Knapczyk. Phd Dissertation. Final Draft. 8.20.14
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Copyright by Peter Andrew Knapczyk 2014 The Dissertation Committee for Peter Andrew Knapczyk certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Crafting the Cosmopolitan Elegy in North India: Poets, Patrons, and the Urdu Mars̤ iyah , 1707-1857 Committee: Syed Akbar Hyder, Supervisor Rupert Snell Gail Minault Patrick Olivelle Martha Selby Afsar Mohammad Crafting the Cosmopolitan Elegy in North India: Poets, Patrons, and the Urdu Mars̤ iyah , 1707-1857 by Peter Andrew Knapczyk, B.A.; M.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2014 For Kusum Acknowledgements In the course of researching and writing this dissertation, I have incurred innumerable debts of kindness and generosity that I cannot begin to repay, but which I am honored to acknowledge here. To begin, I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Syed Akbar Hyder, whose courses in Urdu literature at UT captivated me early on, and whose unwavering patience and enthusiasm have sustained me to the completion of this project. I am grateful that my time in Austin overlapped with Rupert Snell, whose inspiration and guidance are reflected in the pages of this work. I thank Gail Minault and Patrick Olivelle who have often shared their wisdom with me over the years; their teaching and scholarship are models of excellence to which I aspire. I am also grateful to Martha Selby and Afsar Mohammad for their advice and encouragement. This project was greatly enriched by the generosity of Naiyer Masud and his son Timsal Masud. Not only did they allow me to explore their private collection for days at a time, they also welcomed me as a guest in their home in Lucknow for fine meals and many insightful conversations. My acquaintance with these two scholars was truly a highlight of this project. My research and writing were funded by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship; a American Institute of India Studies Junior Research Fellowship; a travel grant from the Department of Asian Studies, University of Texas at Austin; and a Cullen Trust Endowment Fellowship from the Graduate School, University of Texas at Austin. v During the period of my Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship, I was affiliated with Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi, where S. M. Azizuddin Husain was my faculty sponsor. During the period of my AIIS Junior Fellowship, I was affiliated with the Henry Martyn Institute in Hyderabad, where Qadeer Khwaja was my faculty sponsor. I am grateful to both of these faculty sponsors for their assistance. The administrative staffs of both programs, especially Purnima Mehta, Elise Auerbach, Adam Grotsky, and S.K. Bharathi, ensured that my time in India was extremely productive. I conducted a major part of this research at libraries and archives in India and the United Kingdom, and the success of this project owes a great deal to the staff members of these institutions. In the U.K., these included the British Library; the Royal Asiatic Society, London; Cambridge University; and the University of Edinburgh. In India, these included the Sahitya Academi, New Delhi; Jamia Millia Islamia; Anjuman Tarqqi Urdu (Hind), New Delhi; Iran Culture House; Jawaharlal Nehru University; Aligarh Muslim University; Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library; the Asiatic Society, Kolkata; National Library, Kolkata; Salar Jung Museum; Osmania University; Idara-e Adabiyat-e Urdu, Hyderabad; Lucknow University. Special thanks to the Raja of Mahmudabad for allowing me to consult his private library. There are many others who played important roles in my research for this project. In no particular order, these include: Ryan Perkins, Mrs. Sharma and her staff, Ahtesham Khan, Sheeba Iftikhar, Ram Advani, Ghulam Nabi, Arshad ul-Qadiri, Rashid Musvi, Ali Zaheer, Mujtaba Husain, and Sadiq Naqvi. I thank Carla Petievich and Frances Pritchett for providing me with copies of texts from their personal libraries. Early on in my vi research, Jameel Ahmad first directed me to Masud Hasan Rizvi Adib’s manuscript collection. Ulrike Stark helped with questions about publication history. Michael Bednar and Supriya Gandhi shared advice for conducting manuscript research. At the University of Texas at Austin, I remained in good hands with our Graduate Secretary, Jennifer Tipton. I must also thank Merry Burlingham and the staff of the Interlibrary Loan at the PCL who filled my many requests for rare Urdu and Persian texts. I am also grateful to the following faculty and staff members in Austin: Shahnaz Hassan, Edeltraud Harzer, Joel Brereton, Herman van Olphen, and Jeannie Cortez. Classmates who helped by talking