Christopher Lee, "Globalization Moves the Mushaira "

One of the regular highlights of several years of fieldwork among Muslim poets of Urdu in Varanasi, India in the late 1990s was attending and occasionally performing at poetry gatherings called mushairas. The mushaira, carried to South Asia from the Middle East along with Perso-Arabic poetics, originally referred to a small gathering of a few poets and wealthy patrons. The Urdu mushairas of my 1990s fieldwork were radically different: they were large–scale events where an audience – sometimes numbering in the tens of thousands – assembled to watch a dozen or more poets sing, chant or otherwise perform their poetry late into the night. More recent observations, however, suggest that the mushaira, as well as its social, cultural and religious milieu, continues to travel and transform. One important catalyst of these changes is globalization. In this paper, after a brief discussion of the classical and contemporary mushaira, I focus on two intersections of globalization and the Urdu mushaira, and their cultural and religious consequences: the growing popularity of the mushaira among overseas South Asians (including those living in the Middle East as well as North America and Europe), and the disastrous effects on Indian mushairas caused by the loss of cottage industry jobs due to cheap imported goods. Email: Lee4@canisius.edu
Website: http://www.canisius.edu/rst/faculty.asp