Vali Dakhani and the Early Rekhtah Networks

"Placing the earliest Urdu poets and their craft in the lively social gatherings, bazaars, shrines, and courts of eighteenth century South Asia, this book reframes the history of Urdu within the diverse contexts from which it emerged. Dhawan and Pauwels re-examine the long-dominant mischaracterization of Urdu as an elite language of South Asian Muslims by analysing the poetic biographies of Vali Dakhani and his contemporaries Fa'iz, Abru and Hatim. The authors reveal how selective attention to a handful of poets and rarefied courtly texts obscured the much more diverse roots of an important vernacular tradition, thereby reconstructing a lost literary network of speakers, poets and participants in Urdu's past"--