A Wilderness of Possibilities: Urdu Studies in Transnational Perspective - Hardcover

Over the past forty years the study of Urdu literature has played a dynamic role in contemporary discourses on culture and history, reaching out to a far-flung international community of scholars. The ten essays in this volume, assembled for Professor C. M. Naim, a pioneer of Urdu studies in the United States, exemplify the changing place of Urdu in the world today. They discuss diverse aspects of Urdu and Persian literature and poetry, between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. The focus is mainly on Urdu poetry offering a comprehensive introduction to the sociology, culture and politics of its enchanting and complex world but it also includes essays on travelogues, print journalism and a play. In the first part, contributors explore the divergent social and political spaces that Urdu literature has occupied through the centuries. In the second, they critique the paradigms that have informed Urdu literary history and point to new methodologies of reading. Pillars of poetry like Ghalib and Iqbal, women writing from the zanana, popular dramatists, travellers to Britain, and modern novelists form the subjects of this wide-ranging collection. The contributors are specialists in the field and include such distinguished scholars as Kumkum Sangari, Barbara Metcalf, Gail Minault, and Aditya Behl as well as new scholars in the field doing some really interesting work such as Ramya Sreenivasan. The authors use a combination of approaches: while some articles focus on well-known texts, others focus on individual poets and writers. The book includes lucid new translations of texts not yet available to English readers. It will interest all scholars and students of South Asian cultural history and literary studies.