Cosmopolitan Dreams: The Making of Modern Urdu Literary Culture in Colonial South Asia
This talk introduces the world of Urdu print culture in colonial South Asia. In late nineteenth-century South Asia, the arrival of print fostered a dynamic and interactive literary culture. Within the pages of Urdu-language publications, readers found a public sphere that encouraged their reactions to featured content. Readers and writers cultivated cosmopolitan affiliations in the pages of Urdu–language periodicals and newspapers such as Avadh Akhbar and Avadh Punch. Cosmopolitan Dreams shows how literature became a site in which modern daily life could be satirized, modernity challenged, and new futures imagined.
Jennifer Dubrow is Associate Professor of Urdu at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is the author of Cosmopolitan Dreams: The Making of Modern Urdu Literary Culture in Colonial South Asia (University of Hawai’i Press, 2018; Permanent Black, 2019). Her articles have been published in Comparative Literature Studies, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, and South Asian History and Culture.