Nostalgia and the City: Urdu shahr āshob poetry in the aftermath of 1857

International audienceAbstract After the Uprising of 1857, many poets from north Indian cities resorted to the Urdu nostalgic genre of shahr āshob to recall mournfully pre-colonial urban landscapes and articulate emotional and poetic narratives of loss. This article proposes to open new perspectives for the historical study of collective memory and trauma among Urdu-speaking ashrāf in the nineteenth century by looking at one collection of such poems entitled ‘The Lament for Delhi (Fuġhān-e Dehlī)’ (1863), which has recently started to attract the attention of historians. Although scholarship has generally emphasised the continuity of these poems with the shahr āshob tradition, this article re-assesses this body of texts through a careful analysis of their main literary motifs and highlights their originality and divergence from previous shahr āshobs . Beyond the stereotypical, the poems of ‘The Lament for Delhi’ both construct 1857 as cultural trauma through the use of powerful literary devices and the performance of collective grief as well as re-channel memory and melancholy into the urban landscape by emphasising its materiality and reinvesting it with new meanings and stakes. This paper more broadly underlines the importance of this under-studied source to understand the impact of 1857 on the imaginary of Urdu-speaking ashrāf and on the cultural and social history of colonial India