Organizer: A. Sean Pue, University of Chicago
Chair: Carla R. Petievich, University of Texas, Austin
Discussant: Lisa Mitchell, University of Pennsylvania
2007 marked the sixtieth anniversary of the Partition
of India. Among its effects was the splitting of the Urdu linguistic community
into two nations carved out of the Indian Subcontinent. This panel will consider
the geography of Urdu from a number of perspectives. The association of Urdu
with Northern India erases the beginnings of its literary tradition in the
Southern Indian region of the Deccan. One paper will reconsider the Urdu literary
canon through a study of seventeenth-century Deccani poet-kings. Their lyrical
poetry, understood in its social and geographical milieu, challenges hegemonic
understanding of Urdu's literary tradition. Topographical figures provide thematic
unity to the Urdu poetic tradition. A second paper will consider the uses of
the figure of the desert in modern poetry. Initially a metaphor for the Muslim
community, the desert became a trope for commenting on the historical trauma
of Partition. Present-day Chennai is the unexpected home of a community of
Urdu speakers. Employing an anthropological perspective, a third paper examines
the place of “Madrasi
Urdu” in the hierarchy of linguistic value. While Partition poignantly
symbolizes Urdu’s especially troubled relationship to geographical space,
this panel is ultimately concerned with ways that geography is always constitutive
of a language’s identity. The three issues of canon, metaphor, and community,
though distinct, are fundamental to the development of that identity. Through
their juxtaposition, this panel seeks to provide a fuller consideration of
the relationship between geography and language.
Carla R. Petievich, University of Texas, Austin
Despite sustained and increasingly vocal scholarship that attempts to disrupt
the canonical myths of Urdu literature by historicizing it, conventional
(and hegemonic) understanding of Urdu as the language of identity for South
Asian Muslims continues to prevail into the 21st century, perpetuating a glorified,
nearly unified, largely ahistorical notion of its “Glorious Tradition”.
The canon is comprised of poetry that reflects this “glorious tradition” in
the eyes of Urdu’s intelligentsia. Increasingly, over time, what is acceptable
narrows, while the life of Urdu language, literature, and culture broadens.
A variety of Urdus has proliferated around the subcontinent over the past
several centuries, and these Urdus are often grounded in the geography of
their social milieus. Ironically—and paradoxically—“mythic Urdu” informs
and inspires these historically grounded, geographically specific Urdus,
even as they morph, enrich, transgress, and undermine it.
In previous work, Petievich has argued against the narrowness of canon-designators
who excluded Dakani, which substantially predates the “Glorious Tradition” and
gave rise to it directly. But in this paper, she shows how they have also been “right”.
Discussing several Dakani poet-kings from the 17th century, she argues that
the particular spaces and circumstances in which they composed necessarily produced
lyrics that both disrupted central myths about what Urdu is/was and contributed
crucially to the development of its “tradition.” As is so often
the case, the triumph of noble battles can prove to be pyrrhic.
A. Sean Pue, University of Chicago
In the classical lyrical poetry of Urdu, the desert is a site for the solitary
wanderings of the unrequited lover. In the landscape of modern poetry, however,
the desert comes to represent social space. Evoking the distant sacred places
of Islam, the desert serves as a landscape for the imagination of the Muslim
community. In the early twentieth-century poetry of Muhammad Iqbal, the Muslim
community takes the form of a caravan. The late work of post-colonial poet
N. M. Rashed turns on images of desert sand in ways that draw upon and critique
both of these forms. As a social landscape of indeterminate form, Rashed’s
desert serves as a means of calling into question the permanence of the state
and the fixity of national identity for a literary community separated by
Partition.
By noting the differences between the treatment of the desert in the classical
ghazal, the writing of Iqbal, and that of Rashed, this paper will show the
effect of the intervening historical shifts of the twentieth century on the
symbolic language of Urdu poetry. By the time of Iqbal’s writing, the
Urdu language had become marked as Muslim and its literature criticized as representative
of a foreign culture lacking an authentic indigenousness. With the creation
of Pakistan, Urdu became the official language of a nation, although its
traditional home remained outside its borders in India. The desert, signifying
the seeming opposites of distance and community, is an apt symbol for the displaced
geography of Urdu.
Amy C. Bard, University of Florida
Born in the Deccan,
It came of age in Delhi,
Blossomed lushly in Lucknow
But gave up the ghost when it went to Madras
How have the “high” cultural valuations of the controlling discourse
of Urdu depended on the construction of orphaned, “substandard” Urdus?
And how does today's “global hierarchy of value” (Herzfeld 2004)
affect such notions of language development and status? The bit of Urdu doggerel
above traces a trajectory of development, efflorescence, and decay that is endlessly
reiterated by many speakers of the language. It diverges from most imagined
geographies of Urdu, though, in putting Madras on the map at all. Highlighting
the complex, tense dynamics of local Urdus in a wider subcontinental, even global,
Urdu “community”, I examine a culture of deprecation around Madras
Urdu, in which both “insiders” and “outsiders” participate.
Contemporary, cosmopolitan Chennai has relatively recent migrants from North
India, but some Urdu-speaking groups have been established in the city for several
hundred years: a small community of Shiahs, families with branches in Hyderabad,
and clans connected with the erstwhile Nawabate of Arcot. For many within these
networks today, local, especially domestic, Urdu is frequently the butt of jokes,
a source of embarrassment, or a subject of the disclaimer, “it is not
really Urdu.” Anthropologist Michael Herzfeld has shown how an international,
homogenizing cultural and ethical code can deprecate local differences at the
level of everyday practice and interpretation, even as it reifies or commodifies “tradition”.
Unlike Lucknow's celebrated Urdu, however, “Madrasi Urdu” lacks
even the double-edged prestige of tradition.
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