Arthur Dudney | University of Cambridge (original) (raw)

Papers by Arthur Dudney

Research paper thumbnail of “In the Age of Non-Mechanical Reproduction: Manuscript Variation in Early Modern South Asia,” Manuscript Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring, 2019), pp.1-18 (co-authored introduction to a special issue)

Manuscript Studies brings together scholarship om around the world and across disciplines related... more Manuscript Studies brings together scholarship om around the world and across disciplines related to the study of premodern manuscript books and documents, with a special emphasis on the role of digital technologies in advancing manuscript research. Articles for submission should be prepared according to the Chicago Manual of Style, 16 th edition, and follow the style guidelines found at http://mss.pennpress.org.

Research paper thumbnail of Innovation and Poetic Authority in Eighteenth-Century Persian

India in the Persian World of Letters

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Persian literary culture was experiencing a transfor... more In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Persian literary culture was experiencing a transformation: A poetics that explicitly valued newness, the “tāzah-goʾī” or “Fresh Speech,” threatened the traditional system of literary authority (sanad). To address this disconnect, Ārzū reiterated the importance of tradition as a unifying factor across the Persian world of letters while also systematizing the expertise of living poets. This chapter argues against the common but anachronistic interpretation of the tāzah-goʾī debate as a contest between Iranian and Indian aesthetics. It analyzes Ārzū’s influential disagreements with the long-dead Abū al-Barakāt Munīr Lahorī (1610–44) and with his contemporary Shaiḳh Muḥammad ʿAlī Ḥazīn Lāhījī (1692–1766). In Ārzū’s framing, Munīr and Ḥazīn both stood for a literary purism that valorized the works of the pre-tāzah-goʾī poets, but their claims to be the present-day guardians of this earlier poetic style were undercut by their inconsistency.

Research paper thumbnail of Ārzū’s Fruitful Theory of Language

India in the Persian World of Letters

Ārzū’s magnum opus, Mus̄mir (The Fruitful), is a dense Persian philological work likely completed... more Ārzū’s magnum opus, Mus̄mir (The Fruitful), is a dense Persian philological work likely completed at the end of his life. The text, which is based on a fifteenth-century Arabic text, is invested in a philological tradition that stretches back a millennium, but vastly extends the possibilities of that tradition and represents the zenith of Ārzū’s own development as a scholar. Reconstructing Ārzū’s thought through Mus̄mir provides insights into a Mughal-era conceptualization of language that is radically different to our own understanding. In the text, Ārzū describes the origins of Persian, describing how usage (taṣarruf) changes over time and geography, how literary standards are set, discourse and rhetoric (figurative language), and most importantly a description of how words are shared between languages, notably tawāfuq which can be understood as a theory of the common linguistic origin of Sanskrit and Persian.

Research paper thumbnail of In the Age of Non-Mechanical Reproduction: Manuscript Variation in Early-Modern South Asia

Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, 2019

Manuscript Studies brings together scholarship om around the world and across disciplines related... more Manuscript Studies brings together scholarship om around the world and across disciplines related to the study of premodern manuscript books and documents, with a special emphasis on the role of digital technologies in advancing manuscript research. Articles for submission should be prepared according to the Chicago Manual of Style, 16 th edition, and follow the style guidelines found at http://mss.pennpress.org.

Research paper thumbnail of India in the Persian World of Letters

This study traces the development of philology (the analysis of literary language) in the Persian... more This study traces the development of philology (the analysis of literary language) in the Persian tradition in India, concentrating on its socio-political ramifications. The most influential Indo-Persian philologist of the eighteenth century was Sirāj al-Dīn ʿAlī Ḳhān (d. 1756), whose pen-name was Ārzū. Besides being a respected poet, Ārzū was a rigorous theoretician of language whose intellectual legacy was side-lined by colonialism. His conception of language accounted for literary innovation and historical change in part to theorize the tāzah-goʾī [literally, “fresh-speaking”] movement in Persian literary culture. Although later scholarship has tended to frame this debate in anachronistically nationalist terms (Iranian native speakers versus Indian imitators), the primary sources show that contemporary concerns had less to do with geography than with the question of how to assess innovative “fresh-speaking” poetry, a situation analogous to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Mode...

