In pre-modern South Asia, not just any rhymed text could be poetry, and not just any language could be a language of literature. In this session, we will discuss notions of literature (काव्य) and notions of literary language in pre-modern (or rather pre-colonial) Hindi. You’ll probably notice as you read through the materials for this session that Hindi or ‘भाषा’, and its literature did not exist in isolation, but rather within a complex ecology of languages (constituting a ‘language order’ or ‘schema’, according to Andew Ollett, who adapts the concept from Naoki Sakai).

The texts for this session include:

1. Rupert Snell, The Hindi Classical Tradition: A Braj Bhasa Reader. London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1991.
2. Mirza Khan, Tuhfat ul-Hind. Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 1676.
3. Bhikharidas, Kāvya Nirṇaya. Kashi: Nagari Pracharini Sabha, Samvat 2014.

Since some of you are encountering early Hindi (Brajbhasha) for the first time, I have included the following video to help you when reading Bhikharidas.

Mirza Khan and Bhikharidas are good composers to begin with when trying to get a sense of what ‘Hindi’ and ‘Hindi literature’ were in the pre-colonial period, because they give us a sense of how rich and complex these concepts were, and how they related to other languages and literatures. (They also foreground the importance of romance and erotic love in literature, which is one of the themes of this course.)

If you would like to know more about Mirza Khan and Bhikharidas and their respective places in the Hindi tradition, I recommend beginning with the following:

• Allison Busch, “Hindi Literary Beginnings.” In South Asian Texts in History: Critical Engagements with Sheldon Pollock, edited by Whitney Cox Yigal Bronner, and Lawrence McCrea. Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies, 2011.
• प्रोफ़ेसर राजकुमार, “भाषा बहता नीर: आरम्भिक आधुनिक भारत में भाषा और समाज.” तिरछी Spelling (website). https://tirchhispelling.wordpress.com/tag/भाषा विमर्श/