2

Orientalism and the Institution of Indian Literature

THE ROLE OF THE new Orientalist studies and associated literary practices in the emergence of intellectual and literary cultures of a Romantic bent in the West in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and in the emergence of literature as such in the Romantic and modern sense, is not a developed subject of investigation today; but this has not always been the case, and in fact the role can hardly be overestimated. The influence is by no means limited to those famous (and numerous) European works—from Vathek to Kubla Khan, Lalla Rookh, the West-östlicher Divan, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, Don Juan, and beyond—that explicitly adopt Oriental themes, locales, or forms as their own but may be equated with the emergence of an entire cultural horizon, which Raymond Schwab, following Schlegel, famously conceived of as nothing less than a second (“Oriental”) Renaissance in the West.¹ The arrival in Europe and into the European languages of works originating in the classical languages of Asia and the Middle East had far-reaching effects on generations of writers throughout the West. Starting in the mid-1780s, Sanskrit works were added to the Persian and Arabic, soon superseding both in their ability to cause a “mania” among literary publics across Europe.

Schwab, whose La renaissance orientale (1950) remains to date the most detailed mapping of the emergence and development of this cultural horizon from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, went so far as to view the rise of Romanticism as little more than the extended “literary repercussions” of the Orientalist knowledge revolution.² This understanding of the origins of Romanticism in the Orientalist conjuncture, routinely expressed by many of the writers themselves and restated at key moments in the history of Romanticism studies, by such figures as Schwab and M. H. Abrams, is with few exceptions largely ignored in the discipline in our own times. In this chapter, I turn to this period, the long nineteenth century, in order to trace a series of sociocultural interactions between new philological practices, different bodies of verse and prose narrative literature, and literary history as a genre across a social landscape that connects the European literary sphere with the activities of the colonial state in India and emergent public spheres in the vernacular languages of that country.

Calcutta Orientalism, Phase I: Europe’s “Age of Śākuntala”

William Jones, whose enormous influence in the nineteenth century on several generations of writers and intellectuals on several continents does not get the attention today in literary studies that it deserves, played an almost unique role in the early development of modern Orientalism of both the Persian-Arabic and Sanskrit-Indic varieties.³ Jones’s influential texts include, as we have seen, his “imitations” from classical Arabic, Persian, and Turkish poetry, most famous among them a ghazal of Hafez, followed in the 1770s and early 1780s with a Persian grammar and the Histoire de Nader Chah, a translation into French of a contemporary Persian history of the marauding eighteenth-century Iranian ruler, a translation of the pre-Islamic Arabic poems known collectively as the Mu‘allaqāt, and then of course a range of works as the leading figure of the new Sanskrit studies to emerge from Calcutta after his arrival there in 1784. Asiatick Researches, the chief organ of the Calcutta Orientalists, launched by Jones in 1788, was republished and translated repeatedly back in Europe, its diverse contents further disseminated through numerous reprints and summaries in the popular press, and became the vehicle of their soaring celebrity. As Edward Said put it memorably in his essay on Schwab, the “job of displacements was apportioned to the great capitals: Calcutta provided, London distributed, Paris filtered and generalized.”⁴ A wide range of writers in Europe and America, most famously perhaps Goethe, absorbed both these Orientalist waves, if not always in the chronological order of their unfolding.

In Germany, the so-called Indo-mania of the 1790s was triggered by Georg Forster’s German translation (1791), from Jones’s English (1789), of the first millennium CE dramatic text attributed to Kalidas (Kālīdāsa), Abhijñānaśākuntala (or Śākuntala for short). This icon of the new knowledge found its way into the work of Herder, Goethe, Schlegel, and Novalis, among numerous others, leading Schwab to refer to the entire age as a “Śākuntala era.”⁵ Herder’s own somewhat impressionistic view of India was turned into a sustained and more serious engagement largely as a result of the encounter with Śākuntala, about which he wrote repeatedly for the rest of his life, including a preface published in 1803.⁶ He became one of the leading proponents of the Indian “spirit” in Germany, looking in ancient India for evidence, first, of a primordial monotheistic revelation and, later, for a vitalistic pantheism, bringing Indian sources into his responses to the famous Pantheismusstreit (Pantheism controversy) of the 1780s between Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Moses Mendelssohn, Immanuel Kant, and others.⁷ And it was to this work that Herder turned in his attempt to break free of the authoritative Aristotelian view of drama refashioned for the times in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s influential dramaturgical writings.⁸ But, as with Jones in this regard, the effort to break free of the authority of classical norms is a less-than-unequivocal one, Herder’s very defense of Indian aesthetic works as reflective of universal values and norms taking the form, as I have already noted, of their comparison to classical ones. In a detailed historical and textual study of the Śākuntala phenomenon, Dorothy Matilda Figueira notes that it “was received with such critical acclaim by its nineteenth-century European audience that it engendered in the century following Jones’ translation no fewer than forty-six translations in twelve different languages.”⁹ Jones’s translation helped to establish a new paradigm for “Oriental” translation with a stability of relationship to an “original” text or textual tradition, unlike not only Antoine Galland’s Les mille et une nuits (1704) and Anquetil Duperron’s Zend Avesta (1771), a selection of the Zoroastrian scriptures that was widely referenced by Herder in own writings, but even Nathaniel Brassey Halhed’s A Code of Gentoo Laws (1776), the most influential digest of “Hindu” law available to Europeans until Jones’s translation of the Mānavadharmaśāstra (published as Institutes of Hindu Law, or the Ordinances of Menu, 1794) but whose “original” is likely to have been a written translation in Persian of an oral account given by a pundit in Bengali.¹⁰ With his translation of Śākuntala, therefore, Jones helped to establish Oriental translation as a distinct mode of action in and on the colonial world, an asymmetrical mode of cultural transmission either linked in direct ways to the exigencies of colonial governance or at the very least reliant upon the conceptual systems and institutional frameworks put in place by the colonial state and the international imperial system. But as a mode of cultural transmission Oriental translation worked in two distinct but related ways: bringing the newly codified exempla of Oriental thought and imagination, that is, a “textualized India,” to the various intellectual and aesthetic debates and projects internal to the European sphere, to European self-making, while at the same time codifying an image of the Oriental society in question—“the fixing of colonized cultures”—that, precisely through its circulation in the European literary sphere, became available to native intelligentsias in the process of their embourgeoisement and modernization.¹¹

The fabrication of Kalidas as the “Indian Shakespeare,” which took place first of all in Germany, marks perhaps the first assimilation of Sanskrit textual materials to the new category of literature and was to become instrumental in the nineteenth century in the repatriation, so to speak, of Śākuntala to the emerging colonial-nationalist intelligentsia in India as “their” greatest contribution to world literature.¹² An unelaborated notion, if not always an explicitly formulated concept, of world literature itself became a feature of nationalist culture from the late nineteenth century onward, as the stage for the reconciliation of all that is specifically Indian with universal and human values as such. Rabindranath Tagore is perhaps the exemplary figure of this negotiation, elaborating precisely such moves in “World Literature” (Biśwasāhitya), a well-known lecture first delivered in 1907.¹³ And when Tagore extolled the greatness of the Sanskrit work, comparing it to The Tempest, he did so explicitly on the authority of Goethe.¹⁴ In fact, since the appearance of Śākuntala in the Orientalist canon, it has been a cornerstone of that powerful and persistent modern narrative concerning the Orientalists’ great “gift” to the Indian people of their own past and tradition—a narrative featured not merely in the official historiography of Orientalism into our own times but also in a wide range of nationalist writing in India itself, including, most famously perhaps, Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India (1946): “To Jones and to the many other European scholars India owes a deep debt of gratitude for the rediscovery of her past literature.”¹⁵ And the early role played by Germany in this process should help us understand Orientalism itself as a pan-European system of relays that cannot be reduced to an unmediated logic of colonial raison d’état, a position that Said’s critics have sometimes incorrectly attributed to him.¹⁶

Empire was from the beginning a matter of translation and translation itself an anxious scene of fidelity and betrayal, as Bernard Cohn argued long ago with reference to Thomas Roe, James I’s emissary to the Mughal court, who represents the beginnings of official English presence in the subcontinent.¹⁷ And the precise historical context for the birth of the new Orientalist practice of translation in Calcutta was no less clearly political in an immediate sense, namely, the ascendancy of British rule in India in the second half of the eighteenth century and the conquest of Bengal in particular. With the victory in the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the British found themselves for the first time in possession of a large contiguous territory populated by an expanse of agriculturalists and, having seized the revenues of Bengal in 1765, felt the need for systematic knowledge of Indian society, whose economic dimension was described over forty years ago by Ranajit Guha in his A Rule of Property for Bengal, a pioneering study of knowledge forms and their role in the transformation of colonized societies.¹⁸ On being appointed as the first governor-general of India, Warren Hastings, whom Edmund Burke was to help impeach over two decades later, began to create the first official and institutional context for the new Indological studies to emerge. Hastings is the first great patron and facilitator of this new philology emerging from Calcutta, and Jones, Halhed, Henry Thomas Colebrook, and Charles Wilkins were all officials of the East India Company under his administration.¹⁹ The German and eventually pan-European discourse of world literature is thus fundamentally indebted to and predicated on this British colonial project. These early forays into the world of Sanskrit textuality betray anxieties about what was at least initially a near-blind reliance on the native practitioners and specialists of what appeared to the emerging Orientalists to be an ocean of indigenous learning. The “secretiveness” of the Brahmins is a constant anxiety in the literature of the period, including in Jones’s private correspondence, and the story of his gradual entry into the Sanskrit universe is often told as one of his winning over their trust and even love.²⁰ The relationship between the European scholar-administrator and “his” pundits, as they came to be called, constitutes the core institution of this early Indology, an institution that survived to some extent the great shift of the 1820s toward a textual-archive-based Indology, and already by the first decade of the century, Indian philology had begun to acquire a more firmly textual basis in Europe itself: in the 1780s, Jones and Wilkins could have acquired Sanskrit only in India; in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, Schlegel and Franz Bopp did so in Paris, and Wilhelm von Humboldt (from Bopp) did so in London. Through the 1770s, the linguistic focus of the new research in Calcutta had remained on Persian, the language through which the British had largely come to know the history of India.²¹ It is only gradually in these decades that these early scholars became acquainted with Sanskrit textual traditions, whose very existence had largely been a matter of rumor and sometimes of wild speculation until then.²² Some of the translations from this period whose ultimate source is a Sanskrit text or set of texts, such as Halhed’s well-known compilation, widely read in Europe at the time, were translated from Persian versions of the Sanskrit originals, themselves often at more than one remove.