Research paper thumbnail of Literary Decadence and Imagining the Late Mughal City

Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2018

abstract:Poetry in the Persianate genre of shahrāshob (lit. "tumult in the city") is ge... more abstract:Poetry in the Persianate genre of shahrāshob (lit. "tumult in the city") is generally hailed in historical work on eighteenth-century South Asia as socially conscious poetry. This article makes several interventions: It demonstrates that the Urdu shahrāshob was first meaningfully codified as a genre in the 1870s by Indian critics who were influenced by Western conceptions of poetic truth. They wrongly presumed that Urdu poetry had tried to define itself as realist against the Persian poetry it was gradually replacing. This idea has obscured a much more important continuity: Against a background of political difficulty and changing patterns of literary patronage in Delhi, there was a translatio studii from Persian to Urdu poetry that maintained the aesthetic tradition of representing the city as an idealized space. Representations of the city in eighteenth- century Urdu poetry were not a new, imperfect realism but rather a continuation of the moral vision of Islamicate poetry that was only definitively overturned by the colonial encounter in the following century. More broadly, this article questions the utility of the concept of "decadence" for literary interpretation.

Research paper thumbnail of Negotiating Languages: Urdu, Hindi, and the Definition of Modern South Asia. By Walter N. Hakala. pp. 287. New York, Columbia University Press, 2016

Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2017

Research paper thumbnail of Sabk-e Hendi and the Crisis of Authority in Eighteenth-Century Indo-Persian Poetics

Journal of Persianate Studies, 2016

Modern debates over the merits of the so-called Indian Style (Sabk-e Hendi) in Persian literature... more Modern debates over the merits of the so-called Indian Style (Sabk-e Hendi) in Persian literature, which was dominant from the late sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries, have been based on problematic assumptions about how literary style is tied to place. Scholars have often therefore interpreted the Persian literary criticism of the first half of the eighteenth century as a contest between Indians who praised Persian texts written in India and Iranians who asserted their privilege as native speakers to denigrate them. A more nuanced reading suggests that the debates mainly addressed stylistic temporality, namely the value of the writing styles of the “Ancients” (motaqaddemin) versus the innovative style of the “Moderns” (motaʾakhkherin). In the thought of the Indian critic Serāj al-Din ʿAli Khān Ārzu (d. 1756), there is clear evidence of a perceived rupture in literary culture that we can call a “crisis of authority.” Ārzu was concerned because Persian poetry had been judged acc...

Research paper thumbnail of Bibliography for Delhi: Pages from a Forgotten History

Delhi Pages from a Forgotten History, 2014

Research paper thumbnail of A Desire for Meaning: Ḳhān-i Ārzū's Philology and the Place of India in the Eighteenth-Century Persianate World - please see book revision (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/india-in-the-persian-world-of-letters-9780192857415) instead, also open access

Research paper thumbnail of Advice for the Sultan: Prophetic Voices and Secular Politics in Medieval Islam. By Neguin Yavari. pp. 197. London, Hurst, 2014

Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2015

Research paper thumbnail of “At Cosmopolis’s End: The Slipping Apart of Iran and South Asia as Reflected in Lexicographical Works” presented at the Persianate World Conference (Yale University, May ’14)

