In their two respective articles on the state of field, both J. Stetkevych (1979) and Sells (1987) note that 19th century Oriental studies tended to sap literary texts of their aesthetic and mythic vivacity and deny non-western artists credit for the virtuosity that their audiences craved (Boas). These limitations might be understood as Said's Orientalism supporting Europe's colonial expansion, but how does one explain the stark isolation of Orientalists from the broader mid-19th century advances in the humanities, such as those from the emerging fields of folklore, comparative literature, and anthropology? To exacerbate matters, Cartesian mind-body dualism blinded our intellectual forerunners from perceiving let alone analyzing embodied artistic performance. This panel builds upon recent non-western literary studies to rethink the text as a performance event, embedded in a social and spatial niche, whether historically or theoretically constructed, as a heuristic for better perceiving and analyzing the implications. We come together to think about literature not as text on the page, but as a performance event: a temporal-spatial larger-than-life chronotope (Bakthin) for reforming bonds of romance and friendship, competing and cooperating in acts of sociability, forging ties of identity and fealty with the dead, and dreaming of more meaningful engendered selves and societies. The first paper on classical Adab consciously draws upon Arabic text salons to articulate the performance event where cultural agents interact, pour wine, wink, crack knuckles and laugh at the delivery of jokes and poetry. The point here being that beyond our orientalist stereotypes of brainy Adab, Adab salons could well be sociable, meaning warm or competitive, and Bacchic and bodily. The second paper grapples with the agency of a Cairene Sufi women, 'A'ishah al-Ba'uniyah, to re-conceive of her persona, not simply as a mystic, but as a woman in the public sphere performing literary communications as she exchanges praise poetry with patrons and peers or sheds jurisprudence with literary devices and flourishes. The city-scape becomes her stage in a sense. The third paper focuses on sociability in 18th century Delhi arguing that Persianate sociability underwent a historic transformation as it moved to Moghul Delhi based on local demands. In contrast, Paper four positing the Shi'i majlis (salon) of Awadh as a competing venue where local audiences could cultivate social networks. We come together on this panel to place sociability and performance in dialogue and show productive ways of thinking of texts as suggestive of lived experiences.
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In What is Islam?, Shahab Ahmed posits a geographical space, Balkan-to-Bengal complex, as a transcontinental belt of Islamicate cultures characterized by cosmopolitanism, at the center of which are habits and discourses of sociability (suhba, mu'anasa, lutf) between friends, neighbors and loved ones. This paper grounds that sociability in a culture of literary performance in salons held in homes, bookshops, chancery offices, monasteries, and gardens. Though mentions of salons in sources are legion (mujalasa, mudhakara, musamara, or muhadara), the textual evidence describing them in any detail is fragmentary at best. For this talk, I draw together literary sources - in both printed and in manuscript form - that provide rare glimpses of the mood of these gatherings, modes of collegiality and turn taking in the bubble of egalitarianism, and exchanges of affection or Bacchanalia. One manuscript source in particular, Halbat al-Kumayt (Gathering for Wine) by al-Nawaji, distinguishes between hierarchical royal salons over which a patron presides and collegial ones where friends relax decorum and scrutiny in favor of a warmer more intimate sociability. The usual approach to classical Arabic culture is one that privilege texts as a cerebral exercise, often dubbed with the misnomer belle-lettre, but here I deploy a performance approach, drawn from the study of folklore and the ethnography of communication (Bauman and Hymes). This approach theorize issue and question based on sources that construct the text as a performance event where agents of culture inhabit body, space, and time to make shared experiences and cultural memory. I argue that far from a brainy production, these classical Arabic sources illustrate a bawdy bodily culture that partakes of human aspirations while embracing the hairy toothy animality of the human.
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Kaley Keener
This paper explores female Sufi agency through the context of laic public performance. Hagiographical and literary works of Sufi women have gained considerable attention and scholarship in recent decades, however, most of the literature and actions attributed to Sufi women are limited to their spiritual vocation. Consequently, female Sufi agency is defined exclusively by their religious contributions such as praise poems for the Prophet Mohammad, religious treatises, and anecdotes about their asceticism. Focusing scholarship on these aspects of female authorship and literature has in turn limited our conception of agency among female Sufis (as-Sufiyat). The Sufi poetess ‘A’ishah al-Ba‘uniyah (d. 1517), represents a break with these traditional constructs of Sufi women. ‘A’ishah enjoys an overtly public role in Syrian and Cairene society. In addition to the conventional role of composing praise poems to the Prophet and writing theological treatises, tasks exemplified by previous Sufiyaat, ‘A’ishah is granted jurisprudential authority, composes praise poetry to men, and engages in public literary exchanges with scholars and politicians. In this paper, I analyze sections of ‘A’ishah’s praise poem to her patron Ibn Aja and their literary dialogues and argue that ‘A’ishah’s performances in the public sphere of Cairo illustrate a break from the traditional construct of female Sufi roles. Not only is the object of ‘A’ishah’s performance non-religious and her subject is notably not God, Mohammad, or Sufism, but her use of rhetorical devices and gendered language with her patrons and peers demonstrates an alternative mode of performance for as-Sufiyaat. I will draw on performance theory and concepts of ritual exchange as expounded by Stetkevych to show how ‘A’ishah’s performance with her audience provides us with a new context for female Sufi agency.
