Books by Taimoor Shahid
ProQuest, 2023
This dissertation examines the Islamic epic romance tale of Saif al-Mulūk. A universalist narrati... more This dissertation examines the Islamic epic romance tale of Saif al-Mulūk. A universalist narrative embodying a religio-ethical worldview about self-formation, travel, and cosmopolitan belonging, Saif al-Mulūk is the story of a prince’s quest for love. It has been narrated from the 11th through 21st centuries across the vast geographical space and virtually all the languages of the Indian Ocean World, from Judeo-Arabic to Malay. The dissertation reconstructs for the first time the long history of Saif’s production, consumption, and transmission from 11th century West Asia to 21st century Southern Asia to investigate the social, cultural, political, and ideological foundations underlying the universality of Saif al-Mulūk across diverse socio-political contexts of the court, the port, the town, and the Sufi hospice. Unearthing a variegated archive, the first half of the dissertation provides a longue durée view of Saif as a paradigmatic example of the cosmological, philosophico-ethical, and literary discourses that shaped the Indian Ocean World as a cultural continuum. It complements this view with a microhistory of Saif’s proliferation in various languages of 17th century South Asia, situating it in the Early Modern Indian Ocean World connections between the Deccan, Sindh, Arakan, and Sumatra. It argues that Saif exemplifies the cosmopolitan humanism of Islamic ethics (adab) and morals (aḳḥlāq) discourse rooted in Sufi-philosophical categories to articulate a comportment of openness towards the other as a fundamental means of ethico-spiritual self-formation in relation to the cosmos.
Saif’s ethical discourse reaches its zenith in its 19th century retelling by the Kashmiri Sufi Saint Mian Muhammad Bakhsh. Building upon the historical overview, the dissertation examines for the first time this retelling—popularly known as the ‘Quran in Punjabi’—through a historical, philological-interpretative, and ethnographic study. It finds the categories of ethics (adab), morality (akhlāq), the Sufi-path (faqr/tasavvuf), and love (‘ishq) as central to Saif’s articulation of cosmopolitan humanism understood in the Sufi-philosophical framework of Unicity of Being (wahdat al-wujūd). It also reconstructs the cosmology and phenomenology of Saif’s primary mode of consumption, its musical audition (samā‘), revealing it as an exercise of affective ethical self-fashioning. Moreover, it explores Saif’s encounter with modernity, analyzing the evolution of Saif’s samā‘ across 20th and 21st centuries, and contextualizing it within the historical changes in material culture, production technology, market demands, and the consequent transformations in the hermeneutics of engagement with the text and its narrative.
In summary, this dissertation illuminates the enduring presence and evolving nature of Saif as a paradigmatic global Islamic ethics and morals discourse offering insights into the values and ideals of the Indian Ocean World and the cosmopolitan selfhood and sense of belonging sustained by its social, political, and literary culture. In adopting a unique interdisciplinary, multilingual, comparative, and transhistorical approach, the project contributes to Indian Ocean historiography, Islamic studies, South Asian studies, comparative literature, and ethnomusicology. It explores how various peoples accommodated cultural and religious differences by asserting universalist and cosmopolitan Islamic modes of belonging in the Indian Ocean World, and in doing so offers fresh ethical lessons towards understanding alternative forms of globalism and cosmopolitan belonging in the world.
Published in 1899, Muhammad Hadi Ruswa’s famous novel, Umrao Jaan Ada, created a sensation when i... more Published in 1899, Muhammad Hadi Ruswa’s famous novel, Umrao Jaan Ada, created a sensation when it came out, with its candid fictionalized account of Umrao Jaan, based on a renowned Lucknow courtesan and poetess of the same name. Considered by many as the first Urdu novel, it remains highly popular today, and has been the basis for three films and a Pakistani television serial. What is less known, however, is that a month after he wrote Umrao Jaan Ada, Ruswa penned a short text, a novella entitled Junun-e-Intezar (The Madness of Waiting, April 1899) in which Umrao avenges herself on her creator, Ruswa, by narrating the story of his life. Blurring the lines between truth and fiction, narrator and character, this clever narrative strategy gives the courtesan a speaking voice.
While Umrao Jaan Ada, continues to evoke interest, this paratext has been completely forgotten -- until now. The Madness of Waiting redresses this imbalance, featuring both the Urdu original and a superb English translation of Junun-e-Intezar. The book also includes a critical introduction that rethinks Umrao Jaan Ada and the Urdu literary milieu of the late-nineteenth-century Lucknow.
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The Dangerous Man: Roshi, a prostitute, has always known how to take care of herself until the da... more The Dangerous Man: Roshi, a prostitute, has always known how to take care of herself until the day she meets a handsome young man called ‘Parrot’. Soon she is caught in a spiral of intrigue and she doesn’t know who to trust. Who is this ‘Parrot’? Will he prove to be her saviour? Or is he the archnemesis?
Mysterious Screams: Ten years ago, Nawwab Hashim was found dead in his bedroom. Now a man claiming to be him appears out of the blue. Sajid, his nephew and heir, doesn’t know what to believe, nor can he fathom the terrible screams that have started emerging from the house each night.
