Prizes for “Literary Moments of Exchange in the 18th Century: The New Urdu Vogue Meets Krishna Bhakti.” (Article)

Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship
Date: 4/1/2011 12:00:00 AM
Organization: Guggenheim Foundation [link]
Abstract: I received a Guggenheim Fellowship for support to enable me to carry out a major study of the hybrid intellectual culture of eighteenth-century India. I seek to contribute to the study of the circulation of ideas, poetic and art styles from cosmopolitan to provincial centers and the other way around. I will focus on Hindu-Muslim exchanges, and how those were regarded at the time. I seek to do so by means of a case study of Kishangarh’s famous dynamic art patron, the crown-prince Savant Singh of Kishangarh (1699-1764). He was also a prolific poet under the nom de plume Nagridas, and commissioned Kishangarhi miniature paintings to illustrate his own poetry. He mainly composed devotional poetry to Krishna, however through my research I have learned that he also tried his hand at composing in the then new style of poetry, originally known as Rekhta, but later called Urdu and associated with Islam. This shows a case of fluidity of boundaries between cultural communities in the eighteenth ce

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