agent of recognition and "the rest" as the object of recognition, in representation".

Aditya Behl, Love's Subtle Magic: An Indian Islamic Literary Tradition, 1379–1545 (Edited by Wendy Doniger), New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 403.

The invention of folk literature/loksahitya by Francesca Orsini (SOAS, London) One of the tasks that world literature requires is to pluralise our assumptions about what literature is, and to widen its remit. Oral-performative genres feature significantly in our understandings of Indian literary history (whether devotional song-poems, Barahmasas/ "12-months songs" by all kinds of poets, including Urdu poets, tales, etc.). They stand at the beginnings of the process of "vernacularization" of Indian regional literary cultures between the second half of first and second millenniums CE, but also acted in dynamics of literary circulation, both across languages and scripts and also across oral and literate realms. The study of the production and circulation of these oral-performative genres has generated its own philological method (J.S. Hawley, K.S. Bryant, C.L. Novetzke et al.). Yet while some of the earliest colonial scholars of Indian vernacular languages and literatures (like George Grierson) recorded and studied a great number of these forms, they classified them as "folklore" rather than literature. Similarly Indian literary activists collected folk songs and sayings with verve, but viewed them as loksahitya, the expression of a timeless (and casteless) "folk". The situation now is that oral-performative forms are studied largely by ethnographers (Ann Gold, Susan Wadley, Kirin Narayan) rather than as part of literature (exceptions like Stuart Blackburn and Rich Freeman and Narayana Rao notwithstanding). This paper will trace this development and ask how, with the pluralising of literature that comes with world literature, the process can be reversed, and what now counts as loksahitya can be viewed as part of sahitya or literature.

How can we conceptualise multilingual literary culture, and how can we research it? Using the turbulent 'long fifteenth century' in north India as a site, this article questions research models based on single languages (Hindi, Urdu) and engages critically with early modern taxonomies and archives. The article focuses on the materiality of the archive—the language, script and format in which texts were written down and copied—on the spaces and locations in which literature was produced and performed, and on the oral-performative practices and agents that made texts circulate to audiences in ways not bound by the script in which the texts appear to us. Not only are the models of composite culture and language-specificity questioned as a result, but the sites of literary production move from the court to a series of intersections, and areas that were peripheral move into view and connect with others.