Abstract
Johan Huizinga’s examination of culture as play is particularly evocative for this study, because, unlike most Western thinkers, he integrates non-Western ideas into his argument that “civilization arises and unfolds in and as play” and that play, being outside truth and falsehood, expresses itself in excess and “is freedom itself.”1 Having no purpose outside itself, it steps out-side real life into an intense and sacred reality of its own. Although undertaken spontaneously, it creates order and has rules and limits.
Life must be lived as play.
—Plato, Laws, 7.796
I don’t play accurately—anyone can play accurately—but I play with wonderful expression.
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
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Notes
All page numbers refer to Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1955).
Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, “Conventions of Love, Love of Conventions: Urdu Love Poetry in the Eighteenth Century,” Annual of Urdu Studies 14 (1999): 3–32;
Frances W. Pritchett, “On Ralph Russell’s Reading of the Classical Ghazal,” Annual of Urdu Studies 11 (1996), 197–201.
Malik Mohamed, The Foundations of the Composite Culture in India (Delhi: Aakaar, 2007), 101.
Sabir Ali Khan, Sa‘adat Yar Khan Rangin (Karachi: Anjuman Taraqqi-yi Urdu, 1956), 105. Hereafter cited as SYKR.
Mir Qutbuddin Batin, Gulistan-i Bekhizan (Lucknow: UP Urdu Akadmi, 1982), 100.
Khalil-ur Rahman Da‘udi, ed., Kulliyat-i Insha (Lahore: Lahore Majlis-i Taraqqi-yi Adab, 1969), 110. Hereafter cited as KtI.
Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, A Fatal Friendship: The Nawabs, the British and the City of Lucknow, in The Lucknow Omnibus (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 210.
Michael Herbert Fisher, A Clash of Cultures: Awadh, the British, and the Mughals (Riverdale, MD: Riverdale Company, 1987), 26, 65–71.
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Anna A. Suvorova, Masnavi: A Study of Urdu Romance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 35–37.
Amina Khatoon, translator of the book from Persian to Urdu, demolishes Āzād’s claim that Sa‘adat Ali was grave and sober, different from the fun-loving Inshā. Insha Allah Khan, Lataif us-Sa‘ādat, trans. Amina Khatoon (Bangalore: Kausar Press, 1955), chhotī he.
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Mir Insha Allah Khan Insha, Daryā-ĕ Lat̤āfat, translated into Urdu by Pandit Bri-jmohan Dattatreya “Kaifi” (Delhi: Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu, 1988), 66. Hereafter cited as D-eL.
Nurulhasan Hashimi, Dilli ka Dabistan-i Sha’iri (Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Urdu Akadmi, 1992), 403.
Mustafa Khan Shaiftah, Tazkirah-yi Gulshan-i Bekhar (Lahore: Majlis Taraqqi Adab, 1973), 231.
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© 2012 Ruth Vanita
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Vanita, R. (2012). A Poetics of Play. In: Gender, Sex, and the City. Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137016560_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137016560_10
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