Sauda, Mir, and Ghalib: 'Shi'a' themes in pre-modern Urdu poetry
The works of Urdu’s three most prominent pre-modern poets – Sauda, Mir, and Ghalib – yield a number of interesting poems where sectarian themes appear to be directly evoked or addressed, either through laying out a claim for one’s own self, or by refuting the claim of another. One of the most intriguing aspects of these writings, given historical and persisting ideas of sectarian ‘tensions’ in diverse and multi-sect Muslims settings, is that the poets sometimes introduce potentially controversial sectarian references in an almost humorous, light-hearted vein. The paper attempts to analyse the social implications (if any) for the literary evocation of sectarian themes that might be considered ‘sensitive’ in many modern contexts, and whether this can tell us anything about the way in which sectarian relations played out between Sunnis and Shi‘as at particular pre-modern moments in the Hindustani, or North Indian, context.