Professor Mehr Afshan Farooqi spoke on "Social Values and Literary Acts: Interpreting Ghalib's Published and Unpublished Poetry"

This extension Lecture (Under the Viksit Bharat @ 2047), was delivered by Prof. Mehr Afshan Farooqi on "Social Values and Literary Acts: Interpreting Ghalib's Published and Unpublished Poetry".

Some important points from her lecture:

• How do we judge a literary text?

• Hermeneutics is a tool, theory and methodology through which literary texts can be understood. But we have no such tool for oral traditions.

• Urdu in its initial stage was a spoken language, the literature written in it was based on oral traditions. Later in times, any form of genre of writing preserved in spoken language started converting into textual or printed form. Now, the question comes, what are the tools that one can use and how do we judge such texts now?

• Any text exist in a discourse and that discourse is created through its socio-historical background that should be taken into consideration.

• Presentation of a text changes with time & sometimes performative aspect of a text becomes an issue as performative act creates yet another way of looking at texts.

• Judgement is different for two different types of presentation. There is a difference between the judgement for oral tradition & judgement for, when such oral tradition takes textual/printed form as the type of audience and readership also change in both forms.

• Philosophers associated with deconstruction including Derrida and Foucault argue that discourse of written texts has more stability in comparison to discourse of orality.

• Ownership plays an important role in written text. Ghalib was aware of this fact and used the concept of copyright in 1841. He was also aware of the fact that what type of audience is going to read the text in printed form.

• Now the question arises that how did oral culture did respond to the printing culture? Then, people started memorizing the printed texts and it was an intervention between spoken discourse and written discourse.

• There is a difference between imagination and thought. At the same time, there is a relation between the two as well.

• There is a difference between oral tradition and written discourse but when we judge a literary text, we have to look in space between the two that is embedded in contemporary socio-historical background. And from the point of view of Ghalib, he was aware about the response of the public and he took the same into consideration then.

This extension lecture was organized by the Department of Urdu, Jamia Millia Islamia University, Delhi on 07-02-24.

Mehr Afshan Farooqi is a Professor of Urdu and South Asian Literature in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages & Literatures, University of Virginia, USA.