What this early generation of Orientalists encountered on the subcontinent was not one single culture of writing but rather a loose articulation of different, often overlapping but also mutually exclusive, systems based variously in Persian, Sanskrit, and a large number of the vernacular registers, often more than one in a single language, properly speaking.²³ Their writings reveal both a sense of elation and apprehension at this encounter with an unknown of almost sublime proportions. I think we may speak here of a sort of philological sublime, a structure of encounter with a linguistic and cultural complexity of infinitesimal and dynamic differentiations and of seemingly infinite proportions. Sympathetic chroniclers of these intellectual developments, even into the twentieth century, cannot resist the language of incalculability. “He stood,” writes Garland Cannon of Jones at the threshold of his study of Sanskrit, “the pioneer and orienter [sic], before a huge, unexplored knowledge.” Jones’s famous third-anniversary address to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta in 1786, in which he broached for the first time the claim for a genetic “affinity” between Sanskrit and Greek and Latin—the germ of the idea of the Indo-European family of languages—was itself intended as the first of five annual discourses that would elaborate a vast comparative anthropology of, as Cannon puts it, “titanic scope” to encompass the ancient continent:²⁴

The five principal nations, who have in different ages divided among themselves, as a kind of inheritance, the vast continent of Asia, with the many islands depending on it, are the Indians, the Chinese, the Tartars, the Arabs, and the Persians: who they severally were, whence, and when they came, where they are now settled, and what advantage a more perfect knowledge of them may bring to our European world, will be shown, I trust, in five distinct essays; the last of which will demonstrate the connection or diversity among them, and solve the great problem, whether they had any common origin, and whether that origin was the same, which we generally ascribe to them.²⁵

The famous prospectus of research that Jones had already penned during his passage to India is similarly expansive, covering such fields as flora and fauna, astronomy, geography, numismatics, and archeology.²⁶ And in these early records of his Eastern discoveries, at least, it is not simply “India” that is referenced but India, Asia, and the East more broadly, in a series of synecdochal enlargements. It is only in later decades that the idea of Indo-European affinity came to function explicitly as part of the cultural apparatus of colonial governance, mutating in the course of the nineteenth century into the full-blown theory of the Aryan conquest, in which race, language, and culture became indistinguishably fused.²⁷

In the now-classic study Rhetoric of English India, Sara Suleri has spoken of Burke’s famous involvement with the impeachment of Hastings as the occasion for an elaboration of what she calls the “Indian sublime.” Implicit in the workings of the sublime in colonial culture, Suleri writes, is an “overdetermined fearfulness that the colonial imagination must experience in relation to its Indian novelty.” To reduce experience to a list or itinerary thus becomes the “driving force” of Anglo-Indian narrative, such forms of the “catalogue” becoming the modality of “colonial self-protection” in the face of the sublime. Suleri calls attention to Burke’s insistence on the failure of colonial description, to “the colonizer’s pained confrontation with an object to which his cultural and interpretive tools must be inadequate.”²⁸ The various philological “projects” (to borrow a term from Said) of the long nineteenth century, from these early excavations of Jones and his contemporaries, through the linguistic inventions of the College of Fort William, to which I return in the next section, and culminating in the monumental cultural cartography of G. A. Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India (1898–1928), are linked by their participation in the philological version of this overdetermined sublime and mark a variety of attempts to grapple with the unrepresentability of the sociocultural reality of the subcontinent in the terms of contemporary Western intellectual systems at various points in the history of its subsumption into the imperial domain. The birth of modern (European) comparative philology itself is linked to this philological sublime and may be traced to, first, Jones’s thesis about the connectedness of Sanskrit to Greek and Latin (in the “Third Anniversary Discourse” of 1786) and, second, to the observations about the genetic relationship between Sanskrit and Persian (in the “Sixth Anniversary Address” of 1789).

The new Indology to arise out of and alongside Jones’s involvement with India—the founding of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the systematic study of Sanskrit by a number of officials in Calcutta, the “discovery” of Sanskritic aesthetics, the translation of works of imaginative literature or of a religious nature and their dissemination to European reading publics, the fixing of a newly canonized Sanskritic culture as the “classical” culture of the (singular) civilization of the subcontinent, the development of schemes for the transliteration of Indian texts (from various languages) in European writing systems, and last but not least, the establishment of legal codes for specifically defined religious communities in contemporary society through the translation of “classical” juridical works—proceeded to a great extent through an application to the “Indian novelty” of the theory of cultural difference and national “poetic genius” that Jones had developed in the early 1770s with regard to ancient (that is, pre- and early Islamic) “Arabia” and medieval (that is, early Islamic) “Persia.” One consequence of this transposition (and generalization) from, strictly speaking, pre-Sanskritic Orientalism to the Sanskritic domain is that the Indo-Persian tradition, which in Jones’s early essay had simply stood in for (contemporary) Indian culture as such, now appeared in a problematic light as the embodiment of a nonnational cultural imagination continuous with the cultures of the Near East and without deep roots in the subcontinent.²⁹ More than any other contemporary European thinker and scholar, therefore, Jones helped to install the chronotope of the indigenous, as I have called it in Chapter 1, a figure as much as a conception of a certain form of deep habitation in time, helping to establish it as the fulcrum of the new knowledge practices concerning the culture and civilization of Britain’s newly acquired possessions in Asia.

Schlegel’s Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier marks the culmination of this initial elaboration of the new Indology, the codification of the Indic complex as it operated throughout the nineteenth century. On the one hand, it identified Sanskrit as “the Indian language,” identifying it, as Foucault noted, as the extreme case of an “inflectional language” (Chinese being the exemplar of the opposite juxtapositional or additive mode).³⁰ On the other, Schlegel linked Sanskrit to Old Persian and the languages of European antiquity as their common ancestor, “the earliest derived language, to the general source” (presumably something like “proto Indo-European”):³¹ in other words, this work produced in a single stroke a mode of producing the canon of “Indian literature,” that is, a conception of the unique tradition of the vast and complex society of the subcontinent, and grounded it in the notion of the Indo-European family of languages. While specific hypotheses, like the notion of Sanskrit as genetic ancestor to Greek, came to be refuted by later researchers, that correction took place within the larger structure of knowledge systematized in Schlegel’s work from the material provided by Calcutta Orientalism, namely, general grammar and, more broadly, comparative philology.

Schlegel also marks the shift from India to Europe itself as the site for the study of Sanskrit and Indo-European philology—the world centers of Sanskrit studies would henceforth be in European cities and universities. He was taught Sanskrit by a veteran of Calcutta Orientalism, but in Paris, so his experience encapsulates this historical transition perhaps more neatly than that of any other individual. As is well known, this experience involves the person of Alexander Hamilton, member of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, and the event of his arrival and stay in Paris in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Able to enter France in 1802 after the signing of the Peace of Amiens to study what was then the largest collection of Sanskrit manuscripts in Europe, which he subsequently helped to catalogue for the first time, Hamilton was detained when hostilities broke out once again and, through the intercession of leading scholars and public figures in France who were aware of his reputation for prodigious Sanskritic learning, as well as an appeal to Talleyrand by his namesake American cousin, was released and allowed to provide instruction to individuals in the language. It was with him that Schlegel studied Sanskrit and under his daily influence—Hamilton lived in his home for a while—that he wrote his instantly famous work.³² Hamilton was allowed to leave France after the intercession of Sylvestre de Sacy and took up position as a professor at the East India Company’s training college at Haileybury, the classically “Anglicist” institution designed to moderate the malign “Orientalist” influence of the College of Fort William in Calcutta (about which more in the next section) on the young recruits of the company.

What began to emerge in the work of the Calcutta Orientalists and its dissemination throughout the Euro-American world was thus the cultural system of English as a worldwide assemblage. Asiatick Researches was among the first vehicles of this dissemination and therefore of this cultural system. It is in this manner, by providing the materials and the practices of a new cosmopolitan (as well as indigenist or particularist) conception of the world as linguistic and cultural assemblage, that English began to supplant the neoclassical cultural order on the continent in which above all others French and France had provided the norms for literary production. Crucially, it helped transform the role of Paris itself as literary center, which rapidly emerged, as both Schwab and Said noted a long time ago, as the most important locale for the systemization, institutionalization, and diffusion of the new Oriental learning, including, above all, Sanskritic Indology.

It is thus in English as cultural system, broadly conceived—namely, in the new Indology and its wider reception in the Euro-American world—that the subcontinent was first conceived of in the modern era as a single cultural entity, a unique civilization with its roots in the Sanskritic and more particularly Vedic texts of the Aryans. It is in the new Indology that the contemporary Western frames of thought that I have referred to as nation-thinking were first brought to bear on culture and society in the subcontinent. I cannot put it more starkly than this: the idea that India is a unique national civilization in possession of a “classical” culture was first postulated on the terrain of literature, that is, in the very invention of the idea of Indian literature in the course of the philological revolution. The dissemination throughout the European intellectual world of the new researches that began to emerge from Calcutta in the 1780s therefore constitutes the first significant dissemination anywhere of the Indian national idea. This invocation of an “Indian” tradition of sublime appearance and proportions consisting of both sacred and secular elements—this invention of the sacred-secular Indic complex as such—functioned historically as a massive collective act of interpellation, calling up into existence a specifically Indian intelligentsia for the first time and assuring its inculcation in the procedures and methods of nation-thinking. As I have already noted, the Anglicist project for the modern and Western education of segments of the elite classes in the subcontinent served as the means for the transmission of Orientalist knowledge to them. The history of this transmission—the process by which this particular historical consciousness, this emergent understanding of language, culture, society, and history, took hold within certain elite sectors of society in India itself later in the century—is an extremely complex story, being reconstructed in bits and pieces by literally dozens of scholars across several disciplines but still best understood in the formation of a new literary culture among the Bengali Hindu bhadralōk, the first properly colonial and thus first modern intellectual culture in India and perhaps Asia, which came eventually to refer to itself as the Bengal Renaissance.

The role of Orientalist knowledge in the fabrication of this colonial elite and the first, properly speaking, Indian intelligentsia in the subcontinent is copiously documented but understood largely in terms of the historiographical category of “influence.” The narrative that lurks close to the surface in most of these accounts, as I have already noted, represents this cultural transaction as a selfless gift from colonizer to colonized of the latter’s past conceived as History. Two generations of scholars of modern Hinduism—such as Partha Chatterjee, Tapan Raychaudhuri, Brian K. Pennington, Srinivas Aravamudan, Amit Ray, and Anustup Basu—attempting precisely to break free of this profoundly colonial narrative, have shown in recent years that the most famous products of the translation labors of the Calcutta Orientalists, such as Charles Wilkins’s Bhagvat-Geeta, or Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon (1785) and Jones’s translations of Śākuntala and the Mānavadharmaśāstra, were acts of invention with far-reaching consequences of a different sort for the colonized society.³³ They acquired a prominence and uniqueness within the Orientalist conception and practices of the Indian “tradition” that had little or nothing in common with their authority and place in precolonial cultures in the subcontinent, in Bengal or elsewhere. This is true equally of forms of writing deemed sacred as of those deemed secular. And the process reveals the mutual interdependence between emergent secular-national and Hindu-religious identities. The conception of the Gita as a distinct and core scriptural text of the Hindus, for instance—a conception that allowed Gandhi even to juxtapose it to the scriptures of the monotheistic religions in his publicly ostentatious practice of religious ecumenicism—cannot be understood outside this, precisely speaking, Orientalist process of its extraction from its textual and social contexts and reconstellation at the core of a newly fashioned Indian national tradition.

