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15 A Long History of Urdu Literary Culture, Part 2 Histories, Performances, and Masters Frances W. Pritchett Like almost all other Urdu literary genres, the tazkirah (anthology) tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was taken over from Persian; in fact, until well into the nineteenth century most tazkirahs of Urdu poetry were themselves written in Persian.1 Etymologically, tazkirah is derived from an Arabic root meaning “to mention, to remember.” Historically, the literary ta|kirah grows out of the ubiquitous little “notebook” (baya{) that lovers of poetry carried around with them for recording verses that caught their fancy. A typical notebook would include some verses by its owner and others by poets living and dead, both Persian and Urdu. More serious—or more organized—students might compile notebooks devoted only to certain kinds of poetry: to the work of living poets, for example, or the finest poets, or poets from a particular city, or women poets, or poets in a certain genre. There were a great many occasional poets, but only a few of them had become “possessors of a volume” (3ahib-e divan) by collecting a substantial body of their own poetry and arranging it for dissemination in manuscript form. Compilers of notebooks were thus often moved to perform a public service by sharing their work with a wider circle. With the addition of a certain amount—sometimes a very small amount—of introductory or identifying information about the poets, a notebook could become a tazkirah. Tazkirahs circulated in manuscript form, and as printing presses became more common in north India they gradually began to be printed as well.2 864 I thank Philip Lutgendorf and Carla Petievich for their close readings of this paper and most helpful comments on it. 1. It should be kept in mind, however, that the first tazkirahs of Persian poetry were Indian: they were composed in Sindh in the early thirteenth century. See Alam, chapter 2, this volume. The transliteration scheme employed here is that of Pritchett 1994. 2. Khan 1991. Since tazkirahs both define and embody the parameters of this literary culture , they are excellent tools with which to understand it. They can illustrate for us its highly formalized, remarkably coherent vision of poetry. By no coincidence , Urdu criticism—that is, literary criticism of Urdu literature written in Urdu—has adopted over the last century the term “classical” (klasiki) as a rubric for the poetry of this period. For the purposes of this essay, then, and to avoid definitional ambiguities, “classical” refers to the poetry created by this literary culture in north India between the early eighteenth century and the late nineteenth century. The poets of this literary culture were conscious of sharing both a vocabulary of inherited forms (genres, meters, themes, imagery) and a set of authoritative ancestors to be emulated (certain earlier Persian and Urdu poets); they were committed to mastering and augmenting a single, much-cherished canon, so that the memorization of thousands of Urdu and Persian verses lay at the heart of their training. They even shared, as we will see, an unusually codified approach to poetic practice : a formidable apprenticeship system to which much importance was given and an institutionalized set of regular gatherings for recitation and discussion . All these elements were already fully present—albeit still somewhat new—by the time of the first three tazkirahs (1752) and were present still— albeit somewhat on the decline—at the time of the last tazkirah (1880).3 Both before the early eighteenth century and after the late nineteenth century, the absence of not just some but most of the elements in this cluster is equally striking. The sudden, seemingly full-fledged appearance of this literary culture , and then its relatively abrupt and thoroughgoing disappearance, give it clearly marked boundaries; it thus becomes, for comparative purposes, a very suitable case study. All the tazkirahs document and record this literary culture—but not, of course, always in the same way. Their origin in the ubiquitous personal “notebook ” explains one of their most conspicuous traits: their individuality, their insouciance, the insistence of each one on defining its own approach to its own group of poets. These idiosyncrasies can be clearly seen in their various styles of organization. Although the majority arrange their contents in alphabetical order by the first letter of each poet’s pen name—and thus are emphatically ahistorical—this scheme is by no means universal; no fewer than twenty out of the sixty...

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