Mapping Modernisms offers a study of three writers: Miraji (1912-1949), N.M. Rashed (1911-1975), and Sadegh Hedayat (1903-1951). It highlights the role that each played in defining an emerging modernist mode in prose and poetry in Urdu and Persian literature during the mid-twentieth century in India, Iran, and beyond. I focus on the twin acts of travel and translation as crucial elements of their literary practice. In chapter one, which serves as an extended introduction, I activate an interdisciplinary methodology to the study of their works, drawing from literary history, orientalism, translation studies, and theories of global modernism and critical cosmopolitanism. This dissertation advocates an approach to comparative study that considers both the works and networks that enable encounters between literary agents from the Global South, uncovering shared literary lineages and alternative geographic imaginaries. In chapter two, I contextualize N. M. Rashed’s collection of poetry titled A Stranger in Iran within the discourse of critical cosmopolitanism, and trace a contrarian, anti-imperialist poetics. This chapter closely examines poems that, among others, were written in and about Tehran during the second world war. These poems dramatize the crisis of a weakening “Asian” identity as a viable counter to Western imperialism. In chapter three, I closely examine Miraji’s literary commentaries and translations to build a case for translation as both a constituent aspect of modernist writing in Urdu, and a subversive challenge to the existing norms of literary canonization during the colonial era. In chapter four, I analyze the Persian writer Sadegh Hedayat’s novella The Blind Owl (1936), written in Bombay, India, to evaluate the role occupied by India as a symbolic construct and uncanny Other in the narrator’s world. All three writers offer a conception of “the world” in their work that exposes the instability of both national borders and the identities contained within them.