More broadly speaking, Orientalism placed selected Brahminical texts, practices, and social and cultural imaginaries from ancient times at the core of the civilization of the subcontinent as a whole, establishing hierarchies not merely between diverse textual traditions within contemporary Indian society but between these various elite forms of textual authority and a vast range of lived socioreligious forms—in what was well into the twentieth century a largely nonliterate population—hierarchies that continue to help reproduce elements of the colonial social order in postcolonial times. Orientalism thus helped to reproduce in secular-literary terms the authority of those social classes whose place in the hierarchy of precolonial society had been ensured by their religious-ritual connection to Sanskritic learning. It is thus not mere coincidence that the founders of modern savarna (literally, “same color”) or upper-caste Hinduism—figures such as Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Swami Vivekananda, and Keshub Chander Sen—were enthusiastic readers and devotees of the European Orientalists.³⁴ The awe and even reverence in which these early “moderns” in the subcontinent held such eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European codifiers of this “Indian” tradition as Jones, Wilkins, Hamilton, Colebrooke, and Max Müller is an index of the Orientalists’ invention of Indian literature and its insertion into an expanded and transformed world literary space. We might even say that the acquisition of this structure of feeling—a sense of awe and reverence for the labors of the Orientalists—is what it meant to be (colonial) modern for the first time in different regions and languages of the subcontinent at different times in the course of the nineteenth century.

Thus, when the colonial-nationalist intelligentsia began gradually to emerge in different parts of the country from the middle decades of the nineteenth century, it found fully formed a body of writing understood as “Indian literature” and a body of knowledge and cultural system for configuring language, literature, and culture in national terms. Put differently, this emergent intelligentsia was in a strong sense schooled in Orientalism, which constituted for it the very horizon of modern and Western humanistic knowledge. The nineteenth century in India can thus be conceived of in cultural and intellectual terms as the period of the long emergence of the chronotope of the indigenous and its installation at the core of a new middle-class intellectual culture of increasingly pan-subcontinental scope. Both the secular and the religious types of nationalism in modern times share this ground of the indigenous as facilitator of the authenticity of tradition (paramparā), the shared ground that explains the ease of movement over the modern era from the one to the other political and cultural formation—from the religious to the secular in the early decades of the twentieth century and in the opposite direction in our own times.³⁵ The notion of world literature itself came to have a significant place in this culture of nationalism, stressed to varying degrees by different writers and thinkers, as that universal space to which India may be said to have made, in the form of its ancient Sanskritic culture, a distinct national contribution, as I have already noted with respect to Tagore.

But my larger interest here, to which I return in more detail shortly, is that this mode of insertion of the colony into the space of world literature, this distinctly nationalist resolution of the question of literature and culture, set the stage for the elaboration of contradictions (and eventually social conflicts) between national and nonnational social imaginaries in the subcontinent, in particular between the indigenized Indic complex and the Indo-Persian ecumene, of which the Urdu version of the northern vernacular (as opposed to its Hindi version) may be said to carry the most visible linguistic trace in modern times. Let us briefly consider the case of Payām-e maśriq (Message of the East, 1924), the great “response” in Persian to Goethe’s Divan produced by Muhammad Iqbal, Tagore’s approximate contemporary, in which “the East” as a whole is produced above all as a transnational Islamicate sphere. If Goethe’s Divan of 1819 may be said, in its detailed and close engagement with the (fourteenth-century) dīvān of Hafez, to be the culminating gesture of the emerging European practice of world literature, taking the “national” literary complex of “Persia” to be a synecdoche for the “East” more broadly, Iqbal’s cycle of poems returns the gesture “a century later,” as he puts it in the preface, by placing an Indo-Persian (and, by implication, Indo-Muslim) literary and theosophical complex, in whose elaboration he himself had played a role for some two decades already, at the center of this “message” in response.³⁶ Iqbal’s preface to the work offers a summary history of the so-called Oriental school in German poetry from Goethe to Friedrich Rückert and beyond and locates the necessity of his own work in the wake of “Europe’s war,” just as, he notes, Goethe had sought refuge in the East from the devastation of a whole continent in the great wars of his own times. But his own dīvān of poems, Iqbal asserts, has the “aim [mudda‘ā]” of warning his readers in this time of crisis in both East and West against the “Eastern tendencies [‘ajamīyyat, literally “Persianism”]” that “avoid the problems of life” and cannot “reconcile sentiment [jazbāt-e qalb] with the rational mind [afkār-e dimāgh].” As in a great deal of his verse, the challenge for Iqbal here is how to engage with the philosophical and poetic heritage of Sufism without succumbing to the Orientalist-Anglicist stranglehold of the “mystical East.” In this practice of world literature on Indian soil, the tradition (rivāyat) of the Indo-Muslim poet, born in a family of Kashmiri Brahmin converts, leads through a circuitous route via Goethe back to the Persian Hafez—a fundamentally non-nationalist, because nonindigenist, resolution—and the so-called indigenous cultural materials of the Indian-national literary complex certainly make an appearance from time to time in Iqbal’s verse, but as a framed (rather than framing) element.

In the remaining sections of this chapter, I shall return at length to the question of the divided vernacular of North India, namely, Hindi-Urdu, whose history in the nineteenth century is a record of a series of effects of the emerging logic of indigenization. But let us turn first to an Anglophone context for the early elaboration of the topos of the nation and consider briefly the case of Henry Derozio, the poet and famously charismatic teacher of literature at Hindu College in Calcutta. A young “half-caste” of mixed English, Portuguese, and Indian parentage, Derozio got caught up in the late 1820s in one of the first controversies in colonial India concerning the effects of Western-style education and will likely forever remain associated with the perhaps apocryphal image of his students, the sons of upper-caste Hindu families, allegedly consuming liquor and meat openly and ostentatiously in the marketplace. It is conventional to regard Derozio as a leading member of the generation known as Young Bengal and as the first Indian to write poetry in English. Hindu College itself was an early attempt to negotiate between Hindu orthodoxy and the new education. But this new culture of reading and writing became immediately associated with the scandal of iconoclasm and the breaking of caste rules. The new practice of reading literature is in tension here with fealty to a textually authorized religious orthodoxy. A mere four decades later, as Chatterjee has shown in his reading of the Bengali writer Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, this seemingly insurmountable tension became, for certain classes of people in certain places in colonial India, a distant memory: for Chatterjee, Bankim is both the leading figure of the new Bengali literature that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century and one of the founders of a modern Hindu neo-orthodoxy.³⁷

“Anglicist” classicism comes into productive tension in Derozio’s verse with “Orientalist” indigenism, poetic conventions that, for instance, Jones’s Indian verse, especially the hymns to the figures of the Hindu pantheon—which appeared in several editions of his collected poems in the quarter century from 1799 on—had helped to popularize. On the one hand, the European classical imagery itself acquires a certain ambiguity. Are the “barbarous hordes” in the poem “Thermopylae” the Persians knocking on Europe’s door or Europeans who have come to subjugate Persia’s ancient neighbor? Are “Sparta’s sons” defending Europe against the Asiatic horde or a model for Asia’s sons themselves that shows them how “liberty in death is won”? Is the “patriot sword” in “Freedom to the Slave” a gift of the English language or lifted against it?³⁸ On the other hand, Derozio replicates Orientalist conventions by repeatedly invoking an Indian golden age. This is, for instance, the case with “To India—My Native Land”:

“My country! In thy day of glory past

A beauteous halo circled round thy brow,

And worshipped as a deity thou wast.

Where is that glory, where that reverence now?

… Well, let me dive into the depths of time,

And bring from out the Ages that have rolled

A few small fragments of those wrecks sublime,

Which human eye may never more behold.”³⁹

Indian national sentiment—“My country!”—arises out of a Western and in fact English literary model here, which in itself is the product of an encounter between literature in the new sense and the Orientalists’ philological labors. And a constitutive ambiguity is already at work in this very early, properly speaking, nationalist text, revealing the ambiguous and ambivalent reliance of nationalist culture on the structures of colonial knowledge: how could “India” appear to one of its “native” sons as an ocean full of “wrecks sublime”? The national consciousness finds itself, so to speak, precisely by adopting the colonizers’ orientation toward “Indian literature” and can therefore only be understood, to be more precise, as an Orientalized consciousness.

The historical trajectory I am interested in here, leading from the birth of the new Orientalism in the late eighteenth century to the fitful and regionally uneven emergence of a colonial-nationalist intelligentsia in the course of the nineteenth, is far from being a linear or unidirectional one and cannot be said to conform to any notion of historical necessity. And it unfolded across a social field marked by contradictions at various levels. Perhaps most importantly, and as Thomas Macaulay already understood, this process of acculturation to indigenizing notions and practices was directed ultimately at a small class constituted mostly from the precolonial social elites rather than the subaltern mass of the people, turning the latter into the popular object of the former’s project of self-elaboration, which would thus take national form. And this intelligentsia came eventually to turn this national complex, including the Orientalist myth of a lost Indian Golden Age that we have just encountered in Derozio’s verse, against colonial rule. The imperial overlords, furthermore, remained as a whole highly ambivalent about these cultural developments, split in the late nineteenth century, for instance, between the posture of selfless tutelage of the natives and that of savage disdain for these “chattering” classes, both of which we encounter, for instance, in Rudyard Kipling’s fiction as well as verse. But the fact that nationalist intellectuals appropriated the work of the Orientalists selectively and in effect ironically, or with a view to their own perceived interests, does not in any way lessen the significance of a distinctly Orientalist pedagogy in their very emergence as a pan-subcontinental, “Indian” class.⁴⁰ When in the middle to late nineteenth century members of the emergent nationalist intelligentsia produced apologia in response to “Anglicist”—secular utilitarian or evangelical Christian—attacks on “their” religious and cultural traditions, they typically did so, as Pennington has argued, in broadly “Orientalist” terms, drawing on precisely the figures whose influence on colonial policy the Anglicists wished to displace.⁴¹

This logic of indigenization, first put to work with respect to society in the subcontinent, as I am arguing here, in the assembling of the Sanskrit-centered Indic complex, had far-reaching effects across the cultural and social field that came into being under the impact of colonial rule and across a range of contemporary vernacular formations. But Orientalism’s linguistic and literary invention of India has in fact to be understood as a complex two-part, nonsynchronous process: the assembling of the Indic complex (Jones and his contemporaries and the wider discourse in the nineteenth century initiated by their work) and then, following the first significant transition in the history of this early Indology, the invention of the modern vernaculars through an enormous and multipronged project. This second phase of Orientalism’s Indian “project” (in Said’s sense) involved in these early years such colonial institutions as the College of Fort William in Calcutta (about which more in the next section), the Baptist mission at Serampore in Bengal, and the College of Fort St. George in Madras—the mission, for instance, undertaking a massive printing project in a large number of the vernaculars, inventing movable type for the first time for several of the languages and dialects of India. One tectonic impact of this dual process of indigenization in colonial culture—the Sanskritization of tradition, on the one hand, and the invention of the modern vernaculars, on the other—was the rapid decline and disappearance of Indo-Persian civilization, whose forms of cosmopolitanism, once the culture of vast segments of the literate classes in the subcontinent across the lines of religious affiliation, could now only appear under the sign of the nonindigenous, the elite and thus alien.

