Arabic in Hindustan: Comparative Poetics in the Eighteenth Century and Azad Bilgrami’s The Coral Rosary

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the contributions of Ghulām ʿAlī “Āzād” Bilgrāmī (1704–1786) to our understanding of comparative poetics and Arabic in eighteenth-century Hindustan. It attends to Azad’s oeuvre through the lenses of translation, multilingualism, and literary science. Philological analysis reveals how Azad establishes analogues across these three literary languages that attest to the adaptive capacity of poetics. His sections on Hindi poetry in his Arabic work Subḥat al-marjān fī āthār Hindūstān (The Coral Rosary of Hindustan’s Traditions, 1763–64), and its later adaptation into Persian Ghizlān al-Hind (The Gazelles of India, 1764–65) anchor this study. The essay also establishes a Hindi inspiration for Azad’s Arabic poem Mir‘āt al-Jamāl (The Mirror of Beauty, 1773). By probing the intertextualities within and beyond Azad’s corpus, this study demonstrates how Arabic literary production in Hindustan benefits from a comparative method that accounts for a multilingual milieu. It thus considers the contributions of precolonial Hindi and Persian literatures to a reading of Arabic in Hindustan.