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The Incomparable Festival (Musaddas Tahniyat-e-Jashn-e-Benazir) by
Mir Yar Ali (whose pen name was Jan Sahib) is a little known but
sumptuous masterpiece of Indo-Islamic literary culture, presented
here for the first time in English translation. The long poem,
written in rhyming sestet stanzas, is about the royal festival
popularly called jashn-e-benazir(the incomparable festival),
inaugurated in 1866 by the Nawab Kalb-e-Ali Khan (r. 1865-87) with
the aim of promoting art, culture and trade in his kingdom at
Rampur in northern India. The task of commemorating the sights and
wonders of the festival was given to the hugely popular writer of
rekhti verse, the tart and playful sub-genre of the ghazal,
reflecting popular women's speech, of which Jan Sahib is one of the
last practitioners. Structured as an ode to the nawab, the poem is
a world-album depicting various classes on the cusp of social
upheaval. They include the elite, distinguished artists and
commoners, brought together at the festivities, blurring the
distinction between poetry, history and biography, and between
poetic convention and social description. The book is a veritable
archive of the legendary khayal singers, percussionists, and
instrumentalists, courtesans, boy-dancers, poets, storytellers
(dastango) and reciters of elegies (marsiyago). But, above all, the
poem gives voice to the 'lowest' denizens of the marketplace by
bringing to light their culinary tastes, artisanal products,
religious rituals and beliefs, and savoury idioms, thereby focusing
on identities of caste and gender in early modern society. This
Penguin Classics edition will be of interest not just to the Urdu
and Hindi literary historian, but to specialists and readers
interested in the histories of music, dance, and the performative
arts, as well as scholars of gender and sexuality in South Asia.
Lovers of Urdu poetry will find in it a forgotten masterpiece
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