Papers by Taimoor Shahid
Many scholars have argued that Bollywood should be viewed as India’s “national” cinema, reflectin... more Many scholars have argued that Bollywood should be viewed as India’s “national” cinema, reflecting its policies, ambitions, self-understanding, and its vision for future. However, most of this analysis has taken narrative, as the privileged medium for nation-building, as the centre of its analysis. Taking this as my point of departure, I contend that Gowarikor’s Jodha-Akbar (2008), Bollywood’s last Muslim Historical, uses image and sound rather than the narrative as a two-pronged fundamental device for constructing a national imaginary that formulates Hinduized Muslimness as normative and equates unadulterated Muslimness with evil. All the villains in the film, for example, are portrayed as “devout” Muslims through a) their appearance (beard, turban, robe, head-scarf etc) and b) their Arabized vocabulary and pronunciation of the gutturals, in strong contrast with beardless “good” Muslims who cannot pronounce their gutturals. In another instance, a bhajan, a Hindu devotional song, serves as the final adjudicator in a debate between a Muslim “‘alim” (who is a co-conspirator against the state) and the Emperor. These and other numerous mediations in the sensory use sight and sound to create national “lieux de mémoire”: heterotopic sites of cultural memory which can be visited and revisited by the public. This collapse of history into experiential memory, that serves the identity-forming needs of the nation-state, relies heavily on the sensory as formative, which calls for a move away from cinema-as-narrative and towards cinema as aesthetic, sensory experience. This brings the aesthetic—open to sensory perception—into the idiom of the national which has been associated strongly with narrative as in Benedict Anderson’s seminal take
This is a complete concordance of Dīvān-e Ghālib, the Urdu works of Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan Ghā... more This is a complete concordance of Dīvān-e Ghālib, the Urdu works of Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan Ghālib (1796-1869), the preeminent Indian Urdu and Persian poet known for his ghazals. The ghazal, a traditional genre of Arabic, Persian, Urdu poetry is comprised of independent two line poems called shi'rs that follow a rhyme and are in one meter. This concordance-a complete index-is a digitally compiled work that uses his traditional divan, known in Urdu as muravvaj dīvān, as a reference point. This divan has two hundred and thirty four ghazals in total. The ghazals, however, are not traditionally numbered but they follow the same traditional sequence in all editions of the muravvaj dīvān.
The Annual of Urdu Studies, 2013
This is a short encyclopedia entry, with biographical information on Amir Minai and a brief sketc... more This is a short encyclopedia entry, with biographical information on Amir Minai and a brief sketch of his works, done for the Oxford Companion to Urdu Literature to be published by Oxford University Press, Karachi.
Minai, Amir Ahmad (1829-1900) – Amir Minai was born on 20h February 1829 in a religious and literary family that had settled in a Lucknow. In addition to his preliminary intellectual training at home Amir studied at the Farangi Mahal. He was trained in languages (Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit), philosophy, logic, religion, jurisprudence, history, geography, astrology, and other subjects such as ‘ilm-ul rijāl (the science of Hadith) and ‘ilm-e jafar (the art of divination). By the age of twenty-five he was esteemed as one of the prominent scholars of Lucknow....
This entry is also available published online, along with scans of his manuscripts at: amirminaiarchive.blogspot.com
Essays by Taimoor Shahid
This is a meditation on borders, international borders, the ways in which they structure our live... more This is a meditation on borders, international borders, the ways in which they structure our lives—our pasts, presents, and futures, and the ways in which we navigate them. It is a dialogue between what was and what is. It is a reverie, a plea, against the imagined lines that cut across our bodies, that separate us from our pasts, that divide our homes into halves, and that are always too real to pass.
It is based on selections from Padma Surkh Hai or The Bloodied Padma, the war diary of Shaakh, a student from Lahore studying at Dhaka University in 1971. War struck. And he moved with a Bengali friend’s family. Then they had to flee for life. First they fled from Dhaka to a small town, then to Rajshahi. Then to the Indian refugee camp across the river Padma. And then back from the refugee camp itself. All this while, Shaakh maintained a diary, in Urdu, his mother tongue, but also the tongue of the aggressors. He recorded killing, looting, arson, but also bare life during war, and the ways in which borders were created, navigated, and transcended.
Shaakh is my father. Here I read a few episodes from his diary and meditate on them through my own experiences: of borders, separations, migrations, and an inheritance of his past. I present this piece then as a tentative reflection on Borders of all kinds, seen through this episode of human history, an episode unfortunately not unique. Here the partition of 1947, of 1971, and the continuing partitions of the present come together. Here Dhaka and Lahore, and Calcutta and Chicago exist on the same plane in a complicated relationship built through text and sound: through disembodied connections that borders cannot sever.
It is to one of these connections that I owe this piece. It emerged from my collaboration with The Travelling Archive, a field recordings and field notes project based in Calcutta and run by singer and writer Moushumi Bhowmik and sound recordist and designer Sukanta Majumdar since 2003. I became friends with Moushumi di when I found myself across the India-Pakistan border that carves us into different flesh. Moushumi di had heard about my father’s diary, and she and Sukanta da had already been working on Borders for some time. We talked, and she came up with this idea: that we must do something. We must archive these voices for us to remember, and perhaps to transcend the Borders, through a collapsing of geographies, of time, of sounds. I thus recorded this piece for them in Chicago, which was then woven with Jarigan recordings—songs of lament sung for the martyrs of Karbala—from Faridpur, Bangladesh archived by The Travelling Archive in 2008. It was presented as an art installation at the annual I.G. Khan Memorial lecture event in Aligarh in Feb 2016. I am publishing here, however, only my contribution, in which I interact and interpret Borders as seen through my father’s eyes of 1971. It is not a finished project, and I invite you to comment, respond, and take this forward in whatever way you think necessary and useful to dismantle Borders of any kind.
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An ethnographic account of racialized/religious profiling and discrimination in contemporary Laho... more An ethnographic account of racialized/religious profiling and discrimination in contemporary Lahore, Pakistan after the global expansion of 'War on Terror.'
In today’s creative world, where everyone expects an artist to come up with ever new visual parla... more In today’s creative world, where everyone expects an artist to come up with ever new visual parlance, Jamal comfortably picks up the clichés, the untouchables of the art world, and gives them a fresh new perspective by sucking out their color and impregnating them with new meanings. What is wrong with a cliché, Jamal asks? And the answer he provides beautifully conjoins the concerns of the modern creative self with the temptations of a common visual aesthetics. He zooms into the frame of a butterfly and challenges its conventional beauty. He unweaves the rainbow and reminds us of its white light origins. He strips the roses off the props and creates a haunting scene from blooming flowers. For him the word cliché becomes a cliché. He discovers new avenues, and speaks with a rich visual vocabulary difficult to grasp in words. And he, like Rudolf Khametovich Nureyev, says, “If I could, why would I’ve bothered to paint?” when someone asks him the clichéd question, “Can you explain the meaning of this painting?”
