One of my earliest publications was in a volume edited by Shobna Nijhawan, entitled
Nationalism in the Vernacular: Hindi, Urdu, and the Literature of Indian Freedom. For this compendium I translated and wrote a brief introduction to two poems by Shahāb al-Dīn Ahmad Sāqib and Hakīm Muhammad Ahsan from the 1863 anthology
Fughān-i Dihlī. These poems, in the
musaddas form, came to be seen as exemplars of the shahr-āshob genre, which at some point in the twentieth century, or perhaps the nineteenth, was defined as a genre of poetry describing the despoliation of a city. Delhi, ravaged multiple times in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was very often the subject of poems in this genre.
As Munibur Rahman has pointed out, however, this definition of the
shahr-āshob genre was not the only one. In an earlier sense, the
shahr-āshob was a catalogue of the beautiful "city-disturbing" boys of a locale, often listed by their occupation. Later on when I developed my ideas about genres and the flux that they can undergo, this example became very useful to me.
Recently I uploaded
a longer version of the introduction to the poems to my
academia.edu page. This is the uncut version that I initially submitted to the editors. Hopefully it gives a better sense my main contentions, one of which is that although these poems were made out to be mirrors of the historical situation (and preludes to the Indian independence movement), they are more intertextual than world-reflecting.
