Teaching Indo-Islamic poetry: Sexuality in the global classroom

• Published in: Thesis eleven Vol. 162; no. 1; pp. 46 - 61
• Main Author: Naved, Shad
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01-02-2021; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Antiquity; Case studies; Classrooms; Education policy; Eroticism; Homogeneity; Islam; Languages; Literary criticism; Literary studies; Multiculturalism & pluralism; Nationalism; Poetry; Sexuality; Teaching; Urdu language; South Asia; vernaculars; global sexuality; Hindi; literary pedagogy; Urdu
• ISSN: 0725-5136; 1461-7455
• DOI: 10.1177/0725513621990989

The article argues that a critical encounter with pre-modern literatures from the national past is long overdue under the impact of a globalized discourse of sexuality. Its effects are already felt at the level of both pedagogy and literary reading, one reconstituting the other, in the ‘global classroom’, a self-conscious pedagogical space imagined by the new educational policy to bring about a globally accredited cultural homogeneity. The case study comes from teaching erotic poetry at an Indian university, from the joint literary complex of Hindi and Urdu in South Asia, a theme uncomfortably located in national culture not just because of its sexuality but its association with non-national linguistic elements which the article terms ‘Indo-Islamic’. The overlapping of the sexual modern with the Indo-Islamic resurfaces a tension in the nationalized body of literary writing in Hindi/Urdu, the major ‘national’ languages of South Asia. This encounter of erotic poetry in old Hindi and Urdu with globalized sexuality, the article shows, offers a chance to reflect on how literary studies are being reshaped by the assumptions of a monolingual, monocultural global sexuality in our nationalist times.