Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018. xv, 175 pp. (Figures, map.) US$62.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-7270-0.
In her engaging and enjoyable Cosmopolitan Dreams, Jennifer Dubrow draws upon her reading of Ratan Nath Sarshar’s famous picaresque work, Fasana-e Azad (lit. “Tale of Azad”), to argue that this “first novel in Urdu” helped create a modern literary culture—an Urdu cosmopolis— from what had been the premodern culture of classical Urdu. The argument rests largely on the publication circumstances of Sarshar’s novel in the Avadh Akhbār, where the tale appeared in serialized excerpts between 1878 and 1883.
The book consists of five brief chapters. Chapter 1, “Printing the Cosmopolis,” offers a survey of the various journals in northern and eastern India during the aftermath of the failed Mutiny of 1857. Chapter 2, “The Novel in Installments,” addresses the practice of narrating novels in daily newspaper installments. Following Benedict Anderson, Dubrow marks the world of Urdu print readers as distinctively modern due to its simultaneity of reception across space. Interactions between author and readership also suggest this (see below). In chapter 3, “Experiments with Form,” the intertextuality of other Urdu print journals is discussed, especially Avadh Punch, which saw the Avadh Akhbar as its rival, attacking it through satire. This, too, the author posits as a growing feature of Urdu literary modernism. Chapter 4, “Reading the World,” takes on the famous and (to some) regrettable divide between Urdu and Hindi as languages, the most infamous outcome of which was the religio-cultural divide between Hindus and Muslims and their resulting political rivalry. The book’s concluding chapter, “New Spaces of the Urdu Cosmopolis,” brings the reader into contemporary times, arguing that the Urdu cosmopolis, though created through print a century and a half ago, persists as a phenomenon that has expanded by means and reason of visual media and the globalization of the internet.
Dubrow observes that this new literary culture was made possible by the advent of lithography. Relatively affordable, print culture represented a crucial break from Hindustan’s erstwhile, predominantly oral, literary culture, which had been controlled by courtly élites rather than urban middle classes. Newspapers were inexpensive to buy so that Urdu letters could now be consumed by many who had earlier enjoyed little or no access. Dubrow also avers that Urdu print culture was secular and transnational (though “transregional” might have been a more accurate term). This public now extended to mufassil towns throughout northern India rather than just established centres of culture (marākiz), thanks to dissemination along railway lines. These two features changed the profile of the successful Urdu writer, who now had to be simultaneously an author, an editor, an entrepreneur, and a critic. On the other hand, “he” was freed from the onus of having to keep in the good graces of a royal patron, because his new patron was a subscribing public.
Thus, while capitalism replaced traditional patronage practices in certain ways, the competition for patronage continued to take familiar contours (as in the case of Avadh Punch’s barbs against the Avadh Akhbar, which reminded one of famous rivalries—even brawls—between poetic masters (ustāds) and their disciples (shāgirds). Family ties and social entrée became far less important than the ability to appeal to the public’s taste, and the public could be rather assertive, as Dubrow shows us in exchanges between editor and readership. Sarshar’s “engaged public,” which Dubrow argues replaced ustādi, freely offered editorial comment; suggestions submitted to the author by his readers were often quite directive. That he was willing to follow their suggestions as much as he did reflects his desire to please his patrons.
In this modern literary culture, says Dubrow, one’s religious affiliations and class position were irrelevant. However, rivals such as those at Avadh Punch were by no means above levelling claims of Sarshar’s unfitness to claim Urdu mastery (ustādī) because he was Hindu. They lampooned his journal by calling it Baniya Akhbar, clearly a class- and caste-based slur. This despite the fact that, during the second half of the nineteenth century, a number of distinguished Hindu writers, especially in Lucknow, made it into the Urdu canon. Such occurrences illustrate that the making of a new literary culture through Urdu print journalism was hardly seamless. It also reflects an unsurprising time lag between what becomes possible through modern technologies—secularism and an end to class consciousness—and people’s ability or willingness to change their consciousness. Like it or not, Indian Muslims, though they could claim no geographical region as exclusively theirs, considered Urdu culture to be their own, and protected it, often fiercely. One can see this even today in Pakistan.
The introduction and conclusion frame Dubrow’s arguments theoretically, though I did not always agree that she had demonstrated all she had claimed. More precise definitions of such central terms as “modernity,” “cosmopolitan,” “middle class” and “secular” would have been welcome precisely because they are applied so variously by different scholars. This was true also in her discussions (albeit mostly elsewhere) of concepts like Bhal-mānsi to replace the strictures of sharāfat as it had been understood before (Dubrow, “Sharāfat and Bhal Mānsī: a new perspective on respectability in Fasana-e Azad,” South Asian History and Culture, 9:2, 181–193). If a cosmopolis was created by Urdu print journalism in the late nineteenth century, the term has to be understood very differently from the ethos of a Persian cosmopolis recently treated by Richard Eaton (India in the Persianate World, University of California Press, 2019).
On the other hand, Dubrow’s close readings of the actual text of Fasāna-e Āzād were interesting and enjoyable, and one would have liked to see more of them (see Dubrow, “A Space for Debate: Fashioning the Urdu Novel in Colonial India,” Comparative Literature Studies 53, 2, Special Issue: Beyond the Anglophone—Comparative South Asian Literatures (2016), 289–311). Students and scholars both will want to read this book in conjunction with Dubrow’s other published work, and we look forward to more from this gifted scholar.
Carla Petievich
The University of Texas, Austin