Urdu, Persian, and (Even) English: Triangulating Postcolonial Literary History with <i>The Making of Persianate Modernity</i>

ABSTRACT This article highlights the advantages of taking a triangulated approach to colonial and postcolonial literary history as modeled by Alexander Jabbari’s The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India. Jabbari’s reconsideration of literary modernity through the synchronous and multilingual exchange between Persian, Urdu, and English letters softens some of the assumed hierarchies that dominate Persianate and Anglophone studies, particularly. It furthermore underscores the unique perspective that Urdu writing on literary modernity offers scholars of world literature in light of the former’s associations with Persian in an intellectual climate that chiefly valued indigenized historiographies of linguistic origin.