through ideas and offering advice include Elliott McCarter, Isabel Huacuja, Matt Sayers, Max Bruce, Imran Khan, Nathan Tabor, Mubbashir Rizvi, Ian Woolford, Ishan Chakrabarti, Sarah Green, Suzanne Schultz, and Jonathan Seefeldt. At the University of Colorado Boulder, I want to thank Janice Brown and David Atherton who encouraged me to share a portion of this research with the department. Finally, I would like to thank my family members in the US and India who cheered me on at every step of this project. This work is dedicated to my wife, Kusum. I am delighted to be starting a new chapter with her now. vii Crafting the Cosmopolitan Elegy in North India: Poets, Patrons, and the Urdu Mars̤ iyah , 1707-1857 Peter Andrew Knapczyk, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2014 Supervisor: Syed Akbar Hyder This dissertation examines the literary and socio-religious development of mars ̤ iyah , a genre of Urdu elegiac poetry associated with the ritual life of Shi ʿi Muslims in South Asia. I use the mars ̤ iyah tradition as a touchstone for investigating the rise of Urdu literary culture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the North Indian centers of Delhi and Avadh. In the early 1700s, mars ̤ iyah poets were among the first to shape Delhi’s local vernacular into the Urdu literary language. By the mid-1800s, Urdu would assume many of Persian’s literary roles and become North India’s foremost cosmopolitan literary culture. This study focuses on the genre of mars ̤ iyah and the lives of mars ̤ iyah poets, while providing a unique perspective on this period’s shifting literary and cultural landscape, and offering a corrective to the discourse of linguistic and religious nationalism that has obscured Urdu’s history. In the first part of this dissertation, I argue that the experiments of mars ̤ iyah poets to develop the genre’s form, literary language, and aesthetics were instrumental in creating Urdu’s translocal appeal and composite cultural orientation. Among the genres of Urdu literature, mars ̤ iyah was exceptional in its ability to synthesize Persianate and viii Indic literary sensibilities, and traditional and contemporary worldviews. These innovations helped to make Urdu a viable alternative to Persian as a cosmopolitan literary culture, and made mars ̤ iyah a model for later reformist poets as they crafted a response to modernity and colonialism. The second part of this dissertation examines the changing roles and status of mars ̤ iyah poets within systems of patronage and hierarchies of political and religious authority. Although in the early 1700s mars ̤ iyah poets were relatively marginalized and even dismissed as “inept poets,” in later generations mars ̤ iyah poets became celebrated as masters of Urdu literature and revered as religious functionaries. Despite mars ̤ iyah ’s association with Shi ʿi sectarian ritual, temporal rulers such as the Navābs of Avadh patronized mars ̤ iyah poets and promoted the genre among their diverse population as a strategy for fostering social cohesion and a shared cultural ideal. In the mid-1800s, as British rule began to undermine traditional systems of patronage, mars ̤ iyah poets were at the vanguard of seeking out new sources of patronage in distant centers, advancing the ideals of Avadh’s mars ̤ iyah tradition, and establishing Urdu as the new cosmopolitan literary culture across India. ix Table of Contents Notes on Transliteration ........................................................................................ xii Chapter One: Introduction .....................................................................................1 1) Sources and Methods ...............................................................................6 2) Historical Context ..................................................................................10 3) Urdu Literary Culture and Cosmopolitanism ........................................22 Chapter Two: The Mars ̤ iyah Tradition in Ritual Life and Literature ....................38 1) The Karbala Narrative in Shi ʿi Devotion and Mars ̤ iyah .......................39 2) Mars ̤ iyah and Ris ̤ āī Adab in Ritual Life: The Shi ʿi Majlis ....................49 3) The Shi ʿi Majlis and Ritual Life in Delhi and Avadh, 1707-1857 ........55 4) Overview of the Classical Urdu Mars ̤ iyah ............................................68 5) Mars ̤ iyah Studies in English and Urdu Scholarship ..............................80 Chapter Three: Mars ̤ iyah and Genre......................................................................86 1) Rekhtah Poets and the Persian Ġazal ....................................................88 2) Mars ̤ iyah in Persian and Dakani ..........................................................101