Aditya Behl Recieves Literature Fellowship for Translation
Aditya Behl, an associate professor in the Department of South Asian Studies, received a $20,000 grant for a translation project from the National Endowment for the Arts. Translation fellowships in poetry and prose are offered by the NEA to published literary translators for translation projects from other languages into English. Behl’s grant is to support the translation from Hindavi (medieval Hindi) of the Mirigavati, an Indian Sufi romance about a prince who must find his true love in a distant land. The Mirigavati was written in 1503 by Qutban Suhravardi, a court poet whose patron was Sultan Husain Shah Sharqi, the ruler of the kingdom of Jaunpur in northeastern India. Little else is known about Qutban, except that he considered himself a disciple of Shaikh Buddhan Suhravardi, a Sufi master.
Aditya Behl teaches Hindi and Urdu literature, and Sultanate and Mughal cultural history. His intellectual interests are in literary theory and comparative religions, and he writes on Sufi narrative poetry, religious ideology in Mughal India and Indian cultural history. He has translated fiction and poetry from Hindi, Urdu and Panjabi into English, notably Shaikh Manjhan’s Madhumalati: An Indian Sufi Romance. He is also the editor of The Penguin New Writing in India.
The NEA is a public agency dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts, bringing the arts to all Americans, and providing leadership in arts education. Established by Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government, the Arts Endowment is the largest national funder of the arts, bringing great art to all 50 states.