City of Lyrics: Ordinary Poets and Islamicate Popular Culture in Early Modern Delhi

Nathan L. M. Tabor is an associate professor in the Department of History at Western Michigan University. 

City of Lyrics: Ordinary Poets and Islamicate Popular Culture in Early Modern Delhi chronicles the origins of a global poetry phenomenon. For centuries, Urdu-speaking poets and their audiences have gathered for mushāʿirahs, literary competitions for spoken-word verse.

Today the mushāʿirah is a global phenomenon, as audiences in the millions convene in person and online for hours of poetic performance. Tracing these modern gatherings back to their origins, Nathan Tabor introduces readers to the popular emergence of the mushāʿirah in eighteenth-century Delhi.

Scores of poets composed two-line lyric poems, called ġhazals, that they muttered, sang, shouted, and spat out in contentious salon spaces across India’s largest metropolis. Delhi’s mushāʿirahs circulated lyrics, satires, and songs for both common and elite poets, who traded and assessed words as an urban commodity that defined hierarchy, taste, and notions of delight.

Co-sponsors: James Madison College, Asian Studies Center, and Muslim Studies Program.