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Nostalgia and the City: Urdu shahr āshob poetry in the aftermath of 1857*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2017

EVE TIGNOL
EVE TIGNOL*
Affiliation:
Université Paris 3 - Sorbonne [email protected]
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Abstract

After the Uprising of 1857, many poets from north Indian cities resorted to the Urdu nostalgic genre of shahr āshob to recall mournfully pre-colonial urban landscapes and articulate emotional and poetic narratives of loss. This article proposes to open new perspectives for the historical study of collective memory and trauma among Urdu-speaking ashrāf in the nineteenth century by looking at one collection of such poems entitled ‘The Lament for Delhi (Fuġhān-e Dehlī)’ (1863), which has recently started to attract the attention of historians. Although scholarship has generally emphasised the continuity of these poems with the shahr āshob tradition, this article re-assesses this body of texts through a careful analysis of their main literary motifs and highlights their originality and divergence from previous shahr āshobs. Beyond the stereotypical, the poems of ‘The Lament for Delhi’ both construct 1857 as cultural trauma through the use of powerful literary devices and the performance of collective grief as well as re-channel memory and melancholy into the urban landscape by emphasising its materiality and reinvesting it with new meanings and stakes. This paper more broadly underlines the importance of this under-studied source to understand the impact of 1857 on the imaginary of Urdu-speaking ashrāf and on the cultural and social history of colonial India.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 27 , Special Issue 4: Feeling Modern: The History of Emotions in Urban South Asia , October 2017 , pp. 559 - 573
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2017 

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References

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18 For examples of intertextuality, see for instance Tajammul, ‘Phirte chalte jo meṇ ā niklā beshahr-e Dehlī’, verse 20, in the collection. I am thankful to Katherine Butler-Schofield for pointing out to me during the Urban Emotions workshop (St John's College, Oxford, 27 February 2016) that the period immediately following 1857 and especially the years 1862-1863 were significant for the development of new musical styles, especially in north Indian regional courts. Contrary to what is sometimes assumed, the period after 1857, to which Fuġhān-e Dehlī belongs, was an intense period of renewal and adaptation.

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