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Dr. Nathan Tabor
This paper focuses on the eighteenth-century Persian and Urdu language mahfil-i musha’irah (poetry gathering or salon). Mughal India’s Persian-educated urban elite patronized and documented this socio-literary institution beginning in the sixteenth century. The Persianate salon space privileges sociability or sohbat above all else through forms of speech (sukhan) and bodily comportment (adab). From this position, we find that the presumed hierarchy between Persian as an elite language and Urdu as a vernacular is ambivalently expressed in the salon space during the eighteenth century, a moment of significant literary change. In this paper, I show that the salon’s space informed period conceptions of literary historiography that disrupt conventions on language hierarchy and class. From the Balkans to Bengal, much literary history of Islamicate societies written after the nationalist era has sidelined the relational, embodied, and behavioral aspects that informed Islamicate intellectual pursuits in pre-modern times. Of late, some scholars have reassessed early modern Islamicate text genres and institutions to foreground socio-textual practices holistically—in other words what texts do with people and their bodies. The text genre par excellence in the salon setting was the tazkirah or biographical compendium. Eighteenth-century compendia document the bodily, aesthetic, and hierarchical aspects of courtly and extra-courtly gatherings through verse, cursory biographies, and anecdotes. In short, the tazkirah represents salon-based conceptions of sociability or sohbat at a particular point in time. The work of Marcia Hermansen, Francesca Orsini, Tayab al-Hibri, and Robert McChesney represent contemporary theorization on the tazkirah as an Islamicate text genre. Expanding on their approaches, this paper examines the 1740s in the Mughal capital of Delhi, a watershed decade for poetry exchange and criticism. This epoch bridged several generations of India-based poets who were advancing the tazah or “fresh” goals of contemporary Persian writing and who were also recasting Persophone civility according to vernacular sensibilities at the center of early modern Persianate literary production. The salons of Delhi and their documentation produced histories of literary sociability which force us to reconsider hierarchical relationships between dominant languages and vernaculars from a stance that foregrounds disciplined bodies and polite speech.
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Peter Knapczyk
This paper considers the Urdu marsiyah (elegy) and its recitation in the Muharram assemblies of premodern Awadh. Although scholarship from Religious Studies has focused on the genre’s role in ritual life, this paper investigates the performative context of marsiyah as a dynamic site of aesthetic debates, poetic rivalries, and literary innovation. The Urdu marsiyah, which commemorates the Battle of Karbala, rose in popularity in Awadh during the dynasty of the Shi’i Nawabs who ruled from the late 18th century until 1856. Asserting their independence from the Mughal empire, the Nawabs promoted Shi’i public rituals such as Muharram assemblies to foster a shared cultural ideal for Awadh’s diverse population. This paper uses accounts of marsiyah recitation found in tazkirahs (biographical dictionaries) and other contemporary sources to examine the changing relationship between marsiyah poets and their patrons and listeners. It will be shown that patronage transformed marsiyah's performative context, becoming a space for the negotiation of both religious authority and aesthetic taste, where poets such as Mir Anis (d. 1874) and Mirza Dabir (d. 1875) assumed the roles of religious functionaries and literary icons.
Whereas before this period the chief setting for Urdu poetry in Mughal India had been the musha’irah (poetry gathering), in Nawabi Awadh the Shi’i majlis emerged as a rival space for the construction of Urdu’s social networks and literary standards. Marsiyah poets’ innovative compositions and spirited performance styles attracted admirers who debated the superiority of their preferred poets. As in the musha’irah, these literary rivalries reinforced ties of identity and drove creativity, with marsiyah poets engaging in duels of literary one-upmanship from the pulpit. Despite the pious context of these assemblies, fanatical supporters at times denied the ability of a rival poet’s recitation to move devotees to tears, equating matters of literary aesthetics with religious efficacy. Moving beyond narrow textual approaches, this paper aims to examine the competitive nature of marsiyah’s performative context and, more broadly, to highlight how pious texts and ritual spaces in Persianate South Asia were embedded in aesthetic debates and literary rivalries.