Research paper thumbnail of The Wonders of Words, or the Role of Ḳhān-i Ārzū's Navādir al-alfāz̤ in the Development of Urdu

columbia.edu

i --1756 CE s -i Ā zū is g d d s e of the towering figures of eighteenth-century Urdu literature.... more i --1756 CE s -i Ā zū is g d d s e of the towering figures of eighteenth-century Urdu literature. Surprisingly given this reputation, he did not write enough in Urdu for more than a few lines of his Urdu works to have survived. Instead he was praised by his contemporaries for his scholarship in Persian, and in particular for bringing the tools available for Persian literary criticism to bear upon the vernacular. That means that some of his theoretical works in Persian, all of which are nominally about Persian literature, should in fact be d pp y U du s . Ā zū's is ic vi gu g suc s i guis ic i i y [tavā uq] between Persian and Indic vernacular languages like Urdu, allowed his work to bridge Persianate and Indian literary practices. The key primary source for this pap is Ā zū's Navādir alal ā , a Persian work which can be considered the first critical dictionary of the language that would later be called Urdu. It is worth contextualising Navādir within Ā zū's g sc y p c i reference to his other works like ād-i u a and u mir. This paper argues, on the one hand, that Ā zū applied the scholarly tools available in Persian and Arabic to Urdu, providing a literary critical framework which had not yet been available for vernacular poetry. On the other hand, Ā zū invokes his understanding of the history of the Persian language to argue implicitly that a standard Urdu should emanate from the royal court in Delhi.

Research paper thumbnail of Why Did Shāh Ḥātim's Collected Works Spawn a Child?

academiccommons.columbia.edu

Research paper thumbnail of Colonial Knowledge and the Greco-Roman Classics: Resituating the Legacy of Sir William Jones in a Humanist Context

South Asian Studies MA thesis, Columbia University, …, Jan 1, 2008

Research paper thumbnail of Keeping the Magic Alive How Devakīnandan Khatrī's Chandrakāntā, the First Hindi Best-seller, Navigates Western Modernity and the Fantastical

Research paper thumbnail of Braj Reinvented: Some British Approaches to Hindi Dialects

Unpublished essay, Jan 1, 2007

Books by Arthur Dudney

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Advice for the Sultan

Arthur Dudney Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Available on CJO 2015 doi:10.1017/S13561863... more Arthur Dudney
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society,
Available on CJO 2015 doi:10.1017/S1356186315000243

Research paper thumbnail of “In the Age of Non-Mechanical Reproduction: Manuscript Variation in Early Modern South Asia,” Manuscript Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring, 2019), pp.1-18 (co-authored introduction to a special issue)

Manuscript Studies brings together scholarship om around the world and across disciplines related... more Manuscript Studies brings together scholarship om around the world and across disciplines related to the study of premodern manuscript books and documents, with a special emphasis on the role of digital technologies in advancing manuscript research. Articles for submission should be prepared according to the Chicago Manual of Style, 16 th edition, and follow the style guidelines found at http://mss.pennpress.org.

Research paper thumbnail of Innovation and Poetic Authority in Eighteenth-Century Persian

India in the Persian World of Letters

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Persian literary culture was experiencing a transfor... more In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Persian literary culture was experiencing a transformation: A poetics that explicitly valued newness, the “tāzah-goʾī” or “Fresh Speech,” threatened the traditional system of literary authority (sanad). To address this disconnect, Ārzū reiterated the importance of tradition as a unifying factor across the Persian world of letters while also systematizing the expertise of living poets. This chapter argues against the common but anachronistic interpretation of the tāzah-goʾī debate as a contest between Iranian and Indian aesthetics. It analyzes Ārzū’s influential disagreements with the long-dead Abū al-Barakāt Munīr Lahorī (1610–44) and with his contemporary Shaiḳh Muḥammad ʿAlī Ḥazīn Lāhījī (1692–1766). In Ārzū’s framing, Munīr and Ḥazīn both stood for a literary purism that valorized the works of the pre-tāzah-goʾī poets, but their claims to be the present-day guardians of this earlier poetic style were undercut by their inconsistency.

