Today’s dohā is from Kabir, the famous saint-poet of Banaras who lived in either the fifteenth or sixteenth century.
Detail from painting by Mir Kalan Khan, c. 1770-1775. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
चलती चक्की देख के दिया कबीर रोय ।
दो पतन के बीच आ साबित गया ना कोय ।।
— कबीर
Rasikapriyā of Keshavadas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Acc. 37815.
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). Read more
In this course, we will investigate three (seemingly) simple questions:
How will we attempt to answer these questions? We will look at a variety of materials- including poetry, prose, film, music, advertisements, and news articles- using a variety of techniques falling within the realm of philology.
Folio from the Satsaī (Seven Hundred Verses) of Bihari, ca. 1785. Metropolitan Museum of Art.