Jennifer Dubrow to speak on realism in Fasana-e Azad

On March 21, Jennifer Dubrow will present a talk in the South Asian Studies Colloquium, “To Capture a Picture: Fasana-e Azad and Experiments with Realism in the Urdu Novel in Nineteenth-Century India”.

4:30pm, March 21 • Room 203, Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue

This talk investigates experiments with realism in Fasana-e Azad (1878-1883), arguably the first novel in Urdu. The work of Ratan Nath Dar ‘Sarshar,’ Fasana-e Azad was serialized in the daily newspaper Avadh Akhbar, where it became the subject of readers’ letters, commentary by the author, and critiques by rival journals. Among the subjects discussed in relation to Fasana-e Azad was realism, defined by its author as the ability to “capture a picture” of human emotion. This definition of realism was related to both the rise of photography and other visual media, and the “natural poetry” movement in Urdu, which supported pictorial poetry that would forge a direct link between poet and listener. Sarshar’s experiments with realistic writing in Fasana-e Azad were not well received by readers, however, despite reader support for realism in theory. The talk points to the pitfalls and pressures on novelists such as Sarshar writing for a general public during the period when the novel was still gaining ground in Indian languages.

Jennifer Dubrow is Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington, where she teaches courses on modern South Asian literature and Urdu language. She received her Ph.D. in 2011 from the University of Chicago in South Asian Languages and Civilizations. Her current research is on the development of Urdu novel in nineteenth-century India, print culture and serialized fiction, and narrative theory. She is currently working on a book-length study of Fasana-e Azad, the first serialized Urdu bestseller.