Zukunftsphilologie
2012/ 2013

Mudasir Mufti

Revisiting Kashmir's Hagiography: Rishis, Sufis and Syncretism

Mudasir Mufti is a Senior Assistant Professor in the Department of English, University of Kashmir, Srinagar, where he completed his Masters in 2002 and PhD in 2009. For his doctorate he worked on two British dramatists, Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, from a postmodernist perspective, looking into the problems of language, power, subjectivity, memory and history as reflected in the works of these playwrights. Mufti’s interests include literary theory, translation, religious studies and Classical Persian and Arabic literatures. Mufti has translated Mullah Tahir Ghani (d. 1669), the foremost Persian poet of Kashmir, for Penguin, India, which will be published in January 2013.

Revisiting Kashmir's Hagiography: Rishis, Sufis and Syncretism

As a Fellow of Zukunftsphilologie, he will be working on some important hagiographical texts of Kashmir written from 16th to 19th centuries. Mufti will focus on the biographies of Sufis and Rishis of Kashmir to reassess their role in the creation and consolidation of a new religious order. He will try to see how these texts can be read as instances of self-representation aiming to construct and control the identities, beliefs and desires of an emerging social order and will also re-examine the historical validity of such ideas as pluralism and syncretism in the context of Kashmir.