In this developing work, I approach two literary objects from an otherwise broad-ranging archive of modern Urdu literary texts: first, Quratulain Hyder’s translation and re-inscription of T.S Eliot’s The Dry Salvages into the Urdu language, with which she prefaces her 1959 magnum-opus Urdu novel Āg kā Daryā (River of Fire). This translation, I demonstrate, disorients us from dominant modes through which we have come recognize a category and genre called modernism (vis-à-vis Eliot and others, those based within the Euro-American context). In a highly charged process of translation, Hyder transforms The Dry Salvages into unrecognizable form, locating it within the idiom, register and language of South Asian religious syncretism. I read this as a form of catachresis. What is displaced here is the Christian subtext of Eliot’s modernism. The second object I read is the opening section of Intizar Hussain’s 1979 novel Bastī (Settlement), a powerful critique of colonial rule effected through a modernist construction of (cyclical) time. In the case of Hussain, too, such cyclicality is staged not through an inspiration from Euro-American modernist sources, but rather through a recourse to syncretic forms of South Asian mythic and mystical source material, borrowed from the literary traditions of Islam and Hinduism respectively. In both of these writers, the ghost of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has called an “intuition of the transcendental” appears and lingers. Such intuitions can expand, I show, the ways we conceptualize dominant literary categories, genres and thought, displacing the Christian and colonial histories associated with them (in this context “Western modernism”), in service of making space for transcendental and literary worlds found elsewhere. Such intuitions also connect Urdu modernisms with Middle Eastern modernisms, as well as modernisms emergent in other peripheries. Tracking these comparisons thus allows for a truly transnational, planetary and broad-ranging inquiry into how modernisms manifest in multiple geographies and linguistic contexts, as is the vision of this panel.