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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:
- xml
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 4 months ago
- License:
- Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
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lament_for_delhi_lv_v3.pdf