A SULTAN IN THE REALM OF PASION: COFFEE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DELHI

The ephemeral nature of this connoisseurship hints at what Sheldon Pollock has characterized as vernacular modes of cosmopolitanism in South Asia, a cultural assertiveness based on selfconsciously regional cultures and languages, which by the middle decades of the century collided in increasingly violent, spectacular, and ultimately productive ways with the forces of western European colonialism.1 Scholars have been excited to identify these parallel patterns of coffee consumption in South Asia, pointing to descriptions of the qahwah-khanah [coffeehouse] in Dargah Quli khan's memorial of his trip to the imperial capital from 1737-41 in the so-called Muraqqa'-i Dihli [Album of Delhi]2 and Anand Ram "Mukhlis"'s love of the drink in his Account of a Journey to Bangarh.3 Evidence of this brief efflorescence of coffee connoisseurship is vividly if obliquely depicted in an Urdu poem composed by a major author of the period, Shah "H. atim" (1699-1783), a work that appears largely to have escaped notice in English-language scholarship.4 A manuscript of that work housed in the British Library (MS Urdu 68) is of special interest not least because it may be an autograph copy.5 In it, the poet is able to produce unexpected and occasionally delightful literary effects through the combination of the poem's particular topic, an appreciation of qahwah [coffee], and the linguistic register in which it finds expression, a style of language called rekhtah. rekhtah [mixed] was famously described in an early definition as "poetry of the Persian style in the language of the exalted city of Shahjahanabad in Delhi.