The Turki-Language Diary of Insha Allah Khan Insha as a Literary Monument

Introduction. Insha Allah Khan Insha was a key author of Urdu literature at the turn of the nineteenth centuries. His works were multilingual, and the languages he used comprised a local version of literary Turki. Nowadays there is only one surviving manuscript of the poet’s largest Turkic-language work ― The Turki-Language Diary ― housed at the Rampur Raza Library (Rampur, India) and never subjected to any special Turkological research. Goals. So, the paper attempts a comprehensive description of the narrative as a written and literary monument. Results. The article provides a detailed archaeographic description of the manuscript, clarifies somewhat exact dates of the mentioned events, determines a quantitative ratio of India’s languages in the text, and links fragments in different languages to certain thematic blocks. A variety of literary methods proves instrumental in identifying the structure of daily notes, their compositional features, and key content/thematic blocks. Although the manuscript primarily focuses on everyday life and describes conversations with various people, it does contain fragments of poems once heard by the author and those composed by him. The latter’s analysis makes it possible to delineate the reading range of individuals from Insha’s circle, and to clarify some textual aspects of his own works that would be included in his Complete Works (poems). Identifications of the individuals mentioned in the manuscript are as instrumental in determining the poet’s social circle, cast light on his relationship with the patron. The abundance of direct speech patterns helps reconstruct Insha’s perceptions of his contemporaries and close ones, and, to a certain extent, styles of their everyday communication and ranges of their constant interests. The manuscript ― its content and form ― significantly expands our understanding of both Insha Allah Khan Insha proper, and of Turkic-language practices in India throughout the last decades of the Mughal Empire.

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