SAC presents: Walter Hakala

Walter Hakala on 'You Campaign in Poetry. You Govern in Prose': A Tale of Two Dictionaries

Walter Hakala, Assistant Professor, Department of English, University at Buffalo

Chiranji Lal, the author of an important 19th-century Urdu dictionary, possessed impeccable credentials: he was from Delhi, had apprenticed with British scholars, and had identified a large readership eager to use dictionaries to learn this language of government. Today, however, Chiranji’s useful dictionary has been all but forgotten while the contemporaneous Farhang-i Asafiyah of Sayyid Ahmad Dihlavi is celebrated. In the midst of the increasingly communalized linguistic environment of late-nineteenth-century northern India, Hindu lexicographers like Chiranji could no longer fit neatly into the emerging Urdu literary culture. 

Open to the Public

Sponsored by the South Asia Center at the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs