Nathan Tabor’s City of Lyrics is far more than a modern tazkira or biographical compendium detailing the lives of poets in eighteenth-century Delhi. It is also an ethnographic atlas of the city of Delhi, mapping its literary, economic, and political life across its myriad urban locales. One may even read it against the broader tabaqat tradition of biographical literature which organizes individuals by generational or social grouping, insofar as it reconstructs the multiple milieus that shaped Delhi through the interconnected lives of poets, Sufis, conquerors, nobility, and nonelite urban citizens across several generations. City of Lyrics therefore centers the mushaira, or ghazal recital, to demonstrate that it was a space where poets from across the social spectrum could negotiate the trappings of power and class. The mushaira is also revealed as a site of social superposition, where the political, spiritual, and economic dimensions of darbar (court), mazar (shrine), and bazar (market) occupied the same space simultaneously. Charting the history of mushaira across three decades, the book thus uses the poetic gathering as a touchstone for the changing lives of Delhi’s elite and nonelite denizens.

City of Lyrics focuses on the mushaira held at the grave of Delhi’s eminent poet Abd ul-Qadir Bedil, framing its analysis between 1720 and 1750: the year of Bedil’s death and the point at which textual sources cease to record the graveside mushaira, apparently owing to waning interest in the practice. Although the monograph is fundamentally a study of the ghazal, it draws on close readings of diwans (anthologies), diaries, tazkiras, and miscellaneous works. It thus situates the ghazals recited at Bedil’s urs, or death-anniversary gathering, within the poets’ larger oeuvres, the contexts of their composition, and their lingering yet fluid literary memory. The book effectively posits that the meaning of ghazals is inseparable from the performances and circumstances of their recitation, which can only be recovered by reading the poems through the complex constellations of spaces and individuals with which they were entangled. Its methodology might therefore be described as a study of mushaira networks combined with a “thick” reading of the mushaira as a stage on which poetic, social, and political relationships were performed and negotiated.

City of Lyrics’s major intervention is methodological. It shifts the analytical lens from individual poets and texts toward the reconstruction of the social and spatial world of eighteenth-century Delhi. Its method links the mushaira to other public arenas in the city, where various actors employed artful uses of Persian and Hindustani registers to carve out spaces for themselves: hawkers in markets, braggarts in coffeehouses, and devotional singers in shrines. So too do the poets of City of Lyrics transform the ghazal from a constricted poetic form into a flexible vehicle not only for literary and aesthetic expression but also for political and social ambitions. The book highlights the role of Rekhta, or, in modern terminology, Urdu, as a language that enabled such experimentation within the otherwise rigid formal constraints of the ghazal. Rekhta allowed the introduction of common idiom into the cultivated ghazal. Most importantly, it permitted iham, or poetic misdirection, creating new possibilities for skilled poets from diverse backgrounds to acquire both renown and economic patronage. The book’s second major intervention is thematic: through this methodological framework, it demonstrates that the mushaira did not simply trickle down from the elite literary environments of the Mughal court but gained its cultural currency by surviving and flourishing within the public sphere.

The thirty-year story of the graveside mushaira is thus narrated across four chapters. Each chapter uses the mushaira as a touchstone to chart the changing social, economic, and political conditions of Delhi and, more broadly, Hindustan. Chapter 1 charts Bedil’s rise from humble origins to poetic renown through the accounts of his students and disciples. Chapter 2 turns to the decade following Bedil’s death, when poets increasingly turned toward the new poetic language of Rekhta. Chapter 3 explores the patronage afforded to poets by Delhi’s Mughal elite during the 1730s, a decade culminating in Nader Shah’s invasion and considerable bloodshed. Chapter 4 examines the impromptu literary duels between Ataullah Nudrat and Muhammad Rafi Sauda that took place at Bedil’s grave, revealing the flexibility with which poets could deploy high literary idioms for immediate poetic jibes. Each chapter brings the quoted verse to life through vivid translations and by tracing the dynamic connections among its sizable cast of characters.

City of Lyrics’s accessible language and engaging narrative, without any compromise in conceptual complexity, make it an enjoyable read even for nonspecialist audiences. The monograph enters into productive conversation with the work of Abhishek Kaicker and Farhat Hasan and would be particularly valuable when read alongside Kaicker’s The King and the People and Hasan’s Paper, Performance, and the State. Together, these works could illuminate the concurrent emergence of middle-class public spaces across literary, legal, and economic spheres in early modern South Asia especially, in eighteenth-century Delhi. Although it does not directly engage with scholarship from Pakistan Studies, the book offers an important prehistory of the Urdu literary culture that would later become central to Pakistani cultural identity. City of Lyrics therefore deserves a wide readership among scholars and students of early modern South Asia, nonspecialist readers, and, above all, lovers of poetry.