Zikr-i Mir: The Autobiography of the Eighteenth-Century Mughal Poet: Mir Muhammad Taqi ‘Mir’, 1723–1810. Translated, annotated, and with an introduction by C. M. Naim. New Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. viii, 214 pp.

This article surveys the deep history of the discipline of comparative philology in the Indo-Persian world, and attempts to situate it within larger debates about global forms of intellectual modernity. From its early beginnings in the production of literary lexicons designed to help poets in different regional centers of the Persianate world understand each other’s works, comparative philology in South, Central, and West Asia developed into a key scholarly discipline in which a whole host of concerns relating to Indo-Persian intellectual life was negotiated: literary canon formation, the arbitration of good taste, the maintenance of cosmopolitan literary intelligibility in an increasingly vernacular world, and even the nature of language itself. These developments took place over many centuries, in a vast array of works, spread out over a vast region that stretched from Anatolia to India. But in their increasingly sophisticated scholarship, as well as their increasing cognizance of their own scholarly disciplinarity, we find several distinctly “modernizing” tendencies among many of the Indo-Persian philologists discussed here, long before the supposed “invention” of the discipline by western scholars like the British colonial judge and orientalist, Sir William Jones (1746-1794).

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A Sultan in the Realm of Passion: Coffee in Eighteenth-Century Delhi

Hakala¹

2014

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The Urdu poet Shāh “Ḥātim” (1699–1783) enjoyed a long career, interacting with several generations of Urdu poets in Delhi and observing firsthand the massive upheavals that accompanied the Mughal Empire’s rapid political decline. He is remembered today primarily for his claim, made some twenty years after he composed poems in praise of coffee and tobacco, to have purged his earlier collections of poetry containing unliterary vocabulary and outdated puns. Ḥātim’s choice to retain the poem on coffee, despite what he acknowledged to be its outdated style, provides insights into modes of elite connoisseurship practiced in late Mughal society.

show abstract

Zikr-i Mir: The Autobiography of the Eighteenth-Century Mughal Poet: Mir Muhammad Taqi ‘Mir’, 1723–1810. Translated, annotated, and with an introduction by C. M. Naim. New Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. viii, 214 pp.

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Mīr, Mīr Muḥammad Taqī

Mīr, Mīr Muḥammad Taqī

Cultures of Comparative Philology in the Early Modern Indo-Persian World

A Sultan in the Realm of Passion: Coffee in Eighteenth-Century Delhi

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