Cosmopolitan Dreams

Cosmopolitan Dreams v Cosmopolitan Dreams v The Making of Modern Urdu Literary Culture in Colonial South Asia Jennifer Dubrow University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu © 2018 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 23 22 21 20 19 18 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dubrow, Jennifer, author. Title: Cosmopolitan dreams : the making of modern Urdu literary culture in colonial South Asia / Jennifer Dubrow. Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018008661 | ISBN 9780824876692 (cloth; alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Urdu literature—19th century—History and criticism. | Literature and society—South Asia—History—19th century. Classification: LCC PK2157.D83 2018 | DDC 891.4/3909954—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008661 Cover art: Cover of 1961 edition of Fasana-e Azad, edited by Ra’is Ahmad Ja‘fri. Courtesy of Sheikh Ghulam Ali and Sons. University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Contents Preface vii Acknowledgments ix Note on Transliteration and Translation xv Introduction: Print, Literary Modernity, and the Urdu Cosmopolis 1 Chapter One: Printing the Cosmopolis 13 Chapter Two: The Novel in Installments 35 Chapter Three: Experiments with Form 62 Chapter Four: Reading the World 82 Conclusion: New Spaces of the Urdu Cosmopolis 109 Notes 121 Bibliography 151 Index 167 Preface Cosmopolitan Dreams In his response to Benedict Anderson’s foundational work on nationalism, the historian Partha Chatterjee remarked, “If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain ‘modular’ forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine? History, it would seem, has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity. Even our imaginations must remain forever colonized.”1 This book is about how readers and writers in late nineteenth-century South Asia imagined and dreamed anew—using the very tools that Anderson had isolated as providing “the technical means for ‘re-presenting’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation”: the novel and the newspaper.2 In the chapters that follow, I show how the arrival of affordable print technology in the late nineteenth century fostered a flourishing and dynamic literary culture in Urdu. Literature became a site in which modern daily life could be portrayed and satirized, the protocols of modernity challenged, and new futures imagined. Urdu readers and writers envisioned a particular form of affiliation through their participation in print. This is called in this work “the Urdu cosmopolis.” Urdu was a transregional language in the nineteenth century, spoken across a wide swath of present-day South Asia. It was spoken by the educated classes in northern India and present- day northern Pakistan, and was the language of the princely state of Hyderabad (which comprised parts of present-day Telangana, Karna- taka, Andhra Pradesh, and Maharashtra). As recent scholarship has shown, Urdu was also spoken by migrants to the thriving port city of Bombay, and by Indian settlers in East Africa and Burma. This world of Urdu speakers was brought together by the spread of lithography, a print technology invented and brought to India in the early nineteenth century, and by the proliferating railway and telegraph lines. vii viii Preface The Urdu cosmopolis acted to resist the fractures of religious communalism—political forms that relied on religion as a “hard” marker of identity—and incipient nationalism. Against this back- drop, the actions of members of the Urdu cosmopolis to claim a shared space and affiliation on the basis of language, rather than religion, region, caste, or class, became an act of resistance, the construc- tion of a cosmopolitan ideal that was soon challenged, yet revived in other forms and other locations. Unlike Urdu’s status in the present day, when it is often understood as a language used exclusively by Muslims, this book brings to light a different moment in Urdu’s history, when its users imagined other forms of belonging. It shows how languages can be at the center of nonnational, transregional communities whose borders transcend the modern nation-state, and how they can be tied to ethical practice. A modern critical ethos developed in the pages of late nineteenth- century Urdu periodicals. In the conclusion, I follow the continuation of this ethos into the present. I close here by citing Mulk Raj Anand’s 1928 novel Untouchable, which follows a day in the life of a young Dalit sweeper named Bakha. As Bakha debates between different forms of modernity, he “dreams of a way to access both ethical and political forms of liberation.”3 Such dreams of liberation began in the late nineteenth century as modern literary forms became the means with which to interrogate the self, critique political and social norms, and model new social relations. Cosmopolitan Dreams suggests not a vision of liberation that went unfulfilled