"Persian in India's Literary Ecology: The Case of a 17th Century Persian Ramayana"

Prashant Keshavmurthy talks about " Theory, 'Capital' and the Global South " as part of the Azim Premji University Colloquium Series.
February 17, 2017

About the Lecture:
Following a brief survey of the millennial life of Persian in South Asia, this lecture will offer the case study of Masih’s early seventeenth century Masnavi-i Rām va Sitā, a Persian verse translation of Vālmiki’s Sanskrit epic Rāmāyana. It opens by remarking on a shift in the study of the relations between poetics and politics of Persian translations of Indic texts. Then, purporting to complicate understanding of this relation, it takes issue with prior studies of this poem before answering the following questions these studies fail to pose: how does the prophetological metaphysics of the prefatory chapters relate to the poetics of emotion in the main body of his tale? And: what does this relation let us infer of Masih’s theological conception of translation?
About the Speaker:
Prashant Keshavmurthy is Associate Professor of Persian-Iranian Studies in the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, Montreal. He is the author of Persian Authorship and Canonicity in Late Mughal Delhi: Building an Ark (https://www.routledge.com/Persian-Aut..., Routledge, 2016) and is currently working on a study of Mughal Persian reading practices. His interests include pre-modern literary theory and Persian-Urdu literatures.

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