Introduction
This book presents a selection of Urdu literature for anyone who cannot read Urdu but is interested to find out what it has to offer.
Apart from people who count English as their mother tongue, there are many to whom this description applies. In particular I hope it will be useful to young people of South Asian background who use English as their effective first language. In both India and Pakistan there are tens of thousands of people whose parents are Urdu speakers but whose own education has been through the medium of English, and who are likely to be considerably more fluent in English than in Urdu. I am very pleased to know that many of them regret that they have learnt less about Ghalib’s poetry than about Wordsworth’s, and would like to do something to change this situation. In India, many others who are not Urdu speakers have heard Urdu poetry recited or sung, and know that it has a rich literature. They look upon it as part of their wider South Asian heritage and would like to know more about it. In Britain, Canada, the USA and elsewhere where people from Urdu-speaking backgrounds have settled, many of their children and grandchildren have not had the chance to become confident speakers and readers of the language of their family and community. A growing number of them now feel a strong desire to learn more about the wealth of their literary heritage, and they have no choice but to do this through the medium of English.
How Urdu Became a Literary Language
Urdu is one of the fifteen or so major languages of the South Asian subcontinent. It was born out of the need of Muslim invaders of India from the tenth century onwards to create a language in which they could communicate with their Indian subjects. Its basic structure, and much of its everyday vocabulary is almost identical with that of Hindi, which in an earlier form had been the lingua franca of northern and central India. The Muslim invaders were men from different regions of what is now the Middle East and Central Asia, speaking different languages, but their common language of culture and administration was Persian. Gradually Persian words became more commonly used in the native Indian language framework, and the result was a new language, Urdu.
Like many other literatures, Urdu literature begins with poetry. But, like the modern languages of Europe, Urdu had to establish itself as a literary medium in the face of a convention that only a classical language could be a fit vehicle for poetry. In medieval Western Europe this language was Latin. In India it was Persian, and by comparison with Europe it was late in the day that the modern language won out. In northern India, it was not until the early decades of the eighteenth century that Urdu became accepted as the medium of poetry. The change came about because many Indians had begun to feel that they could not express themselves as adequately as they would wish in Persian, a language that was not their own; and major poets now appeared who made Urdu the medium of their work. Nevertheless, until well into the twentieth century there were Urdu-speaking poets who continued to write some of their verse in Persian as well, just as in England Milton wrote verse in Latin as well as English. All of them were completely familiar with the literary heritage of Persian, and followed Persian models in both genres and the established themes of classical poetry. Thus Urdu poetry represents, in a sense, a further development of a literature already centuries old, with only the language changed.
For a century after poets were writing in Urdu, Persian remained the only acceptable medium for serious writing in prose. It could be the vehicle of powerful feeling, but it was a highly stylized form of Persian which employed all manner of literary devices—wordplay, alliteration, antithesis, balancing rhythms and rhymes, and many more. What little Urdu prose there was, imitated this style of writing. Clearly, this could not be an all-purpose prose, able to meet all the varied needs of modern writing. For that it was necessary to establish the convention that the spoken language of educated people—Urdu—should be accepted as the medium of written literature, prose as well as poetry. When that change came about, it was partly as a response to a new colonizing presence, the British. This process is described in the section on ‘The New Light’.
Urdu has predominantly been the language of Muslims. Its literature, like the Thousand and One Nights, is about people who profess the religion of Islam. A few non-Muslims have made major contributions to its literature, though until the 1920s those who did, wrote in the tradition which made the life and experiences of Muslims their theme. But its literature is not primarily a religious literature. Millions of non-Muslims have been able to read and write Urdu, and millions more have been able to understand and speak it. It is now the vehicle of one of the richest literatures of the subcontinent, in both poetry and prose. Its poetry has been made popular through song, and carries universal messages which have touched people of all backgrounds. Its prose offers a wealth of stories, and insights into a way of life.
How This Book is Organized
I have thought it best not to follow a chronological order, but to begin with a selection of twentieth century short stories and sketches. This is the part of Urdu literature which English-speaking readers will be able to relate to most easily, for twentieth-century writers are familiar with, and deeply influenced by Western literature, and so share a common background with the readers for whom this book is intended.
The next section is on popular literature, and mostly by anonymous writers. They write within a tradition that knows nothing of the literature of the West, in simple forms, and often on themes which are universal, which any modern reader can easily appreciate. Few histories or anthologies of Urdu literature would include them; but because their subject matter is drawn exclusively from their own tradition, you will learn from them things which will help you understand the society from which other forms of literature grew.
The third section is on poetry, which is without a doubt that part of literature which Urdu speakers most prize. Of the many genres of classical poetry, I have focused on the one that is most highly valued—the ghazal. To appreciate it you will need some explanation of its background and its form, though I have tried to present it in a way which makes only minimal comment necessary.
The last sections deal with prose literature of the late nineteenth century, when Urdu-speaking society was feeling the full impact of British rule and British ways.
