UCLA

This dissertation examines the reception of Urdu and Persian ghazal poetry in primitivist scholarship of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While seventeenth and early eighteenth-century poets writing in Urdu or Persian would have regarded the Indo-Persian ghazal as a cosmopolitan literary tradition, starting in the eighteenth century, scholars begin to represent ghazal conventions in ‘naturalistic’ terms that seek to imagine it as a folk tradition. I highlight the discourses of ‘nature’ in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Anglophone and Urdu literary scholarship to illustrate the particular challenges that writers faced in assessing the ghazal by primitivist standards of authentic expression. I demonstrate how the reengineering of the ghazal towards more ‘natural expression’ sought to transform ghazal poetry into a literary tradition that represented its ‘people’.