Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and Its Critics / Edition 1

by Frances W. Pritchett

Overview

Frances Pritchett's lively, compassionate book joins literary criticism with history to explain how Urdu poetry—long the pride of Indo-Muslim culture—became devalued in the second half of the nineteenth century.

This abrupt shift, Pritchett argues, was part of the backlash following the violent Indian Mutiny of 1857. She uses the lives and writings of the distinguished poets and critics Azad and Hali to show the disastrous consequences—culturally and politically—of British rule. The British had science, urban planning—and Wordsworth. Azad and Hali had a discredited culture and a metaphysical, sexually ambiguous poetry that differed radically from English lyric forms.

Pritchett's beautiful reconstruction of the classical Urdu poetic vision allows us to understand one of the world's richest literary traditions and also highlights the damaging potential of colonialism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520083868
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	05/09/1994
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Frances W. Pritchett is Associate Professor of Modern Indic Languages at Columbia University.

Read an Excerpt

Nets of Awareness

Urdu Poetry and Its Critics

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By Frances W. Pritchett

University of California Press

Copyright © 1994 Frances W. Pritchett
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520083868

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The Lost World

By the late eighteenth century, the once-mighty Mughal Empire was in rapid political decline. The magnificent Red Fort itself had been sacked over and over by a series of plunderers: first by Nādir Shāh and his Persians (1739), who carried off the famous Peacock Throne; then by Ahmad Shāh Abdālī and his Afghans (1757); and finally by Ġhulām Qādir and his Rohillas (1788), who not only despoiled the library but even dug up the palace floors looking for concealed valuables. Toward the end of this period the unfortunate emperor Shāh ‘ālam II (r. 1759-1806), Aurangzeb’s great-great-grandson, had much to endure. He was crowned while a fugitive in Bihar, and did not even manage to return to Delhi until 1772. His political impotence became proverbial; as the saying went, “The realm of Shāh ‘ālam—from Delhi to Palam.”1 The emperor knew humiliation, helplessness, and actual poverty. He was “only a chessboard king” (253).

At length he accepted the Marathas as his protectors, and from 1785 to 1803 they were the real power behind his throne. Even then, though, histribulations were not over. For when the brutal Ġhulām Qādir seized the city in 1788, he was outraged at finding so small an amount of loot—and had Shāh ‘ālam blinded. The Marathas later came to the rescue, retook the city, and restored the blind emperor to his nominal throne. But gradually, amidst the military and political turbulence of the period, the British gained the upper hand over the Marathas; finally, in 1803, Lord Lake took Delhi. For the first time in decades, stability returned to the city. The new conquerors, like the old, valued the Mughal dynasty for its time-honored legitimating power, its continuing hold on the Indian imagination. The British kept Shāh ‘ālam II on the throne until his death three years later, at the age of seventy-nine.2

Despite Shāh ‘ālam’s legal sovereignty, his throne rested uncertainly on layers of nostalgia and remembered glory. He himself as an “emperor” was hopelessly vulnerable. But he had another calling as well: he was a serious poet, as well as a notable connoisseur and patron of poetry. Toward the end of his life, poetry became his chief pursuit. And as a poet, he could feel an unchallengeable pride and confidence. He came from a tradition that knew itself as the center of its cultural world—and knew that its cultural world was the only one that counted. For he wrote in the beautiful court language, Persian, and took full advantage of its rich classical literature and its sophisticated, highly developed array of genres. As Persian poets had done for centuries, he often composed in the brief, intense lyric genre of ghazal (Ġhazal), with its endless romantic and mystical possibilities. And as Persian poets had also done for centuries, he chose a personal pen name (takhallus), which he incorporated into the last verse of each ghazal: he called himself “āftāb” (Sun).

Moreover, as North Indian poets had been doing since at least the beginning of the eighteenth century, he composed ghazals not only in Persian, but also in Urdu. Urdu, while still resting firmly on its Indic grammatical and lexical base, was steadily enlarging its repertoire of Persian genres and imagery. As a literary language, Urdu was absorbing almost everything that Indians loved in Persian—so that it was in fact gradually supplanting Persian. Thus it is not surprising that when Shāh ‘ālam II wrote in Urdu, he, like most poets, used the same pen name as he did for his Persian verse. When he composed poetry in the Indic literary language of Braj Bhasha, however, he used a different pen name: his own title “Shāh ‘ālam” (Ruler of the World). He was also fluent in Panjabi, and is said to have known Arabic, Sanskrit, and Turkish. During his reign “the Red Fort once again became a center of literary enthusiasm.”3 It was the scene of frequent mushairahs (mushā‘irah), or poetry recitation sessions.

