The Ghazal Eros - by Shad Naved (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book argues that there is one element - the expression of masculine passion for a masculine object - that has shaped the ghazal historically and across languages.

Book Synopsis

The Ghazal Eros studies the movement of language and society in the old ghazal, i.e. the poetry of eros in Urdu, Persian and Arabic. It revisits scenes from the millennium-long literary history of the ghazal as an expression of masculine passion (ishq) for the masculine beloved which the author calls 'lyric queerness'. The neglect of this movement of lyric queerness in not only mainstream cultural history but also LGBTQ history, the book argues, screens from us a lyric corpus that was historically aware, linguistically evolving and suspicious of mystical interpretation.

This corpus is represented here by the ghazal of the Indian subcontinent: its major poets from the eighteenth century, Vali, Abru, Naji, Siraj and Mir; the antecedent figures of lyric queerness, al-Hallaj and Ibn Davud from tenth-century Baghdad and Sarmad from seventeenth-century Delhi; and, finally, Altaf Husain Hali, Muhammad Husain Azad and Abul Kalam Azad, our first modern writers to recognize the true significance of the ghazal's lyric queerness.

About the Author

Shad Naved teaches literature and translation at Dr B.R. Ambedkar University, Delhi (AUD). His recent writings include articles on Georg Lukács, Pablo Neruda, and the translations of García Márquez in Indian languages. He has translated The Hindi Canon: Intellectuals, Processes, Criticism and Jashn-e Benazir: The Incomparable Festival from Hindi and Urdu, respectively.