The Friday Times, Mar 4, 2011
Madiha Sikander’s work is primarily concerned with books. However, in her work Sikander successfu... more Madiha Sikander’s work is primarily concerned with books. However, in her work Sikander successfully transforms the book into a visual space by dissolving the demarcation between image and word, texture and text. This makes the task of perception simultaneously sensory and cognitive, a process of meaning-making that is as much a part of the art work as the art work itself. Perception becomes laborious and consuming and thus akin to the backbreaking process of miniature painting. Parallel to this unifying process of meaning-making we find a process of unification at the conceptual level in which different ontological domains – the different categories of being – are fused into one.
Translations by Taimoor Shahid
Afzal Ahmed Syed (b. 1946) is a leading voice and an acknowledged master of classical and modern ... more Afzal Ahmed Syed (b. 1946) is a leading voice and an acknowledged master of classical and modern Urdu poetic expression. The two poems translated here reflect the wide range of Syed’s subject matter and its treatment, and echo the understated haunting and a search for poetic excess common to his expression. The first poem, published in 2009 in a literary periodical, simultaneously mourns the murder and celebrates the life of a dancing girl, one of the many victims of short Taliban occupation in the Swat Valley in Northern Pakistan. Typical of Syed’s style, the poem remains true to its historical circumstance—by referencing the street, the incident, the place of her murder (slaughterhouse rotary)—, and yet transcends the immediate by collapsing the present with the past and the future. It places the murdered girl on the altar alongside Mohenjo-Daro’s famous dancing girl, and wishes for her (imagined) trainees to continue dancing. History, poetry, and lived experience come together in his bare yet penetrating voice.
Syed’s second poem evokes a fatalistic yet hopeful sense of alienation that could be a universal human experience. The poem speaks for itself, but one can read his search for a new language to converse with one’s self as a parable for his work, or in fact all poetry. Is such a language possible? Perhaps, only poets have the key to such a language. Syed is surely leading the way to it in Urdu.
Desi Writers Lounge, Dec 2013
Random Reads, Aug 2011
Mysterious Screams: Ten years ago, the Nawwab Hashim was found dead in his bedroom. Now a man cla... more Mysterious Screams: Ten years ago, the Nawwab Hashim was found dead in his bedroom. Now a man claiming to be him appears out of the blue and moves back to the old house. Sajid, his nephew and heir, doesn’t know what to believe, nor can he fathom the terrible screams that have started emerging from the house each night. Moody, a romantic young American comes across the girl of his dreams. She gives him an antique casket and disappears. Soon thereafter, strange people start following the American. The answer to both these mysteries is one. The only man who can find it is genius snoop Imran.
Syllabi by Taimoor Shahid
This course aims to introduce students to the variety of exciting long form narrative poems produ... more This course aims to introduce students to the variety of exciting long form narrative poems produced in South Asian languages over the centuries, particularly in North India. The texts that we will read range from the story of how an exiled subject convinces a cloud to take a message to his wife to how a parrot prevents a merchant’s wife from cheating on him, from the battle of mouse and cat armies in a mosque to a prince’s journey in search of his fairy beloved, from the description of the numerous types of heroes and heroines to the famous journey of Rama. While focus will remain on Urdu/Dakani poems to aid the readings, students will also read some classics in Persian, Hindi (Awadhi, Brajbhasha), Sanskrit, and other languages in translation. Reading texts in the original will be encouraged; thus, Punjabi, Seraiki, Sindhi and Persian texts will be assigned for those who can read these languages, while translations will be suggested for others. This is a readings course that is open to students from all backgrounds, and as such most texts, particularly in the original, will be read in class. Students will not only become familiar with various texts, but also improve their language(s) and reading skills.
In Urdu, the focus will remain on the mathnavī; however, we will also read other genres like the bārahmāsah—a poem that narrates the lover’s separation in accordance with the twelve months/seasons of the calendar year. Important genres of other languages, such as the premākhyān—Sufi poems of love—in Awadhi, qissa in Punjabi, and kāvya in Sanskrit will be introduced. These primary texts will be accompanied by secondary literature on these poems, dealing with a complex set of questions that deal with their context, function, language, reception, genealogy, and the place of this literature in the cultural and intellectual history of South Asia.
Primary texts will include works like the Dakani, Punjabi, and Seraiki versions of the mathnavī Saif al-Mulūk from 1625-1865, Maulana Daud’s Awadhi Sufi premākhyan Madhūmālatī from 1545 and excerpts from Tulsidas’ Ramācaritmānas from 1574, Mir Hasan’s Urdu mathnavī Sehr ul-Bayān from 1785, Bhanudatta’s Sanskrit alankārshastra (the science of poetry) text Rasāmanjāri from 17th century, Kālidāsa’s Meghadūta from circa 5th century, and Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai’s Risālo from 18th century among others.
The aim of this course is four-fold: one, to inculcate in students an appreciation of the variety... more The aim of this course is four-fold: one, to inculcate in students an appreciation of the variety of literary traditions in South Asia and their internal diversity, with a focus on North India; two, to introduce students to the fundamental question of literary historiography: why should we study languages and their literature and write their histories; three, to acquaint students with how to read and write the history of languages and literatures of this region with its complex multilingual past; four, to teach students critical engagement with scholarship.