Shāh ‘ālam’s eldest son, Javān Bakht, shared his love for poetry. “This exalted prince was so inclined toward poetry that he arranged for mushairahs to be held twice a month in his apartments; he used to send his own mace-bearer to escort the distinguished poets on the day of the mushairah, and encouraged everyone by showing the greatest kindness and favor.”4 Javān Bakht, however, died young. When Shāh ‘ālam himself died, the British installed his second son on the throne as Akbar Shāh II (r. 1806-1837). Akbar Shāh composed poetry only casually, because it was the thing to do; playing on his father’s pen name, he called himself “Shu‘ā” (Ray). But the new heir apparent, Akbar Shāh’s son Bahādur Shāh (1775-1862), vigorously sustained the family poetic tradition: he brought poets into the Red Fort, held mushairahs, and pursued his own strong literary interests.5

Bahādur Shāh was a very serious poet. The famous pen name he chose for himself, “Zafar” (Victory), was actually part of his given name, Abū Zafar Sirāj ud-Dīn Muhammad Bahādur Shāh. His mother, Lāl Bā’ī, was a Hindu. Bahādur Shāh had been educated entirely within the Red Fort, under his grandfather’s supervision, and had mastered not only Urdu and Persian but Braj Bhasha and Panjabi as well; he composed a volume (dīvān) of poetry in each of these four languages. Like his grandfather, he used two separate pen names: “Zafar” for poetry in Urdu and Persian, “Shauq Rang” (Passionate) for the rest of his verse.6

When Akbar Shāh II died, Bahādur Shāh, who was sixty-two years old at the time, duly replaced him on the throne—a throne behind which the British were definitely the real power. The new emperor Bahādur Shāh II (r. 1837-1857) was a man of parts: he studied not only poetry but mystical philosophy as well, and practiced calligraphy, pigeon flying, swordsmanship, horse breeding, riding, and other aristocratic arts. While his dress and most of his tastes were simple and dignified, he enjoyed the company of women: he was much influenced by his favorite wives, and continued to marry an occasional new one even into his sixties and seventies. Living on a fixed British pension, he nevertheless had royal traditions of largesse to uphold, as well as many relatives and dependents to support, so that he was hard-pressed for funds; he used every possible means to increase his income, and his financial affairs were always in disarray.7 He certainly felt the difficulty of his position—and sometimes wittily used it as a source of poetic imagery. As he wrote in one of his poems, “Whoever enters this gloomy palace/Is a prisoner for life in European captivity.”8

Bahādur Shāh was a man of “cultured and upright character,” who as a “philosophic prince” could have “adorned any court,” and whose “interests and tastes were primarily literary and aesthetic.” The British certainly viewed him with less and less respect over time; yet, as Percival Spear argues, a large part of their disdain was a function of their own increasingly limited, utilitarian outlook on life. The emperor was “a poet, and so could expect no more consideration than the same men gave to Shelley or Byron or Keats.” But since the emperor was so much loved and esteemed in India, motives of prudence kept British disdain in check.9 Even when the physical power of the Mughal emperor was close to nonexistent, his symbolic power as a cultural icon was a force to be reckoned with. As the governor general put it in 1819, the British should seek to avoid any behavior that “might be misinterpreted into a wanton oppression of a dignified tho’ unfortunate Family.”10

Even as the emperor’s royal prerogatives slowly eroded, the decline was managed for the most part with decorum: the hostile British Resident Hawkins, who made a point of violating court etiquette, was soon sent home. “After this, in the deft hands of William Fraser and then Thomas Metcalfe, even the gradual withdrawal of British recognition of the imperial status was smoothed by dignified deference.”11 C. F. Andrews makes a similar point: although “real power passed more and more, every year, into the hands of the English,” nevertheless since “the English were, throughout this whole period, very few in numbers,” and since they “did not interfere more than they could possibly help,” the result was a kind of “dual control” that was “not altogether disturbing.”12 Peter Hardy notes that in studying the period “one is impressed by how little in feeling and in style of life the educated classes of upper India were touched by the British presence before 1857.”13 As Azad later put it, “Those were the days when if a European was seen in Delhi, people considered him an extraordinary sample of God’s handiwork, and pointed him out to each other: ‘Look, there goes a European!’ ”14

