I Too Have Some Dreams: N.M. Rashed and Modernism in Urdu Poetry (South Asia Across the Disciplines) - Hardcover

Pue, A. Sean

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520283104 ISBN 13: 9780520283107

Verlag: University of California Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

I Too Have Some Dreams explores the work of N. M. Rashed, Urdu's renowned modernist poet, whose career spans the last years of British India and the early decades of postcolonial South Asia. A. Sean Pue argues that Rashed’s poetry carved out a distinct role for literature in the maintenance of doubt, providing a platform for challenging the certainty of collective ideologies and opposing the evolving forms of empire and domination. This finely crafted study offers a timely contribution to global modernist studies and to modern South Asian literary history.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

A. Sean Pue is Associate Professor of Hindi Language and South Asian Literature and Culture at Michigan State University.

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I Too Have Some Dreams

N. M. Rashed and Modernism in Urdu Poetry

By A. Sean Pue

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2014 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-28310-7

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Note on Transliteration, 
Introduction, 
1 • Embodiment, 
2 • Position without Identity, 
3 • Allegory and Collectivity, 
4 • Temporality, 
Conclusion: Hasan the Potter, 
Appendix: Poems in Transliteration and Translation, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Embodiment

IN 1941, N. M. Rashed published Mavara (The Beyond), a work celebrated as the first volume of free verse, or azad nazm, in Urdu. The poetry, which vividly describes the subjective experiences of a narrator whose life resembled that of both the author and his readers, solidified Rashed's reputation. The formal experimentation that was the hallmark of this volume remained important throughout the poet's body of work. His association with free verse also led him to be classified as a modernist poet by Urdu critics, and the reception of his poetry remains tied to the category of modernism itself.

For Rashed, to be a modern (jadid) poet was to respond to contemporary experience and to explore changing ideas of the self. The poet understood his social reality, and particularly the political domination of colonialism, through its psychological effects. Rashed adopted a loosely Freudian view of the self that led him to focus directly on sexuality. The need to engage with sexuality, he argued, necessitated a decisive break with traditional poetic forms, which could not accommodate lust. It required the poetry to focus on embodiment rather than transcendence, on material life rather than a spiritual "Beyond." The title of his volume is clearly ironic.

In this chapter I examine what led Rashed to articulate this relationship between experience, psychology, poetic content, and form. I argue that the significance of Rashed's break with form is dependent on both the history of the association of language with political community and the emergence across North Indian languages of romantic forms of poetry that privileged a new kind of lyrical subjectivity. By the late 1930s, when Rashed began to compose the poems included in Mavara, Urdu and Hindi had become mapped upon Muslim and Hindu religious communities. Advocates for Hindi, in particular, had extended their claim to representation to aspire to the status of a national language. Literary reform movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had associated literature with the moral fitness of these linguistic communities. And while each of these language movements advocated linguistic purification, there were obvious commonalities across languages. As I will describe in this chapter, the literary histories of Hindi and Urdu were both heavily influenced by that of Bengali.

Because of the linguistic diversity of South Asia and the tendency of both language movements and academics/critics to view literatures in isolation from one another, it has been difficult to account for the emergence of these movements across languages. The tendency to focus on individual literatures has been particularly pronounced in scholarship on modernism. In the case of Urdu, this has led authors to ignore the significance of romanticism in the development of modernism, and to focus more squarely on the continuing importance of literary and social reform. This ignores the influence of Bengali, in which romanticism allowed for the articulation of a new form of poetic subjectivity, and Hindi, in which lyrical subjectivity was tied to formal innovation.

This is unfortunate, for as I argue in this chapter, romanticism was the immediate touchstone for the formal experimentation that led to azad nazm. Romantic poetry in Urdu, with its articulation of a new form of subjectivity, was as important a target of critique for Rashed's poetry as the moral reform movements and community-based address popularized by earlier literary reformers. This chapter therefore begins with a discussion of the politics of literature and language as well as an overview of the key role of romanticism in the emergence of modernism in Urdu, Hindi, and Bengali literatures.

By emphasizing romanticism and the emergence of a new poetic subjectivity, I argue that Rashed's modernist Urdu poetry was less of a reaction to "progressivism," or taraqqi pasand adab, than it later appeared to be. Between the time the poems were written and when they were published, modernism and progressivism gradually came to be opposed categories of literary analysis. Because the reception of Rashed's poetry—and with it, modernism in general—has been so closely tied to this distinction, this chapter concludes with an account of slightly later "progressive" condemnations of Rashed's poetry. The focus of those critics is the poetry's imagination of psychology, which was dismissed as inimical to the realism prized by progressive literature. However wooden and wrongheaded these critical texts, this reception of his poetry is significant because it led Rashed to articulate a critique of progressivism, or more accurately "socialist" (ishtiraki) writing, in his later poems and criticism.

POETIC MODERNISM IN URDU AMONG SOUTH ASIAN LITERATURES

Colonial modernity fundamentally altered South Asian literary traditions as vernacular languages were codified and literary histories became attached to linguistic communities. While some languages and literary forms were abandoned, others were invented. Some writers explicitly rejected past forms, while others forged new relationships with reconceived literary traditions. Although scholars typically trace these processes as they affect single languages, it is clear that shared movements can be seen at least across North Indian languages, if not across the entire subcontinent. The contours of these changes are fairly uniform: in the late nineteenth century, movements for morally uplifting and realistic literature emerged in Urdu, Hindi, and Bengali, which led in the first decades of the twentieth century to the emergence of counter-movements described as romanticism. In the 1930s, a deliberately crosslinguistic movement for anticolonial and sometimes socialist-realism inspired progressivism gained strength and emerged at the same time as modernism or experimentalism in Hindi and Urdu. The move for experimentalism in poetry in Bengali, however, began earlier in the 1920s in a reaction to the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). Literary histories of Urdu have overemphasized the distinction between modernism and progressivism and obscured the importance of romanticism as the ground for the emergence of modernism. A comparison between romanticism and modernism across these three languages is therefore particularly revealing of the certain lockstep in which these literatures developed that would otherwise be obscured in a single-language approach.

Among these literatures, the literary history of formal experimentation in Urdu has depended on a distinction between "progressivism" and "modernism" that obscures what these movements have in common. That is less the case in Hindi and Bengali, where the emphasis placed on the lyric poetry associated with Rabindranath Tagore has allowed for the articulation of what constitutes modern poetry. What emerged in the early twentieth century across these languages was a new idea of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520283104
• ISBN 13: 9780520283107
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland