A market for speech : poetry recitation in late Mughal India, 1690-1810

This project focuses on 18th-century Persian and Urdu language mushairahs or poetry gatherings patronized by Mughal India’s urban elite and depicted in period compendiums or tazkirahs. Besides preserving poetry, the compendiums chronicle the social, aesthetic, and sensual aspects of 18th-century public and private gatherings from a stance that prizes the delight of lyric verse. The 1740s in particular mark a watershed decade for poetry exchange and criticism as they bridged several generations of India-based poets who were advancing the “fresh” goals of contemporary Persian writing and who were also recasting Persophone civility according to vernacular sensibilities in a social setting that was arguably the heart of Safavid and Mughal literary production. This dissertation examines how poets, listeners, and patrons enacted a material form of literary sociability that informed the circulation of people and verse over the 1700s. Analyzing this pre-colonial context allows for a more critical understanding of aesthetic and ethical drives in South Asian literary practices, providing a more grounded and critical understanding of lyricism as a cultural practice. By foregrounding the socio-aesthetic implications of recitation as a discursive practice, the present study understands the mushaʿirah as a unique site of literary subjectivity. Hence, the disciplinary boundaries between history, literary criticism, and ethnography are blurred to show that lyricism was not abstracted in 1700s poets’ gatherings. Instead, it formed a highly instantiated social script that allowed for the playfulness of Persian-based aesthetics to parallel the levity of Mughal-era sociability found in period salons. The Mughal literary sphere in the 1700s was governed by expectations of honesty, humor, exaggeration, enchantment, and originality, qualities that were not bounded by one language or textual medium. Historiographically, the compendiums from the 1700s attest to mushairah verse being self-referential, intertextual, and multilingual whereby the conventions of Persian-based aesthetics had a charismatic social life.Asian Studie

The torchbearers of progress : youth, volunteer organisations and national discipline in India, c. 1918-1947

The thesis deals with volunteer bodies in India from the end of the Great War to c.1947. It examines the genealogy of these bodies as a projection surface for ideal citizenship, a space to experimentally put those ideas into practice and as site of a mobilisational drive ‘from below’ rendering these bodies contested spheres of national self-definition. The energies of ‘Youth’, both feared and desired by many actors, were sought to be disciplined into volunteer corps and utilised for the building of a disciplined ‘modern’ nation. ‘Youth’ and ‘volunteers’ thereby become mutually related categories, the former needing to be transformed into the latter. Several groupings of ‘volunteers’ appeared at the time, such as the Seva Dal, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Khaksars, and the Muslim National Guards, all of which were provided paramilitary training and were available for use not only for various ‘social service’ activities, but also political intervention and, when necessary, for displays of violence, the latter feature most evident during the Second World War and the communal violence leading up to Partition and Indian Independence. Three levels of analysis are undertaken herein: the first, of event history, which aims not at a comprehensive narrative but to provide illustrations of the operation and dynamics of youth and volunteer movements. The second is an intellectual history (or genealogy) of the movements, outlining a series of engagements with ideas relating to modernity as well as to organicist ideas of the nation as a body with its citizens as component parts. The third is a structural analysis of volunteer groups with their tendency to resemble one another. Such ‘family resemblance’ also reopens the question regarding the greater ideological formations of the first half of the twentieth century