The Taste of Words: An Introduction to Urdu Poetry (2 page)

Naddi ka mod, chashma-e shireen ka zer-o-bam

Chaadar shab-e nujoom ki, shabnam ka rakht-e nam

Moti ki aab, gul ki mehak, maah-e nau ka kham

In sab ke imtezaaj se paida hui hai tu

Kitne haseen ufaq se huvaida hui hai tu

Lehja maleeh hai ke namak-khwaar hoon tera

Sehat zaban mein hai ke beemar hoon tera

Aazad-e sher hoon ke giraftar hoon tera

Tere karam se sher-o-sukhan ka imam hoon

Shahon pe khandazan hoon ke tera ghulam hoon

The bend of the river, and the stream’s bubbly path

The veil of the starry night, and the moist dew of the morn

The pearl’s clarity, rose’s fragrance and the new moon’s swathe

All came together harmoniously and you were born

What a beauteous horizon have you arisen from!

Sweet is my speech for having tasted of your salt
1

Healthy my tongue that I am ill with love for you

My verse flies free, for I am entombed in your vault

It is your boon that I rule the realm of poetry too

I mock the kings now that I am your slave.

This beautiful ode to Urdu, written by Josh Malihabadi, was never published, but has found its way to Urdu lovers over time through a rich oral tradition.
2

Contrast this verse with the playful comedy of Dilawar Figaar, a Pakistani poet who laments the replacement of Urdu by English in common usage. Here are two
sher
s (couplets) from his poem ‘Pure Ghazal in Urdu’ that exemplify how English has been incorporated into daily speech alongside colloquial Urdu:

Na ho jab
heart in the chest,
phir
tongue in the mouth
kyon
?

To beautify this line, throw some light in Urdu

There should be
yaqeenan
no
milawat
in the literature

Therefore I never call
shab ko
3
night in Urdu.

Urdu has prided itself on its mongrel roots and cosmopolitan ethos. It was never a language of kings and courts (though a surprising number of rulers tried their hand at Urdu poetry), nor did it confine itself to any religion (despite its deployment by communalists and divisive rulers to drive a wedge between communities). It is a quintessentially modern language, with neither a distinct writing style (no formalized diacritics, and a borrowed script) nor any claim to a direct link with a root language. To chart the emergence of Urdu is itself a fraught task, full of political pitfalls and contradictions. The progression between Hindavi, Rekhti and Urdu is a continuous one, and to break that continuity into a linguistic taxonomy is an act of social construction that is neither helpful nor productive. In this anthology, for instance, I have included Amir Khusrau, who lived in the thirteenth century, as an Urdu poet. Others may choose the sixteenth-century Deccan king Quli Qutub Shah as an originary Urdu poet, while some may play safer and commence with the seventeenth-century poet Wali Dakkani. At any rate, it is correct to say that the language has primarily thrived through an oral tradition, much of which is predicated on its poetry. That tradition has always been engaged with the direct reality of its purveyors, and I would venture to say that the best Urdu poetry is rarely the kind that is steeped in metaphysics, but one which talks of real issues: love and other relationships, jobs and occupations, bazaar scenes, feelings of marginality and oppression, revolution, the yearning of enslaved people to be free, and matters of religion (not metaphysical exegeses but rather matters of practice, celebrations of martyrs and making fun of hypocritical proselytizers).

In this introductory essay, I make no claims to comprehensiveness
or neutrality. I just offer you a contingent and partisan analysis of what I consider to be important milestones in the dynamic trajectories of Urdu poetry
.

The period between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries CE can be said to mark Urdu’s prehistory, where the language existed primarily as consciousness rather than category. Much like Molière’s bourgeois gentleman who, when told about the distinction between prose and poetry, exclaimed ‘
Par ma foi, il y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose, sans que j’en susse rien
’ (‘Good lord, for over forty years I have been speaking prose and I did not know it’), the exponents of the new tongue in that era would be shocked to hear that they were speaking a different language, one whose name would eventually be linked to military barracks (
orda
in Turkish).

Like all languages, Urdu emerged into consciousness primarily as speech and song, and did not detach itself from its roots in Hindavi grammar, Turkish/Pali vocabularies and plebeian deployment (as opposed to scriptural Sanskrit or courtly Persian) until the taxonomies of colonialism ripped it apart from Devanagri. If one is looking for a definite date when Urdu was born, one should consider the year 1900, in which Anthony MacDonnell’s infamous ‘Nagri resolution’ postulated that Hindi and Urdu were separate languages. But to do that would get us ahead of our story. For the moment, imagine if you will, a new way of speaking, that emerged as a fad and began spreading like wildfire across northern and western India, adopted by Sufi mendicants, bhakti singers, street balladeers and regular working folk who did not have access to more courtly languages. Imagine tradespeople, holy men and other travellers who seeded the countryside with its common metaphors, turns of phrase and grammatical peculiarities. The argot grew in usage and popularity, flying under the radar of Persian court records, classical poems in Sanskrit, and florid Turkish tracts.

Then came Mir.

It is difficult to understate the role played by Mir Taqi Mir in legitimizing Urdu as a language of culture as well as popular communication in the eighteenth century. I do not intend to offer biographical sketches of any poets in this introduction; I do that when I introduce their poems. But Mir was not just a person; he was also a phenomenon, a force of Urdu nature. It was he who provided innovative rhyme schemes, metaphoric codes and subject matter—a roadmap that future poets could adopt. His contemporaries like Mirza Sauda and Khwaja Dard in Delhi were able to leverage that insight into the building blocks of a tradition. Parallel movements in other parts of north India contributed to the emergence of a relatively unselfconscious mode of poetic and literary expression in the new argot. The Mir era may have been the moment when Urdu began to achieve legitimacy, when the stuffed
Farsi-daan
s of the Mughal court realized that this argot that had become the lingua franca of the subaltern class actually had poetic potential that far exceeded the derivative Persian of the court tracts, the ghostwritten princely memoirs or even the classical
mushaira
s (social gatherings where poets gathered to recite poetry, often in the form of a contest). The ghazal in the hands of Mir became a rapier, touching the vulnerable part of the listener’s heart in a way Hafiz may have touched the Persian heart, but which no Indian had replicated in Farsi. Mind you, the language was still known primarily as Rekhti, though ‘Urdu’ was now becoming an accepted word as well. Mir’s acolytes adhered faithfully to the guidelines set by his creative genius, producing what we now refer to as the ‘Delhi school’ of Urdu poetry. Outside of Delhi, there were stalwarts like Nazeer Akbarabadi writing the era’s equivalent of top hits in the
nazm
tradition, and parallel developments in the prose world led to the emergence of a loose consensus around how the language would be scripted.

A brief but vital digression into the Urdu prose tradition is necessary here. Until the eighteenth century, traditions of Urdu prose had been overwhelmingly oral, relying on the narrative powers of
dastan
s (epics) such as
Char Darvesh
,
Hatim Tai
,
Betal Pachchisi
,
Gul-e Bakawali
,
Laila Majnun
,
Panchatantra
and others. Also influential were the traditions that were derived from the folklore associated with the Islamic Empire, such as the dastan of Amir Hamza. Enter the famous press started by Munshi Nawal Kishore in Lucknow in 1858. This press began to tap into a vast market, which had been starved of popular fiction. One of the best-known offerings of Nawal Kishore Press, Pandit Ratan Nath Sarshar’s
Fasana-e Aazad
(The Legend of Aazad), is often spoken of as Urdu’s first novel. Somewhat similar in structure to
Don Quixote
,
Fasana-e Aazad
chronicles the travels of a modernist nobleman Azad, and his reluctant rustic companion, Khoji, who embarks on a series of adventures to win the hand of a beautiful woman named Husn-Ara. The journey of Urdu fiction from
Fasana-e Aazad
to Mirza Rusva’s
Umrao Jaan Ada
, and then on to Premchand’s
Godaan
, and eventually Qurratulain Hyder’s
Aag ka Darya
is fascinating, which we shall reluctantly set aside in order to return to poetry.

A parallel movement in the eighteenth century was the maturing of the
marsiya
tradition, especially in Lucknow. The religious observances of Shia Muslims during the month of Mohurrum have always involved poetic representations of the events surrounding the battle of Karbala where Imam Husain, the grandson of Prophet Mohammed, was martyred. The Karbala passion play has provided a fertile ground for poets in a variety of languages. Urdu was no exception, but thanks to the extraordinary literary ability of the eighteenth-century marsiya poets, in particular Mir Anees and Mirza Dabeer, the marsiya or elegy emerged as a robust literary form in its own right, a tradition that endures till today.

