Allison Busch Is a Literature Professor at Columbia University Specializing in Indian Court

Allison Busch is a literature professor at ColumbiaUniversity specializing in Indian court literature and how it moved into popular venues. Eleanor Zelliot, a History professor at CarletonCollege, focuses on medieval Indian saint-poets and Ambedkar’s Untouchables movement. Shantahu Phukan is an Assistant professor of Comparative Religious studies at San JoseStateUniversity and specializes in religious, cultural, and literary history, especially cultural interactions between Hindus and Muslims in South Asia, Urdu poetry, and Sufism.

Two main issues are evident in these readings. First, the academic question of how to deal with contemporary arguments about the origins of Hindi (Sanskrit) and Urdu (Persian) that fed and still feed into nationalist propaganda in both India and Pakistan. Faruqi traces Urdu’s literary beginnings to somewhere in the 11th or 12th century, predating Mahmud Ghazni’s arrival, and specifically to Khari-Boli which developed into the language the British named “Urdu” or camp language, which had militaristic overtones. He also found that the British, in conjunction with academics in their Indian universities, produced today’s Hindi, without specifying which one, bypurging Arabic and Persian words from Hindustani, or the language of India.[1] Second, the question of motive in Sufi and Bhakti literature also gained relevance during British rule in India and seems to imply that the main motive for their literary corpuses was conversion. Several scholars have bought into this theory, such as Richard Eaton (mentioned by both Zelliot and Phukan).[2]

A brief historical outline will help contextualize Zelliot, Busch, and Phukan’s literary environments. The first Mughal Emperor, Akbar, succeeded his father in 1556 at just fifteen years old. In order to centralize and consolidate power, he instituted vast yet inclusive reforms designed to politically align himself with local chieftains in the 1570s, most notably the Rajputs, thru marriage alliances and by assigning land rights to these and other Indian groups in exchange for military support and recognition at court. One result of his administrative structure was a class of literate bureaucrats whose main avenue towards upward mobility lay in education. This included literature (i.e. Mukhlis’ servant), accounting, and artistic trades. The debate house, or Ibadat Khana, was another innovation that gave religious leaders an avenue to work out their contrasting or not so contrasting religious viewpoints. I mention these two examples because I feel they are pertinent to our discussion. We can see hints of a booming literary class in Busch’s alankarasastras’ audience and in Mukhlis’ servant, revealing an important trend although separated by over a century. And Zelliot’s bharud has vague similarities to a debate house. The nobles and their retinues tried to duplicate Imperial “norms of comportment”, especially through their large retinues of servants, craftsmen, artists, and accountants. One of the most accessible ways to climb up the economic ladder was by way of employment in a retinue and families actively sought educations for their children with this goal in mind. This provides a particularly convenient entry for Busch’s literary training guides. The masses hinted at in different readings include agriculture workers who produced up to three crops per year (for example, in the Gangetic and Indic river valleys), their upper crust Khud Kasht peasant-land owners, merchants and traders who profited from surpluses in agriculture, textiles, horses, sugar, etc. Nomadic groups also profited from the expanding economy but not to the same extent, and sometimes doubled as soldiers. This background will help us place our readings in a larger historical framework.[3]

Questions:

1)How do all three authors use genre as a way of looking at innovation?

2)How do the arguments in these three articles interact with each other?

3)How do Zelliot, Busch, and Phukan treat each audience?

4)I was especially taken by Phukan’s conclusion (that Vāleh’s construction of Afẓal’s personal rooted the Bikat Khahānī in a debate internal to the Muslim community). Is it possible to use a similar methodology with other genres? For example, the alankarasastras and the poetry they discuss?

[1] Shamsur Faruqi, “A Long History of Urdu Literary Culture, Part 1: Naming and Placing a Literary Culture” Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia. ed. Sheldon Pollock (Berkley: University of California Press, 2006), 813-814.

[2] Richard Eaton, The Sufis of Bijapur: Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1978.

[3] John F. Richards, “Norms of Comportment Among Imperial Mughal Officers” in Power, Administration, and Finance in Mughal India (Brookefield: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1993) 255-289. Also, by the same author, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 79-93, 185-204.