Narayani Gupta describes a lively Hindu-Muslim cultural life—conducted entirely in Urdu, by people who had consciously chosen not to learn English. The father of the great Urdu novelist Nażīr Ahmad (1836-1912) went so far as to tell the boy he would rather see him dead than learning English. As the recently founded (1825) Delhi College developed, not its English section but its Urdu-medium “Oriental” one flourished—and showed itself especially zealous in pursuing the new Western sciences.15

Spear characterizes this period, especially the second quarter of the nineteenth century when the “English Peace” was well established, as a time of prosperity, confidence, urban growth, and religious and cultural harmony. “The Court was the cultural centre, the Hindus dominated the commercial life and the British conducted the administration”; daily life was a matter of mutual accommodation and shared festivals, with “much interchange of civilities and much give and take.” Spear paints an almost (though not quite) idyllic picture: “Old and new for a time met together in the short-lived Delhi Renaissance.”16 C. F. Andrews agrees: the “impact from the West” in fact “led to a cultural renaissance which proceeded remarkably from within.”17 This Delhi Renaissance was rich in the arts, and extraordinarily influential. Lucknow, untouched by the kind of repeated plundering that Delhi had endured, was a great magnet and center of patronage; but Delhi, as the last Mughal capital, had a special nostalgic appeal. The court was “the school of manners for India” and “a cultural influence of great value”; its prestige and patronage made it “the natural centre of all the arts and crafts.”18 Urdu poetry was widely and seriously cultivated: there were not only frequent mushairahs at the Red Fort, but also weekly ones held on the Delhi College premises,19 as well as numerous privately sponsored ones. When it came to poets, Bahādur Shāh’s circle included, besides himself, one great poet, several major ones, and literally dozens of highly competent minor poets.

The great poet, Mirzā Asadullāh Khān (1797-1869), who used the pen name “Ġhālib” (Victorious), is now universally recognized as either the first or second greatest classical ghazal poet of Urdu; his reputation is rivaled only by that of Mīr Taqī “Mīr” (c. 1722-1810). Ġhālib came of Turkish stock, and was always proud of his family’s military tradition: his father had died fighting in the raja of Alwar’s army, while his uncle Nasrullāh Beg had been in the service of the Marathas and then in 1803, when the British took Delhi, had become a commander under Lord Lake. The British pension inherited on this uncle’s death was the mainstay of Ġhālib’s finances throughout most of his life. He was raised in Agra by his mother’s well-off and aristocratic family. At the age of eleven he began writing Persian poetry; he had already, according to his own account, been writing in Urdu for some time. When he was thirteen he was married—by family arrangement, as was customary—to a girl from a wealthy and socially elite background; a year or two later he settled in Delhi, which became his home for the rest of his life.20

Ġhālib’s life in Delhi was firmly grounded in the aristocratic Persianized culture surrounding the court. He always knew who he was, and knew his own worth as a poet; despite his lifelong financial and personal vicissitudes, neither his confidence nor his sense of humor ever really failed him. His complex, metaphysical, “difficult” poetry, however disturbing to conventional tastes, was arresting and undeniably powerful; even during his lifetime he began, so to speak, to be Ġhālib.

But he also had many friends in the British administration, including the Resident John Fraser. He made a two-year journey to Calcutta and took a strong interest in the English influence on view there—including newspapers, as yet unknown in Delhi. (Although he knew neither English nor Bengali, Persian served as an effective link language.) And he certainly thought the Emperor Akbar’s administrative style inferior to that of the English, as he made clear on one occasion to the great reformer Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khān (1817-1898).21

Ġhālib met the new culture on his own terms and tried throughout his life to make it behave like the old. In some respects, of course, it obliged him. The elaborate etiquette of English ceremonial gatherings was directly borrowed from that of the Mughal court, and Ġhālib set considerable store by it: “In the Government durbars I occupy the tenth place to the right, and the marks of honour prescribed for me comprise a ceremonial robe, seven gifts of cloth, a turban with an embroidered velvet band and jewelled gold ornament to wear in it, a string of pearls and a cloak.”22 Such feudal honors were as consciously manipulated by the English as they had always been by the Mughals.23

