82 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East Vol. 39, No. 1, 2019 • DOI 10. 1215/1089201X- 7493799 • © 2019 by Duke University Press Heartless Acts Literary Competition and Multilingual Association at a Graveside Gathering in Eighteenth-Century Delhi Nathan Lee Marsh Tabor F rom 1721 to roughly 1760, Delhi’s poets convened around the grave of the writer and self-proclaimed demi- prophet ‘Abd al-Qadir Bedil (1644–1720). Bedil was a Persian-language poet of late Mughal India, composing in a modernist sle that fell out of artistic favor during a nineteenth-century return to classical aesthetics. However, this article is not about Bedil per se—nor is it about his verse. It concerns the former students of Bedil who held at the poet’s grave what Hindi and Urdu speakers today would call a mushā‘irah, or a poetry gathering, the now popular South Asian literary institution with Arabo-Persian cultural roots held among Urdu speakers the world over. Emologically, the Arabic word mushā‘irah, an associative connotation for a confrontational form of literary sociabili , means to exchange verse with a competitor. However, the poetry gathering at Bedil’s grave was quite unique in eighteenth-century Mughal India, when Persian-educated literati also favored Rekhtah, the Persianized vernacular we know today as Urdu. Poetic competitions recorded in attendees’ diaries and participants’ recitations reveal a cultural understanding of literature as it instrumentally shaped social space. This is a context in which literary production merged with the material practices of multiple classes, e.g., poets seeking a moneyed patron, pilgrims lighting candles at a shrine, or people buying goods in the bazaar. The posthumous event was among the most well documented from the precolonial period, when mushā‘irahs were assumed to be a literary social fact, thus usually recorded with few particulars. Yet, the graveside gathering marked a signifcant space. The shrine’s hosts, many of them Bedil’s former stu- dents, provided food for pilgrims and candles for supplicants seeking Bedil’s saintly intercession. Relics were sta- tioned next to the tomb, and the deceased Bedil’s relative hawked family-made medical concoctions. This was a space inhabited by not only elite literati but also commoners about whom little is known. Both groups shared a connection to this unique graveside event, producing a sociabili based on a shared conceit that Bedil was worth venerating. Afer 1760 or so, what may have been a localized cult for a literary saint came to a close. Those who hosted the graveside gatherings died during the 1750s. Instabili in Delhi brought on by occupying Maratha and Afghan armies between 1757 and 1761 was another likely contributor. The Persian literary scene, now favoring Urdu, began to shif further east, with Lucknow eclipsing Delhi. Ghulam Hamadani Mushaf (1750–1824), a famous gath- ering impresario of both Delhi and Lucknow, noted in the early 1780s that the grave had fallen to ruin. 1 In the 1820s, British hydrological projects caused Delhi’s Yamuna River to change course several times, likely taking the grave and environs into its depths. So, why over this for -year period was a Persian poet’s annual graveside gathering important to both elite (khāss) and common (‘āmm) denizens of late Mughal Delhi? Recent histories of eighteenth-century Islamicate India have