Translating Gender

Abstract

This paper examines the figure of Āzād Bilgrāmī (d. 1785), who was the first Persian author to synthesize Persian, Arabic and Indian poetics, combining the purely theoretical interest of a scholar with a practising poet’s insight into local traditions. In his Arabic work, Subhat al-marjān fi āthār Hindūstān (Coral Rosary of Indian Antiquities, 1763–64) Āzād Bilgrāmī compared the rhetorics of Arabic and Sanskrit love poetry in order to effect a form of cultural accommodation that would not be devoid of aesthetic pleasure. A year later he Persianized the first two sections of his Arabic work. Ghizlān-i Hind (Female Beloveds of India) challenges the scholarly view of a monolithic Islamic poetics by treating Arabic and Persian as independent literary cultures, albeit from an eighteenth-century Indo-Muslim point of view. Interestingly, Āzād Bilgrāmī’s work is located in between two major empires – Mughal and British colonial – both of which valued translation as an indispensable political tool. Is such a work then merely a literary aberration or does it point to a nascent national consciousness that is multicultural and multilingual? The paper explores these questions and suggests that the theoretical and creative aspects of Bilgrami’s project offer non-hierarchical traces of literary interface and knowledge exchange between cultures.