Surveilling the Poetic Body: Organic Unity, Ballad Meter, and Colonial Control of the Ghazal Form

By returning to key moments in lyric’s development, including the work of William Jones, John Stuart Mill, and the New Critics, this essay argues for the centrality of the contexts of British colonialism in India for the development of the lyric genre through translations and interpretations of the ghazal form. Tracing the scholarly genealogy of the abstraction of poetry into an “organic unity” that relies on a bifurcation of the poem into form (body) and content (soul), the essay reveals that this divide relies on racializing, carceral, and surveillant logics in John Stuart Mill’s influential definition of poetry. The essay then traces these logics through scholarly responses to the ghazal form—which famously resists organicism in favor of semantically independent two-line verses—to demonstrate that both lyric reading and metrical translation functioned as means of surveilling and disciplining the “fragmentary” poetic form of the ghazal in the wake of the 1857 Rebellion.