Moving Stories: The Sufi Romance Across Language, Space & Form

This talk presents episodes in the history of the Sufi romance (‘ishqiya masnavi), a genre that circulated across South Asia in the fifteenth to twentieth centuries. 

Featuring tragically-separated lovers who embark on adventures and surmount supernatural obstacles on a quest to find each other, the tales are allegories for the Sufi quest for God. With reference to stories told and retold in Persian, Dakhni, and Urdu from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, I examine multilingual manuscripts, workshop illustrations, early print books, and accounts of gatherings to uncover the social spaces in which these tales were told. I argue that genre should be understood materially, through the physical form of the texts and the ways in which people interacted with them in gatherings. These aspects, in conversation with the discursive content of the texts, cued audiences to respond to the Sufi allegory that underpinned the works.

While stories moved between different languages through translations, and across space through the physical form of the book and the institution of the gathering, these were also “moving stories” in the transitive sense, with the capacity to move their reader-listener-viewers emotionally. When the books ceased circulating in assemblies and became objects of individual study in libraries and schools, readers lost the affective relationships that had animated the texts.

Speaker

Hallie Nell Swanson completed her PhD in Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is lecturer in humanities at NYU London.

Image credit: Philadelphia Museum of Art