This talk was given by Professor Jennifer Dubrow (University of Washington) for the Magazine and World Literature Webinar series.

“The major Urdu literary journal Saqi (“Cupbearer”) published a 240-paged special issue on Japan, titled the Japan number, in January 1936. In this presentation, I examine the role played by Japan in the formation of a modernist literary worldview in 1930s South Asia. The 1930s saw a flourishing of Urdu journals, as well as special issues devoted to world literatures. Based on a network of Urdu professors and students in Tokyo, the Japan number of Saqi was particularly notable for its focus on looking eastward. Japan appears in this issue as a model of alternative modernity— one that was modern, not Western. This formation was part of a broader pan-Asianism, yet also different from the fashion for Japanese objects and artforms known as japonisme in late-19th-century Europe, as well as the search for a “national” art, influenced by Japanese painting, that occupied Abindranath Tagore and the Bengal School of art. In the pages of Saqi, readers were introduced to Japanese art forms such as Noh and haiku, but also to politics, daily life, and culture. Periodicals could bring world literary cultures into closer contact, allowing Saqi readers to cultivate a cosmopolitan worldview. This presentation also points to the East-East exchange enabled by the interchange of students, professors, poets, artists, and revolutionaries between India and Japan. As the shift from modernism to global modernism has necessitated rethinking conceptualizations of the globe, Japan emerges as an important interlocutor for the emerging world of Urdu modernism.”