Experiments in Form: Urdu Literary Culture and Temporalization

Between 1750 and 1755, four Indian poets produced the first commemorative lists of Urdu poets. All four poets claimed to be the first to do so, and all four wrote their lists, or tazkiras, in Persian. These included the best known Urdu poet of the 18th century, Mir, and his contemporaries Hamid, Qaim, and Gardezi. These tazkiras are interesting for us because they broke with previous models of tazkira-writing in Persian. From the thirteenth century on, Persian-language tazkiras had been written in reference to already existing ones, and so a poet staked their status as a connoisseur in reference to others. Who one held as a literary model, or who one denigrated as overrated, were positions that made claims to the commemorator’s own critical ability. In the case of these eighteenth-century tazkiras, our four poets each canonized a literary tradition ab initio. Each had to grapple with the uniqueness of the Urdu language and their own unique status as fountainheads of Urdu literary criticism. This produced new experiments in tazkira-writing, most notably that our writers therefore had to historicize Urdu poetry. These writers, Mir and Qaim in particular, write as literary historians and present us with an alternative temporalization of India from the 13th to the 18th centuries. In this paper I will explore this alternative, and then argue that the emergence of Urdu reflects a historical rupture of epochal proportions: namely that Urdu emerges precisely through the connectivity and networks of circulation that were established in the early modern. However, as our tazkira-writers show us, this emergence cannot be historicized onto the temporal framework of the Mughal empire, nor can it be mapped onto the streets of Delhi. Urdu’s literary career brings to light the widespread transformations of the period that cannot be captured in imperial histories.