Each section has an introduction of its own, and there are occasional explanations in footnotes. I have tried to keep these to a minimum and not stand in the way of your direct encounter with the literature.
Those who want to know more about the background of the literature can turn to my book The Pursuit of Urdu Literature:A Select History, which may be regarded as a companion to this volume.
A Note On the Selection
Those already acquainted with Urdu literature may be curious to know why I have chosen to include the writers that I have, and excluded others.
Every selection is bound to be determined by personal choice. I chose from the literature I know and have liked enough to want to translate. Urdu literature contains a great deal more than I have read, and I do not doubt that there are things which, if I had read them, I might have liked as much or more than the things I have included here.
Chronologically the selection ends in the early twentieth century, with the short story writers of the Progressive Writers Association. I decided not to go further, nor have I included any twentieth-century poetry, knowing that once readers’ interest has been stimulated, it is twentieth-century writers that they will most easily find in good translations.
More importantly, my selection has been limited to work which is not only good, but is likely to appeal to an audience encountering Urdu literature for the first time. The tastes of such an audience are bound to be more circumscribed than
of those who can read Urdu, who have grown up with its literature since childhood, and to whom its conventions present no problems. I have deliberately excluded those genres, and the work of those writers, which could only be made intelligible to English speakers by the introduction of an amount of explanatory matter so great as to scare them away. For these reasons I have not included the marsiyas of Anis, which I greatly admire, or extracts from the novels and other writings of Nazir Ahmad, whose vivid, magnificent Urdu prose far surpasses that of any other nineteenth-century writer and affords me some of my favourite reading.
I expect that most Muslim readers will particularly regret my omission of anything from the poet Iqbal. But Iqbal is above all a Muslim poet, and makes his most powerful appeal to his fellow Muslims. Many readers of this book may be non-Muslims, and though (as I have shown in The Pursuit of Urdu Literature) if his message is fully understood it can be valid for all humankind, the specifically Muslim form of its delivery is a barrier between him and the non-Muslim reader.
Other important writers have been omitted for a different reason. Readers who are encountering Urdu literature for the first time will be able to estimate its worth more easily if they are given substantial extracts from a relatively small number of the best writers than if they had been presented with a larger number in necessarily much smaller selections. That is why I present the ghazal through the poetry of Mir and Ghalib alone; it is not that I am unaware that there are other ghazal poets of the first rank. For similar reasons, I have chosen to represent the early novel by a long extract from Rusva’s Umrao Jan Ada rather than by many shorter extracts from the work of other novelists. And those who compare my translations with the originals will see that I have occasionally abridged some passages, and transposed others where a different order is helpful to the English reader.
I hope that this selection will meet the needs and stimulate the interest of a wide variety of readers. The poet Ghalib talks, in one of his ghazals, about
… the music of His secrets
Hidden no more than melody is hidden in the lute
I like to think of the ‘melody’ as the charm of Urdu literature, and the ‘lute’ as the language in which it was written. I hope that in doing these translations I have played the lute in a way which reveals the melody and enables you to enjoy it.
RALPH RUSSELL
Ralph Russell (1918–2008) has been widely recognized as the greatest western scholar of Urdu. Khushwant Singh described him as ‘the most revered name of interpreters of Ghalib’s life and works’. He headed the Urdu department at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London for thirty years, and was a popular visiting scholar in India and Pakistan. His unusual skill as a translator and his insightful writing have opened up an appreciation of Urdu literature to a wide range of readers. His books include The Pursuit of Urdu Literature:A Select History (1992), How Not to Write the History of Urdu Literature: and Other Essays on Urdu and Islam (1999) and The Oxford India Ghalib: Life, Letters and Ghazals (2003) among others.
Marion Molteno is a prize-winning novelist. She is the literary executor for Ralph Russell. She has edited several of his books, including his autobiography and his introduction to Ghalib’s ghazals, The Famous Ghalib:The Sound of My Moving Pen (2015). Her latest novel, Uncertain Light (2015) has been published by Speaking Tiger.
Praise for Hidden in the Lute:An Anthology of Two Centuries of Urdu Literature
The most comprehensive anthology of its kind in English. It will certainly be of great help to non-Urdu readers, in India and elsewhere, who desire a preliminary yet clearly focused understanding of Urdu literature and the values, the milieu, and the ethos that inform it.
—Mohammed Asaduddin
Indian Review of Books
No one in the West today speaks with such authority about Urdu or is better able to communicate its pleasures to those who do not read the language.
—Francis Robinson
Times Literary Supplement
With Russell’s almost unparalleled skill as a translator from Urdu, this eclectic, wide-ranging anthology succeeds not only in casting light on Russell’s own tastes, but also in supplying some core texts for new enthusiasts of the language’s heritage, and for students of history.
—Aamer Hussain
Times Higher Education Supplement
An exceptional introduction to Urdu literature organized by styles and with many very appropriate explanations of the Indo-Pakistani culture, biography and times of the authors and their relevance. Written in a pleasant, but not simplistic style, it is highly recommended for those who like me want to learn more about this literary work.
