Abstract
This book explores the cosmopolitan sensibilities of Urdu poetry written in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially in the city of Lucknow, which was the center of a flourishing Indo-Persian culture. Rekhtī, a type of Urdu poetry whose distinguishing features are a female speaker and a focus on women’s lives, becomes a catalyst for the transformation of the ghazal (a love poem with a fixed metrical and rhyme scheme): first, by focusing it not on love alone but on the practices, spaces, and rituals of everyday life; second, by bringing subordinated figures such as women (both of conventional families and courtesan households) as well as servants center stage; and third, by challenging the ghazal’s ideal of perfect love as framed by separation and suffering. The bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom expand the diagetic setting of the ghazal, to which the marketplace and street were already integral. As distinct from the mystical ghazal that for most people today is synonymous with Urdu poetry, many ghazals of these times (including ghazals with a male speaker) are nonmystical, inspired by the romance of everyday life and material things. Hybridity, diversity, the beautiful people and pleasures of the city, fashion, glamour, and gender-bending practices are some markers of the urban imagination developed in this literature.
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Notes
See Carla Petievich, “Gender Politics and the Urdu Ghazal,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 38, no. 3 (2001): 223–48.
Khalil Ahmad Siddiqi, Rekhti ka Tanqidi Mutala’ah (Lucknow: Nasim Book Depot, 1974), 85. Hereafter cited as RTM.
Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Architecture/Mouvement/Continuite 5 (October 1984): 46–49.
See S. R. Faruqi, “Mir Saheb ka Zinda Ajayabghar,” in Kulliyat-i Mir (New Delhi: Qaumi Kunsil bara’e Farugh-i-Urdu Zaban, 2003), 2:47–77.
Amritlal Nagar, Ye Kothevaliyan (Allahabad: Lokabharati Prakashan, 2008), 145.
K. C. Kanda, Bahadur Shah Zafar and his Contemporaries (New Delhi: Sterling, 2007), 384.
Sa‘adat Yar Khan Rangin Dehlvi, Masnavi Dilpazir, ed. Sayyad Suleiman Husain (Lucknow: Nizami Press, 1992), 73.
Vikram Sampath, “My Name Is Gauhar Jan” (New Delhi: Rupa, 2010), 284–301.
Mirza Ja‘far Husain, Qadim Lakhnau ki Akhiri Bahar (New Delhi: Qaumi Kunsil bara’e Farugh-i-Urdu Zaban, 1998), 193, 199, 207.
Sayyid Sulaiman Husain, ed., Masnavi Dilpazir (Lucknow: Nizami Press, 1992), 101.
Sibt-i Muhammad Naqvi, ed., Intikhab-i Rekhti (Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Urdu Akadmi, 1983), 83.
Mir Insha Allah Khan Insha, Daryā-ĕ Lat̤āfat, trans. into Urdu by Pandit Brijmohan Dattatreya “Kaifi” (Delhi: Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu, 1988), 86–88. Hereafter cited as D-eL.
Faruq Argali, Rekhti (New Delhi: Farid Book Depot, 2006), 59. Hereafter cited as R.
Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, eds., Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 108–9.
Gail Minault, “Other Voices, Other Rooms: The View from the Zenana,” Women as Subjects: South Asian Histories, ed. Nita Kumar (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 108–24.
Monique Wittig, “The Mark of Gender,” in The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon, 1992, 76–89.
Iqtida Hasan, ed., Kulliyat-i Jur’at (Napoli: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1970), 2:261–62. The whole poem is translated in Vanita and Kidwai, Same-Sex Love in India, 222–23.
Carla Petievich, When Men Speak as Women: Vocal Masquerade in Indo-Muslim Poetry (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Ruth Vanita, Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), chap. 4.
Both C. M. Naim, “Transvestic Words? The Rekhti in Urdu,” Annual of Urdu Studies 16, no. 1 (2001): 3–25, and Carla Petievich, “Gender Politics and the Urdu Ghazal,” make this argument.
Abid Peshawari, Insha Allah Khan Insha (Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Urdu Akadmi, 1985), 546.
