• On The Lament for Delhi, Genre, Literature, and History

    Author(s):
    Pasha Mohamad Khan (see profile)
    Date:
    2015
    Subject(s):
    South Asia, Poetry, Literature, Urdu poetry, Urdu literature, Literary form, Sepoy Rebellion (India , History, Historiography
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    1857 Rebellion, Urdu, Urdu Literature, Genre, South Asia, South Asian Studies, historiography
    Permanent URL:
    https://doi.org/10.17613/1mfk-y513
    Abstract:
    The collection of poems Fughān-i Dihlī (The Lament for Delhi) was compiled in 1863 by Tafazzul Husain Kaukab. Its poems reference the turbulent events of 1857 and their aftermath in Delhi. The shahr-āshob genre of poetry, which began as a catalogue of ravishing male youths in Persian, took on a different meaning in later Urdu literature. Generally by the nineteenth century, a shahr-āshob was poem that detailed a city’s sociopolitical crisis. While scholars have often valued shahr-āshobs as mines of socio-historical information, the highly literary style of the Lament’s poems challenges this form of interpretation. Literary convention also renders its poems resistant to Pakistani and Indian nationalistic readings.
    Notes:
    The current article is a longer draft version of the introduction to and translation of poems from ``The Lament for Delhi'' (Fughān-i Dihlī), a shorter version of which was published in: Nationalism in the Vernacular: Hindi, Urdu, and the Literature of Indian Freedom. Ed. Shobna Nijhawan. Delhi: Permanent Black. 2009. 88-92. I proofread it and modified its formatting in 2015.
    Metadata:
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    7 months ago
    License:
    Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
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