Ġhālib tried to extend his aristocratic status into more modern realms as well. In 1842 he was invited to be interviewed for the newly created post of Persian professor at Delhi College. A famous anecdote gives a vivid picture of Ġhālib’s arrival, in his palanquin, for the interview. He alighted, but refused to enter the building until Mr. Thomason, the secretary, appeared and gave him the formal welcome to which his aristocratic rank entitled him. Time passed. Finally, Mr. Thomason came out to try to resolve the situation:

[Mr. Thomason] came out personally and explained that a formal welcome was appropriate when he attended the Governor’s durbar, but not in the present case, when he came as a candidate for employment. Ghalib replied, “I contemplated taking a government appointment in the expectation that this would bring me greater honours than I now receive, not a reduction in those already accorded me.” The Secretary replied, “I am bound by regulations.” “Then I hope that you will excuse me,” Ghalib said, and came away.24

Despite his poverty and indebtedness, Ġhālib made the grand gesture with a flourish. Honor was honor, it was clear where it lay, and that was the end of the matter.

Ġhālib tried again and again to teach the new regime manners, especially when it came to the vital question of patronage. He reminded the English that poetry was a uniquely potent art, conferring immortal fame not only on its creators, but also on the patrons whose generosity it celebrated. In 1856 he composed a Persian ode (qasīdah) to Queen Victoria, and forwarded it to London through Lord Ellenborough. But he then received a bureaucratic letter suggesting “that the petitioner, in respect to the norms of administrative procedure, should channel his petition through the administrator in India.” He therefore sent his ode again, through the proper channels, along with a letter in which he politely reminded the queen of the well-known and long-established duty that sovereigns owed to poets. (It was indeed a long-established one: more than five centuries earlier, the Indo-Persian poet Amīr “Khusrau” (1253-1325) had used exactly the same line of argument on one of his own patrons.)25 Ġhālib pointed out to Queen Victoria that since great kings had customarily “rewarded their poets and well-wishers by filling their mouths with pearls, weighing them in gold and granting them villages and recompense, the exalted queen should bestow upon Ghalib, the petitioner, the title of Mihr-Khwan, and present him with the robe of honour and a few crumbs from her bounteous table—that is, in English, a ‘pension.’ ” He was eagerly awaiting a response—but by then it was 1857.26

The natural source of patronage for Ġhālib would have been the Red Fort. Poets were so much a part of Persianized court life that they often became intimate “boon companions” to the king; in some cases they became “part of the royal paraphernalia” and changed hands along with the throne.27 Ġhālib indeed found some support from the court, though never what he needed and felt he deserved. In 1850 he wrote to Bahādur Shāh:

I swear that you too must feel pride in the great kindness of fortune, that you possess a slave like Ghalib, whose song has all the power of fire. Turn your attention to me as my skill demands, and you will treasure me as the apple of your eye and open your heart for me to enter in.…And why talk of the poets of the Emperor Akbar’s day? My presence bears witness that your age excels his.28

The absolute, passionate confidence of Ġhālib’s claim has no bombast in it. He speaks with the impatient certainty of one who knows beyond doubt both what his craft is worth, and what he is worth as a master craftsman.

But although Ġhālib had many admirers and shagirds (shāgird), pupils who studied poetry under his guidance, Bahādur Shāh Zafar was not inclined to be one of them. Like any other serious poet, Zafar made his own choice of a master or ustad (ustād), who would criticize and correct his verses; apprenticeship was, in poetry as in other arts and crafts, the accepted way to acquire a skill. Zafar’s first ustad was Shāh Nasīr ud-Din “Nasīr” (Helper) (d. 1838), who was more or less Zafar’s contemporary and an important poet in his own right. At the middle and end of every month Shāh Nasīr sponsored mushairahs, some of which were notorious for the complicated meter and rhyme patterns (tarah) assigned to be used in the poems recited. Around 1803, however, Shāh Nasīr left Delhi for the Deccan. Zafar then briefly named as his ustad ‘Izzatullāh “‘Ishq” (Love); and after him Mīr Kāzim Husain “Beqarār” (Restless), a shagird of Shāh Nasīr; Beqarār eventually resigned to become Lord Elphinstone’s chief secretary. Zafar’s true ustad was Beqarār’s replacement, the major poet Shaikh Ibrāhīm “Żauq” (Taste) (c. 1788-1854), who had also been a shagird of Shāh Nasīr. Żauq and Zafar developed such a satisfactory relationship that it remained firm for four decades.29 Ġhālib, by contrast, received only a minor token of royal favor: he was commissioned to compose, in Persian, a Mughal dynastic history—a task he found tedious and uninspiring.30

