Abstract
In this article, the author has discussed how Altaf Hussain
Hali, the first critic writing in Urdu language, can be located in
the western tradition of literary criticism? And how his
contribution becomes significant in imagining and circulating the
configurations of Muslim identity in the colonized culture of the
subcontinent? The author has drawn upon Said’s idea of colonial
othering in Culture and Imperialism to show that Hali, as the
colonized subject, “the civilizational other” in British
colonialism is faced with the arduous task of defining the
parameters of his cultural identity. Said argues that the west
considers the colonized subject as “other” and inherently inferior
to imperial culture. Furthermore, the west also imagines its
history as linear without internal contradictions and fissures.
This monolithic view of historical tradition is to be resisted by
the native intellectual. And Hali does it by searching the roots of
Urdu poetry in Arabian and Persian cultures. Hence he comes up
with a counter narrative of identity which can be an antidote to
colonially instilled cultural inferiority.
Khurshid Alam. (2016) Plato’s Ontology and Hali’s Teleology: The Construction of the Muslim identity in Muqaddama-e-Sher-o-Shairi, Bazyaft, Vol 28-29, Issue 1.
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