Urdu print culture has received considerable attention in the past few decades. Works by Gail Minault, Mushirul Hasan, Ulrike Stark, Francesca Orsini, Walter Hakala, and, most recently, Megan Eaton Robb have examined the emergence, proliferation, and influence of Urdu print in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the lenses of, among other things, women's magazines, satirical cartoons, publishers, songbooks and popular stories, dictionaries, and newspapers.1 In Cosmopolitan Dreams, Jennifer Dubrow turns to newspapers and literary magazines to examine Urdu print culture in the 1870s and 1880s. The book is too short and leaves one asking for more detail, but it gives us some fascinating glimpses of an important moment in the history of Urdu literary culture and opens several new lines of inquiry.
Dubrow begins with a theoretical and comparative discussion of literary modernity. Describing what she calls the “Urdu cosmopolis,” she reminds us that Urdu in the...
