Cycle de conférences

 

Sharḥ: Two Kinds of Sociality and Two Ways of Reading in Three Mughal Commentaries on Sa‘dī’s Gulistān

Vendredi 11 mai 2018, de 11h à 13h en salle A651, 54 boulevard Raspail 75006 Paris

Sa‘dī’s prosimetrum, The Rose Garden, completed in 1258 in Shiraz, was the paradigmatic formulation in Persianate societies from the Balkans to Bengal of a worldly ethics of cautious moderation in all dealings and the virtuous circulation of words, gifts and deeds. Central to character formation, The Rose Garden acquired numerous commentaries over the centuries. This talk will focus on three such commentaries from Mughal North India of the 18^th-19^th centuries. Through close readings of representative passages it will distinguish between two ways of reading Sa‘dī’s text that corresponded to two kinds of sociality respectively: a philological method that corresponded to a secular and egalitarian model of friendship; and an allegorical method that authorised itself by the Sufi hierarchical model of saintly friendship with God or wilāya.

Dans le cadre de l'atelier thématique du CEIAS « Histoires de soi, histoires des autres : questions de traduction et d’historiographie »

 

Translating Rāma as a Proto-Muhammadan Prophet: Masīh’s Masnavī-yi Rām va Sitā

Mardi 15 mai 2018, de 13h30 à 16h30 en salle A737, 54 boulevard Raspail 75006 Paris

This lecture aims to finesse understanding of precolonial Persian literary translations of Indic language texts by considering Masīh’s early seventeenth century Masnavi-yi Rām va Sitā, a Persian translation of Vālmiki’s Sanskrit epic Rāmāyana. It opens by remarking on a shift in the study of the relations between poetics and politics of Persian translations of Indic texts. Then, purporting to finesse understanding of this relation, it takes issue with prior studies of this poem before answering the following questions these studies fail to pose: how does the prophetological metaphysics of the prefatory chapters relate to the poetics of emotion in the main body of his tale? And: what does this relation let us infer of Masīh’s theological conception of translation?

Dans le cadre des séminaire EHESS "Actualité de la recherche sur l'Asie du Sud" et "Asie du Sud et culture persane (XVIe - XXe siècles). Productions savantes, traductions, interactions" 

 

A Hindu Allegory of the Islamic Philosopher-King: the Tale of Madan and Kāmdi in Bedil’s Masnavi-yi ‘Irfān

Mardi 22 mai 2018, de 15 à 17h en salle A737, 54 boulevard Raspail 75006 Paris

In 1712 in Delhi the prolific Sufi poet ‘Abdul Qadir Khan “Bedil” completed his narrative poem or masnavī entitled ‘Irfān, roughly translatable as Gnosis. This poem comprising 11,000 couplets is the longest of his masnavīs and his most extended interpretation of the theistic monism of the Sufi Ibn al-‘Arabī (d.1240) whose thought pervaded the early modern Islamic world. At a certain point in Bedil’s cosmogony the first human Adam turns to the sun to ask where he came from. The sun directs him to look within himself, telling him ten stories to aid such introspection. The longest of the sun’s tales comprises an adaptation of a tale widely diffused in Hindavi of utopian Hindu kingship. This lecture presents an interpretation of how and why Bedil adapted this tale into a parable of the Greco-Islamic philosopher-king.

Dans le cadre du séminaire EHESS "Asie du Sud et culture persane (XVIe - XXe siècles). Productions savantes, traductions, interactions" 

 

Khushgū’s Dream of Ḥāfiż: Building an Ark with Ārzū and Bedil

Mardi 29 mai 2018, de 15 à 17h en salle A737, 54 boulevard Raspail 75006 Paris

When, sometime between 1724 and 1735 in Delhi, the Hindu Persian-language litterateur Bindrāban Dās “Khushgū” composed his tazkirah or biographical anthology of Persian-language poets, Safīna-yi Khushgū (‘Khushgū’s Ark’ or, punning on his own pen-name, ‘The Well-Spoken Notebook of Poems’), he decided to assign three separate volumes respectively to the old, intermediate-and-recent and contemporary poets and further sub-divided each volume into the old, intermediate and recent. This was a tripartite chronological schema that was conventional in Persian literary history and that he therefore inherited from certain earlier biographical anthologies. Into the first volume devoted to the old masters he inserted, unsurprisingly, a notice on Ḥāfiż (d. c. 1390), canonized in Khushgū’s time as in ours as the greatest master of the classical ghazal. However, in a digression characteristic of 17^th-18^th century tazkirahs he gave a part of this notice to reflections apparently only tangential to a biography of Ḥāfiż but bespeaking his own investment in the questions they were responding to. At the center of these digressive reflections was his childhood dream-vision of Ḥāfiż. This lecture reads Khushgū’s dream of Ḥāfiż as a manifold response to three analytically distinct needs that may be grasped by trying to answer the following questions: what were the functions in the Safīna of Khushgū’s memory of his vision of the poet when he was twelve years old? What relations did this dream-vision bear to his multiply periodized temporality of Persian literary history? And how were both these questions co-implicated in the question of his relations with Ārzū (d. 1756) and Bedil (d. 1720-21), his two most revered teachers and among the greatest Persian litterateurs of the age?

Dans le cadre du séminaire EHESS "Asie du Sud et culture persane (XVIe - XXe siècles). Productions savantes, traductions, interactions" 

 

 

https://www.mcgill.ca/islamicstudies/people-0/faculty-members/prashant-keshavmurthy