—Renata
Reader’s review on Goodreads.com
My love, I cannot tell the tale of all the things I want from you.
A hundred longings fill my soul, a thousand yearnings throng my heart.
kya kahiye rakhein hain hum tujhse, yaar khvaahish
yak jaan, sad tamanna—yak dil hazaar khvaahish
—Mir
Contents
Ralph Russell and Urdu Literature: Foreword by Marion Molteno
Introduction
SHORT STORIES AND SKETCHES
Prem Chand: A Wife’s Complaint
Ismat Chughtai: Tiny’s Granny
Rashid Jahan: Behind the Veil
Krishan Chander: Kalu Bhangi
Saadat Hasan Manto: The Black Shalwar
Shaukat Thanavi: Love and Prudence
Ismat Chughtai: Hellbound
POPULAR LITERATURE
Outwitting the Powerful
Akbar and Birbal
Mullah Dopiaza
Shaikh Chilli
Tales of Famous Men
The Creation of Adam and the Loss of Paradise
Sikandar, Khizar and the Water of Life
Khwaja Hasan Nizami: Guests are Pests
LOVE POETRY:
THE GHAZALS OF MIR AND GHALIB
Hasrat Mohani and Momin: Lovers’ Meetings
Mir: The Ideal Ghazal Lover
Ghalib’s More Nuanced View of Love
Mystic Love
The Challenge to Orthodoxy
The Humanist Values of the Ghazal
God and Humankind
The Poet in Society
Ghalib’s Personal Philosophy
Images and Allusions
Eleven Ghazals of Ghalib
A Living Tradition
THE LIVES OF POETS
Muhammad Husain Azad: Nasikh: Portrait of a Poet
Abdul Halim Sharar: The King and the Singer
Farhatullah Beg: A Memorable Delhi Mushaira
Altaf Husain Hali: A Memoir of Ghalib
Ghalib: Letters
THE ‘NEW LIGHT’:
RESPONDING TO SOCIAL CHANGE
Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Aligarh Movement
Akbar Ilahabadi: Satire in a Changing Society
THE NOVEL
Rusva: Umrao Jan Ada
EDITOR’S NOTES
Urdu Pronunciation
Further Reading
Ralph Russell and Urdu Literature
Foreword by Marion Molteno
The book you are about to read is the work of an Englishman who became an eminent scholar and translator of Urdu. He felt that his close engagement with Urdu speakers and their literature had immeasurably enriched his life. So he directed his considerable intellect and energy to sharing what he had learnt by teaching and translating Urdu literature to make it accessible to people who didn’t know the language.
Ralph Russell was born in 1918, at the end of the First World War, and died at the age of 90 in 2008, when the world had changed almost unrecognizably from the one he had grown up in. Throughout his long life he was continually reading, thinking, writing, making new friends and cherishing old ones, always keen to understand how others saw the world. He was an easy communicator: warm, relaxed, open to people of all kinds. Until a month before his death he was still teaching,
advising others, and writing further chapters of his autobiography.
His first encounter with Urdu was—to say the least—unusual. During the Second World War, as a young man of 22 just out of university, he was conscripted and sent to serve on an attachment to the Indian Army. He had been a communist since the age of sixteen and was a passionate believer in the cause of Indian independence. Urdu was the army’s language of communication, and from his first days in India he applied himself to learning it as well as possible, so that he could get to know the people among whom he would be living. His unit was sent to Assam to supervise the building of a road to the Burma border, and in this remote area, cut off from civilian life, he spent the war years in the company of the hundred Indian sepoys in his unit. Most were from South India but they all used Urdu to communicate. The British officers around him knew little Urdu, relying on their Indian subordinates to interpret. Ralph picked up the language fairly quickly, and freely talked with the men about things which the authorities would have regarded as highly subversive. He taught himself to read, practising on leaflets from the Communist Party of India and translations of the works of Lenin.
This experience changed the direction of his life. When the war was over he was sent back to the UK, but looked for a way to maintain his connection with India. He got a scholarship to study Urdu at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, with the possibility—if he did well enough—of becoming a lecturer. He describes the shock of discovering how difficult he found Urdu literature in his autobiography. It involved a huge leap in vocabulary from the kind of conversational Urdu he had acquired. Its literary forms were strange to him, particularly the poetry. Later he wrote about his personal journey in getting past this strangeness, in an article called The Pursuit of the Urdu Ghazal. Eventually he came to not only appreciate the ghazal, but felt a close identification with it.
Even before studying Urdu he was well read in other languages. He had studied classical Latin and Greek, and read French, Russian and several other European literatures in translation. But Urdu was not just another language, it had grown out of a culture very different from his own. Some of that culture was familiar to him from his years in India, but the literature he encountered at university took him to another level. He learnt to see from the point of view of people who had been formed by a different society, in different times. It became his pleasure to constantly extend his understanding—to learn from Urdu speakers how they understood a particular verse of poetry or a piece of prose. Then he would translate and interpret it, hoping to share with others what he had learnt.
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