Description:

Please join the South Asia Research Forum for this online talk by Peter Knapczyk (Wake Forest University), Assistant Professor, Hindi-Urdu & Middle East and South Asia Studies. 

Among the literary cultures of early modern North India, women’s voices of longing and desire formed a pervasive trope that created intertextual links across regions. This trope transcended languages and sectarian identities, evoking a shifting set of moods and meanings when placed in different interpretive frames, from the mundane to the mystical, and from the erotic to the elegiac. 

This talk examines the trope of women’s longing and desire in early modern Hindi and Urdu literature with examples from the Shi’i elegy (marsiyah), Sufi romance (premakhyan), and other devotional genres. Although this legacy was later obscured by colonial-era reformists, recovering these voices can help us to disentangle the complex heritage of Hindi-Urdu from the paradigm of linguistic nationalisms that remains dominant today.

About the speaker:

Peter Knapczyk received a BA in Folklore/Ethnomusicology from Indiana University, an MA in Music/Ethnomusicology from Brown University, and an MA and PhD in Asian Cultures and Languages from the University of Texas at Austin. His PhD dissertation, “Crafting the Cosmopolitan Elegy in North India: Poets, Patrons, and the Urdu Marsiyah, 1707-1857,” is a socio-political history of Shi’i elegiac poetry and the rise of Urdu literary culture during India’s transition from Mughal to British rule. He teaches courses in Hindi-Urdu and South Asian Studies, and is advisor for ALC’s Certificate in South Asian Languages and Civilizations.

This event is online.  Please register below.