Abstract

The Persianate genre of the tazkira, or biographical compendium, typically concerns poets and Sufi saints, but a different approach is taken in Yadgar-e Rozgar, published in 1931 by Sayyid Badr al-Hasan, an aristocrat and honorary magistrate from Patna. Hasan focuses on the ordinary people—landlords and courtesans, doctors and bakers, lawyers and counterfeiters—who made up Patna’s social world as the city transformed from a provincial town into the capital of a new province. While many Patnaites celebrated these changes, Hasan was deeply ambivalent about the dilemmas of colonial modernity. He struggled to reconcile modernist ideals with his sense that older ways were essential to Patna’s cohesion and distinctiveness. As he worriedly put it, ‘Asian breeding’ had been replaced by a fickle disregard for social norms, as ‘nationality’ increasingly gave way to ‘fashionality’.

摘要

塔兹基拉人的波斯人流派，或传记传记，通常涉及诗人和苏菲圣人，但Yadgar-e Rozgar采用了不同的方法，由Patna的贵族和名誉裁判官Sayyid Badr al-Hasan于1931年出版。哈桑着眼于普通人-房东和妓女，医生和面包师，律师和造假者-随着城市从省镇变成新省会，他们组成了帕特纳的社会世界。当许多帕特纳人庆祝这些变化时，哈桑对殖民地现代性的困境深有矛盾。他艰难地调和了现代主义的理想，他认为旧的方式对于Patna的凝聚力和独特性至关重要。正如他担心的那样，随着“国籍”逐渐被“时尚性”所取代，“亚洲繁殖”已被无视社会规范的善变者所取代。