Razak Khan: Desire, Poetry, & Subjectivity in Persianate Literary Culture of South Asia

The 59th episode of Parse is an excerpt of a lecture given by Razak Khan. Razak’s thesis revisits the question of desire and the making of poetic subjectivity in the Persianate literary archives of South Asia. It examines the nom de plume, life and poetry of Dagh Dehlvi, Munni Bai Hijab and Mir Yar Ali Khan Jan Sahib in the Persianate milieu of nineteenth-century Delhi, Rampur, Calcutta and Hyderabad. The paper attempts to read poetry as an affective archive of forbidden desires and emotions. Following Lacanian psychoanalytical approach, Khan proposes reading the desire for the “Other” in poetry to rethink our conventional understanding of gender, sexuality, and subjectivity. 
Dr. Razak Khan is a Research Fellow in the History Research Group at the University of Göttingen.  His book, Minority Pasts: Locality, Emotions and Belonging in Princely Rampur was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. 
To watch the full talk, click here: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoDxAQw2Tlo&t=597s⁠