Amir Khusrau: A Postcolonial Study

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About the Book This book is a step in the direction of the Favonian reclaiming of the past. The colonial blinding and amnesia with which the present generations of the subcontinent suffer is rooted in the prejudices that are taught through the history documented by the colonialist enterprises. There is a need to undo these prejudices in order to cure the amnesia and blinding. This is possible if the interdisciplinary and antidisciplinarity are adopted by the scholars working in humanities and social sciences so that disciplines like history and literature may get a more synthesized space to be analyzed and studied in tandem. The present book is an attempt in the similar paradigm. The periodisation that has been lent to the Indian subcontinent generalizes and villainies the past and the history. There is a need to study history through alternate and non-standardized methods in order to break free from the impact of the colonial pedagogical framework that most of the academia still celebrates in the region. In this book Amir Khusrau's composite worldview has been fore grounded through his hindavi poetry to bring home the argument that the medieval age of India is not the dark age of the subcontinent and thus not medieval in terms of the popular connotation of the word. The book also presents a collection of illustrations from important manuscript of Amir Khusrau as an extension of the antidisciplinarity wherein a collaborative framework of literature, history and art is created. Thus, the book proposes a fresh approach in terms of its content and methodology to study literature, history and art as co-texts.

The book is a useful resource to postcolonial studies and to all those scholars and students who look for fresh approaches to signify their understanding of the native culture and literature.

About the Author Vibha Sharma teaches in the Department of English at Aligarh Muslim University. She holds a PhD in drama studies and literary theory. She has keen interest in Theatre Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Translation Studies and Cultural Studies with a focus on performance traditions. She is a founding member of Indian Society for Theatre Research (ISTR) which is the Indian Chapter of International Federation for Theatre Research. At present she is also the general secretary of ISTR. Sharma has attended several national and international conferences on related topics. She has presented papers on the topics like Indian drama, Theatre Studies, Modern Drama, Translation Studies, Indian English Studies Cultural Studies and English Language Teaching. Sharma has publications in national and international journals and books including Asian Theatre Encyclopedia published from the UK and Performance, Feminism and Affect in Neoliberal Times published from Palgrave MacMillan UK. She has authored a book: Reading Shaw: A Freudian Way. Sharma has been awarded scholarships and fellowships to visit and present papers in Germany, Japan, Chile, Spain and Nepal on drama studies and performance traditions. She has been invited as a visiting faculty to Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden to undertake a teaching assignment and deliver lectures on postcolonial studies in theatre and literature and world literatures. She actively works to reclaim the literary and cultural richness of Indian subcontinent in a paradigm of compositeness and progressive ideas through scholarly and creative pursuits. Preface Few years back in a literary conference in a university, I came across a slight brush off It inspired me to verify whether my appreciation for Khusrau is indeed worthy of any respect and seriousness. While presenting my paper 1 began by saying, "I have an old association with Amir Khusrau ...” To this statement, the professor in the chair of the session responded by saying that he had expected a saner way of beginning a paper than the one I had used. Upon inquiring later, T found that it had baffled the chairperson as to how could a sane person living in twenty first century claim to have an association with centuries- old poet. Obviously, the person took my words "has an old association" only literally and therefore the impossibility of knowing Khusrau in person made him doubt my sanity. It made me ponder over the way we envisage the past and history. Well there are many ways of doing that: history is formed from the experiences and formations of the present; it is read from textbooks; it is imagined through oral knowledge systems and it is re-read, re-imagined and re-writ- ten with agendas, clarifications, confusions and politics of prevailing discourse in a given phase of time. Amidst all these processes of writing and understanding history, how does one lead to appreciate a personality from the past is not very clear it mayor may not be a mix all these. But there is one thing that is at the basis especially if we are talking of eight centuries' historicity) that what- ever is believed or rejected about it was at one point of time established through some processes. and efforts. In case of the Indian subcontinent, writing of history has been the most domineering of all the aforementioned processes that has led to the present formation of history. This writing of history has happened in the colonial period and therefore most of the other processes of approaching history have got weakened and in fact completely shoved into oblivion. It is for this reason, that when a person claims to have an association with Amir Khusrau in contemporary situation, the person will be considered insane.

Thus to have an understanding of one's past, for a colonial subject (or even a formerly colonial subject in my case), on the basis of alternative ways (read non-western ways) of approaching history (with an oblivion to the ways in which the colonial historians envisaged) is immaterial even to a post-colonial university scenario. It is a paradigm provocative enough to throw the thinking and struggling individuals who want to pierce through the wall of colonial un- distending of their past that hinders the access to the historicity of the pre- colonial times. >p> Why can’t I have an association with Amir Khu-srau? Probably because 1 am an English literature scholar and not a scholar of history, not a practicing Sufi and illiterate in written Persian, so, I may never have had any exposure to Khusrau, sufficient enough to feel associated with him. Hence, only knowing one's history is not important, more important is the medium through which one has known one's history. This is absolutely a straitjacketing of not only the history but also the process of approaching the history. This hegemonising of accessing history makes a colonial subject unsure of the ways in which he/she gets to appreciate a particular episode, person or text from her/his culture's past. It is important to access the history beyond the books written with colonial frameworks, but it is even more important to access history with those processes that are not approved as the standard methods of studying history in modem education and research which are governed by the western principles of pedagogy.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages