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“Worlds Together Shined”: Bīdil, Traherne, and Collaborative Comparison
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2024
Abstract
At the same moment in the seventeenth century in two distant parts of the globe, two poets who did not know of each other's existence both confronted an ancient philosophical question—How does human knowledge begin?—by imaginatively reconstructing their own originary experiences. In poetry and autobiographical prose, Thomas Traherne (in England) and Mīrzā ʿAbd al-Qādir Bīdil Dihlavī (in India) describe being in the womb, birth, nursing, first thoughts. Deeply original with respect to their own contexts yet strikingly similar to each other, these accounts demand comparison. In this essay, we draw on Carlo Ginzburg's concept of “conjunctive anomalies,” Bruce Lincoln's “weak” comparison, and Roland Greene's “obversive poetics,” among other frameworks, to reveal the overlooked early modern world of Avicennan thought. By collaboratively comparing traditions that do not fully belong to either of us, we attempt to dislodge the siloed ways of thinking that have come to structure the study of early modern literatures.
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- Copyright © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Modern Language Association of America
Footnotes
This essay has been years in the making, during which time we have benefited from many colleagues’ generous and incisive comments: we thank Finn Barry, Edgar Garcia, Adrienne Ghaly, Rivi Handler-Spitz, Sonam Kachru, Ellen MacKay, Glenn Most, Noémie Ndiaye, Mark Payne, Ayesha Ramachandran, Ben Saltzman, Haun Saussy, Joshua Scodel, Nigel Smith, Richard Strier, and Kevin van Bladel. We thank Prashant Keshavmurthy for reading our essay in 2021. We are very grateful to Domenico Ingenito for the invitation to present an early draft at a public Zoom talk at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2019 and to participants at the Renaissance Workshop at the University of Chicago in 2023.
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