My dissertation investigates how a concept of passionate, mad love—‘ishq—became mainstream in precolonial South Asian popular culture through a genre of narrative poem, the ‘ishqiya masnavi (often translated as ‘romance’), written by Sufi initiates in Persian, Urdu and Punjabi. These stories depicted love as a way to access the divine by revealing the divinity inherent in creation. Lovers’ trials and tribulations—from mystical beasts to jealous relatives—were allegories of the Sufi path.
I bring a material approach to the literary analysis of these poems, to show how song, recitation and the use of illustrations served to instruct communities of reader-listener-viewers in how to use earthly love to access God. Over two centuries, the romance tradition gradually moved out of the Sufi lodge and the court into urban coteries, colonial textbooks, and eventually modern print publics—but the Sufi cosmology that underpinned these stories remained a constant.