Urdu Studies in Wisconsin

The University of Wisconsin at Madison publishes the Annual of Urdu Studies, sponsored by its Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia. Click on the link and you'll find several items (articles, reviews, poems) related to the ghazal and its cultural context in Urdu. (Thanks to David Jalajel for pointing me to this site.)

One item that particularly caught my attention is the article, "The Rama Story of Brij Narain Chakbast," by Neil Krishan Aggarwal. Toward the beginning, Aggarwal says,

Several generations ago, scholars spoke of Valmiki's Ramayana as the "original" and all others as "variations" (Hopkins 1926), a tenet which Ramanujanlater disputed in his suggestion that texts be treated on their own terms as "tellings," to be read intertextually to examine "what gets translated, trans-planted, transposed" (1991, 24).

This quotation clearly addresses the issue of canonicity: One of India's two major epics, Ramayana exists in numerous versions, with the one traditionally ascribed to Valmiki being the "original." The epic continues to be an important scripture for Hindus.

My concern isn't Ramayana, but the notion of the "real" version of anything, which is to say the canonical version, the authoritative version. I recently discussed this issue on my blog, NotesETC: "Which Is the Real Story?" This post talks about The Lord of the Rings, novel, movie, radio drama.

The traditional view is that, in the face of different versions, one version is the "real" one. Aggarwal's point is that, rather than canonizing one version as the real one, we inter-relate all versions, study them and compare them and profit from difference, likeness, and variation.

Does the same approach apply to the study of the ghazal form?