Title: A Stranger in Punjab? Lahore, Delhi, and the Place of Urdu in Colonial India
Location (Zoom): https://upenn.zoom.us/j/98356011056?pwd=SER2dXg1dUNYdHE0SUV0TFZ0UTBJQT09
Abstract: The mid-19th century in colonial India witnessed the development of a substantial Urdu literary culture in the Punjab, a province where it was not the vernacular. Even as many Punjabi intellectuals retained their native language in a variety of everyday situations, colonial language policy encouraged literary production in Urdu by institutionalizing it as the administrative and educational language of the region. The colonial state’s efforts to establish Urdu in the Punjab particularly impacted the province’s capital Lahore, which was increasingly becoming a new center, or markaz, of Urdu culture. Lahore’s building significance to Urdu literature stemmed from an alignment with the colonial state and its various forms of symbolic and material capital. The city thus came into conflict with traditional literary figures in Delhi who attempted to establish a monopoly over ‘proper Urdu.’ Delhi writers denigrated Lahore’s Punjabized language and instead marked their own literary pedigree by drawing on the Mughal court as an alternative locus of linguistic authority. My talk traces the history and repercussions of these debates as they informed Urdu literary politics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It foregrounds the literary magazine as a crucial form that mediated between the local literary cultures of Lahore and Delhi. The magazine was a spatially dialectical form that participated simultaneously in the concentric geographies of the city, region, nation, and world. I show how Lahore’s Punjabi Urdu writers used magazines to deploy notable strategies of contestation that asserted their place within Urdu literary culture. These debates, I suggest, moulded Lahore into an embattled center of Urdu literature, one whose authors’ relationship to the language would remain ambivalent up till Partition.