Students will read contemporary scholarship on literatures in Sanskrit, Persian, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Sindhi, English, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Tibetan, and others from Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (2003), the most important collection of essays on fifteen literary cultures from South Asia. Written by a variety of scholars with different methodological foci, this comparative reading will introduce students to the different ways histories of languages and literary cultures can, and need to be written, and to their strengths and weaknesses. In addition to LCH, students will read other crucial interventions in the study of language and literary cultures, such as Farina Mir’s monograph on Punjabi popular literature: The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab (UC Press, 2010). This survey of various literary traditions will be complemented by using the Hindi-Urdu world as a case study for literary historiography. Students will read various recent works on the literary cultures of these worlds, and see where this scholarship is headed: how it goes beyond the questions of “origin” and “difference” between Hindi and Urdu; complicates the use of these blanket labels; and examines the premodern tradition in detail for a better postcolonial understanding of this complex literary world.
Some key questions that will guide this comparative study include: What are literary cultures and in what ways do they come into being? What are the relationships of literary cultures to their broader social and political contexts? How do literary cultures constitute and understand themselves, and how do we understand them from the outside? How and why do literary cultures change over time and in what ways do historical transformations like colonialism and nationalism affect them?
The discourse on love in every society is diverse, be it prescriptive, religious, social, linguis... more The discourse on love in every society is diverse, be it prescriptive, religious, social, linguistic, aesthetic, or gender-specific—same is the case in South Asia. This course explores the various idioms of love that developed in this region—whether they be concepts, images, or stories that have transformed into cultural repertoire over their long history. It closely follows the model of Love in South Asia: A Cultural History, a collection of essays edited by Francesca Orsini (Cambridge University Press, 2006), which includes contributions by leading literary scholars, historians, anthropologists, film historians and political theorists, who explore how the discourses of love have developed in South Asia and map its significance in literary, oral, visual, and cultural traditions. However, the course also draws majorly on other important scholarship, such as Ruth Vanita’s edited volume Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society (Routledge, 2002), that explores questions and histories of gender, intimacy, and queer desire from various perspectives, Rachel Dwyer’s work on the construction of desire in Hindi cinema, as well as other works ranging from one on the love imagery on the Indian temple to the place of music, and food in construction of
love, and desire.
This course is a study of Bollywood as an object of cultural and historical inquiry. Bollywood, o... more This course is a study of Bollywood as an object of cultural and historical inquiry. Bollywood, or the “Hindi” cinema industry based in Bombay (Mumbai), has by and large come to stand for the Indian national cinema, however problematic it may be. While it is not the only cinema industry in India, it is the oldest (with the first
full-length [silent] motion picture Raja Harishchandra produced in 1913, and the first Indian talkie Alam Ara produced in 1931); and has been the contesting space of many core issues of Indian nationalism.
This course does not aim to be a comprehensive study of Bollywood; however, it will examine some of these key problematics. These include the anti-colonial struggle that defined the beginnings of this industry before partition in 1947; the contested formation of a homogeneous Indian national identity through the ages—such as the gradual “socialist” turn in the Nehruvian era (50s, 60s) where the cinema focused its gaze on the problems of the working urban class, and nationalism became “inclusive.” Other themes include an examination of the economic, social, and political transformations as experienced by the nation imagined through Bollywood. Within this broad umbrella, we will examine the depiction/construction of gender,
particularly that of the Indian female through the ages—the archetypes of the tramp, the pious housewife, the working woman. We will look at the transformation in the cinematic imaginary after liberalization of the Indian economy in 1992; the global turn of the cinematic lens with the distribution networks extending to serve
the huge and lucrative audience found in the Indian diaspora at the turn of the millennium (Dil Chahta Hai [2001]). The coming of “modernity” and its contestations with the “traditional” and the past throughout Bollywood’s history, and the eventual, though reluctant embracement of it as seen in films like Kal Ho Na Ho
(2003), and then its eventual surpassing, and embracement of what can be called the postmodern (cf. Dabang [2010]) will also be an important theme. Finally, we will see how the privileging of a particular narrative as the narrative of the nation—such as the story of the Hindi speaking urban middle classes—silences others such as the experiences of the marginalized casts and regions such as that of Dalits and the peoples of South India.
Reference/Research Tools by Taimoor Shahid
This is a complete concordance of Dīvān-e Ghālib, the Urdu works of Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan Ghā... more This is a complete concordance of Dīvān-e Ghālib, the Urdu works of Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan Ghālib (1796-1869), the preeminent Indian Urdu and Persian poet known for his ghazals. The ghazal, a traditional genre of Arabic, Persian, Urdu poetry is comprised of independent two line poems called shi‘rs that follow a rhyme and are in one meter. This concordance—a complete index—is a digitally compiled work that uses his traditional divan, known in Urdu as muravvaj dīvān¬, as a reference point. This divan has two hundred and thirty four ghazals in total. The ghazals, however, are not traditionally numbered but they follow the same traditional sequence in all editions of the muravvaj dīvān¬.
Here I use Professor Frances Pritchett’s numbering of the ghazals and its individual shi‘rs as found on her web project on Ghālib, ‘A Desertful of Roses’, where each ghazal is numbered from 1-234 and each shi‘r of the ghazal is numbered from 1-. Every reference in the concordance thus is composed of a ghazal number and a shi‘r number. This is how a sample entry looks like: [word]: {ghazal no., shi‘r no.}…: [frequency of the word in corpus]. For example, ābād: {101,9}, {145,1}, {182,2}: 3. The word ābād appears 3 times in the corpus, in shi‘r 9 of ghazal 101, shi‘r 1 of ghazal 145, and shi‘r 2 of ghazal 182. The textual corpus I use to compile the concordance is also borrowed from Pritchett’s web project, and is in the Roman transliteration system used for the project. I owe much gratitude to her for making the text available publicly.
Finally, it must be mentioned that this is the first research/reference tool of its kind for Urdu, the first known concordance for any Urdu text, and is part of a larger project of compiling similar concordances for other canonical Urdu works, such as the complete works of Mir Taqi Mir (d. 1810), Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938), and Faiz Ahmad Faiz (d. 1984) amongst others. One hopes to make this, and other concordances, available dynamically on a web site very soon, in addition to the textual versions. This piece has not been published, and is being made available publicly for the first time in this format.
