Hubble-Bubble of Transcultural Encounters: A Study of the Social Life of the Hookah

Abstract

Early modern Hindi writer Thakur Jagmohan Singh’s play, The Play of the Hookah Smoker: A Farce in Four Acts, emulates the British idea of the hookah pipe as a “thing” that corrupts the mind of the smoker with indolence and perfidy. The metaphor of the hookah has undergone a range of changes from its origin in Persianised India to Anglicised India. In the light of thing theory, this paper engages, heuristically, with The Play of the Hookah-Smoker, which is supposedly the first example of the hookah metaphor in Hindi. In the first part of the paper, I argue that transcultural encounters are responsible for “thingifying” the hookah. In the second part of the paper, I contend that by employing the hookah metaphor, Singh has created one of the first myths of Hindi nationalism.