a stranger in the city.pdf

Stranger in the City: The Poetics of Sabk-i Hindi By Shamsur Rahman Faruqi A Stranger In The City: The Poetics of Sabk-i Hindi by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi 29 C, Hastings Road, Allahabad 211 001, India Phones: 91-532-2622693; 2623137 Email: ******@.in 1 Stranger in the City: The Poetics of Sabk-i Hindi By Shamsur Rahman Faruqi A Stranger In The City: The Poetics of Sabk-i Hindi By Shamsur Rahman Faruqi If there is a knower of tongues here, fetch him; There’s a stranger in the city And he has many things to say. Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib 1 (1797-1869) The phrase sabk-i hindi (Indian Style) has long had a faint air of rakish insubordination and unrespectability about it and it is only recently that it has started to paratively positive feelings. 2However, this change is clearly symptomatic of a process of gentrification and seems to be powered as much by political considerations as by literary ones. Hence the proposal by some scholars to describe the style as “Safavid- Mughal”, or “Isfahani” or plain “Safavid” rather than “Indian.” 3 Wheeler Thackston even believes that “there is nothing particularly Indian about the ‘Indian-style’….The more accurate description is ‘High-Period’ style.” 4 The term sabk-i hindi was coined perhaps by the Iranian poet, critic, and politician Maliku’sh Shu’ara Muhammad Taqi Bahar (1886-1951) in the first quarter of twentieth century. It signposted a poetry in the Persian language, especially ghazal, written mostly from the sixteenth century onward by Indian and Iranian poets, the latter term to include poets of Iranian origin who spent long periods of their creative life in India. “Iranian” here means a native of “greater” Iran, a cultural entity that was generally meant prise all of present day Iran and Azerbaijan in the North and West, Afghanistan in the South and East, and Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in the East. Similarly, 1 Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, Kulliyat-e Ghalib , Lucknow, Naval Kishor Press, 1872, p. 442. A very good