but rather the critical act of dreaming in moving toward freedom. Acknowledgments Cosmopolitan Dreams is in part about alternative forms of community based on language and affective bonds. It gives me great pleasure to acknowledge here the academic and Urdu communities without whom this book would not have been possible. My work in Urdu would never have begun without the early guidance and encouragement of professor Frances W. Pritchett at Columbia University. Her passion for Urdu poetry and tireless work in making visible the many-layered tapestry of Urdu literary culture have served as model and inspiration. Fran has written of the Urdu ustad (teacher/mentor) as “a priceless resource”; I can- not express my intellectual and personal debt to my two ustads at the University of Chicago, C. M. Naim and Muzaffar Alam. From my early days as a student in Naim sahib’s Urdu class, to our later discussions of poetry, literature, and Urdu literary culture in the classroom and over coffee, Naim sahib exemplified how to be a scholar, teacher, and public intellectual. Muzaffar sahib supported and guided my project as it developed over the years; besides serv- ing as dissertation advisor and mentor, his intellectual curiosity and wide-ranging scholarship form models that I admire and hope to emulate. Dr. Aftab Ahmad, now at Columbia University, as di- rector of the AIIS Urdu language program in Lucknow further re- fined my Urdu with humor and patience. He has also been a dear friend. I also thank early Urdu teachers Afroz Taj and John Caldwell, who first taught me the Urdu script. My thinking and scholarship have been nurtured and sus- tained by a number of intellectual mentors and scholars: Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sheldon Pollock, Ulrike Stark, Priya Joshi, David Lelyveld, Sudipta Kaviraj, Francesca Orsini, Lawrence Rothfield, Vasudha Dalmia, Sanjay Joshi, Swapan Chakraborty and Abhijit ix x Acknowledgments Gupta, Gail Minault, Christina Oesterheld, Nile Green, Farina Mir, Sascha Ebeling, Margrit Pernau, Veena Naregal, Veena Old- enburg, Francis Robinson, Seema Alavi, and Kavita Datla. I thank them for their work, and also for supporting and encouraging me at various stages. Lawrence Rothfield took on my project in the early days and supported my interest in novel theory. Clint Seely asked important questions at the beginning. In the field of Urdu studies, I am grateful for the pioneering and foundational work of Kathryn Hansen, Gail Minault, Barbara Metcalf, Mehr Afshan Farooqi, Syed Akbar Hyder, Christina Oesterheld, Frances Pritch- ett, C. M. Naim, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, Mike Fisher, David Lelyveld, and Muhammad Umar Memon. At the University of Chicago, Gary Tubb, Yigal Bronner, Sascha Ebeling, Valerie Rit- ter, Whitney Cox, Elena Bashir, Rochona Majumdar, Steven Col- lins, Wendy Doniger, and Ron Inden taught and encouraged me. Their intellectual and personal guidance has been invaluable. The archives of the Urdu cosmopolis are spread from the United States to South Asia. This book would not exist without the generosity, support, and guidance of the staff of several volu- minous and extraordinary libraries in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. I thank the staff of the Khuda Bakhsh Ori- ental Public Library in Patna, whose work to preserve and digitize Urdu, Persian, and Arabic manuscripts and printed books ensures that these treasures will be safeguarded for future generations. The staff at the Salar Jung Museum and Andhra Pradesh State Ar- chives provided invaluable assistance in locating hard-to-find periodicals and pointing me to new sources. The British Library is where this project really began, in the sense that it was there that I first became engrossed in the pages of Avadh Akhbar and glimpsed the incredible breadth and depth of Urdu print culture. The library staff’s tireless work to preserve nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Urdu printed material, and their genuine joy at bringing out old materials made the library a truly productive and inspiring place to work. I thank Leena Mitford and Mike Fisher for guiding me through the collections and providing access to material. The work of James Nye, Bronwen Bledsoe, SAMP (South Asia Materials Project), and the Center for Research Libraries in Chi- cago to disseminate Urdu periodicals and books serves as a guid- Acknowledgments xi ing light for the future. I am especially grateful to Jim Nye for al- ways encouraging and facilitating my archival research. I have been fortunate to be surrounded by several wonderful intellectual communities at the University of Washington. In the department of Asian Languages and Literature, I thank Nandini Abedin, Ian Chapman, Justin Jesty, Tim Lenz, David Knechtges, Amy Ohta, Prem Pahlajrai, Pauli Sandjaja, Wang Ping, and Anne Yue-Hashimoto for many words of encouragement over the years.

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