By far the most dramatic instance of this process of indigenization on the terrain of language, not surprisingly, is the effort to produce a linguistic and literary center for the emerging nation-space—the invention of modern śuddha (purified) Hindi as the language of the nation precisely under the sign of the indigenous. As Vasudha Dalmia has shown in her now-classic study of the colonial invention of standardized Hindi, The Nationalization of Hindu Tradition, since British officials in the nineteenth century were convinced that “Hindus” and “Muslims” in India were distinct and radically different populations, those tasked with educational matters in North India were in constant search for the “original” language of the Hindus, as opposed to the many existing forms of the actual lingua franca, which were understood to be variously degraded forms, mutilated by centuries of “Muslim” influence.⁴² And if modern Urdu may be described for our purposes as the version of the northern vernacular that most visibly carries traces of the now mostly disappeared Indo-Persian culture, then the concept of indigenization helps clarify for us the distinct situation of Urdu since the middle of the nineteenth century as a set of linguistic, literary, and social practices at odds with the emerging practices of the nation.

It is therefore meaningful, as confirmed by a number of scholars of the emergent Hindi nationalist polemics, which were elaborated in a wide range of forms of writing, from poems and plays to pamphlet literature, that one of its distinct features was the feminization of Urdu, often anthropomorphized as an aristocratic and indolent “bībī” or “Begum Urdu” or even a louche and garishly made up courtesan, figures of the precolonial upper-class social milieu in the towns of North India that are inassimilable to notions of “national” productiveness and rectitude.⁴³ The larger issue here, however, is not simply that the fabrication of an Indian tradition was anchored by a (modern) Hindu religio-political identity but rather that these shifts in the contours of knowledge, language, and culture produced (and reproduced) two increasingly distinct social groups and social imaginaries among the new urban middle classes across the subcontinent, each marked by a newly standardized religious identity but only one of which came to see itself as being in possession, in a strong sense, of that Orientalized Sanskritic, and more broadly “Indic,” heritage, and the other, because it could not replicate that strong claim to possession, came to see itself, and of course was seen by others, as not quite Indian in the emergent sense. The indigenization of language, literature, and culture is a core and canonical practice of Orientalist knowledge in the subcontinent with far-reaching effects across the social and cultural field.

The sociology of “communalization” in colonial India has most often focused on what it considers to be the partial and incomplete modernization of the aśrāf Muslim elites of northern India and their subsequent competition of unequals within the state with the ascendant Hindu middle classes. This way of understanding the Muslim question is in fact canonical to nationalism itself. I have argued at some length elsewhere that this argument is circular in nature, assuming the prior existence of those entities—“Hindu” and “Muslim” as religio-political identities—whose emergence it is meant to explain. Moreover, this account of a social fissure in the elite domains of colonial society cannot explain the “effectiveness” of communalized politics with respect to the masses at large or why this regional problematic could have been translated into a national one.⁴⁴ Such analyses lack an adequate understanding of the historical trajectory of the ideological elements of this process of social transformation, and it is their genealogy that I am trying to present in this chapter. As Ranajit Guha has argued, the politicization of the Hindu-Muslim question in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marks one of the two “axes” along which the nationalist bourgeoisie failed in enacting a hegemonic project with respect to society, with the other, of course, being class.⁴⁵ My goal here is to develop a way of understanding the cultural logic that unfolds along this “communal” axis. The emergence of polarized religio-political identities in India in modern times, and of the two distinct and rival forms of the North Indian vernacular associated with them, that is, modern Hindi and Urdu, itself so decisive for the course of the larger processes that precipitated the final Partition of India in the middle of the twentieth century along religious lines, is in a strong sense a colonial development. This is a historical judgment, furthermore, that must not be confused with the more popular, and distinctly nationalist, habit of assigning the “blame” for the political split to British policies of Divide and Rule. But the precise unfolding of these processes of partition across the cultural, social, and political fields cannot be understood without reference to the conditions of colonial rule in the subcontinent. The entire dialectic of the indigenous and the alien, Hindu and Muslim, that is so defining of the cultural history of the second half of the nineteenth century is put into motion for the first time in the slow and massive realignment of the gears of knowledge and culture at its beginning.

Calcutta Orientalism, Phase II: What Is the “Language of Hindoostan”?

At least two levels of interaction are significant here, if we may return for a moment to the terms of analysis introduced by Casanova: first, this linguistic and cultural conflict may be viewed as evidence of a struggle to achieve preeminence in an emerging national literary space in the subcontinent in the course of the nineteenth century, a literary space whose (evolving) political milieu is provided by the development of the structures of the colonial state; and second, the emergence of this national space itself is inseparable from the process of its insertion into the world literary space in the period of the latter’s massive expansion across the globe. Of course, to a large extent this process in India parallels developments in language and literature in Europe itself since the middle of the eighteenth century, from the ubiquitous collections of folk tales across the continent to the recovery of “bardic” traditions—the so-called Herder effect, in short.⁴⁶ And the celebrated “Ossian” forgery, which, given its initial popularity, acquired scandal-like proportions once exposed, in fact reveals the inventive nature of all philological fabrications of national traditions. But the paradox of the Indian situation is this: the process of vernacularization that we know to be inseparable from bourgeois modernization—and outside Europe, we may think of such language revolutions as the May Fourth Movement in China, genbun itchi in Japan, the nahḍa in Egypt and Greater Syria—produced in India not one but two claimants to the status of lingua franca. To put it more precisely, it produced two versions of the same language complex, the northern Indian vernacular, in conflict and rivalry with each other over claims to social reach and social distinction in the emerging national literary space. These two supposed languages are in fact two lexically overlapping versions of the same khaṛī bōlī (upright speech) morphological subset of the vernacular of western Uttar Pradesh and eastern Punjab (including present-day Haryana), which the armies and Sufis of the Mughal sphere had helped to establish as the northern Indian lingua franca. Part of the difficulty of making this argument about Hindi-Urdu as spectrum, which is instinctually evident at various levels to native speakers, is that there is no name for this more encompassing and contradictory linguistic formation—whether Hindi, Urdu, or Hindustani—that is not subject to the terms of the conflict itself: Indian and Pakistani speakers, for instance, routinely use “Hindi” and “Urdu,” respectively, to refer to exactly the same common speech forms. To acquire one or the other of these supposedly distinct languages as a native speaker is therefore not simply to learn a language as such. It is to learn ways of participating in a language field constituted as a polemic. It is now the settled social reality of the North Indian vernacular to be experienced internally by native speakers simultaneously as one single and two different languages.

Urdu cannot be conceived of as just another Indian language among others, as it were, since part of its historical reality over the past two hundred years has been precisely that it creates difficulties of a particular sort for the very terms in which the Indianness of language and literature have come to be conceived, difficulties that have repeatedly produced an embittered response in those who are committed to the production of a philology or literary history of a nationalist orientation.⁴⁷ In this connection, we may consider briefly the history of Urdu’s relationship as a cluster of language practices and a textual corpus in the northern vernacular to the mārga/dēśī polarity (literally, “the way” / “of the place, local”) operative in nationalist philology and literary history. A feature of Sanskritic culture since its rise to hegemonic status as the cosmopolitan cultural order in the subcontinent early in the first millennium CE, it acquired a radically new valence and functionality in colonial-nationalist culture. Sheldon Pollock has translated this polarity into English as “cosmopolitan/vernacular” and analyzed its ability to give an account of the relation between Sanskrit and the rise of the vernaculars toward the end of the first millennium of the Christian era.⁴⁸ Since the early nineteenth century, however, this conceptual binary has been subject to the logic of indigenization that I have been attempting to describe here and played a central role in Orientalist-nationalist philology. In the foundational work of such figures as Suniti Kumar Chatterjee, for instance, it functions entirely within the terms of the Hindi-Urdu polemic, with both the “cosmopolitan” and “vernacular” functions and orientations (read: “Sanskrit” and the “new Indo-Aryan languages” like Hindi, respectively) now carrying the force of the indigenous as against the hybrid and alien forms of Urdu and the Indo-Persian cultural sphere more broadly. Any attempt to conceptualize linguistic-literary relations between different cultural formations in contemporary South Asia in terms of the conceptual structure of mārga/dēśī, as in G. N. Devy’s After Amnesia: Tradition and Change in Indian Literary Criticism, which is a pioneering attempt to envision a practice of literary criticism that is capable of thinking against and beyond what Devy calls the “epistemological stumbling block” of colonial culture, finds its own stumbling block in the forms of anomaly that from the perspective of nationalism seem to coalesce in Urdu.⁴⁹

The single most important institutional setting for an understanding of the inventiveness of Calcutta Orientalism in its second, “vernacular” phase is the College of Fort William, which embodied this first transition in its history from the decade of Jones and deserves a closer look from our discipline than it has gotten. (From Said’s account of the developments in Calcutta, it is missing entirely.) The college was formed in 1800 as the first formal institutional attempt to train the future officers of the East India Company. If Governor-General Hastings is the patron of the first, that is, Sanskritic, phase of Orientalism, Wellesley is that of the second, vernacular one. In the course of a few years at the beginning of the century, a small group of European lexicographers and translators, including John Gilchrist, Edward Warring, and the Baptist missionary William Carey, along with their teams of native assistants, including Mir Amman, Mir Sher Ali Afsos, Lalluji Lal, and Ramram Basu, produced the models for standardized prose in several of the vernacular languages of India. The very organizational structure of the college, which grouped its personnel into European “professors” and “teachers,” on the one hand, and native “munshis” (scribes), on the other, was thus an acknowledgment of its articulation of vastly different intellectual cultures, subjectivities, and social temporalities—European intellectuals with the most “advanced” contemporary forms of Western humanistic education from such institutions as Oxford, supervising the work of munshis of various sorts, who were trained in the traditional manner of the late Mughal Empire, in the first formal institution of “modern” education in India.⁵⁰

