Urdu produced great poetry for six centuries before its prose fiction emerged
Evidence
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. Not that prose itself had not been there; the earliest prose texts in Urdu date back to the fifteenth century, but those were written for religious purposes and were often mere translations from Arabic or Farsi. Non-seminarian and non-theological narratives – those that had to do with the pleasures of reading and the etiquettes of civility – began appearing much, much later, in the last decade of the eighteenth century. Then, over two dozen were published during the next ten years. 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, 191
Categorization
- QUESTION: The timing puzzle — why prose fiction emerged only in the late 18th century — is flagged but deferred; worth chasing the social history that explains it.
- XREF: Parallels the broader question of why prose fiction develops late in many non-European literary traditions — connects to histories of the novel beyond Europe. — connects to: Urdu’s six-century prose delay shows literary form follows material social conditions