UCLA

This dissertation pursues the literary-historical tracks of the image repertoire of "boy-love" (amradparasti) versified for over two centuries in the Urdu ghazal. It critically engages with key positions in sexuality studies and ghazal criticism that have reduced this theme to visible sexuality, submerging its historical narrative elements. It is a part of my argument to show why the ghazal (as genre and predominant form of poetry) matters to the study of modern South Asian identities (sexual and political) and what historical forces have operated through its aesthetic lineaments to give it the illusion of traditional cultural continuity.

The dissertation is divided into two parts presenting the concentric circles of a historical problematic including poetry, sexual representation, the colonial archive and historiography. In Chapter One, I broadly describe colonial reformism in which sexuality emerged as a category of social and intimate experience. My aim is to show that modern sexual identities (e.g. homosexual) belong to a nationalist problematic whose assumptions are still with us in our postcolonial, `sexually liberated' era. Chapter Two narrows the genealogical focus on "boy-love" as a distinct historical-narrative element in the ghazal as well as in literary-historical recountings of its tradition. This chapter mirrors the larger argument as it places reformist (Hali), postcolonial (Firaq) and premodern (Yaqin) meditations on the image of the beautiful boy in the same argument.

In Part Two, I cross the threshold of the premodern into the South-Asian eighteenth century but not before delineating, in Chapter Three, the historiographic roadblocks in transitioning from categories of modern analysis (the state, family, subjectivity, identity) into the pre-existing social unities of premodern life. I make a critique of revisionist historiography to argue against a naively mimetic and sentimental understanding of literary objects from the past and posit the condensation of an erotic terrain in the rhetorical and vignette-like patterns of `classical' ghazal poetry. To highlight the operation of this terrain I study the formation of the boy-love image repertoire as part of the vernacularizing process from which elements of later "Urdu" first emerged. The exemplary figures here include the satiric-obscene verse of Jafar Zatalli and the iham set of poets (Abru and Naji in particular)

Finally, Chapter Four presents the case of Muhammad Taqi Mir and through the canonized stability of his oeuvre I draw the outer form of its erotic content as a social value form in whose negative relation with social conditions, a historical expanse becomes possible to imagine. In the final turn to Mir, I demonstrate that it is possible to read historical forms of subjectivity in the heavily routinized idiom of the ghazal, and not settle for a depoliticized history of surfaces (images, representations, typologies) which has been the fate of the ghazal and several other expressive practices in the postcolonial world.