For citation, the Columbia University's Academic Commons reference can be used: http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:179692 . The item also has a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) Number and a permanent link: http://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8FB51NB
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Books by Taimoor Shahid
Saif’s ethical discourse reaches its zenith in its 19th century retelling by the Kashmiri Sufi Saint Mian Muhammad Bakhsh. Building upon the historical overview, the dissertation examines for the first time this retelling—popularly known as the ‘Quran in Punjabi’—through a historical, philological-interpretative, and ethnographic study. It finds the categories of ethics (adab), morality (akhlāq), the Sufi-path (faqr/tasavvuf), and love (‘ishq) as central to Saif’s articulation of cosmopolitan humanism understood in the Sufi-philosophical framework of Unicity of Being (wahdat al-wujūd). It also reconstructs the cosmology and phenomenology of Saif’s primary mode of consumption, its musical audition (samā‘), revealing it as an exercise of affective ethical self-fashioning. Moreover, it explores Saif’s encounter with modernity, analyzing the evolution of Saif’s samā‘ across 20th and 21st centuries, and contextualizing it within the historical changes in material culture, production technology, market demands, and the consequent transformations in the hermeneutics of engagement with the text and its narrative.
In summary, this dissertation illuminates the enduring presence and evolving nature of Saif as a paradigmatic global Islamic ethics and morals discourse offering insights into the values and ideals of the Indian Ocean World and the cosmopolitan selfhood and sense of belonging sustained by its social, political, and literary culture. In adopting a unique interdisciplinary, multilingual, comparative, and transhistorical approach, the project contributes to Indian Ocean historiography, Islamic studies, South Asian studies, comparative literature, and ethnomusicology. It explores how various peoples accommodated cultural and religious differences by asserting universalist and cosmopolitan Islamic modes of belonging in the Indian Ocean World, and in doing so offers fresh ethical lessons towards understanding alternative forms of globalism and cosmopolitan belonging in the world.
While Umrao Jaan Ada, continues to evoke interest, this paratext has been completely forgotten -- until now. The Madness of Waiting redresses this imbalance, featuring both the Urdu original and a superb English translation of Junun-e-Intezar. The book also includes a critical introduction that rethinks Umrao Jaan Ada and the Urdu literary milieu of the late-nineteenth-century Lucknow.
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Reviews here: http://www.timeoutdelhi.net/books/reviews/madness-waiting ; here: http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/B9bw2e7Oqh3yZUEHJesFOI/Lounge-Loves--The-Madness-of-Waiting.html ;
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and here: http://tribune.com.pk/story/734920/book-launch-hadi-ruswas-forgotten-work-translated/
Mysterious Screams: Ten years ago, Nawwab Hashim was found dead in his bedroom. Now a man claiming to be him appears out of the blue. Sajid, his nephew and heir, doesn’t know what to believe, nor can he fathom the terrible screams that have started emerging from the house each night.
Papers by Taimoor Shahid
Minai, Amir Ahmad (1829-1900) – Amir Minai was born on 20h February 1829 in a religious and literary family that had settled in a Lucknow. In addition to his preliminary intellectual training at home Amir studied at the Farangi Mahal. He was trained in languages (Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit), philosophy, logic, religion, jurisprudence, history, geography, astrology, and other subjects such as ‘ilm-ul rijāl (the science of Hadith) and ‘ilm-e jafar (the art of divination). By the age of twenty-five he was esteemed as one of the prominent scholars of Lucknow....
This entry is also available published online, along with scans of his manuscripts at: amirminaiarchive.blogspot.com
Essays by Taimoor Shahid
It is based on selections from Padma Surkh Hai or The Bloodied Padma, the war diary of Shaakh, a student from Lahore studying at Dhaka University in 1971. War struck. And he moved with a Bengali friend’s family. Then they had to flee for life. First they fled from Dhaka to a small town, then to Rajshahi. Then to the Indian refugee camp across the river Padma. And then back from the refugee camp itself. All this while, Shaakh maintained a diary, in Urdu, his mother tongue, but also the tongue of the aggressors. He recorded killing, looting, arson, but also bare life during war, and the ways in which borders were created, navigated, and transcended.
Shaakh is my father. Here I read a few episodes from his diary and meditate on them through my own experiences: of borders, separations, migrations, and an inheritance of his past. I present this piece then as a tentative reflection on Borders of all kinds, seen through this episode of human history, an episode unfortunately not unique. Here the partition of 1947, of 1971, and the continuing partitions of the present come together. Here Dhaka and Lahore, and Calcutta and Chicago exist on the same plane in a complicated relationship built through text and sound: through disembodied connections that borders cannot sever.
It is to one of these connections that I owe this piece. It emerged from my collaboration with The Travelling Archive, a field recordings and field notes project based in Calcutta and run by singer and writer Moushumi Bhowmik and sound recordist and designer Sukanta Majumdar since 2003. I became friends with Moushumi di when I found myself across the India-Pakistan border that carves us into different flesh. Moushumi di had heard about my father’s diary, and she and Sukanta da had already been working on Borders for some time. We talked, and she came up with this idea: that we must do something. We must archive these voices for us to remember, and perhaps to transcend the Borders, through a collapsing of geographies, of time, of sounds. I thus recorded this piece for them in Chicago, which was then woven with Jarigan recordings—songs of lament sung for the martyrs of Karbala—from Faridpur, Bangladesh archived by The Travelling Archive in 2008. It was presented as an art installation at the annual I.G. Khan Memorial lecture event in Aligarh in Feb 2016. I am publishing here, however, only my contribution, in which I interact and interpret Borders as seen through my father’s eyes of 1971. It is not a finished project, and I invite you to comment, respond, and take this forward in whatever way you think necessary and useful to dismantle Borders of any kind.
