Nathan L M Tabor

In India’s early modern histories, chroniclers narrate moments in which speakers with profound religious knowledge and eloquent rhetorical abilities would recite their poems at Persian and Urdu poets’ shrines. I examine graveside recitation at poets’ tombs in 18th-century India by studying literary compendiums chronicling poets, their verse, and personal anecdotes. Drawing on contemporary scholarship discussing Sufi networks, early modern history, and material conceptions of public culture, we can see how graveside recitation is part of a literary public propagated by Persian language patronage in which Muslims and non-Muslims re-charted popular Islamic material praxis. For example, patrons had famous verses carved into headstones, devotees preserved autograph manuscripts for bibliomancy, and poets exchanged verses within tombs’ marble walls. The material implications of this heterogeneous public sphere blur disciplinary boundaries between literary practice, shrine devotion, and cultural patronage, complicating our notion of Muslim religio-literary economies and pre-colonial Muslim publics.

Since the early twentieth century, Urdu poets have recited verse at locally-organized poetry gatherings held in country fairs across North India’s Gangetic plain. Critical engagement with these mushāʿarahs overturns assumptions about historical and affiliative aspects of vernacular and elite literary practices, revealing a patchwork of patronage, influence, and taste among poets and their audiences, while also highlighting unexpected routes of textual circulation outside urban locales. This essay examines poetry gatherings in and around the city of Muzaffarnagar located in North India’s Upper Doab. Ethnographic and archival materials tell a history of the performance arenas, tea stalls, and municipal structures of a semi-urban milieu that changes the scale of Urdu literary spaces over time.

Since the early twentieth century, Urdu poets have recited verse at locally-organized poetry gatherings held in country fairs across North India's Gangetic plain. Critical engagement with these mushāʿarahs overturns assumptions about historical and af-filiative aspects of vernacular and elite literary practices, revealing a patchwork of patronage, influence, and taste among poets and their audiences, while also highlighting unexpected routes of textual circulation outside urban locales. This essay examines poetry gatherings in and around the city of Muzaffarnagar located in North India's Upper Doab. Ethnographic and archival materials tell a history of the performance arenas, tea stalls, and municipal structures of a semi-urban milieu that changes the scale of Urdu literary spaces over time.

This article examines a posthumous literary gathering held at the grave of eighteenth- century Persian-language poet 'Abd al-Qadir Bedil (1642-1720) in order to trace varying uses of a peculiar shrine space and its Persianate textual practices in late- Mughal Delhi. This graveside mushā'irah was a setting for the competitive exchange of poetry and one of the most well-documented gatherings of the mid-1700s. In anecdotes and verse written between 1721 and 1784, attendees at this event reveal their implicit and explicit associations between elite and non-elite classes. This article provides a genealogy of the normative literary acts and material practices at the grave. The tomb's space and its texts reveal a setting that overturns assumptions about vernacular and elite literatures as it hosted Urdu poetry recitation, cutting edge Persian verse, as well as a medicines market and space for Sufi devotional practices—institutions with contradictory social expectations. This setting and its varied social practices provide an example of a late Mughal cultural institution formed outside of the court that forces us to redefine precolonial forms of publicity in light of localized linguistic and social hierarchies.