A literature of the sublime in late colonial India: Romanticism and the epic form in modern Hindi and Urdu

Challenging the conventional approaches to modernity, this work argues that sublimity, rather than diminishing, became a persistent feature of modern life. This work engages with the sublime by investigating late colonial Hindi and Urdu reinventions of the classical epic form. Emerging under the auspices of a newly wrought romantic sensibility, epically stylized works became vehicles of sublime visions. I argue that the sublime became the primary aesthetical and ideological means for giving expression to and providing resolutions for wide-ranging conflicts and contradictions of late modern society. Most crucial among these was squaring existing tradition with the norms of modernity. To this end, constructing a conduit through which traditional Hindu and Islamic inheritances---especially religious categories, metaphysics and rituals---could overcome the demands of modernity was crucial for late colonial romantics. In providing what seemed like a framework for making this possible, the sublime ultimately, I argue, gave expression to critical dissatisfactions with modernity and worked to undo its normative ideological and political tendencies.; After demarcating the theoretical categories (especially those concerning the "epic" and "Romanticism") and delimiting the relevant historical period (that of "the late colonial"), I interpret a variety of intellectual currents, literary movements and neo-epic works in Hindi and Urdu contexts. My readings of figures such as Altaf Husain 'Hali', Michael Madhusudan Datta, Mahavir Prasad Dvivedi, Jayashankar Prasad, Suryakant Tripathi 'Nirala' and Muhammad Iqbal seek to establish how a counter-normative logic of modernity emerges within their works and the milieu of late colonial Romanticism in general. Ultimately, I suggest, India appears less to have produced an exception to (or a qualified version of) the dominant tendencies of modernity than to have manifested its most persistent aspects: dissatisfaction with liberal subjectivity, secularity, scientism and instrumental reason in general and the promulgation of a new religiosity and the turn to (neo-) traditional structures of social and political existence. To grasp that this was the case means to overcome the hierarchical codes of modernity---especially the inheritance of imperial geography for theorization---and to see modernity as the mediation of the unresolved contradictions and divides of a singular system.