The Taste of Words: An Introduction to Urdu Poetry

by Mir

  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-daans 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 mushairas (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 dastans (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 offe
rings.

  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.

  By the early twentieth century, the aforementioned Anthony MacDonnell—who enacted the implicit British policy of intensifying existing Hindu–Muslim tensions to help them govern the colony with greater ease—injected language into the communal debate. In 1900, he passed the ‘Nagri Resolution’, which produced an artificial taxonomic schism between Urdu and Hindi, thereby separating the languages according to religious affiliation. Communalists on both sides of the religious divide rejoiced, but others were less sanguine. Mohsin-ul Mulk, a prominent poet-politician of the time, saw it as the beginning of the demise of Urdu, and wrote an elegy to it in the form of a couplet:

  Chal saath, ke hasrat dil-e mahroom se nikle

  Aashiq ka janaaza hai, zara dhoom se nikle

  Walk along with that heartbroken procession awhile

  It’s the funeral of a lover, bury him in style.

  In the post–World War I era, Urdu seemed destined to be seen as a language of Muslims, a mantle that was almost comically at odds with its multi-religious origins. It is in this era of ambivalence that we must place Allama Mohammed Iqbal, a genius who straddled the divide between the traditions of the East and the modernist renaissance of the West. Iqbal it was who first spoke of modernist notions like selfhood (khudi), hitherto absent in Urdu poetry. The battle between free will and determinism, according to Iqbal, was really one the human could control:

  Khudi ko kar buland itna, ke har taqdeer se pehle

  Khuda bande se khud poochhe, bataa teri raza kya hai?

  Exalt your Self thus, that before every twist of fate

  God should say, ‘My creation, on your desire I wait.’

  Iqbal flirted with the ultimate act of iconoclasm, casting Lucifer (Iblees) as a tragic hero. He produced imaginary conversations between God and Lenin. And it was he who, in his epic 1909 poem Shikva (Complaint), elevated the human being to the status of a petitioner who commented critically on God’s act of creation. While Iqbal’s poetry can be seen as a reflection on the state of Islam and of Muslims as they prepared to engage with modernity, it carried (in my opinion) less of the conservative angst of Hali and more of a globalized sentiment, as he strove to connect the experiences of South Asians with their counterparts in Central Asia, Europe and the Middle East, and envisioned a more creative engagement between ‘religions’, be they Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, modernism, or Marxism.

  In the mid-twentieth century, Urdu was to receive a gift that would revive it in spectacular fashion as a language of revolution and hope, of social change and religious heresy, as a symbol of the human will to be free and as the defiant enemy of divisiveness. I am referring to the ‘progressive phase’ in which Urdu writers (and especially Urdu poets) became the vanguard of a literary movement that combined socialism, anti-colonial sentiment, inter-religious harmony, the foundation of a new nationalism, gender equality, and an ethos of a shared literary and political heritage across all Indian languages and indeed across the globe.4 The broader community of progressive poets included non-Urdu stalwarts such as Sumitranandan Pant and Maithilisharan Gupt (Hindi), Rabindranath Tagore (Bengali), Sri Sri (Telugu), Umashankar Joshi (Gujarati), Gurbaksh Singh (Punjabi) and Anna Bhau Sathe (Marathi). Hasrat Mohani, Josh Malihabadi, Firaaq Gorakhpuri, Makhdoom Mohiuddin, Sahir Ludhianvi, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Asrar-ul Haq Majaz, Ali Sardar Jafri, Jan Nisar Akhtar, Kaifi Azmi and others commandeered Urdu poetry for well over four decades, producing works that drastically altered the conventions of poetic content, while hewing true (for the most part) to the classical form. Josh summed up their agenda pithily:

  Kaam hai mera taghayyur, naam mera hai shabaab

  Mera naara inquilaab-o inquilaab-o inquilaab

  My name is youth, and upheaval is my mission

  My slogan: Revolution. Revolution. Revolution.

  The Progressive Writers’ Association, which was formed in 1936, became the conduit through which a variety of poets expressed ideas that challenged the socio-cultural status quo and provided the real possibility of taking the freedom movement in the subcontinent in the direction of social justice.

  Contemporary with the progressive movement (taraqqi pasand tehreek) were the purveyors of modernism (jadeediyat) who preferred to experiment with form more than content. The mutual contempt that the progressives and modernists had for each other was perhaps unfortunate, for it precluded interesting conversational possibilities between them. However, the work of modernist poets like Noon Meem Rashid, Miraji and the members of the Halqa-e Arbaab-e Zauq (circle of connoisseurs) has stood the test of time. Perhaps their greater contribution has been to rescue Urdu poetry from the prison of metre (zameen) that it had always found itself in. Jazz-like improvisations abound in the poetry of Rashid in particular, where non-linear narratives mix with layered thoughts, with the poet gleefully ‘contaminating’ conscious feelings and unconscious desires in a palimpsest of literary production.

  The freedom movement also produced a frenzy of activity among the Urdu poets in the 1930s and 1940s. I remember my late father, who was nineteen when India achieved its freedom, declaim poems from memory that I have never seen in print (and for all I know, he never read either, but rather imbibed orally). One of them bears repeating, for it demonstrates simplicity and songlike rhythm. It was a taunt directed at a well-dressed Englishman, invoking an old Urdu term that referred to disloyal people as ‘white-blooded’:

  Ye coat bhi sufaid, ye patloon bhi sufaid

  Teri sufaid hat ka hai oon bhi sufaid

  Khud jism bhi sufaid hai, aur is ke saath saath

  Main to ye jaanta hoon, tera khoon bhi sufaid

  White is your coat and white your pants flat

  As is the white wool on your white hat

  Your body is white and I do know that

  Your blood is white, you betrayer rat.

  Literary critics might think such verse doggerel, but when situated in i
ts milieu, it carries the resonance, meaning and anger of a population that was ready to set itself free from the yoke of foreigners. As the mid 1940s appeared, the Urdu poets of that generation sharpened their quills and began to ready themselves to write panegyrics to the newborn nation.

  However, just as 1857 had once snuffed out the renaissance of Urdu poetry, 1947 was another catastrophic moment. The dawn of independence brought with it not the red horizon of a new day, but a horizon reddened with the blood of Partition. Like the last gasp of a dying taper, poets wrote expressive poems about their grief at the moment their hopes were betrayed. In Faiz’s words: ‘Vo intezaar tha jis ka, ye vo sahar to nahin’ (‘This is not the dawn that we had awaited’). Or in Josh’s grieving hyperbole: ‘Apna gala kharosh-e tarannum se phat gayaa / Talvaar se bachaa, to rag-e gul se kat gayaa’ (‘Our throat was torn by a song sharp as a stinging nettle / It evaded the sword, but was slit by a rose petal’).

  The Partition geographically divided a poetic fraternity, and produced different tensions on both sides of the border. While the Urduwalas on the Indian side had to contend with a new regime of suspicion and intolerance, the Pakistani poets (especially the progressives) faced persecution by the elite class for advocating social change and wealth redistribution. The wars between India and Pakistan, the decline of social patronage, the inability to replicate the critical mass of readers and enthusiasts, combined with the general disappointment of the failed promise of decolonization, freedom and nationalism, led to another wasted opportunity for Urdu.