Click here: http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/rivers_of_blood_a_meditation_on_borders.html
Translations by Taimoor Shahid
Syed’s second poem evokes a fatalistic yet hopeful sense of alienation that could be a universal human experience. The poem speaks for itself, but one can read his search for a new language to converse with one’s self as a parable for his work, or in fact all poetry. Is such a language possible? Perhaps, only poets have the key to such a language. Syed is surely leading the way to it in Urdu.
Syllabi by Taimoor Shahid
In Urdu, the focus will remain on the mathnavī; however, we will also read other genres like the bārahmāsah—a poem that narrates the lover’s separation in accordance with the twelve months/seasons of the calendar year. Important genres of other languages, such as the premākhyān—Sufi poems of love—in Awadhi, qissa in Punjabi, and kāvya in Sanskrit will be introduced. These primary texts will be accompanied by secondary literature on these poems, dealing with a complex set of questions that deal with their context, function, language, reception, genealogy, and the place of this literature in the cultural and intellectual history of South Asia.
Primary texts will include works like the Dakani, Punjabi, and Seraiki versions of the mathnavī Saif al-Mulūk from 1625-1865, Maulana Daud’s Awadhi Sufi premākhyan Madhūmālatī from 1545 and excerpts from Tulsidas’ Ramācaritmānas from 1574, Mir Hasan’s Urdu mathnavī Sehr ul-Bayān from 1785, Bhanudatta’s Sanskrit alankārshastra (the science of poetry) text Rasāmanjāri from 17th century, Kālidāsa’s Meghadūta from circa 5th century, and Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai’s Risālo from 18th century among others.
Students will read contemporary scholarship on literatures in Sanskrit, Persian, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Sindhi, English, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Tibetan, and others from Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (2003), the most important collection of essays on fifteen literary cultures from South Asia. Written by a variety of scholars with different methodological foci, this comparative reading will introduce students to the different ways histories of languages and literary cultures can, and need to be written, and to their strengths and weaknesses. In addition to LCH, students will read other crucial interventions in the study of language and literary cultures, such as Farina Mir’s monograph on Punjabi popular literature: The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab (UC Press, 2010). This survey of various literary traditions will be complemented by using the Hindi-Urdu world as a case study for literary historiography. Students will read various recent works on the literary cultures of these worlds, and see where this scholarship is headed: how it goes beyond the questions of “origin” and “difference” between Hindi and Urdu; complicates the use of these blanket labels; and examines the premodern tradition in detail for a better postcolonial understanding of this complex literary world.
Some key questions that will guide this comparative study include: What are literary cultures and in what ways do they come into being? What are the relationships of literary cultures to their broader social and political contexts? How do literary cultures constitute and understand themselves, and how do we understand them from the outside? How and why do literary cultures change over time and in what ways do historical transformations like colonialism and nationalism affect them?
love, and desire.
full-length [silent] motion picture Raja Harishchandra produced in 1913, and the first Indian talkie Alam Ara produced in 1931); and has been the contesting space of many core issues of Indian nationalism.
This course does not aim to be a comprehensive study of Bollywood; however, it will examine some of these key problematics. These include the anti-colonial struggle that defined the beginnings of this industry before partition in 1947; the contested formation of a homogeneous Indian national identity through the ages—such as the gradual “socialist” turn in the Nehruvian era (50s, 60s) where the cinema focused its gaze on the problems of the working urban class, and nationalism became “inclusive.” Other themes include an examination of the economic, social, and political transformations as experienced by the nation imagined through Bollywood. Within this broad umbrella, we will examine the depiction/construction of gender,
particularly that of the Indian female through the ages—the archetypes of the tramp, the pious housewife, the working woman. We will look at the transformation in the cinematic imaginary after liberalization of the Indian economy in 1992; the global turn of the cinematic lens with the distribution networks extending to serve
the huge and lucrative audience found in the Indian diaspora at the turn of the millennium (Dil Chahta Hai [2001]). The coming of “modernity” and its contestations with the “traditional” and the past throughout Bollywood’s history, and the eventual, though reluctant embracement of it as seen in films like Kal Ho Na Ho
(2003), and then its eventual surpassing, and embracement of what can be called the postmodern (cf. Dabang [2010]) will also be an important theme. Finally, we will see how the privileging of a particular narrative as the narrative of the nation—such as the story of the Hindi speaking urban middle classes—silences others such as the experiences of the marginalized casts and regions such as that of Dalits and the peoples of South India.
Reference/Research Tools by Taimoor Shahid
Here I use Professor Frances Pritchett’s numbering of the ghazals and its individual shi‘rs as found on her web project on Ghālib, ‘A Desertful of Roses’, where each ghazal is numbered from 1-234 and each shi‘r of the ghazal is numbered from 1-. Every reference in the concordance thus is composed of a ghazal number and a shi‘r number. This is how a sample entry looks like: [word]: {ghazal no., shi‘r no.}…: [frequency of the word in corpus]. For example, ābād: {101,9}, {145,1}, {182,2}: 3. The word ābād appears 3 times in the corpus, in shi‘r 9 of ghazal 101, shi‘r 1 of ghazal 145, and shi‘r 2 of ghazal 182. The textual corpus I use to compile the concordance is also borrowed from Pritchett’s web project, and is in the Roman transliteration system used for the project. I owe much gratitude to her for making the text available publicly.
Finally, it must be mentioned that this is the first research/reference tool of its kind for Urdu, the first known concordance for any Urdu text, and is part of a larger project of compiling similar concordances for other canonical Urdu works, such as the complete works of Mir Taqi Mir (d. 1810), Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938), and Faiz Ahmad Faiz (d. 1984) amongst others. One hopes to make this, and other concordances, available dynamically on a web site very soon, in addition to the textual versions. This piece has not been published, and is being made available publicly for the first time in this format.
