Walter Hakala to Discuss 'You Campaign in Poetry. You Govern in Prose': A Tale of Two Dictionaries
On Tuesday
February 16th Walter Hakala, Assistant Professor in the Department
of English and Asian Studies Program at the University at Buffalo, will host a
lecture titled ‘You Campaign in Poetry. You Govern in Prose’: A Tale of Two
Dictionaries. This lecture will
take place in 341 Eggers at 12:30 PM.
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.
Walter Hakala holds a
PhD in South Asian Regional Studies, with highest distinction, from the
University of Pennsylvania 2010. He has published a book titled,
“Negotiating Languages: Urdu, Hindi, and the Definition of Modern South Asia”. Walter
Hakala has also been the recipient of multiple awards and fellowships. For more
information on Walter Hakala please visit his faculty page at http://www.buffalo.edu/cas/english/faculty/faculty_directory/walter-hakala.html
For the complete line up, click here.