Research paper thumbnail of Ārzū’s Fruitful Theory of Language

India in the Persian World of Letters

Ārzū’s magnum opus, Mus̄mir (The Fruitful), is a dense Persian philological work likely completed... more Ārzū’s magnum opus, Mus̄mir (The Fruitful), is a dense Persian philological work likely completed at the end of his life. The text, which is based on a fifteenth-century Arabic text, is invested in a philological tradition that stretches back a millennium, but vastly extends the possibilities of that tradition and represents the zenith of Ārzū’s own development as a scholar. Reconstructing Ārzū’s thought through Mus̄mir provides insights into a Mughal-era conceptualization of language that is radically different to our own understanding. In the text, Ārzū describes the origins of Persian, describing how usage (taṣarruf) changes over time and geography, how literary standards are set, discourse and rhetoric (figurative language), and most importantly a description of how words are shared between languages, notably tawāfuq which can be understood as a theory of the common linguistic origin of Sanskrit and Persian.

Research paper thumbnail of In the Age of Non-Mechanical Reproduction: Manuscript Variation in Early-Modern South Asia

Manuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, 2019

Manuscript Studies brings together scholarship om around the world and across disciplines related... more Manuscript Studies brings together scholarship om around the world and across disciplines related to the study of premodern manuscript books and documents, with a special emphasis on the role of digital technologies in advancing manuscript research. Articles for submission should be prepared according to the Chicago Manual of Style, 16 th edition, and follow the style guidelines found at http://mss.pennpress.org.

Research paper thumbnail of India in the Persian World of Letters

This study traces the development of philology (the analysis of literary language) in the Persian... more This study traces the development of philology (the analysis of literary language) in the Persian tradition in India, concentrating on its socio-political ramifications. The most influential Indo-Persian philologist of the eighteenth century was Sirāj al-Dīn ʿAlī Ḳhān (d. 1756), whose pen-name was Ārzū. Besides being a respected poet, Ārzū was a rigorous theoretician of language whose intellectual legacy was side-lined by colonialism. His conception of language accounted for literary innovation and historical change in part to theorize the tāzah-goʾī [literally, “fresh-speaking”] movement in Persian literary culture. Although later scholarship has tended to frame this debate in anachronistically nationalist terms (Iranian native speakers versus Indian imitators), the primary sources show that contemporary concerns had less to do with geography than with the question of how to assess innovative “fresh-speaking” poetry, a situation analogous to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Mode...

Research paper thumbnail of Literary Decadence and Imagining the Late Mughal City

Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2018

abstract:Poetry in the Persianate genre of shahrāshob (lit. "tumult in the city") is ge... more abstract:Poetry in the Persianate genre of shahrāshob (lit. "tumult in the city") is generally hailed in historical work on eighteenth-century South Asia as socially conscious poetry. This article makes several interventions: It demonstrates that the Urdu shahrāshob was first meaningfully codified as a genre in the 1870s by Indian critics who were influenced by Western conceptions of poetic truth. They wrongly presumed that Urdu poetry had tried to define itself as realist against the Persian poetry it was gradually replacing. This idea has obscured a much more important continuity: Against a background of political difficulty and changing patterns of literary patronage in Delhi, there was a translatio studii from Persian to Urdu poetry that maintained the aesthetic tradition of representing the city as an idealized space. Representations of the city in eighteenth- century Urdu poetry were not a new, imperfect realism but rather a continuation of the moral vision of Islamicate poetry that was only definitively overturned by the colonial encounter in the following century. More broadly, this article questions the utility of the concept of "decadence" for literary interpretation.

