The Emergence of Urdu Literary Culture in North India

This article attempts to explore Urdu literary culture in eighteenth-century north India by studying the textual predilections of people, forms of expertise, the aesthetics and patronage to particular types of literary cultures. The social and cultural world of the native Indians and their literary preferences if explored can lead to a better understanding of medieval society. Mughal literary culture, to the little extent it has been studied, has too often been approached from the point of privileging Persian over all other literary cultures including Urdu/Hindavi as the only court language, leading to an almost unbalanced presentation of the Mughal literary landscape. There has been substantial work in the field by scholars of literature especially in Urdu; however, in these works the specificity of historical context in which it is written is missing. It endeavours to foreground Urdu literary culture in the historical perspective. Some of the literary figures, poets, intellectuals and genres of their work are analysed in an effort to construct the Urdu literary scene of north India, adding to existing knowledge on historiography of the eighteenth century.