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" Garden of endless blossoms: "
Robert Lowell Phillips
V. N. Rao
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1103926
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| Doc. No
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TLpq755751646
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| Main Entry
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Robert Lowell Phillips
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V. N. Rao
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| Title & Author
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Garden of endless blossoms:\ Robert Lowell PhillipsV. N. Rao
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| College
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The University of Wisconsin - Madison
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| Date
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2010
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| student score
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2010
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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306
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| Abstract
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The story of Ram, Sita, and Ravan, often referred to as the Ramayan, has been a profoundly important "mytheme" in South and Southeast Asia for centuries, its varied forms and functions attracting a great deal of scholarly interest. Yet within the expansive amount of research on Ram's story in South Asia, Urdu renderings have been entirely overlooked. Similarly, most Urdu literary histories give little attention to such works. This two-fold neglect appears to be the direct consequence of 20 th century communalisms and their historicist teleologies based on essentialization of religious and linguistic identities. Yet, as these Urdu Ramayans reveal, a vibrant and self-assured subculture of Perso-Urdu affiliated Hindu groups (including Kayasths, Kashmiri Pandits, Khatris, and others) composed large quantities of "self-addressing" cultural materials in Urdu (and Persian). Using tools and modes of analysis drawn from intertextual studies, sociology of culture, and translation/localization theory, this dissertation explores the diversity of Urdu literary culture(s) (and subcultures) through a diachronic study of 19th and early 20th century Ramayans , situating these works within their contexts of production and reception. It argues that the literary processes and practices embodied in these works offer critical insights into the diversity of agents and stake-holders participating in Urdu literary culture during this period. Moreover, when read as performative, that is contextualized, works (rather than merely for their narrative content alone), these renderings of Ram's story embody contested "fields of action" within Urdu literary culture in which social, political, religious, literary, and linguistic contestations were manifested. Concomitantly, the movement of this Urdu literary sub-culture away from Persianate/courtly affiliations to Sanskritic/Pauranik/nationalist ones is also addressed. Expanding on this analysis, a final theme pursued is the prominence of a "plurilingual ethos" in North India, and the need for cultural histories of the pre- and colonial periods to engage more effectively with such complex dialogic networks. In conclusion, this dissertation will show that these products and processes are integral to a richer understanding of Urdu literary culture and its history, as well as to its organic interconnections with early modern, pre-colonial, and colonial North Indian literary-cultural practices more generally.
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Intertextuality
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Language, literature and linguistics
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Masnavi
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Musaddas
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Ramayans
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Urdu
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