Research paper thumbnail of Negotiating Languages: Urdu, Hindi, and the Definition of Modern South Asia. By Walter N. Hakala. pp. 287. New York, Columbia University Press, 2016

Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2017

Research paper thumbnail of Sabk-e Hendi and the Crisis of Authority in Eighteenth-Century Indo-Persian Poetics

Journal of Persianate Studies, 2016

Modern debates over the merits of the so-called Indian Style (Sabk-e Hendi) in Persian literature... more Modern debates over the merits of the so-called Indian Style (Sabk-e Hendi) in Persian literature, which was dominant from the late sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries, have been based on problematic assumptions about how literary style is tied to place. Scholars have often therefore interpreted the Persian literary criticism of the first half of the eighteenth century as a contest between Indians who praised Persian texts written in India and Iranians who asserted their privilege as native speakers to denigrate them. A more nuanced reading suggests that the debates mainly addressed stylistic temporality, namely the value of the writing styles of the “Ancients” (motaqaddemin) versus the innovative style of the “Moderns” (motaʾakhkherin). In the thought of the Indian critic Serāj al-Din ʿAli Khān Ārzu (d. 1756), there is clear evidence of a perceived rupture in literary culture that we can call a “crisis of authority.” Ārzu was concerned because Persian poetry had been judged acc...

Research paper thumbnail of Bibliography for Delhi: Pages from a Forgotten History

Delhi Pages from a Forgotten History, 2014

Research paper thumbnail of A Desire for Meaning: Ḳhān-i Ārzū's Philology and the Place of India in the Eighteenth-Century Persianate World - please see book revision (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/india-in-the-persian-world-of-letters-9780192857415) instead, also open access

Research paper thumbnail of Advice for the Sultan: Prophetic Voices and Secular Politics in Medieval Islam. By Neguin Yavari. pp. 197. London, Hurst, 2014

Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2015

Research paper thumbnail of “At Cosmopolis’s End: The Slipping Apart of Iran and South Asia as Reflected in Lexicographical Works” presented at the Persianate World Conference (Yale University, May ’14)

Research paper thumbnail of The Wonders of Words, or the Role of Ḳhān-i Ārzū's Navādir al-alfāz̤ in the Development of Urdu

columbia.edu

i --1756 CE s -i Ā zū is g d d s e of the towering figures of eighteenth-century Urdu literature.... more i --1756 CE s -i Ā zū is g d d s e of the towering figures of eighteenth-century Urdu literature. Surprisingly given this reputation, he did not write enough in Urdu for more than a few lines of his Urdu works to have survived. Instead he was praised by his contemporaries for his scholarship in Persian, and in particular for bringing the tools available for Persian literary criticism to bear upon the vernacular. That means that some of his theoretical works in Persian, all of which are nominally about Persian literature, should in fact be d pp y U du s . Ā zū's is ic vi gu g suc s i guis ic i i y [tavā uq] between Persian and Indic vernacular languages like Urdu, allowed his work to bridge Persianate and Indian literary practices. The key primary source for this pap is Ā zū's Navādir alal ā , a Persian work which can be considered the first critical dictionary of the language that would later be called Urdu. It is worth contextualising Navādir within Ā zū's g sc y p c i reference to his other works like ād-i u a and u mir. This paper argues, on the one hand, that Ā zū applied the scholarly tools available in Persian and Arabic to Urdu, providing a literary critical framework which had not yet been available for vernacular poetry. On the other hand, Ā zū invokes his understanding of the history of the Persian language to argue implicitly that a standard Urdu should emanate from the royal court in Delhi.

Research paper thumbnail of Why Did Shāh Ḥātim's Collected Works Spawn a Child?

academiccommons.columbia.edu

Research paper thumbnail of Colonial Knowledge and the Greco-Roman Classics: Resituating the Legacy of Sir William Jones in a Humanist Context

South Asian Studies MA thesis, Columbia University, …, Jan 1, 2008

Research paper thumbnail of Keeping the Magic Alive How Devakīnandan Khatrī's Chandrakāntā, the First Hindi Best-seller, Navigates Western Modernity and the Fantastical

Research paper thumbnail of Braj Reinvented: Some British Approaches to Hindi Dialects

Unpublished essay, Jan 1, 2007

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Advice for the Sultan

Arthur Dudney Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Available on CJO 2015 doi:10.1017/S13561863... more Arthur Dudney
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society,
Available on CJO 2015 doi:10.1017/S1356186315000243