Only when Żauq died in 1854 did Zafar finally appoint Ġhālib, the obvious choice, to fill the prestigious post of royal ustad. Zafar seems to have done this somewhat grudgingly, and Ġhālib accepted only because he needed the pension that went with the job.31 Though he was proud of his position at court—“The Emperor loved me like one of his sons”—Ġhālib complained that the pension was “tiny.”32

While we know a great deal from many sources about the lives of major figures like Żauq and Ġhālib, we know relatively little about their hundreds of less famous contemporaries. Most of our information about minor poets comes from the tazkirahs (tażkirah), traditional anthologies of poetry. One especially interesting and comprehensive tazkirah, The Garden of Poetry (1855) by Mirzā Qādir Bakhsh “Sābir” (Patient),33 lists among its 540 contemporary poets no fewer than fifty princes related to Zafar. Such royal relatives were usually dilettantes rather than serious poets; their sheer numbers show how socially correct it was in their world to affect literary tastes. An interest in Urdu language and literature had even come to be considered a hallmark of the city itself: “Anyone who had not lived in Delhi could never be considered a real knower of Urdu, as if the steps of the Jāma‘ Masjid were a school of language,” as Maulvī ‘Abd ul-Haq put it. In Delhi poetry “was discussed in every house,” for “the emperor himself was a poet and a connoisseur of poetry” and “the language of the Exalted Fort was the essence of refinement.”34

The Garden of Poetry includes fifty-three Delhi poets who seem fromtheir names to be Hindus (mostly Kayasths and Kashmiri Brahmans)and describes a scattering of poets from unexpected walks of life: “Pairā”(Adorner), a poor water-seller in Chandni Chauk; “Sharīr” (Naughty), a merchant in Panjabi Katra; “Zirġhām” (Lion), a young wrestler; “Zarāfat” (Wit), a lady with a colorful past who had now settled into respectability; “Banno” (Girl), a courtesan, who had caught the taste for poetry from her lover, one Gulāb Singh; “Fassād” (Cupper), a barber who was inspired by the company of Shāh Nasīr; “Farāso,” a Western protégé of Begam Samrū; and others.35

Sābir treated the poet Zafar, however, as a special case, for he was also the Emperor Bahādur Shāh, “refuge of both worlds, for whom angels do battle, ruler of time and space, lord of crown and seal…at whose command which is the twin of Fate, the revolution of the sky is established.” His literary powers were equally exalted: “Mazmūns [themes]36 of submission in his poetry are equal in rank to pride and coquetry,” and “the radiance of meaning [ma‘nī] is manifest through his words.” For when it comes to poetry, not only words but even the very letters that embody them on paper are magically potent:

The sequences of lines, through the reflection of mazmūns, are lamp-wicks for the bedchamber of the page. The circular letters, through the effect of meaning (ma‘nī), are the wine-mark on the flagon in the festive gathering of pages. The colorfulness of festive meaning is the glistening of wine; in martial verses, the wetness of the ink is blood and perspiration. In mystical verses, the circular letters are seeing eyes; and in romantic verses, tear-shedding eyes. And in spring-related verses, [the decorations] between the lines are flowerbeds; and in sky-related verses, the Milky Way. The breath, through the floweringness of the words, is the garden breeze; and vision, through the freshness of the writing, is the vein of the jasmine. The line (misra‘) has the stature of a cypress; the verse is the eyebrow of the beautiful ones of Khallukh and Naushad.

In short, the emperor’s poetry deserves praise so endless that if “the messenger of Thought” ran for a thousand years, it would still only cover as much distance as “the footprint of a weak ant” by comparison. For, as Sābir puns, “from the East/opening verse (matla‘) to the West/closing verse (maqta‘) is the excursion ground of that Sun whose domes are the skies.”37 In principle, the emperor was still the center of the universe, just as his ancestors, with their vast domains and absolute powers, had always been.

Not surprisingly, literary people flocked to the court of such an impressive poet-emperor, seeking both learning and patronage. During the period of the Delhi Renaissance two remarkable young men studied in Delhi: Muhammad Husain, who chose for himself the pen name “Āzād” (Free), and Altāf Husain, who first called himself “Khastah” (Worn Out) but later changed his pen name, very possibly at Ġhālib’s suggestion, to “Hālī” (Contemporary). The power that these two came to exercise over Urdu literature and criticism has been unequaled ever since.

