Lyric Lifeforms

Abstract

This article works toward a theory of lyric in the literary corpus of Mīrājī (1912–1949), an Urdu poet, translator, and critic. The article argues that the lyric is an especially salient place to evaluate the phenomenality of such a relationship between self and world, and it is borne through a particular relationship to temporality. It draws this claim from three sources across Mīrājī’s literary corpus: his essay titled “About my Poems” (“Apnī Naẓmon Ke Bāre Men”); his literary critical essay on Sanskrit philosophers of aesthetics titled “Theories on Rasa” (“Ras Ke Naz̤ariye”); and the poem “The Caves of Ajanta (Ajanta ke Ghār).” The article develops a theory of “lyric lifeforms” to encapsulate two features of lyric: 1) how reading and writing lyric can be an experiential and experimental method to (trans)form oneself by redirecting attention and building habits and new appetites of perceiving, specifically through the recognition of shifts in different experiential contexts (such as the sense of return to an ordinary realm after deep absorption in a literary work); and 2) how making oneself requires making a world. Along the way, the article argues that Mīrājī’s approach to lyric becomes legible through his engagement with Hindu and Buddhist cosmological concepts.