Mirza Mohammad Askari, ed., Kalam-i Insha (Allahabad: Hindustani Akademi, 1952), Introduction, p. dāl lām
Apart from the political record, see also Hussein Keshani, “Strangers, Lovers and Kin: Gender Roles and their Interplay with the Architecture of Awadh,” in Studies on Architecture, History and Culture: Papers by the 2003–4 AKPIA@MIT Visiting Fellows (Cambridge, MA: Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004).
Saleem Kidwai, “Of Begums and Tawaifs: The Women of Awadh,” Women’s Studies in India: A Reader, ed. Mary John (New Delhi: Penguin, 2008), 118–23.
Michael Herbert Fisher, A Clash of Cultures: Awadh, the British, and the Mughals (Riverdale, MD: Riverdale Company, 1987), 162–87.
See also Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, A Fatal Friendship: The Nawabs, the British and the City of Lucknow, in The Lucknow Omnibus (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 4–5, 176–77.
See Muhammad Hadi Kamwar Khan, Tazkirat us-Salatin Chaghta: A Mughal Chronicle of post-Aurangzeb period, 1707–1724, ed. Muzaffar Alam (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1980), 159–67.
For emperors’ involvements with dancing girls, see Harbans Mukhia, The Mughals of India (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 117–18.
See Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe, ed., Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History and Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1997);
Katherine Butler Brown, “If Music Be the Food of Love: Masculinity and Eroticism in the Mughal Mehfil,” in Love in South Asia: A Cultural history, ed. Francesca Orsini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 61–83.
Sa‘adat Yar Khan Rangin, Majalis-i Rangin, ed. Sayyid ‘Ali Haidar (Patna: Idara Tahqiqat-e Arabi-o Farsi, 1990), 45.
Tota Ram Shayan, Tilism-e Hind (Lucknow: Naval Kishor, 1874), 285.
Muhammad Taqi Ahmad, trans., Tarikh Badshah Begam (Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyat-i Delli, 2009), 4–5.
Saleem Kidwai, trans., Song Sung True: The Memoirs of Malka Pukhraj (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2002), 114.
Kidwai, “Begums and Tawaifs,” and Juan Cole, Sacred Space and Holy War: the Politics, Culture and History of Shi’ite Islam (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
Saleem Akhtar, Urdu Adab ki Mukhtasar Tarin Tarikh (Lahore: Sang-i Mil Publications, 2000), 190; and Siddiqi, RTM, 59.
W. H. Sleeman, A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude in 1849–1850, with private correspondence relative to the annexation of Oude to British India (London: R. Bentley, 1858), 392, 422, 369.
C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion 1770–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 266.
Narayani Gupta, Delhi between Two Empires, 1803–1931: Society, Government and Urban Growth (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981); Fisher, Clash of Cultures, 21, 71–89.
Khalil-ur Rahman Da‘udi, ed., Kulliyat-i Insha (Lahore: Lahore Majlis-i Taraqqi-yi Adab, 1969), 76:79. Hereafter cited as KtI.
Sa‘adat Yar Khan Rangin Dehlvi, Akhbar-i Rangin ma‘ah muqaddimah o ta‘liqat, ed. S. Moinul Haq (Karachi: Pakistan Historical Society, 1962), 19.
Rosie Lllewellyn-Jones, “Africans in the Indian Mutiny,” History Today 459, no. 12 (December 2009): 40–47.
Dorothy Ko, “The Written Word and the Bound Foot: A History of the Courtesan’s Aura,” in Writing Women in Late Imperial China ed. Ellen Widmer and Kang-i Sun Chang (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1997), 77.
See, for example, Nurulhasan Hashimi, Dilli ka Dabistan-i Sha‘iri (Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Urdu Akadmi, 1992), 280.
Abida Samiuddin, Encyclopedic History of Urdu Literature (Delhi: Global Vision, 2007), 1:517.
Amaresh Dutta, The Encyclopaedia of Indian Literature (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1988), 2:1797.
Aditya Behl, “Poet of the Bazaars: Nazir Akbarabadi 1735–1830,” in A Wilderness of Possibilities, ed. Kathryn Hansen and David Lelyveld (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 194.
Frances W. Pritchett, Nets of Awareness (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 25–45;
C. M. Naim and Carla Petievich, “Urdu in Lucknow/Lucknow in Urdu,” in Lucknow: Memories of a City, ed. Violette Graff (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 166–80.
