The Broken Spell: the Romance Genre in Late Mughal India

The Broken Spell: The Romance Genre in Late Mughal India Pasha Mohamad Khan Submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2013 © 2013 Pasha Mohamad Khan All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT The Broken Spell: The Romance Genre in Late Mughal India Pasha Mohamad Khan This study is concerned with the Indian “romance” (qiṣṣah) genre, as it was understood from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. Particularly during the Mughal era, oral and written romances represented an enchanted world populated by sorcerers, jinns, and other marvellous beings, underpinned by worldviews in which divine power was illimitable, and “occult” sciences were not treated dismissively. The promulgation of a British-derived rationalist-empiricist worldview among Indian élites led to the rise of the novel, accompanied by élite scorn for the romance as an unpalatably fantastic and frivolous genre. This view was developed by the great twentieth-century romance critics into a teleological account of the romance as a primitive and inadequate precursor of the novel, a genre with no social purpose but to amuse the ignorant and credulous. Using recent genre theory, this study examines the romance genre in Persian, Urdu, Punjabi, and Braj Bhasha. It locates the romance genre within a system of related and opposed genres, and considers the operation of multiple genres within texts marked as “romances,” via communal memory and intertextuality. The worldviews that underpinned romances, and the purposes that romances were meant to fulfill, are thereby inspected. Chapters are devoted to the opposition and interpenetration of the “fantastic” romance and “factual” historiography (tārīḳh), to romances’ function in client-patron relationships via panegyrics (madḥ), and to romances’ restagings of moral arguments rehearsed in ethical manuals (aḳhlāq). Table of Contents Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... ii Dedication ..................................................................................................................................... v Transliteration Scheme .............................................................................................................. vi 1. Introduction: The Romance in the Age of the Novel .......................................................... 1 2. Genre ........................................................................................................................................ 36 3. Romance .................................................................................................................................. 64 4. History ................................................................................................................................... 105 5. Panegyric ............................................................................................................................... 141 6. Ethics ...................................................................................................................................... 176 7. Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 202 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 205 Appendix: List of Copies of the Ḥātim-nāmah ....................................................................... 213 i Acknowledgements It is impossible to thank all who deserve thanks, or to thank some of them sufficiently. My advisor Frances Pritchett is one of the latter. Her early work on romances has led to the emergence of my own project; for that alone I should be thankful. Her mentorship has shaped me, both as a scholar and otherwise, and she has been generous with her time, and has opened doors for me. Allison Busch, thorough, indefatigable and unstinting in her support, is another to whom sufficient thanks cannot be given. The other professors on my committee, Hossein Kamaly, Maria Subtelny, and Farina Mir, have my heartfelt gratitude. My archival research for this study was generously funded by a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, while the writing of these pages was funded by a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the Mellon/ACLS. Over the course of my research I indulged my bibliophilia to an unhealthy degree. To the librarians, the cheerful propagators of this disease, I owe a round of thanks. In Chicago, Jim Nye shared with me his awe-inspiringly deep knowledge of archives around the world. At the British Library in London, Leena Mitford was excessively kind, giving me access to Aḥmad Yār’s Punjabi Ḥātim-nāmah. In Lahore Hamid Ali helped me greatly at the Library of Punjab University, and Muhammad Shah Bukhari allowed me to view several important manuscripts at the National Museum archive in Karachi. Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s study of the Dāstān-i Amīr Ḥamzah, Sāḥirī, Shāhī, Ṣāḥib-qirānī, is to a large extent the inspiration behind this study in its current form. Future analyses of the dāstān genre will be written in the shadow of his monumental work, which deserves to be widely influential. When he visited New York, Faruqi Sahib shared with me some choice morsels his great store of knowledge, and his encouragement has meant a great deal to me. ii In Lahore in 2004-2005, the late Suhail Ahmad Khan, then Chair of the Urdu Department at Government College, took me under his wing and introduced me to Muhammad Salim-ur Rahman and Riyaz Ahmad. I was very fortunate to have known him, and grieved at his sudden passing. Also in Lahore, Razzaq and Mushtaq housed and fed me, and Barbara Schmidt, Humera Alam and Muhammad Saleem Akhtar were enormously helpful in their various ways. I have presented drafts of several chapters at various conferences, and I must thank those who gave me these opportunities: Ajay Rao, Jennifer Dubrow, Francesca Orsini, Manan Ahmed, and Harpreet Singh. Francesca Orsini’s invitation to a conference at the School of Oriental and African Studies was particularly momentous, and her work on romances has helped to shape my views. I thank Ajay for having enough faith in me to allow me to help organize his Sanskrit-Persian workshop and panel at the Biennial Conference on Iranian Studies, probably not realizing my inexperience in those early days. Christopher Shackle must be thanked for his patience and forbearance and for answering my questions in Russell Square after I had botched the first attempt at a meeting. Arthur Dudney helped me through the most difficult of times. I am in his debt for life. I owe a great deal of my excellent mental balance to Neeraja Poddar, and to Mae Mehra and Joel Lee. Owen Cornwall kept me company at the dinner table which he illumined with his presence and with gleams of his knowledge of Ġhālib’s poetry. Abhishek Kaicker unwittingly sowed the seed of my central insight regarding genre. Separately from this, he has probably sowed the seeds of much mental imbalance. Azfar Moin kept me company at the British Library in 2009, and the ideas that he communicated to me that autumn are foundational to this project. Prashant Keshavmurthy alerted me to the existence of Sharar’s comments on the iii figure of Ḥātim T̤ā’ī. Walter Hakala and Jennifer Dubrow have been exemplary colleagues. May our paths cross often. In Toronto, Prasad deserves my unbounded gratitude; I will only say that he was the academic upon whom I tried most to model myself. Adil’s true friendship and infectious curiosity have kept me going. Rabea gave me much hope and allowed me to hold learned conversations with her son Amar, an Urdu romance character come to life. In the US, Jyoti Mamu’s enthusiasm and Tattae Khala’s practicality helped me a great deal, and it has been good to have Fahd and Zahran around in the end. My parents cannot be thanked enough for supporting my wish to be a literary scholar, a desire that many other relatives have no doubt considered a clear sign of my utter madness. Lastly, I thank Kanita, for her love and strength. iv Dedication To my parents, Yasmeen and Waheed Ur-Rehman Khan v Transliteration Scheme The range of languages used in this dissertation has necessitated the creation of a reasonably accurate, convenient and consistent system of transliteration for Urdu-Hindi, Persian, Arabic, Punjabi and Braj Bhasha. The orthography of quotations from MSS has been treated as though it were modern. For instance, in the case of the following, کہوري ني جارہ نہین کہایا what looks like kahorī nī jārah nahīn kahāyā is rendered as ghor̥e ne cārah nahīṅ khāyā, i.e., گھوڑے نے چارہ نہیں کھایا On the other hand, punctuation has in most cases been left out of texts that would not have borne it in their original forms, even when, as is usually the case, the modern edition from which the quotation is taken has inserted punctuation marks into the text. Arabic (1.1) I have distinguished between Persian-Urdu-Punjabi and Arabic pronunciations of certain consonants. Therefore, when they appear in an Arabic context, the following letters are transliterated according to their fuṣḥah Arabic pronunciations: t̲h̲ā’, d̲h̲āl, ḍād. (1.2) “Dagger alif” is transliterated like a normal alif, i.e., as ā. For instance: bi-’ismi Allāhi al- Raḥmāni al-Raḥīm—both ā’s here represent dagger alifs. The alif maksūrah

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