In 1912, Yaḥyā Dawlatābādī composed two poems, the form of which diverged greatly from the canonical rules of tradition. Both poems were based on syllabic meters. Critics and historians of modern Persian literature have given these poems little consideration, and discussed them merely from the point of view of metrics. When compared to the great modernist endeavors in the poetry of the time, these pieces were judged severely, or altogether disavowed. This paper aims to show that, beyond mere metrical audacity, Yaḥyā Dawlatābādī’s syllabic poems were in fact innovative. As the article argues, they were born out of the same quest for fresh poetic forms that induced contemporaneous modernists to create new, individualized poetic patterns.

The debate over the impact of British colonialism and “colonial modernity” in India has hinged around questions of epistemic and aesthetic rupture. Whether in modern poetry, art, music, in practically every language and region intellectuals struggled with the artistic traditions they had inherited and condemned them as decadent and artificial. But this is only part of the story. If we widen the lens a little and consider print culture and orature more broadly, then vibrant regional print and performance cultures in a variety of Indian languages, and the publishing of earlier knowledge and aesthetic traditions belie the notion that English made India into a province of Europe, peripheral to London as the center of world literature. Yet nothing of this new fervor of journals, associations, literary debates, of new genres or theater and popular publishing, transpires in Anglo-Indian and English journals of the period, whose occlusion of the Indian-language stories produced ignorance, distaste, indifference—those “technologies of recognition” (Shu-Mei Shih) that produce “the West” as the agent of recognition and “the rest” as the object of recognition, in representation.