I’m writing this after I wrote about Premchand’s short and Satyajit Ray’s adaptation of it, which I think embody interesting relationships with prose (see post for February 12). There, prose is antithetical to the structured literary traditions (and associated detachment and decadence) of old. The ghazal is positioned as one such form. This is not at all the case in Mirza Ruswa’s Umrao Jan Ada. Though it is, of course, written in prose, it clearly holds ghazals in high regard. This represents a version of the significance prose that Anand mentioned in class. For Mirza Ruswa Sahib, its use is born out of a nostalgia for and a desire to portray the past of Lucknowi culture. Ironically, the old forms that were part of the vibrant expressive tradition in Lucknow were not equipped to paint a picture of that Lucknow. Their forms, customs, and embeddedness limited the sorts of topics that could be explored through them. A nostalgia for an artistic scene characterized by that rigidity had to be expressed in prose, a form that allows for constant invention and experimentation. You mentioned, though, that Tagore didn’t conceive of the formal liberty offered by prose as offering all the possibilities a textual artist would need. For him, meter, not prose, was the medium to process Upanishadic wisdom and express those emotions. It’s telling, perhaps, that he has Sandip say: “We, with the clubs of our prose, are the iconoclasts of meter” (57). So far we’ve seen Tagore and Premchand use prose more for the purpose of political satire and commentary, while Mirza Ruswa uses it more to portray life lived in a place and time.