Geo-locating Mir: The Parallel Universes of Mir and the story of a Forbidden Love
Mir Taqi Mir is remembered as one of the greatest poets of the Urdu language, a poet whose verses inhabit worlds of love, loss, longing and profound existential reflection. But what happens when we step away from the familiar image of Mir as a purely lyrical and abstract poet and begin to follow his words across an actual landscape?
In this session, we revisit a neglected and remarkably realistic work attributed to Mir: Tisang Nama, a travelogue describing a journey from Delhi to the village of Tisang, near Meerut. Using modern mapping technology, textual clues and on-the-ground investigation, the speaker traces Mir’s approximately 90-kilometre route, identifying geographical details and revisiting a location that remained the subject of considerable confusion among Urdu scholars and critics for decades.
But this geographical journey leads to an even more intriguing literary mystery.
By cross-referencing different texts, the investigation suggests that Mir may have deliberately divided a single journey into two parallel narratives. While one text records the physical hardships and realities of travel, another poem appears to preserve the traces of a secret and potentially dangerous love affair unfolding during that very same journey.
Was this merely coincidence or did Mir deliberately fragment his own reality, scattering clues across different texts to conceal a story that could not be openly told?
Combining Urdu literary history, textual detective work, geography, technology and a tale of forbidden love, this session invites us to look at a 250-year-old literary mystery through an entirely new lens.
About the Speaker:
Zafar Syed is a fiction writer, critic, historian, science educator, and translator who works in both English and Urdu. He is the author of ten books, including two novels, a volume of criticism, a popular science title, a research monograph, and five translations.
Beyond his books, he has published hundreds of articles in international publications on history, literature, culture, science, etc., and has lectured widely across Pakistan. His intellectual interests span evolution, free will, consciousness, artificial intelligence, history, linguistics and neurology.
Zafar is currently the Editor of Independent Urdu, the Urdu-language edition of The Independent (UK). He has previously worked with the BBC, Voice of America, and the U.S. State Department.
This session is free and open to all. Just visit the venue to attend it.
The Black Hole
Plot 5H, Street 100, G-11/3, Islamabad.
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