Worlds of Advice

Abstract

Abstract This article situates the nineteenth-century Urdu writer Nazir Ahmad’s Chand Pand as a piece of advice literature on an Arabic-Persian continuum, and equally a text of its time and place. Linguistic features of its discourse show that, as a self-conscious performance of the possibilities of Urdu, it imparts culturally resonant ways of inhabiting a multifarious world, and inscribes an expansive and inclusive view of culture. In particular, the narrative organization of the focal section “A Brief Account of the World” is strongly evocative of a conceptual organization of the world by concentric circles that is comparable to the view of human sociality invoked by the tenth-eleventh century Persian ethicist Miskawayh and illuminates the location of Nazir Ahmad’s text in the continuum of ethics (akhlaq) literature. At the same time, beside these signs of literary cosmopolitanism, I argue that Nazir Ahmad’s account of the world stakes a claim for the irreducible particularity of places and their associated textures of life, and offers a view of the world that supports “place-based thinking or imagination” (Dirlik) as opposed to the potentially obfuscating abstraction of globalized “space.”