For citation, the Columbia University's Academic Commons reference can be used: http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:179692 . The item also has a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) Number and a permanent link: http://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8FB51NB
Saif’s ethical discourse reaches its zenith in its 19th century retelling by the Kashmiri Sufi Saint Mian Muhammad Bakhsh. Building upon the historical overview, the dissertation examines for the first time this retelling—popularly known as the ‘Quran in Punjabi’—through a historical, philological-interpretative, and ethnographic study. It finds the categories of ethics (adab), morality (akhlāq), the Sufi-path (faqr/tasavvuf), and love (‘ishq) as central to Saif’s articulation of cosmopolitan humanism understood in the Sufi-philosophical framework of Unicity of Being (wahdat al-wujūd). It also reconstructs the cosmology and phenomenology of Saif’s primary mode of consumption, its musical audition (samā‘), revealing it as an exercise of affective ethical self-fashioning. Moreover, it explores Saif’s encounter with modernity, analyzing the evolution of Saif’s samā‘ across 20th and 21st centuries, and contextualizing it within the historical changes in material culture, production technology, market demands, and the consequent transformations in the hermeneutics of engagement with the text and its narrative.
In summary, this dissertation illuminates the enduring presence and evolving nature of Saif as a paradigmatic global Islamic ethics and morals discourse offering insights into the values and ideals of the Indian Ocean World and the cosmopolitan selfhood and sense of belonging sustained by its social, political, and literary culture. In adopting a unique interdisciplinary, multilingual, comparative, and transhistorical approach, the project contributes to Indian Ocean historiography, Islamic studies, South Asian studies, comparative literature, and ethnomusicology. It explores how various peoples accommodated cultural and religious differences by asserting universalist and cosmopolitan Islamic modes of belonging in the Indian Ocean World, and in doing so offers fresh ethical lessons towards understanding alternative forms of globalism and cosmopolitan belonging in the world.
While Umrao Jaan Ada, continues to evoke interest, this paratext has been completely forgotten -- until now. The Madness of Waiting redresses this imbalance, featuring both the Urdu original and a superb English translation of Junun-e-Intezar. The book also includes a critical introduction that rethinks Umrao Jaan Ada and the Urdu literary milieu of the late-nineteenth-century Lucknow.
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Or here: http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/M/bo16063455.html
Reviews here: http://www.timeoutdelhi.net/books/reviews/madness-waiting ; here: http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/B9bw2e7Oqh3yZUEHJesFOI/Lounge-Loves--The-Madness-of-Waiting.html ;
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and here: http://tribune.com.pk/story/734920/book-launch-hadi-ruswas-forgotten-work-translated/
Mysterious Screams: Ten years ago, Nawwab Hashim was found dead in his bedroom. Now a man claiming to be him appears out of the blue. Sajid, his nephew and heir, doesn’t know what to believe, nor can he fathom the terrible screams that have started emerging from the house each night.
Minai, Amir Ahmad (1829-1900) – Amir Minai was born on 20h February 1829 in a religious and literary family that had settled in a Lucknow. In addition to his preliminary intellectual training at home Amir studied at the Farangi Mahal. He was trained in languages (Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit), philosophy, logic, religion, jurisprudence, history, geography, astrology, and other subjects such as ‘ilm-ul rijāl (the science of Hadith) and ‘ilm-e jafar (the art of divination). By the age of twenty-five he was esteemed as one of the prominent scholars of Lucknow....
This entry is also available published online, along with scans of his manuscripts at: amirminaiarchive.blogspot.com
It is based on selections from Padma Surkh Hai or The Bloodied Padma, the war diary of Shaakh, a student from Lahore studying at Dhaka University in 1971. War struck. And he moved with a Bengali friend’s family. Then they had to flee for life. First they fled from Dhaka to a small town, then to Rajshahi. Then to the Indian refugee camp across the river Padma. And then back from the refugee camp itself. All this while, Shaakh maintained a diary, in Urdu, his mother tongue, but also the tongue of the aggressors. He recorded killing, looting, arson, but also bare life during war, and the ways in which borders were created, navigated, and transcended.
Shaakh is my father. Here I read a few episodes from his diary and meditate on them through my own experiences: of borders, separations, migrations, and an inheritance of his past. I present this piece then as a tentative reflection on Borders of all kinds, seen through this episode of human history, an episode unfortunately not unique. Here the partition of 1947, of 1971, and the continuing partitions of the present come together. Here Dhaka and Lahore, and Calcutta and Chicago exist on the same plane in a complicated relationship built through text and sound: through disembodied connections that borders cannot sever.
It is to one of these connections that I owe this piece. It emerged from my collaboration with The Travelling Archive, a field recordings and field notes project based in Calcutta and run by singer and writer Moushumi Bhowmik and sound recordist and designer Sukanta Majumdar since 2003. I became friends with Moushumi di when I found myself across the India-Pakistan border that carves us into different flesh. Moushumi di had heard about my father’s diary, and she and Sukanta da had already been working on Borders for some time. We talked, and she came up with this idea: that we must do something. We must archive these voices for us to remember, and perhaps to transcend the Borders, through a collapsing of geographies, of time, of sounds. I thus recorded this piece for them in Chicago, which was then woven with Jarigan recordings—songs of lament sung for the martyrs of Karbala—from Faridpur, Bangladesh archived by The Travelling Archive in 2008. It was presented as an art installation at the annual I.G. Khan Memorial lecture event in Aligarh in Feb 2016. I am publishing here, however, only my contribution, in which I interact and interpret Borders as seen through my father’s eyes of 1971. It is not a finished project, and I invite you to comment, respond, and take this forward in whatever way you think necessary and useful to dismantle Borders of any kind.
Click here: http://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/homistan/rivers_of_blood_a_meditation_on_borders.html
Syed’s second poem evokes a fatalistic yet hopeful sense of alienation that could be a universal human experience. The poem speaks for itself, but one can read his search for a new language to converse with one’s self as a parable for his work, or in fact all poetry. Is such a language possible? Perhaps, only poets have the key to such a language. Syed is surely leading the way to it in Urdu.