The effects of the college’s work for language and literature in North India in particular were far reaching. Under the explicit instructions of Gilchrist, appointed professor of Hindostani in 1800, these individuals produced, for use as textbooks in the linguistic education of the young British recruits of the East India Company, a handful of prose works in two distinct forms of the North Indian vernacular, to be called “Hindi” and “Hindostani,” which Gilchrist viewed as separate Hindu and Muslim languages, respectively, the one with Sanskrit as lexical source and the other with Persian and Arabic.⁵¹ In aligning religion, language, and literature in this manner, Gilchrist was simply extending the terms of a wider Anglo-Indian discourse since the middle of the eighteenth century. In these early decades, the British often used “Moor” to refer to Muslims in India and “Moor’s” for their purported language. Jones himself, in his 1786 address to the Asiatic Society, distinguished between the “Hindostani” language and the “Bhasha,” and the Serampore missionaries, among them Carey, who joined the college as teacher of Sanskrit and Bengali, had already begun to highlight in their publications two distinct variants of the northern vernacular. But the Fort William project takes this process to a new level, and the narratives produced there are the first systematic instance anywhere of the standardization of the vernacular in two distinct forms marked by religious difference. And the fact that these works were published with individual munshis identified as authors of the works is already an indication of the at-least-minimal inroads toward the installation of a specifically “literary” space in India—a far cry from the anonymous pundits of Jones and his contemporaries when they started out a mere twenty years earlier. The Fort William project thus represents one attempt to impose order of a particular sort, in line with the methods of nation-thinking, on the “infinitely varied common tongue” of North India, as Alok Rai has put it quite memorably.⁵² A critical reception history of the “Hindi” and “Hindostani” narratives produced at the college, which comprehends the modes by which these profoundly colonial texts entered and shaped the emerging vernacular literary cultures in northern India—their entry into school and college curricula, their canonization in the works of the new literary history—remains still to be written, as does a careful comparative philology that seeks to place these early colonial linguistic-literary projects (the Serampore and Fort William texts above all) alongside the range of contemporary literary practices at various degrees of remove from colonial institutions.⁵³

As Shamsur Rahman Faruqi has shown, the term Hindustani had no such fixed currency within the indigenous culture itself, with the poets and tazkira (biographical anthology) writers of the period using a range of designations, including rēḳhta (scattered or mixed), ẕabān-e urdū-e mu‘allā (speech of the exalted camp/court), Hindavi or Hindui, and even simply Hindi to designate the language of their compositions, which was seen to be in varying ways distant from or proximate to a number of dialects and registers—Braj-bhasha or Braj-bakha, Avadhi, and Bhojpuri, among numerous others, often referred to, indiscriminately, as the bākhā.⁵⁴ Let us consider briefly the case of Inshallah Khan Insha’s Kahānī Rānī Kētakī aur Kuñvar Uday Bhān kī (The Tale of Queen Ketaki and Prince Uday Bhan, 1803?), for instance, a text whose likely period of composition makes it a contemporary of the Fort William College narratives but whose social milieu lay at a relative distance from the social orbit and temporalities of the emerging colonial state. It played a not-negligible role in the production of the self-conception of Hindi nationalism in the twentieth century as having arisen out of a long indigenous tradition.⁵⁵ This Hindi canonization of Insha’s tale is at the very least paradoxical, since otherwise he is widely regarded as one of the major codifiers of the Urdu tradition, due largely to his Daryā-e laṭāfat (The Ocean of Refinement, 1808), a Persian-language prose work establishing rules of bon usage in the northern Indian vernacular. This latter text is perhaps our most fecund source for understanding the range and emerging hierarchy of linguistic practice in North India in the early nineteenth century and has been subject to repeated excoriation in later Hindi literary history as evidence of the tangential nature of Urdu to the mainstream linguistic development of North India.⁵⁶

But in the story, Insha appears to have proceeded with the opposite intention—to purge writing in the vernacular, as a sort of feat of linguistic prowess, of all “foreign” vocabulary originating in Arabic, Persian, and Turkic. It is of course this linguistic conceit that makes it available for later appropriation by Hindi nationalism: “It occurred to me one day to tell a story in which besides Hindavi no mixture of another way of speaking [bōl] should be encountered.… Neither any foreign speech [bāhar kī bōlī] nor the rustic [gañvārī] should be present in it.” But what is meant by the “rustic” here is itself quite revealing, as we are told that a respectable older acquaintance of the author’s had expressed his skepticism about the plausibility of such a linguistic adventure, in which “neither Hindavi-ness would be removed [Hindavī-pan bhī na niklē]”—that is, by “foreign” lexical elements—“nor the bākhā would come bursting in [bākhā-pan na ṭhōñs jā’ē]”⁵⁷ In this text, written at a certain remove from the workings of the properly colonial logic of indigenization at work in state-Orientalist practices—within elite social groups in Lucknow, but outside formal British rule, at the turn of the century—a very different sort of cultural logic seems to be at work. The danger inherent in the quest for “Hindavi-ness,” that is, for a lexically de-Persianized and de-Arabicized practice of the khaṛī bōlī form of the vernacular, “as spoken formerly [pahlē] by the best of the best [achchhōñ sē achchhē] amongst themselves,” is thus eruption of the “bākhā,” coded as “rustic” speech. (And Insha’s boastful response is of course that he is equal to the challenge of overcoming this peril.)

In other words, the register we now identify as Urdu is imagined in Insha’s text as the guarantor of the social prestige and purity of khaṛī bōlī as such and is on a continuum with the register that is characterized here by its “Hindavi-ness,” both forms needing to be vigilant about the popular and “rustic” forms identified collectively here as the “bākhā.” Insha’s story thus seeks to render a whole range of existing forms, including above all Braj, as nonstandard, this being precisely Insha’s task in Daryā-e laṭāfat as well. In other words, both the Urdu and “Hindavi” forms of khaṛī bōlī are equally capable of enforcing this hierarchy within the complex and heterogeneous linguistic space of the North Indian vernacular. The properly colonial logic of indigenization (“Hindavi,” or “Hindi” in our contemporary terms) and alienization (“Hindustani” or “Urdu”)—at work, for instance, in the contemporary Fort William College project—is nowhere to be seen in Insha’s story, which is shaped instead by the effort to assure the prestige of elite language practices (both “Hindi” and “Urdu,” in our contemporary terms) against subaltern, “rustic,” or popular ones. And the fact that Braj, a court language of great social prestige across North India into even the nineteenth century, with a vast corpus of not only poetry but also prose, can nevertheless be rendered as “rustic” or subaltern speech reveals the social ascendancy of khaṛī bōlī forms by the turn of the century.⁵⁸ The nationalist historiographical convention that views each of these works of Insha’s as contradicting the project of the other—one supposedly indigenizing the language, the other alienating it from indigenous forms—thus represents a profound misinterpretation, one made possible, and even inevitable, by nationalist-Orientalist conceptions of language and culture.

Taking a longer historical view, we might therefore say that the Fort William project shatters the linguistic continuum between varieties of khaṛī bōlī practice by positing, with the certainty and effectiveness inherent in the state-Orientalist truth-claim, the existence of distinct and vastly different, indigenous and alien, practices of speech and writing marked by religious difference. The later retroactive “Hindi” assimilation of Insha’s story under the sign of the indigenous and popular and as a sign itself of a continuous historical development that also seamlessly includes the so-called Hindi narratives of Fort William thus misconstrues the fractures of this historical moment entirely, papering over the still-vast gulf separating the indigenizing logic of the colonial state from the precolonial logics of linguistic and cultural differentiation and stratification operating in vast segments of society in the subcontinent.

Modern Hindi thus emerged in conflict and competition, on the one hand, with Urdu, which, under the sign of the nonindigenous, it wished to eject from the space of the nation, but also, on the other, with a range of other forms of the northern vernacular about which it remained instead fundamentally ambivalent, wishing to incorporate them into its own prehistory—even though they are not khaṛī bōlī forms, properly speaking—but as premodern and thus superseded forms of the indigenous vernacular, inadequate to the linguistic and aesthetic demands of the modern world. This is the case above all with Braj, which was, along with the poetic corpus now identified as Urdu, one of the two dominant literary traditions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the northern language zone but which now could only appear in Hindi nationalist culture under the sign of a premodern and popular “sweetness” of expression (miṭṭha) whose temporality is incommensurable with the, properly speaking, historical time of the nation.⁵⁹ This inability of early Hindi nationalists to see anything but khaṛī bōlī as the appropriate idiom—or, more precisely, as the only appropriate and authentic morphological base—for the speech of the nation in its modernity is thus in large measure the result, ironically, to say the least, of the already established and officially canonized modernity of khaṛī bōlī in its Urdu version, which was from 1837 a language of the colonial state in its function as the language of the law courts in North India. Put differently, because modern Hindi occupies the same morphological ground as Urdu, it replicates the morphological hierarchy of bon usage codified in the earlier emergence of Urdu in the late-Mughal eighteenth century and in its standardization in the nineteenth as a language of the colonial state, reproducing (but also revaluing) Urdu’s classification of Braj as primitive and rustic speech. To put it somewhat differently, we might therefore say that at its moment of emergence in the middle of the nineteenth century, modern “Hindi” simply is “Urdu” in the process of being indigenized.

This process of linguistic differentiation and realignment was thus a gradual and laborious one and was by no means linear. This fact may be judged in an anecdotal way from a small but now-famous event from 1847 reported by several scholars of the language conflict. A group of Hindu students at Benares College—which a mere four decades later emerged as one of the centers of the Hindi movement—responded to the linguistic admonishments of their exasperated British educator by noting that since there were numerous forms of the spoken language, they did not understand what he meant by pure Hindi, and that in order to know which words to expunge in an effort to purify their language as he was requiring them to do—this Orientalist demand par excellence, as we have seen—they would have to learn Arabic and Persian. Even if this story were apocryphal, it would be enormously useful for understanding the logic of linguistic indigenization: for the native speaker, the route to the discovery of that which is meant to be properly one’s own is a circuitous one, leading through precisely that which is to be rendered foreign and alien.⁶⁰ The overall process of the emergence of Urdu and Hindi as rival linguistic and literary registers identified with distinct and mutually conflicted religious identities represents a massive rearrangement of a layered, performatively contingent, and dynamic linguistic reality into a structure of binary oppositions. It is only quite late in the nineteenth century, as the notion of a lexically Sanskritized version of the northern vernacular built on the same khaṛī bōlī morphological ground as Urdu gradually gained ground among a segment of the intelligentsia as the only legitimate lingua franca, that the terms “Hindi” and “Urdu” came to acquire their present differentiations and meanings. To sum up this entire historical development, then, we might say that when a colonial intelligentsia emerged in North India in the second half of the nineteenth century that was schooled in the basic procedures of nationalism-Orientalism, which require, as we have seen, the dividing up of the space of culture between indigenous-Indic elements and alien ones—the so-called Hindi nationalist intelligentsia—it desired a language of the nation distinct from both any of the actually existing speech forms of the people and the range of extant literary practices of the precolonial elites. In conjuring up this language, however—a meticulously concrete effort in a range of philological and literary practices—it relied entirely on the existing linguistic hierarchy established in the rise and dominance of Urdu in late-Mughal and early-colonial times between khaṛī bōlī and all the other forms of the northern vernacular.

