Stomping on the Resurrection Ground: Urdu poetry and Political Theology

This paper examines how a form of political theology emerges in the interplay between Urdu poetry and its critical traditions. Focusing on a close reading of a nineteenth-century poem by Mirza Asad Allāh Khān Ghalib, composed shortly after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the study explores the poem’s image of Judgement Day as a mahshar-e khayāl, or “a resurrection ground of thought.” The poem moves between solitude and collective assembly to advance two theological insights: that the individual contains internal multitudes of thought (even if inaccessible), and that resurrection transforms forgetfulness into awareness. Reading the poem alongside later commentary, the paper argues that the nineteenth-century Urdu literary culture articulates political theology beyond reformist prose, complicating assumptions about the secular character of Urdu literary criticism.