A Space For Debate
Fashioning the Urdu Novel in Colonial India
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8909956 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jennifer Dubrow (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 53 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 289-311 |
| Publication date | 2016-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Comparative Literature Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0010-4132 • E-ISSN: 1528-4212 |
| Publisher | The Pennsylvania State University Press (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.5325/complitstudies.53.2.0289 |
| OpenAlex | W2507637504 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 5 |
The novel emerged in South Asia not as an import from Europe, but rather as the product of multiple sources and as a genre capable of fulfilling a distinct function. I argue that the novel as a genre arose in colonial India because of its ability to hold divergent points of view and to subtly critique the British government. I focus on two early Urdu novels, Nazir Ahmad's Mirāt ul-'Arūs (1869) (The Bride's Mirror) and Ratan Nath Sarshar's Fasāna-e Āzād (1878–1883) (The Tale of Azad), to examine how novelists used techniques such as the contrasting character pair to explore irreconcilable problems under colonial rule. I uncover how Fasāna-e Āzād drew from the earlier Indo-Persian and Urdu genre of the romance (dāstān) in its use of contrasting character pairs, reimagining the technique to carve out a space for debate and critique in the novel. This strategy represents one of the ways that early vernacular-language novelists fashioned the novel genre as a form uniquely suited to engaging with the challenges and contradictions of the colonial period
Archaeology · Art · Character (mathematics · Colonialism · Linguistics · Literature · Romance · Space (punctuation) · Urdu · Vernacular · History · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Mathematics · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.44 |
| Citation span | 2017 - 2025 (9) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |