Future’s Moving Terrains

Abstract This essay shows how the Islamic Persianate poetic tradition is a critical conceptual resource for imagining futures in which poetry is a technology of congregation through which futures are postulated, negotiated, and lived. The essay engages the multilingual poetic milieu of Kashmir (Urdu, Persian, and Kashmiri) in the first half of the twentieth century, offering an inaugural analysis of the itinerant nature of Persian, Urdu, and Kashmiri poetry in relation to the form of ghazal and its consequences for future making. Kashmiri poets and critics, in poetry as well as prose, made prominent contributions to the literary and political debates about the purposes and potentialities of poetry as a socially aware public form in an anti-imperial context, a theme that animated multiple Urdu and Persian literary circles from the 1930s.