Finally, any attempt to give an account of the contemporary social situation of Urdu and Hindi as literary languages must confront the paradoxical fact that no literary history, properly speaking, can fail to locate their modern origins in the Fort William College narratives, written expressly not for an Indian reading public but rather for the linguistic and cultural training of young British officers of the East India Company. There was a lag of several decades after the initial publication of the narratives before they became available to “Urdu” and “Hindi” reading publics. Even some three decades later, the ornate language of Rajab Ali Beg Suroor’s Fasāna-e ‘ajā’ib (1831?), written in a prose-poetic style, was intended precisely as a repudiation of the purportedly conversational and pedestrian Fort William idiom. The very foundational acts of historicization that sought to produce for the first time the terms of distinct and independent histories for these two traditions—I am thinking here of such late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century figures as Ramchandra Shukla (Hindi) and Muhammad Husain Azad (Urdu), to whom I turn shortly—thus represent at the same time their anchoring in this colonial and Orientalist logic.⁶¹ In a very real sense, then, prose traditions in the languages we have come to read and write as “our own”—I am speaking here as a person formed in the Hindi-Urdu polemic as a supposedly “native” speaker of “Urdu”—were invented for the purpose of colonial governance, and the task of criticism today is at the very least the untangling and rearranging of the various elements presently congealed into seemingly distinct and autonomous objects of divergent literary histories. The critical task of overcoming the colonial logics persistently at work in the formation of literary and linguistic identities today is thus indistinguishable from the task of pushing against the multiple identitarian assumptions, colonial and Orientalist in nature, of Hindi and Urdu’s mutual and religiously marked distinctness and autonomy. A postcolonial philology of this literary and linguistic complex can never adequately claim to be produced from a position uncontaminated by the language polemic that now constitutes it and can only proceed by working through its terms.

This secular-critical task, furthermore, corresponds not to the erection of some image of a heterogeneous past but to the elaboration of the contradictory contemporary situation of language and literature itself. For the laborious historical process of creating two distinct language identities—a historical labor undertaken, as I have tried to show, first by Orientalists and then by Indian nationalists (and Muslim separatists)—remains still ongoing and incomplete. Despite the countless efforts at differentiation and countless applications of identitarian pressure across the linguistic and literary field in this enormous cultural zone in the subcontinent for well over a century, Urdu and Hindi remain intimately proximate and available to each other in a whole range of media and forms—in spoken language forms, in the so-called Hindi films of Bollywood cinema, but even in literary writing itself. The literary examples are legion, come from some of the most significant writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and I shall turn to a few of them shortly. A desire for Urdu (coded as refined and cosmopolitan) is inherent to modern Hindi, and a desire for Hindi (coded as popular and vernacular) inherent to modern Urdu itself. This coding of course marks the diffusion of a haze of misconceptions—after all, in Pakistan the institutionalization of Urdu as the national language has been achieved by sundering nearly all its former associations with the mannered aśrāf elite of northern India, Urdu is unselfconsciously the language of emancipatory caste politics among Muslim Dalits in India, and modern standard Hindi can hardly be equated with any genuinely popular form of the spoken language. But the misconceptions do not in any way diminish the fact that the encounter does daily and routinely take place. In this sense, Hindi and Urdu remain articulated as the elements of a single formation in contradiction, and the more the contradiction is heightened—by a myriad of nationalizing (and Orientalizing) processes operative at numerous social locations—the more the singularity (in contradiction) is affirmed and renewed, even though at yet one further level of remove from the phenomenal levels of social and cultural experience.

More broadly, then, it bears repeating the obvious, namely, that the chronotope of indigenousness, a temporal structure of deep habitation in time, marks an orientation in and toward modern culture, not a means of return to the origin from the displacements produced by the colonial process. As a modernizing modality, therefore, its installation in a sociocultural milieu in fact (and in effect) intensifies the sense of distance from the origin, even as it heightens the desire for its restoration. This is evident from even a cursory look at the history of indigenizing discourses and projects in India since the nineteenth century, which suggests that the more their concepts and categories become unquestioned in more and more sectors of society and implicit in social and cultural practices, the more anxious and even shrill the need for their reassertion, tending clearly toward a totalitarian view of society. And all attempts at the normalization of Urdu as the language of Pakistan as a nation-state stumble on the demand, built into the nation-state form, of the indigenousness of language, culture, and society. Thus, any invocation of the transparency of world literature need only be confronted with the very different reality within the subcontinent itself, where even literary works in the same language—Urdu in this instance—cross borders in line with the frames of nationalized literary histories, forms of nationalization of language, literature, and culture installed in this region precisely in and through the world-historical process that is the emergence of world literature. But what exactly are the modalities of indigenousness as chronotope, what in each case is its relationship to different cultural modes and genres of writing, and what, finally, are the prospects for nonindigenizing (that is, non-Orientalizing) forms of historical thinking about culture in postcolonial society? It is to some of these questions concerning indigenousness and form that I shall now turn.

Literary History and the Beginnings of Colonial Time

It is one of the most widely shared assumptions in literary studies that the transition to a properly speaking bourgeois literature in any language, and thus entry into the space of world literature, is announced by the rise of the novel form. Moretti’s entire system, for instance, is based on this more or less explicit assumption. Aside from the usual western European cases cited most often—Spanish, English, French, German—this historical claim is also thought to hold true outside the West, in those languages and cultures that experienced the transition under colonial or semicolonial conditions, including, say, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, and the Indian vernaculars. As I have argued at some length elsewhere, however, in Urdu and Hindi the picture is complicated by the fact that the otherwise “minor” form of the short story has long held some of the preeminence associated elsewhere with the “major” form of the novel. This lopsided distribution of genres is a result and a sign of the modes of emergence of modern Hindi and Urdu literatures as distinct (and conflicted) bodies of writing—the entire historical process of insertion into literariness that I have been charting in this chapter.⁶² More broadly speaking, the historical thesis about the novel needs to be revised at the very least so that it does not resemble a sort of natural history of genre, in the manner, say, of Moretti’s evolutionary schema, but rather takes a critical-historical approach to literary historicity itself. If, on the one hand, world literature has been an explicitly literary-historical question, on the other, literary history has been one of the modalities of the institution of world literature. Histories of “national” literatures were of course among the most prolific genres of writing of the extended Romantic culture in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But precisely this genre is central to world literary relations as well. To be more precise, the entry of a body of writing into world literary space as a distinct literary tradition has characteristically taken place since the nineteenth century through its acquisition of a narrative of (“national”) historical development. It is when a writing tradition has produced a literary history that its literary modernity, properly speaking, may be said to have begun.

Ranajit Guha speaks in his essay “A Colonial City and Its Time(s)” of nineteenth-century Calcutta not only as a territorially divided space but as a city split in time—between the rhythms of native society, exemplified to an extreme degree in the time of ritual and festival, and the time of Ophish-para (Officetown, the administrative center of the colonial metropolis), Guha tells us, named thus in the vernacular of the city as a marker of the latter’s deeply divided nature. The social life of the city was thus elaborated along “a tangle of two braided temporalities,” Guha notes, which were unequal and asymmetrically situated with respect to the urban world, but neither of which ever operated without its articulation with the other, each cutting across and interrupting the other’s unfolding. Ophisher bela, or “office time,” operated for the natives first of all in their relationship to the forms of labor solicited from them by the colonial rulers, as “khansamans, bawarchis, ayahs, darzis, dhobis, peons, saises, malis, orderlies, babus, and so on everyday in and around the bungalows, kachehris, cantonments, clubs and other institutions that affirmed the presence and power of their rulers in a colonial city.” And even in the “residential parts” of the city, whose daily rhythms of “indigenous time” were reinscribed by the colonial rulers as “delays, inexactitudes, unpunctualities, and other vagaries which were a constant source of irritation to them,” the ticking of colonial time was never far from the consciousness of the natives, reiterated most starkly perhaps in the hourly firing of the cannon in Fort William.⁶³

In this essay, Guha raises the question of the temporal displacement of native society in the process of its absorption into the rhythms of colonial-capitalist social relations. But the essay proceeds—mistakenly, in my view—by invoking the seemingly solid ground of the indigenous as counter to the colonial formation and, as he puts it, the “primordial and inalienable privilege of a native speaker” against the powers of the colonial language, which “served the regime both as an instrument of dominance and an agency of persuasion.”⁶⁴ In the remainder of this chapter, I take this opening up of the question of colonial temporality as my starting point in order to move into an overlapping but somewhat different terrain, namely, the question of literary history or, more precisely, the question of the ascription of historical temporality to a body of writing as literature.

In separate introductions to a joint translation of Āb-e ḥayāt (The Waters of Life, 1880) by Muhammad Husain Azad, which is often spoken of as the first literary history of the Urdu poetic tradition in the language itself, Frances Pritchett and Shamsur Rahman Faruqi bemoan what they see as the continuing influence of Azad’s work over the imagination of Urdu literature, continuing, as they see it, even into our own times. This is, strictly speaking, a historically accurate statement, for Azad’s work is discourse initiating for elaborations of the modern in Urdu poetics, every new poetic project attempting anew to struggle with and navigate the space opened in and by this work. The question of the “first” Urdu literary history is simultaneously a question about the disappearance of another form of writing, in Persian or in Urdu, concerned with the poets of what is variously called rēḳhta, Hindi, or ultimately, Urdu, namely, the tazkira, an anthology and lives-of-the-poets genre, an element of the culture of (Urdu) poetic composition and circulation that bridged the transition from a manuscript culture to that of print over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The one and the other are in fact different ways of posing the same question. The basic facts of the fate of tazkira-nigārī (tazkira-writing) are well known: this form of writing came to a fairly rapid end sometime in the nineteenth century more than a hundred years after its first appearance in Urdu—an end understood as timely or untimely depending on who happens to be reporting the demise. This judgment itself—that is, the manner in which criticism orients itself toward the disappearance of this genre—is the site in Urdu of a politics concerning poetry and prose, aesthetics and society, tradition and modernity. I am attempting here to reopen once again this double question of the historicization of Urdu poetry, the question of the acquisition, by a non-Western and precolonial body of writing, of the attributes of its own unique and singular history.

The tazkira had come to the Urdu poetic tradition from Persian, although there is strong historical reason to believe that some of the earliest extant exempla of the Persian-language/Persian-poets tazkira were also composed on Indian soil and in the thirteenth century.⁶⁵ The first emergence of the tazkira as a biographical anthology of Urdu-language poets, written in Persian prose, is usually dated to the middle of the eighteenth century and conventionally located in the Nikāt al-shu‘arā of the poet Mir Muhammad Taqi “Mir.” Faruqi has argued that the form of the tazkira is dramatically different from literary history, for not only does it not follow chronology in its assembling of biographical materials, but it has no recourse to the passage of time whatsoever as a structuring element and views the poetic text as existing simultaneously in the past and present. Faruqi attributes this to the status of poetry in the traditional Islamicate sphere—in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, more precisely. The revelation of the Qur’an in language, he argues in an exposition of Arabic poetics, meant that all poetry pointed to the possibility of the perfection of language in the Qur’an, thus freeing it in a sense from its historical circumstances. But this argument has been made by others concerning the precolonial literary traditions of South Asia as a whole, for instance by Kamil Zvelbil with respect to Tamil.⁶⁶ And it accords with the precepts of the Ashis Nandy school on the differences between Indian and European civilizations. Moreover, such arguments are on a continuum with “perennialist” arguments about the one true tradition everywhere, a shared essence to which only the modern West does not conform and whose destruction it represents. In Urdu criticism itself, this viewpoint came to be associated most closely with the late work of Muhammad Hasan Askari, and Faruqi is generally considered to be a figure in the Askari tradition.⁶⁷ Such (perennialist) arguments are symptoms of the crisis of modern culture and made entirely on the latter’s own terms rather than means of escape from it, as they typically claim to be.