After Mir, came Ghalib.

Like Mir, Ghalib is not just a personage in the history of Urdu poetry but an era. The Ghalib stage in the nineteenth century arguably represented an apotheosis of sorts for Urdu
sukhan
, or the poetic aesthetic. Asadullah Khan Ghalib (known lovingly among Urduwalas as
chacha
Ghalib, and to Hyderabadis simply as
chicha
) took the poets of his era who were still recycling Mir’s tropes to school with his incredible riffs on philosophy and love and politics, making it clear who the real inheritor of Mir’s mantle was. Despite his poverty, cantankerous nature and needless obsession with Persian (which led him to devalue his own Urdu poetry and waste time on inferior Farsi efforts), he was recognized as a genius in his own time (at least by the cognoscenti), and in the 150 years since his death he has acquired the status of a colossus in the poetic landscape of Urdu. The
Deevan-e Ghalib
may be the most highly printed book in the history of Urdu literature, and Ghalib’s verse may be the most translated.

While Ghalib was producing his magic in Delhi, the Deccan was displaying its own brand of renaissance. The rulers of Hyderabad were courting artistes like Zauq in much the same way a current IPL franchise may court an upcoming player. Zauq’s regretful rejection was communicated to the Hyderabadis poetically, and gave the Delhi-ites a sher with which to gloat forever:

In dinon gar-che Dakkan mein hai badi qadr-e sukhan

Kaun jaaye Zauq par Dilli ki galiyaan chhod kar

Although in the Deccan they value poetry these days

O Zauq, who can forsake Delhi’s wondrous lanes and byways?

Dagh Dehlavi, a future exponent of the Zauq–Ghalib style of poetry, would eventually move to Hyderabad, where mushairas in the nineteenth century occupied the cultural space that an A.R. Rahman concert might in the early twenty-first century. Poetry began to be published in journals and magazines, newspapers regularly carried ghazals, nazms and literary criticism, and an indigenous movement produced what would become the foundation of an Urdu literary tradition.

Moreover, the Fort William College was founded in Calcutta in the early nineteenth century. Admittedly a colonial institution designed to help the British rule India better, the college (along with its counterpart, the Delhi College) produced a variety of translations of Urdu tracts, exposed Urdu to Western literature through commissioned translations, and produced a corpus of knowledge that, despite its imperial motivations, helped the language immeasurably in broadening its offerings.

The momentum gained by Urdu in the nineteenth century was however to be rudely interrupted by the 1857 war of independence. The savagery with which the British put down the ‘mutiny’ as they called it was unparalleled. In northern India, the entire princely system was dismantled; court patronage shrivelled for those who depended on the nawabs and rajas for their stipends. While Urdu flourished a bit more in the southern parts of the country where the effects of the post-1857 repression were less overt, the renaissance of Urdu suffered a body blow in the late nineteenth century.

As officialized Urdu began to be viewed with great suspicion, it generated an interesting phase of introspection and, in my opinion, defensiveness. The Urdu intellectuals of that time were forced to evaluate—and at times even benchmark—their work against that of their new masters, and Urdu poetry and literary criticism of the late nineteenth century reflects this artificial and stylized engagement with Western poetic and literary convention. Critics such as Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Mohammad Husain Azad, Altaf Husain Hali and Shibli Nomani wrote defensively about their language, vacillating between advocations of modernity and a retreat into religiosity. Sir Sayyid of course is best known for the foundation of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in 1875, which later became the Aligarh Muslim University, the bastion of modernist pedagogy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mohammad Husain Azad wrote
Aab-e Hayaat
(Water of Life) in 1880, arguably the first comprehensive work of Urdu literary criticism, in which he made evocative pleas for Urdu poets to embrace natural themes, in keeping with the Western (British) literary mores of his time. In effect he was asking them to dial down the metaphysics. Altaf Husain Hali had made a similar invocation in 1893 when, in his
Muqaddama-e Sher-o-Shairi
(Exegesis on Poems and Poetry), he decried the Urdu poetry of his time as excessively metaphor-driven, and argued for a more naturalistic approach. Ironically, he had himself not shied from the use of florid metaphors while composing his famous
musaddas,
a long epic poem lamenting the decay of morals in the Islamic world.