In Urdu, the focus will remain on the mathnavī; however, we will also read other genres like the bārahmāsah—a poem that narrates the lover’s separation in accordance with the twelve months/seasons of the calendar year. Important genres of other languages, such as the premākhyān—Sufi poems of love—in Awadhi, qissa in Punjabi, and kāvya in Sanskrit will be introduced. These primary texts will be accompanied by secondary literature on these poems, dealing with a complex set of questions that deal with their context, function, language, reception, genealogy, and the place of this literature in the cultural and intellectual history of South Asia.
Primary texts will include works like the Dakani, Punjabi, and Seraiki versions of the mathnavī Saif al-Mulūk from 1625-1865, Maulana Daud’s Awadhi Sufi premākhyan Madhūmālatī from 1545 and excerpts from Tulsidas’ Ramācaritmānas from 1574, Mir Hasan’s Urdu mathnavī Sehr ul-Bayān from 1785, Bhanudatta’s Sanskrit alankārshastra (the science of poetry) text Rasāmanjāri from 17th century, Kālidāsa’s Meghadūta from circa 5th century, and Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai’s Risālo from 18th century among others.
Students will read contemporary scholarship on literatures in Sanskrit, Persian, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Sindhi, English, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Tibetan, and others from Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (2003), the most important collection of essays on fifteen literary cultures from South Asia. Written by a variety of scholars with different methodological foci, this comparative reading will introduce students to the different ways histories of languages and literary cultures can, and need to be written, and to their strengths and weaknesses. In addition to LCH, students will read other crucial interventions in the study of language and literary cultures, such as Farina Mir’s monograph on Punjabi popular literature: The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab (UC Press, 2010). This survey of various literary traditions will be complemented by using the Hindi-Urdu world as a case study for literary historiography. Students will read various recent works on the literary cultures of these worlds, and see where this scholarship is headed: how it goes beyond the questions of “origin” and “difference” between Hindi and Urdu; complicates the use of these blanket labels; and examines the premodern tradition in detail for a better postcolonial understanding of this complex literary world.
Some key questions that will guide this comparative study include: What are literary cultures and in what ways do they come into being? What are the relationships of literary cultures to their broader social and political contexts? How do literary cultures constitute and understand themselves, and how do we understand them from the outside? How and why do literary cultures change over time and in what ways do historical transformations like colonialism and nationalism affect them?
love, and desire.
full-length [silent] motion picture Raja Harishchandra produced in 1913, and the first Indian talkie Alam Ara produced in 1931); and has been the contesting space of many core issues of Indian nationalism.
This course does not aim to be a comprehensive study of Bollywood; however, it will examine some of these key problematics. These include the anti-colonial struggle that defined the beginnings of this industry before partition in 1947; the contested formation of a homogeneous Indian national identity through the ages—such as the gradual “socialist” turn in the Nehruvian era (50s, 60s) where the cinema focused its gaze on the problems of the working urban class, and nationalism became “inclusive.” Other themes include an examination of the economic, social, and political transformations as experienced by the nation imagined through Bollywood. Within this broad umbrella, we will examine the depiction/construction of gender,
particularly that of the Indian female through the ages—the archetypes of the tramp, the pious housewife, the working woman. We will look at the transformation in the cinematic imaginary after liberalization of the Indian economy in 1992; the global turn of the cinematic lens with the distribution networks extending to serve
the huge and lucrative audience found in the Indian diaspora at the turn of the millennium (Dil Chahta Hai [2001]). The coming of “modernity” and its contestations with the “traditional” and the past throughout Bollywood’s history, and the eventual, though reluctant embracement of it as seen in films like Kal Ho Na Ho
(2003), and then its eventual surpassing, and embracement of what can be called the postmodern (cf. Dabang [2010]) will also be an important theme. Finally, we will see how the privileging of a particular narrative as the narrative of the nation—such as the story of the Hindi speaking urban middle classes—silences others such as the experiences of the marginalized casts and regions such as that of Dalits and the peoples of South India.
Here I use Professor Frances Pritchett’s numbering of the ghazals and its individual shi‘rs as found on her web project on Ghālib, ‘A Desertful of Roses’, where each ghazal is numbered from 1-234 and each shi‘r of the ghazal is numbered from 1-. Every reference in the concordance thus is composed of a ghazal number and a shi‘r number. This is how a sample entry looks like: [word]: {ghazal no., shi‘r no.}…: [frequency of the word in corpus]. For example, ābād: {101,9}, {145,1}, {182,2}: 3. The word ābād appears 3 times in the corpus, in shi‘r 9 of ghazal 101, shi‘r 1 of ghazal 145, and shi‘r 2 of ghazal 182. The textual corpus I use to compile the concordance is also borrowed from Pritchett’s web project, and is in the Roman transliteration system used for the project. I owe much gratitude to her for making the text available publicly.
Finally, it must be mentioned that this is the first research/reference tool of its kind for Urdu, the first known concordance for any Urdu text, and is part of a larger project of compiling similar concordances for other canonical Urdu works, such as the complete works of Mir Taqi Mir (d. 1810), Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938), and Faiz Ahmad Faiz (d. 1984) amongst others. One hopes to make this, and other concordances, available dynamically on a web site very soon, in addition to the textual versions. This piece has not been published, and is being made available publicly for the first time in this format.
For citation, the Columbia University's Academic Commons reference can be used: http://academiccommons.columbia.edu/catalog/ac:179692 . The item also has a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) Number and a permanent link: http://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8FB51NB
Raza Rumi recites these poems at the issue's launch in Islamabad: https://youtu.be/eNPhN0hvBHw?t=8m44s
Web-link to journal: http://www.vallummag.com/archives_9_1.html