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Prior to the nineteenth century, South Asian dictionaries, glossaries, and vocabularies reflected a hierarchical vision of nature and human society. By the turn of the twentieth century, the modern dictionary had democratized and politicized language. Compiled ;scientifically" through historical principles," the modern dictionary became a concrete symbol of a nation's arrival on the world stage. Following this phenomenon from the late seventeenth century to the present, Negotiating Languages casts lexicographers as key figures in the political realignment of South Asia under British rule and

Megan Eaton Robb, Print and the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life in Colonial India. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020, 259 pp.

AbstractThe paucity of sources documenting the role of Indians in the nineteenth-century British imperial engagement with Afghanistan has resulted in significant lacunae within later cultural artefacts documenting the period. The South Asians who formed the bulk of British expeditionary forces in the first Anglo-Afghan war (1837–1842) were, however, indispensable as cultural intermediaries, translating little-studied Afghan languages into patterns of South Asian speech that had become familiar to colonial officials through a gradual and ongoing process of exposure in India proper and, in the presence of comprador agents, beyond. For English-language authors writing in the aftermath of the traumatic retreat of the British army from Afghanistan in 1842, British India and its subject populations provided a convenient and long-established set of topoi through which to produce convincingly authentic representations of Afghanistan as an exotic and alien 'mythic space'. Following George Steiner and Richard Slotkin, this article argues that the narrative memorials to the first Anglo-Afghan War become possible only through the activation of a particular set of stable, yet portable, South Asian literary figures which stand in for Afghanistan itself.

The Ḵẖāliq Bārī is the most famous South Asian example of the niṣāb genre of multilingual versified vocabularies, comprising synonymous or near-synonymous terms and phrases drawn from Arabic, Persian and early Hindawī. Its persistent popularity in the South Asian Islamicate educational system is the result primarily of its association with the celebrated fourteenth-century Persian poet Amīr 'Ḵẖusrau' Dihlawī. This article examines the debates surrounding the authorship of this text, examining both early attributions and more recent nationalist interpretations of the work in light of internal and manuscript evidence. The chaotic structural organisation and mnemonic technologies deployed throughout the Ḵẖāliq Bārī, as well as the multilingual character of the text itself, would suggest that the effort to identify of a single author or original text is misplaced.

Abstract