City of Lyrics

Ordinary Poets and Islamicate Popular Culture in Early Modern Delhi

Nathan L. M. Tabor

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781469690223, 9781469690216
• eBook ISBN: 9781469688299
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry

For centuries, Urdu-speaking poets and their audiences have gathered for mushāʿirahs, literary competitions for spoken-word verse. Today the mushāʿirah is a global phenomenon, as audiences in the millions convene in person and online for hours of poetic performance. Tracing these modern gatherings back to their origins, Nathan L. M. Tabor introduces readers to the popular emergence of the mushāʿirah in eighteenth-century Delhi. Scores of poets composed two-line lyric poems, called ġhazals, that they muttered, sang, shouted, and spat out in contentious salon spaces across India’s largest metropolis. Delhi’s mushāʿirahs circulated lyrics, satires, and songs for both common and elite poets, who traded and assessed words as an urban commodity that defined hierarchy, taste, and notions of delight.

Via poets' verse exchanges and their histories of Dehli’s literary scene, City of Lyrics reconstructs the social networks the mushāʿirahs produced. By understanding the roots of this uniquely Islamic literary practice, readers will gain insight into global popular culture today, which increasingly takes shape according to the tastes and values of the Muslim world yet is enjoyed by wide audiences of Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Conventions
• Dramatis Personae
• Prologue
• Introduction: Delhi’s Market for Speech, 1720–1750
• 1. At the Tomb of Delhi’s Poet-Saint
• 2. New Writers at the Queen Regent’s Mosque
• 3. Literary Discord and the Occupation of Delhi
• 4. The Last Duel at Bedil’s Grave
• Conclusion: Networks, Competitions, and Accessing the Past
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index