“[T]he latest volume of poetical selections published in India, while giving numerous poems of standard poets like Sauda, Mīr, Atish, Zauq, Ghalib, Anis and Dabir … does not contain a single line of Rangin.” R. P. Dewhurst, untitled review of Cata-logue of the Hindustani Manuscripts in the Library of the India Office by James Fuller Blumhardt, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland N.S. 59, no. 3 (July 1927): 581–82.
Amina Khatoon, afterword to Insha Allah Khan, Lataif us-Sa‘adat, trans. Amina Khatoon (Bangalore: Kausar Press, 1955), 97.
Muhammad Husain Azad, Ab-i Hayat (Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Urdu Akadmi, 1998), 259.
Badi’ Hussaini, Dakkin men Rekhtī ka Irtiqa (Hyderabad: Anjuman Taraqqi-yi Urdu, 1968), 128.
‘Ali Javad Zaidi, Do Adabi Iskul (Lucknow: Nasim Book Depot, 1970);
Carla Petievich, Assembly of Rivals (New Delhi: Manohar, 1992).
For example, S. R. Faruqi, “Conventions of Love, Love of Conventions: Urdu Love Poetry in the Eighteenth Century,” Annual of Urdu Studies 14 (1999): 3–32.
Sabir ‘Ali Khan, Sa‘adat Yar Khan Rangin (Karachi: Anjuman Taraqqi-yi Urdu, 1956), 410. Hereafter cited as SYKR.
Gail Minault, “Begamati Zuban,” in Gender, Language, and Learning (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2009w).
Khwaja Altaf Hussain Hali, Voices of Silence: English translation of Khwaja Altaf Hussain Hali’s Majalis un-Nissa and Chup ki dad, trans. Gail Minault (New Delhi: Chanakya Publications, 1986), 96.
See Ruth Vanita, “Gandhi’s Tiger: Multilingual Elites, the Battle for Minds, and English Romantic Literature in Colonial India,” Postcolonial Studies 5, no. 1 (2002): 95–112, reprinted in Gandhi’s Tiger and Sita’s Smile: Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Culture (Delhi: Yoda Press, 2005).
Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (New York: Random House, 1942), 1:208–9.
Na‘im Ahmad, ed., Kulliyat-i Mir Ja‘far Zatalli (Aligarh: Adabi Akadmi, 1979), 215.
Mirza Qadir Bakhsh Bahadur Sābir, Gulistan-e Sukhan (Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Urdu Akademi, 1982), 254.
See Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, “Burning Rage, Icy Scorn: the Poetry of Ja‘far Zatalli,” Lecture at University of Texas, Austin, September 24, 2008.
S. R. Faruqi, “Expression of the Indo-Muslim Mind in Urdu Ghazal” in The Secret Mirror: Essays on Urdu Poetry (New Delhi: Academic Literature, 1981), 11–33, agrees with Āzād. Nurul Hasan Hashmi’s insistence that Urdu poets were influenced only by Persian, not by local Indian languages, seems at variance with the facts. See his Dilli ka Dabistan-i Sha‘iri, 117–19.
Barron Gregory Holland, The Satsai of Bihari: Hindi Poetry of the Early Riti Period; Introduction, Translation, and Notes (University of California, Berkeley, PhD, dissertation 1969), 34. The introduction contains an account of Riti poetry’s themes and conventions.
See Ram Avadh Dwivedi, A Critical Survey of Hindi Literature (New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1966), 102;
Ram Kumar Varma, Hindi Sahitya ka Alochanatmak Itihas (Allahabad: Rama Narayana Lal Beni Madhava, 1964), 619.
Allison Busch, “Hidden in Plain View: Brajbhasha Poets at the Mughal Court,” Modern Asian Studies 44, no. 2 (2010): 267–309.
Waris Shah, The Adventures of Hir and Ranjha, trans. Charles Frederick Usborne (London: P. Owen, 1973).
Abdulhafiz Qatil, introduction to Qais ka Muntakhab Divan-i Rekhti (Hyderabad: Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Taalim, 1984), 17.
Zatal Namah: Kulliyat-i Ja‘far Zatallih, ed. Rashid Hasan Khan (New Delhi: Anju-man Taraqqi-yi Urdu, 2003), 32–35; 304–5.
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© 2012 Ruth Vanita
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Vanita, R. (2012). Introduction. In: Gender, Sex, and the City. Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137016560_1
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