Biography
Muntazir is interested in theorizing the interconnections between place, personhood, and representation in the “borderlands” of South and Central Asia since the 1600s. His dissertation focuses on ideas and practices of place, personhood, representation, and religio-political identities in Chitral, a node in the “greater Badakhshan” region, between 1750 and 1969.
Paper Abstract
This paper examines the categories of water, cypress, and rose in the Persian poetry of Muḥammad Siār, a poet who flourished during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the Chitral region of today’s north-western Pakistan. My reading of these categories in the poetry of Siār excavates the possibilities of a “spiritual ecology,” that suggests human-earth/universe relationships built on human-non-human/more-than-human encounters and interdependence. I argue that Siār’s take on the categories of water, cypress, and rose, their interdependencies, and complex figurations in human affairs point to spiritual “entanglements” and alternate ways of understanding and coming to terms with our “being in the world.”