The urdu-language Khushtar Ramayan: Verbal-and visual-narrative repertoires and sense of place

This essay explores the rich verbal- and visual-narrative repertoires constitutive of a sense of place within the Urdu-language Khushtar Ramayan, highlighting some of the significant ways in which they converge with and diverge from other prominent textual and visual representations of the Ramayan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The material history of Khushtar's work as a book is also traced in order to illuminate a number of important linkages and shifts from a local courtly economy and sense of place to an emergent, proto-national, print-commercial one.