Faruqi’s exposition is notable for a number of reasons. First, in seeking to address the question of the origins of the Urdu poetic tradition by placing it in this strong manner in the Perso-Arabic sphere, he seems to replicate those very historical processes—the colonial transformation of Urdu literary culture that I have been discussing here—against which he appears to be defending the tazkira as an authentic form in the Urdu tradition. Second, to treat the tazkira and literary history in this manner as two free-standing genres of writing misses their mutual inextricability in the nineteenth century, the larger point I am making here. And third, and perhaps most decisively, to offer this particular genealogy of Urdu literary culture as emerging out of an exclusively “Islamic” source, while a recognizable gesture in Urdu criticism, with a distinct politics all its own, is hardly a convincing one.

The first literary history of “Urdu” poetry as a distinct tradition was written by Joseph Héliodore Sagesse Vertu Garcin de Tassy, who was well known in his own time in France but is relatively unknown today even in France, outside the narrow circles of Oriental studies and Indology. But he is not only not forgotten in the world of Urdu literary criticism and literary history; his influence continues to be visited and revisited from time to time, often in the midst of anguished attempts to excavate the tradition of Urdu literature and to forge a coherent link to its past—not, in other words, as detached exercises in historical reconstruction but rather as matters of survival for the critical project itself. Garcin de Tassy studied Arabic and Persian at the École spéciale des langues orientales vivantes with Silvestre de Sacy, the great modernizer of Oriental studies on the continent in the first half of the nineteenth century, whom Said has identified as the person who, by training an entire generation of scholars in Paris who would fan out to the major universities of the continent, established Oriental studies as a pan-European professional network. He was hired by his mentor in 1828 to a newly created chair for the study of “Hindoustani” language and literature at the École, a language in which he was entirely self-taught. His career thus unfolded in close proximity to the centers of the global Orientalist apparatus, and in fact from the early 1830s until his death in 1878, he functioned himself as the center of a vast network for the collection and distribution of information and knowledge on the living literature of the northern Indian vernacular, incorporating scholars throughout Europe, British colonial officials in the subcontinent and in Britain, and numerous native individuals, all of whom regularly channeled textual materials to him in Paris.⁶⁸

Garcin de Tassy’s Histoire de la littérature hindouie and hindoustanie, which was published in two volumes in 1838 and 1847, to be reissued in an expanded edition in three volumes in 1871, is, properly speaking, the first literary history of Urdu literature and marks an odd conjuncture. This text, written by a Frenchman and in French, is nevertheless multiply imbricated within the structures of the British colonial enterprise in the subcontinent. First of all, it was sponsored by British colonial authorities, and a large number of copies were bought in advance of publishing for the benefit of colonial officers at various levels of the colonial bureaucracy—a debt acknowledged by the author in dedicating the book to the Queen. And the text itself, written by an individual who had never set foot on Indian soil, is addressed to the needs of precisely those Europeans who would come into close contact with the language communities whose textual output it sets out to historicize. In this complex relationship to the British colonial enterprise, however, it is far from being unique among the works of French Indologists in the aftermath of the secure establishment of British authority in large parts of the subcontinent beginning in the late eighteenth century and especially after the end of the Napoleonic wars. Equally well known is the case of Description of the Character, Manners, and Customs of the People of India; and of their Institutions, Religious and Civil, written by a French missionary, the Abbé Jean-Antoine Dubois, and purchased and then published in English translation by the East India Company in 1816, the priest eventually retiring on a pension from the company.⁶⁹

Garcin de Tassy’s Histoire quickly produced significant effects in vernacular literary culture. A partial “translation” into Urdu was produced in 1848 at Delhi College, arguably the leading center of (Orientalized) modern learning and translation from English in North India in the decades before 1857.⁷⁰ As Sayida Surriya Hussain has shown, this was in fact a free standing work which took the Histoire as its source material.⁷¹ This Orientalist historiographic enterprise, and its assimilation into the new Urdu public sphere, partial and fitful though it was, mark the beginnings of the shifts in knowledge practices that eventually put a final end to the tazkira by appropriating its materials. In that instant, as it were, of the emergence of the history of Urdu literature, the genre of tazkira was reconstellated and could henceforth only be judged to be a sort of debased literary history, devoid of the basic principles of rigorous historical research and writing. In the form of Garcin de Tassy’s Histoire, literary history not so much repudiated the tazkira as assimilated it, raiding and appropriating its materials and establishing a new hierarchy, with the tazkira now appearing simply as an insufficient and inferior attempt at history writing. (The scholarly historical literature that has emerged in Urdu with recurring frequency ever since on the subject of the failings of the tazkira as historical writing constitutes an enormous archive on its own.) Furthermore, the epistemological basis of what had been a form of anthological compilation pertaining to a narrowly conceived and linguistically and socially delimited tradition of writing within a larger linguistic space—which I have been calling the northern Indian vernacular—was now converted into an instance of the “history” of a language as such and “its” literature. As Pritchett has argued in her discussion of Mir’s Nikāt al-shu’arā, that text seeks to establish a relatively narrow constellation of poets of rēḳhta, which it defines as poetry along Persian lines that is written in the “refined” vernacular of eighteenth-century Delhi, or Shahjahanabad, demoting and marginalizing, while unable to ignore entirely, the enormous body of rēḳhta verse produced in earlier centuries far away from Delhi, namely, in Bijapur, Golconda, and Gujarat.⁷² For the tazkira as a form offered not an account of the past (of poetry), let alone an account of the progressive development of a tradition, but rather a treasury of verse to be emulated and a common stock of anecdotal knowledge that was part of the history of reception of the verse. It was therefore inherently selective in nature in ways that do not conform to those of literary historiography.

It is against this background of the institution of literary history that Azad’s precise role and accomplishment must be understood. Azad was a second-generation product of Delhi College. His father founded the first Urdu-language newspaper in Delhi, and from an early age, Azad himself was involved in the family’s journalistic activities. On the sudden outbreak of the rebellion in 1857, the father half reluctantly threw in his lot with the rebels’ cause; so when the British forces retook the city, he was summarily arrested and executed, and the family, including the twenty-seven-year-old Muhammad Husain, was thrown out of their house and the city. These events and the subsequent years of wandering and destitution are described by Azad toward the end of his literary history as part of a life narrative of his deceased teacher, the poet Shaikh Ibrahim “Zauq,” a fragment of whose unpublished manuscripts Azad saved from the devastation in Delhi.⁷³ When Azad eventually resurfaced in Lahore in the early 1860s, it was as a protégé of local British officials, and he rose rapidly in the educational and cultural institutions set up by the state in Punjab—Government College, Oriental College, and above all, the Anjuman-e Panjāb (Punjab Association)—in the early decades of the region’s incorporation into the colonial domain. The tenor of his writings of this early period are sycophantic in the extreme, endorsing the most racist ideas about the parental tutelage of the rulers over their Indian subjects. And for the remainder of his life, he seems to have struggled between a wholesale endorsement of “English” models for Urdu (and, more broadly, Muslim and Indian) literature and culture and fealty to older practices, institutions, and forms.

Pritchett has documented the ways in which numerous literary histories written in the twentieth century continued to produce judgments concerning the Urdu poetic tradition that can be traced to Azad. She notes the highly ambivalent statements made by such (Anglophone) historians of Urdu as Ram Babu Saksena and Muhammad Sadiq, among others, who cannot quite renounce what they simultaneously denounce as a morally compromised and rhetorically overwrought tradition. She speaks of the “ubiquity and inescapability” of Azad’s colonial appeal for a “naturalistic” poetry along “English” lines and of the “passionate, hypnotic spell” he has cast over Urdu criticism for a century.⁷⁴ And Faruqi goes so far as to state that the “literary career of Muhammad Husain Azad can be described as a triumph of British techniques of management and control in India.”⁷⁵ I will have occasion shortly to engage more closely with Faruqi’s discussion of Āb-e ḥayāt, with which I agree in some important respects but not in others. At the very least, however, we should note here the fact that a long tradition of very “passionate” recapitulation of Azad’s views seems to have solicited in these two introductions an equally passionate denunciation—they seem as caught up in the terms and politics of Azad’s text as are the subsequent historians they excoriate. When I return to Azad shortly, I shall in part be concerned with understanding the structure of this debate, what it means for a postcolonial critique of Urdu’s location in its social worlds, and the possibilities of escaping its seemingly centripetal force.

Azad’s literary history of 1880 and the Muqaddima-e śi‘r o śā‘irī (Introduction to Poetry and Poetics, 1893) by his comrade in arms Altaf Husain Hali have a distinct place in the history of the world literary system, for they mark a colonial project of “reform” with respect to the very practices of “Oriental” writing whose “discovery” and assimilation into the European literary sphere had been so crucial an element in the very condition of possibility of world literature a century earlier. As I have already argued, given the profound involvement of nineteenth-century western European literature with the newly discovered literatures of the East, given the very invention of world literature precisely through the assimilation of these materials—from Jones’s translation of Śākuntala to Goethe’s gestures toward that text and full-scale engagement with the ghazals of Hafez—it is, to say the very least, an ironic development that when a literary-historical and critical practice emerged in Urdu along “Western” lines under the impact of colonial rule, it produced an Anglicist or more broadly “Occidentalist” critique of the lyric traditions of Persianate culture, the very “Oriental” corpus of the lyric that a century earlier had been utilized or evoked by a wide range of individual scholars, writers, and literary movements in Europe in a series of attempts to transform poetic practice in the modern West.

