Urdu Through Its Others: Ghazal, Canonization, and Translation.

Abstract

My dissertation, "Urdu Through Its Others: Ghazal, Canonization, and Translation" analyzes the codification of the Urdu literary tradition as it is both celebrated and reviled in a wide variety of popular and scholarly media. I focus specifically on the genre of the ghazal, which, as the most canonical of Urdu literary forms, holds a unique cultural cache throughout all of South Asia and the diaspora. The canonization of the ghazal reifies Urdu's linguistic boundaries through the project of literary histories and comparison with other proximate literary traditions like Hindi, Persian, and English. This reified notion of Urdu not only underwrites Anglicist colonial intervention in India by rhetorically painting Urdu as the backward foil to the English's modern progressivism, but also continues to shape the national Urdu imaginary in which the language is both vilified as dangerously communalist and idealized as redemptively secular. Although canonizing literary histories point to Rekhtah as the historical antecedent of the Urdu language, I show, via readings of the ghazals of Urdu's "founder" Valī Dakkanī (1667-1707), that Rekhtah in fact represents a unique poetic mode--an idiom of translation that forces us to reconsider boundaries between languages against the standardizing forces of canonization. The uneven ways in which the translative quality of Rekhtah get passed on to the Urdu tradition as it unfolds during the period of colonialism have shaped the ways in which Urdu is seen in the national imaginary as derivative, backward, and foreign. At the same time, popular narratives about ghazal work to naturalize the Urdu tradition in India, particularly through the nationalization of canonical poets Mirzā Ghālib (1797-1869) and Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984). This dissertation diverges from existing attempts to establish canonical literary histories, or reconstruct a moment prior to translation, which ultimately reinforce colonial notions of both history and translation; instead, I focus on the traces of past texts and events as they continue to operate within the present--what I am calling historicity--ultimately arguing that moments of translation themselves constitute the Urdu language and literary tradition.