Urdu’s six-century prose delay shows literary form follows material social conditions

Evidence

I want to offer some comments on the history of Urdu literaturenot in the form of a cogent narrative, less still to formulate a short course in that history, but simply to illustrate the kind of impoverishment that is involved in the a priori declaration that ‘All third-world texts are necessarily to be read as national allegories’ It is, for example, a matter of some considerable curiosity to me that the Urdu language, although one of the youngest linguistic formations in India, had nevertheless produced its first great poet, Khusrow (1253-1325), in the thirteenth century, so that a great tradition of poetry got going; but then it waited for roughly six centuries before beginning to assemble the first sizeable body of prose narratives. … What inhibited that development for so long, and why did it happen precisely at that time? Much of that has to do with complex social developments that had gradually led to the displacement of Farsi by Urdu, as the language of educated, urban speech and of prose writing in certain regions and groupings of Northern India. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 448

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to reader’s research: Ahmad uses Urdu prose history to rebut Fredric Jameson’s ‘national allegories’ doctrine — a discourse-first reading that obscures material conditions, paralleling his critique of strategic essentialism as materially evasive. — connects to: Urdu produced great poetry for six centuries before its prose fiction emerged — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 191; Literary periodization must rest on culture-wide material shifts, not chronology — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 487
• DEFINE: Establishes the Jameson citation Ahmad opposes (all third-world texts as national allegories), the target that frames his materialist counter-argument.

Broader Connections

• Urdu produced great poetry for six centuries before its prose fiction emerged #exemplifies (0.95) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 191
• Literary periodization must rest on culture-wide material shifts, not chronology #expands (0.80) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 487