SPEAKER: THIBAUT D’HUBERT, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Date: Friday, October 13, 2023, 5:00pm
Location: Barker Center, Room 133 (Plimpton Room)
Abstract:
Akbar’s poet laureate, Abu al-Faiz Faizi (1547-1595), was seen by his contemporaries (and depicted himself) as a transitional figure: a sage, almost a seer conversant with pre-Islamic wisdom and sciences; the lyric voice of Akbar’s new forms of religiosity that brought together ancient Iranian and Indian forms of worship with Islamic cosmology and its theological discourse on light; one of the fulcra articulating the styles of the Ancients, and the poetic ambitions of the Moderns; and, finally, the seal of a certain canon of Indo-Persian poetry. His proximity with the emperor and the tandem he constituted with his brother Abu al-Fazl made him an object of special attention, then and now. After discussing some of the recent engagements with his multifaceted oeuvre, I will turn to some salient aspects of his poetry, and more specifically the poetics of his ghazals. I will closely read a selection of verses and a few complete poems that illustrate the wide range of styles that earned him the reputation of a poet that bridged the past and present of Persian poetry in Hindustan. I will pay special attention to his poetics of fire, and how, while being immediately relevant in the context of his time, it resonates with the works of ancient poets, Khaqani Shirwani (1117-1199?) in particular.
About the Speaker
Thibaut d’Hubert is Associate Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His research interests include Indic and Perso-Arabic poetics, Middle Bengali philology, scribal practices, traditional South Asian hermeneutics, literary multilingualism, and the history of translation. He is the author of the monograph In the Shade of the Golden Palace: Ālāol and Middle Bengali Poetics in Arakan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018) and another one titled Meaningful Rituals: Persian, Arabic and Bengali in the Nūrnāma Tradition of Eastern Bengal (Delhi: Primus Books, 2022). He was convenor, with Alexandre Papas (CNRS/CETOBAC, Paris), of a multidisciplinary project on the reception of the works of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (1414-1492), the outcome of which was published in a volume titled Jāmī in Regional Contexts: The Reception of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī’s Works in the Islamicate World, C. 9th/15th-14th/20th (Leiden: Brill, 2019). Dr. d’Hubert’s current projects include the first critical edition of Ālāol’s epic romance Saẏphulmuluk Badiujjāmāl, an annotated translation of Persian ghazals by Akbar’s poet laureate Faiżī (1547-1595), a new edition and translation of sung poems by the celebrated Brajabuli poet from Bengal, Govindadās (late 16th-early 17th AD), and a monograph on the poetics of vernacular courtly and devotional lyrics in eastern South Asia between the fourteenth and the nineteenth century.
Sponsors:
The Mahindra Humanities Center &
the Aga Khan Fund for Iranian Studies
https://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/persian-and-persianate-studies