Rumination on Chronopoetics and the Political Subject: Miraji Reads Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Lyric

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Geeta Patel

Abstract

Using the poet Miraji’s short exegesis of the Faiz’s poem IntebÄh (warning or alarm), popularly known by its opening word , bol (speak), this paper will parse a small entry into Faiz’s poetics.  What did this curious imbrication of modernist exegesis with political poetics allow us to see?  In this paper I suggest that Miraji’s analysis allows us to see anew the ways in which romantic realism, fleshed politics and chronopoetics come together to give us another take on Faiz’s luminous corpus.

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Author Biography

Geeta Patel, University of Virginia

Geeta Patel is an Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia. Her research has engaged with the politics, poetics, and economics of violence, loss, and transgression. Her book, from Stanford University Press, Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings:  Gender, Colonialism and Desire in Miraji’s Urdu Poetry (2002) focusing on a renegade writer, Miraji, reads gender and sexuality in twentieth century Urdu poetic movements that emerge out of the lyric of loss.  She has translated widely from  from prose and poetry composed in Sanskrit, Urdu, Hindi, Braj and Awadhi.  Patel’s most recent manuscripts on South Asia, Homeliness and its desserts :  Rethinking Ismat Chughtai and Billboard Intimacies:  Gendering the Global Nation are informed by queer/gender theory, political economy, postcolonial/diaspora/subaltern historiography, and crossover questions from cyborg feminism and physics.  Her current project Insuring Selves, Assuring a Future:  The Poetics of Finance (manuscript in progress) insurance, pensions, transnational capital, rights and state formations (from 1750-2002) in South Asia, works through gender to grapple with the liaisons between capital, subjectivity and loss.