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.Footnote 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 nineteenth century was a multicommunal and multiregional South Asian language, a means of cosmopolitan thought, and a vehicle for critical and resistive engagement with colonial ideas. The community of Urdu readers and writers stretched across British India and “eschewed identities of religion, caste, and class” (p. 2).

In chapter 1, Dubrow outlines the emergence of a new class of professional Hindi-Urdu authors in the late nineteenth century who used the new technology of serial publication to establish themselves as literary authorities and as sources of income. She then turns to offer interesting descriptions of Hindu and Muslim cultural festivals, which she names “festival vignettes.” The discussion of vignettes supports her argument about the multicommunalism and cosmopolitanism of Urdu literary magazines.

However, Dubrow's argument that literary magazines replaced traditional systems of courtly patronage and “took over the role formerly held by ustads” (p. 27) is underdeveloped. As Dubrow notes, the two Urdu publishers mentioned, Sharar and Sarshar, both sought courtly patronage at Hyderabad. Comparison with the careers of other author-publishers (for example, Mumtaz ‘Ali, Amir Minai) suggests that literary magazines were less than lucrative. Mumtaz ‘Ali famously had to sell Qur'ans to make ends meet, and Amir Minai cut short his brief career as the publisher of a literary magazine in the mid-1880s when his relationship with the court of Rampur was restored, suggesting a preference for patronage. Likewise, although Dubrow shows us that the editors of literary magazines published opinions on literature and that the reading public discussed poetry in print, the claim that this public sphere replaced the role of the ustad would require a broader study surveying letters, collections of corrections to poetry, and biographies and autobiographies of poets along a more extended timeline. On the surface, the claim seems exaggerated, since so many poets of Sarshar's generation and subsequent generations positioned themselves as disciples of an ustad to establish their own authority, even when doing so was not necessary. One thinks of Hasrat Mohani's discipleship to Amirullah Taslim, Bekhud and Iqbal's to Dagh, Saqib's to Amir Minai, and so on.

A chapter follows on one of Urdu's first novels, Fasana-e Azad, and its author, Ratan Nath Sarshar. Dubrow shows us how the novel, published serially between 1878 and 1883 in the daily Avadh Akhbar and later revised, edited, and published in several volumes, emerged from the intersection of humorous vignettes and news reports in Urdu periodicals. She then looks at Urdu satires of colonialism and contemporary life published in Avadh Punch (the rival of Avadh Akhbar). The centerpiece of the chapter is a poem about merchants and famine whose structure Dubrow reproduces in rhyming English (pp. 78–79). The chapter on Fasana-e Azad is an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship that finds non-European influences on modern Urdu literature. One wishes that Dubrow had gone into more detail about Azad's influences and the historical context of the novel. She tells us that the main character travels to fight in the Russo-Turkish War. In the introduction, Dubrow tells us that Urdu writers looked beyond colonial India for sources of inspiration in their works. This, it seems, would have been a good opportunity to examine in detail how world news and historical events outside British India influenced Urdu imaginative literature.

In chapter 4, Dubrow shows how readers’ letters to Sarshar, which he appended to installments of Fasana-e Azad, led him to transform the novel from a social satire that also afforded greater agency and independence to its female characters than was typical of contemporary Urdu novels to one more didactic in tone and more in line with contemporary social-reformist fiction, such as the books of Nazir Ahmad. The chapter concludes with a brief examination of communalist attacks against Sarshar and Fasana-e Azad published by the Avadh Punch. Criticizing the language of the novel, the attackers deny Sarshar, a Kashmiri Pandit, the status of ahl-e zaban (people of the language; pp. 104, 106), excluding him from the Urdu community. They also imply that Sarshar, as a Hindu, is insufficiently familiar with Muslim culture to write about Muslims (p. 105). Dubrow argues that in doing so, Avadh Punch contributed to the realigning of Urdu with Muslims and that it threatened “to rupture the very Urdu cosmopolis that it had helped to create” (p. 85).

Although Dubrow shows convincingly that the language of the attacks drew on the Hindi-Urdu controversy and communalism, one does wish that she had contextualized her analysis of the debates in a longer history of the magazine. Twenty years later, in 1905, Avadh Punch famously came to the defense of Daya Shankar Nasim (d. ca. 1845) and, by implication, to that of literary critic Brij Narayan Chakbast—both Kashmiri Pandits from Lucknow—against similar communalist attacks by Abdul Halim Sharar. One of the defenders, the celebrated masnavi poet Ahmad Ali Shauq, argued that Nasim, being from Lucknow, was an authority and ahl-e zaban (the same category used to exclude Sarshar from the Urdu community). The Hindi-Urdu controversy had only grown in the preceding decades, which suggests that the debates around language and community in the magazine were more diverse than Dubrow's chapter suggests. If Avadh Punch threatened to rupture the Urdu cosmopolis in its criticisms of Sarshar, it appears to have sustained the cosmopolis in its defenses of Nasim.

The book concludes with brief discussions of the Urdu Progressive Writers’ Movement of the mid-twentieth century and twenty-first century Pakistani television serials, both of which, Dubrow writes, exemplify the resurgence of the Urdu cosmopolis despite the persistent legacy of communal fracture that began in the colonial period (p. 118). Dubrow's conclusion indicates new directions in the study of cosmopolitanism and global imaginaries in Urdu. However, it also feels like an afterthought, and could have been more successfully integrated into the overall argument of the book by greater development and by drawing historical connections between the progressives, serials, and the earlier traditions discussed in the book.

The multifaceted quality of Dubrow's study is appropriate to the subject matter, but the book is too short. Many of the topics in the text are outlined only briefly and require further development. Among the most engaging sections of the book are those in which Dubrow closely analyzes Sarshar's work. It is disappointing, therefore, that these analyses are so brief. Likewise, Dubrow's claim in the introduction that Urdu writers looked beyond India to create a “global imaginative space” (p. 8) could have been developed further. Most of the examples in the book specifically concern contemporary culture, life, literature, and politics in colonial India. The cover of Cosmopolitan Dreams shows a battle scene in the Russo-Turkish War. An officer wearing a red Turkish fez with a star and crescent looks toward a figure dressed in red. All this takes place on top of a separate image showing a group of men seated chewing paan and smoking hookah, presumably imagining events in Turkey from their salon in India. Fuller development of Sarshar's engagement with the Russo-Turkish War, with the global news published alongside Fasana-e Azad, would have shown how this global imaginative space was formed in the context of serialized novels. Nevertheless, Dubrow's fascinating study of the interactions among Sarshar, the Avadh Punch circle, and the Urdu reading public is a welcome addition to the literature on Urdu print culture.