Nostalgia and the City: Urdushahr āshobpoetry in the aftermath of 1857

Abstract

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

The rāg that Burned down Delhi: Music and Memory between 1857 and 1947

“…While the attribution to Mir has been contested, it is popularly believed that Mir composed this verse when he relocated to Lucknow in 1782 and looked behind him to his ravaged home in Delhi; drawing on this motif, Shahid Dehlvi stands in Mir's shoes, looking back from Karachi. As Eve Tignol has argued, Urdu reflections on 1857-including Tafazul Husain Kaukab's Fughan-e Dihlī (The Lament for Delhi, 1863)-appealed to 18 thcentury aesthetics, especially via shahr āshob (the city's misfortune) and secular marṣiyah (Tignol 2017). Daniela Bredi observes two varieties of nostalgia: one restorative, looking forward to a resurfacing of Islamic civilization, and one reflexive, characterized by emotional longing for a lost age (Bredi 2009: 140-141).…”

Emotions and Temporalities

“…At its most basic level, the knowledge that the community had known better, even glorious times in the past could lead to feelings of nostalgia, linking them back to Boabdil's last sigh. Nostalgia itself encompassed a variety of emotions of different intensity, ranging from a gentle mourning to anxious spasms of grief and the shedding of "tears of blood," as Urdu poets did not tire of describing (Pernau, 2015;Tignol, 2017). This form of nostalgia has been described as a passive emotion, characteristic of those who longed for the premodern age and refused to look or move forward, but also as sapping the energy needed for an eventual fight against modernity (Boym, 2001;Naqvi, 2007).…”