Despite the location of the ghazal in Urdu at the very center of the crisis of literary modernity in colonial society, it has proven to be a strangely persistent form, surviving wave after wave of excoriation and rejection by writers and critics of all hues for well over a century, from those “Hindi nationalists” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for whom it was “people’s exhibit A” in their case against Urdu for having brought an alien (that is, Near Eastern) sensibility into an Indian language to those Urdu poets and critics themselves, like Azad and Hali, who, for various reasons, considered it a historically superseded form, incapable of giving expression to a distinctly modern subjectivity. At one level, the genre is definable simply as a form in the narrow sense, and the poet Agha Shahid Ali, whose Anglophone ghazal practice we shall turn to in Chapter 3, has delineated the structure with remarkable clarity: “It is composed of autonomous or semi-autonomous couplets that are united by a strict scheme of rhyme, refrain, and line length. The opening couplet sets up the scheme by having it in both lines, and then the scheme occurs only in the second line of every succeeding couplet—i.e., the first line (same length) of every succeeding couplet sets up a suspense, and the second line (same length but with the rhyme and refrain—the rhyme immediately preceding the refrain) delivers on that suspense by amplifying, dramatizing, imploding, exploding.”⁷⁶ But the reformist critique of Urdu and Indo-Persian poetic culture is ironic in another sense as well: the anguished recognition that the corpus of Urdu verse has entered the space of world literature disheveled and disfigured—not on its own terms but on those of the world-literary system—and as such can henceforth be judged only as a relic of the past. In a revealing passage in the introductory section of Āb-e ḥayāt, Azad notes precisely these discrepancies: “My friends! I see that the exhibition hall of sciences and arts is open, and all the peoples have been displaying the handiwork of their literature. Don’t you see on what level our language stands? Yes—you can clearly see—she lies there on the doormat!”⁷⁷ In other words, the act of historicization undertaken by Azad, this very process of the assimilation of the Urdu corpus into a knowledge system in which the literary production of “all the peoples” is placed next to each other and judged from the perspective of the system, is the very agent of its displacement and disfigurement. It is this recognition of the inescapability of the vernacular culture’s alienation in the new world context that marks Azad’s text with its characteristic tone of reproach—self-reproach, above all. The Fort William College enterprise—its narratives and such supplementary forms of its textual production as glossaries, dictionaries, and grammars—which, as I have argued, is the first instance anywhere of a standardization of the northern vernacular in two forms, each firmly marked by its basis in a conception of communities marked by denominational difference, was thus merely the first step in this process of conflicted vernacularization, which is completed in the historicization of this diverse textual corpus. More accurately, we should say that the first literary histories of the northern vernacular constitute an attempt to provide a historical basis to the supposedly distinct languages first standardized at Fort William. How, then, are we to understand this process of acquisition of literary history? What happens in that moment in which a textual corpus is reinscribed within a narrative of historical development?

The question of the literary history of the vernaculars arose in the colonial disjuncture, but its modalities typically consisted of positing a continuity of past and present—emphasizing transition instead of disjunction, papering over the heterogeneity of the moment, both enabling and disabling—that allows the very asking of the question. In other words, to ask the question—what is the history of Urdu literature?—is to mask the historical violence of the question itself; but it is a violence that cannot be papered over entirely, and its effects surface in all kinds of forms in the language itself over the next century and in fact into our times. In this process of the acquisition of literary history, the textual corpus acquires, first of all, the attributes of literariness. That is to say, as I have noted, it enters the world literary system as one among many other literatures, being subject henceforth to the requirements and measures of literariness, replacing the models and modes of evaluation internal to the textual corpus itself. Furthermore, in the moment of its historicization, it undergoes a shift of orientation within the larger social formation, being reinscribed within a discursive system for the attribution of a literature to a language, understood as the unique possession and mode of expression of a people.

With Azad’s Āb-e ḥayāt, widely heralded as the first history of Urdu literature written by a native speaker and practitioner of the written language, the gesture embodied in the Orientalist establishment of the history of “Urdu literature” is imported back into Urdu itself as its foundational declaration of independence from its complex linguistic and literary environment. Whereas the tazkira had been a genre of writing devoted to commemorating and repeating the transmission of a particular poetic practice within a larger linguistic field, the vast and multiform North Indian vernacular, Azad’s text transforms its investments entirely, producing instead a proprietary account of the poetic tradition of a distinct language. This is the significance of the seemingly bizarre historical claim about the origin of Urdu as a language out of Braj-bhasha that Pritchett has correctly identified as a fulcrum point in his text, around which its various lines of force are arranged. The “tree of Urdu grew in the ground of Sanskrit and Bhasha,” Azad writes, and was born when Persian vocabulary and grammatical forms entered Braj-bhasha.⁷⁸ As Pritchett points out, in simply morphological terms, this statement makes no sense at all, since Braj is distinct—morphologically, geographically, historically—from the khaṛī bōlī of Delhi and eastern Uttar Pradesh that is the shared morphological ground of both modern Urdu and modern Hindi. But Azad’s aim here seems to be quite other than philological precision. He is attempting to situate the origins of Urdu centuries ago in the Persianization of the North Indian vernacular, signified here imprecisely as (Braj) Bhasha, a historical process that intensified to the degree that “Bhasha and Urdu became as different as night and day,” the one (that is, the former) a “sweet language,” without metaphor and “exaggeration,” and the other (that is, the latter) a treasure house of metaphorical elaboration.⁷⁹ What is sought in Azad’s claim, in other words, is to resituate Urdu within a narrative of historical development in which its vernacular linguistic environment is remapped as a lost origin from which it has long broken free, Urdu now appearing as the (only) modern form of the northern vernacular. But since this cannot be the ever-present origin of indigenizing nationalist discourse, the corpus now known to us as Urdu can at best ever have an unstable and unsettled relationship to the nation. Or to put it more precisely, in the project of national literary historicization, Urdu inevitably acquires the attributes of a literature in search of a nation.

What is remarkable for both its historical irony and the lack of attention it has gotten by scholars of language and literature is the fact that when modern khaṛī bōlī Hindi began to declare its independence from Urdu, it replicated precisely this historical narrative of the development of the northern vernacular. The emergence of Urdu as a modern (that is, colonial) language thus required that its living connections to its larger linguistic environment be sundered and rearranged within an account of a (tenuous) relationship to a distant past. In this reconstellation of language, writing, tradition, and people, the tazkira became merely a source of information—imperfect and imprecise, needing decoding and evaluation—on the prehistory of a modern language and its literature. It is thus that with Azad, the tazkira finally comes to an end and an Urdu literary history, properly speaking, may be said to have begun. Therefore, by the time a full-fledged historiography of a tradition of writing called Hindi literature emerged in Ramchandra Shukla’s Hindī sāhitya kā itihās (The History of Hindi Literature, 1929), which has been revisited in some recent scholarship as an originary act of independence, the terms for the establishment of separate literary histories out of the single but diverse and diffuse corpus of writing in the vernacular of the North—this colonial resolution of the question of language and literature—had long been settled, precisely by the official historiography of what is now to be called Urdu literature, by its internalization of the Indological premise and gesture. The very foundational acts of historicization that produced for the first time the terms of distinct and independent literary histories for these two traditions thus represent at the same time their anchoring in a colonial and Orientalist logic. The characteristic stance of this emergent national (and colonial) literary history thus reveals the retroactive nature of all literary historicization. Our task, on the other hand, or rather our question, is how to give a historical account of the acquisition of literary history, and in fact two supposedly distinct literary histories, by a vast, diffuse, and internally differentiated body of writing. What I have attempted in this section on literary history is a historical (and critical) account of the Orientalist ascription of historicality to the linguistic-textual corpus of the North Indian vernacular, an ascription structured around the chronotope of the indigenous.

It is therefore not a mysterious or inexplicable fact that Azad’s text occupies the horizon-defining role that Pritchett and Faruqi have ascribed to it, against which each generation of criticism and literary history seems to struggle anew. But this is a problem not only in criticism and scholarship, but rather for literary writing practice itself. In each generation of writers, it seems, the problem of the colonial resolution of the question of language, literature, and history, whose icon and name within the realm of criticism is “Azad,” is renewed and tackled in yet more novel and creative ways. Let us note here in passing a few prominent examples from the post-Partition period. Qurratulain Haider’s epic novel Āg kā Daryā (River of Fire, 1959) represents an attempt to create a historical imagination in novelistic discourse that can take as its purview the entire society of the Indo-Gangetic plain in its historical evolutions over two thousand years, from the empire of the Mauryans to the decade following Partition. Given how stunning the chronological framing of its narrative is, that has received much of the attention of critics over the decades. But one of its more unique (though quieter) experiments is the development of a “high” Urdu vocabulary and mode of discourse for the expression of Hindu and Buddhist religiosity. In the poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, as I have argued at length elsewhere, the conventional Persianized vocabulary of the Urdu tradition is abandoned from time to time, to be replaced with a linguistic register which can only be thought of as “Hindavi,” and in fact these linguistic choices are often marked by direct reference to the thirteenth-century mystic and Hindavi poet Amir Khusrau himself.⁸⁰ And in an important late poem—“Ab tum hī kahō kyā karnā hai” (Now you say what is to be done, 1981)—in which he examines the entire arc of the twentieth century and the collapse of the utopian hopes for decolonization and the revolutionary transformation of society, the “Hindi” register is not medieval but contemporary, khaṛī bōlī in morphological terms but largely without the conventionalized Persian-Urdu vocabulary. It would simply be read as a Hindi poem were it not grounded to the Urdu tradition by the workings of the author-function, the identity of its author as a poet of Urdu. In the work of Jamiluddin Aali, this attempt to struggle against the colonial identity of language and literature takes the form of the adoption in Urdu of a historical poetic form, the dōhā or distich, whose identity in colonial-modern terms is entirely “Indic” or “Hindi.” And Fahmida Riaz, among the greatest living writers in Urdu, has performed this attempt in both verse and prose fiction: her collection Dhūp (Heat of the Sun), written while in exile in India escaping persecution by the General Zia dictatorship in Pakistan, marks an act of deliberate experimentation (explained at length in the preface of the book), with the linguistic boundaries of modern poetry; while her trilogy of novellas attempts, within the temporal confines of the late twentieth century, something like Qurratulain’s civilizational mapping, but what we get now from a late postcolonial location are fragments, epic fragments, perhaps, but not the synthesis of the earlier novel whose main mechanism is the device of reincarnation. It is hard to imagine more canonical figures, works, and practices in modern Urdu literature than the ones I have briefly outlined here, and yet, their very aesthetic energies and modalities raise the most fundamental questions about the identity (in the philosophical sense of this term) of Urdu as language, literature, and civilization. Overall we may therefore say that the question of aesthetic value itself in Urdu literary culture remains inseparable from such destabilizing and unsettling acts. And so to the extent that such works might find a place in world literature, it would be as attempts at dismantling its very effects on a linguistic and literary field in a colonial (and postcolonial) setting and therefore perhaps its entire historical development as such.

In light of this analysis of modern Indological practices and their imbrication in the social and cultural life of the subcontinent, then, we might say that Orientalism, broadly speaking, may be understood as a set of processes for the reorganization of language, literature, and culture on a planetary scale that effected the assimilation of heterogeneous and dispersed bodies of writing onto the plane of equivalence and evaluability that is (world) literature, fundamentally transforming in the process their internal distribution and coherence, their modes of authorization, and their relationship to the larger social order and social imaginaries in their places of origin. World literature in its historically received forms is therefore fundamentally a concept of exchange, that is to say, irreducibly a concept of bourgeois society—a concept that recodes an opaque and unequal process of appropriation as a transparent one of supposedly free and equal interchange and communication. And the Latinate term “literature” and the set of its cognates in the Western languages, together with a number of calques or loan translations in the languages of the Global South, now provide the dominant, universalizing, but by no means absolute vocabulary for the comprehension of verbal-textual expression worldwide.⁸¹ As my analysis of the Orientalizing process in India, and in the specific case of Hindi-Urdu, has attempted to show, this is an ongoing and open-ended process, a determinate logic of the late-capitalist world, so that the critique of Orientalism (and world literature) too is best understood as open-ended and ongoing, rather than engaged in and accomplished once and for all.