The Debate on the Indian vs. Iranian Usage of Persian and the Formation of the Canon of Persian Poetry in Eighteenth-Century India
Expanding upon her dissertation, as a Zukunftsphilologie fellow Hajnalka seeks to investigate the debates, sparked by the linguistic innovations and distinctive poetic style of Bedil, on the competence of Indian poets who were not native speakers of Persian. She aims to pursue her proposed research in two steps: after identifying, through a comparative study of poems composed in response of other poets’ poems, the features of Bedil’s linguistic and poetic usage that distinguish him from other poets of the “Indian” – or, the “fresh”– style, she will examine the polemical literature on the innovations and interventions of Indian poets in the Persian literary language. Her study will contribute to a better understanding of the process through which late seventeenth-, early eighteenth-century Indian scholars negotiated, through philological, lexicographical, and literary writings, the place of Indian authors in the literary canon of the larger Persianate world.