Muhammad Husain Azad was the older of the two. He was born in Delhi, in 1830; his mother Amānī Begam, who came from a Persian émigré family, died when he was only three or four years old. His father, Maulvī Muhammad Bāqir (c. 1810-1857), who also came from a family of learned Persian émigrés, was a man of versatile talents and played a significant role in the cultural life of his day. Educated at the newly founded Delhi College, Maulvī Muhammad Bāqir stayed on for a time as a teacher; but he found the salary too low. He then for many years held a series of administrative positions on the collector’s staff, while also erecting a market for foreign merchants, a mosque, and a Shī‘a religious hall (imāmbārah) in which he himself sometimes preached. In addition, he involved himself in prolonged and acrimonious Shī‘ite religious controversies.

And as if all this were not enough, he also bought a lithograph press, and in early 1837 launched the Dihlī Urdū Akhbār (Delhi Urdu Newspaper), probably the first Urdu newspaper in North India.38 The Dihlī Urdū Akhbār had, like almost all newspapers of the period, an extremely limited circulation (69 subscribers in 1844, 79 in 1848). It followed a dexterously balanced political line. In a general way it was solidly pro-British, but particular instances of official injustice, corruption, or other wrongdoing came in for criticism. And although it reported—and deplored—many cases of flagrant misgovernment by Indian rulers, including Bahādur Shāh, these were almost always ascribed to the machinations of (evil) courtiers who pulled the wool over a (good) king’s eyes.39

Around 1845 Maulvī Muhammad Bāqir enrolled his only son in Delhi College. Muhammad Husain did well there. He was enrolled in the Urdu-medium “Oriental” section, which offered Arabic and Persian rather than English. In both 1848 and 1849 his Urdu essays won prizes; these essays, as his teachers noted, showed the good effects of his family background in newspaper work.40 At some point during these years his family arranged his marriage to āĠhā’ī Begam, the daughter of another Persian émigré family. After completing Delhi College’s eight-year curriculum, Muhammad Husain graduated, probably in 1854. He had started to assist his father in his newspaper work, and in the 1850s his name appears as “printer and publisher” of books produced by the Dihlī Urdū Akhbār Press. He continued with this work until 1857.41

Muhammad Husain Azad later claimed that throughout his childhood and youth he had spent a great deal of time with the poet Żauq, the royal ustad, who was a close friend of his father’s. He claimed Żauq as his own ustad—although at this early stage in his life Azad went to few mushairahs and wrote almost no poetry. He claimed to have been especially intimate with Żauq, and to have received many confidences from him. It seems probable that he had a considerable amount of contact with Żauq, but we have only his word for the nature and intensity of their relationship. His most painstaking and fair-minded biographer, Aslam Farrukhī, speaks of his “Żauq worship.”42 Azad certainly exaggerated at times: he claimed, for example, to have sat constantly at Żauq’s feet, absorbing both “outer” and “inner” (that is, mystical) wisdom, for “twenty years.”43 Azad made even more extravagant assertions as well. He claimed that under Żauq’s direction he had read, and made abridgements from, no fewer than 350 volumes of the work of classical poets; later the figure somehow became 750! These claims are quite impossible to accept, though they certainly show the kind of classical literary study Azad most admired.44

Żauq’s death in 1854 must have been a heavy blow. But Azad eventually undertook a project that offered consolation: the editing of Żauq’s ghazals for publication. He planned to do this task slowly, carefully, and lovingly. Moreover, he pursued his own literary work. He took Hakīm āĠhā Jān “‘Aish” (Luxury) as his new ustad, in a working relationship that continued until 1857. Azad’s first known poem, a nineteen-verse “continuous ghazal” (Ġhazal-e musalsal), was published in the Dihlī Urdū Akhbār. The poem was a meditation on the fleetingness and untrustworthiness of life, and it was called “A History of Instructive Reversals.” It was published, with excellent timing, on May 24, 1857.45

Altāf Husain Hali, born in 1837, was seven years younger than Azad; he came from an old family in the famous town of Panipat, north of Delhi.46 Although he was orphaned at the age of nine, he had an affectionate older brother (an inspector of police, who also wrote Persian poetry) and two older sisters who looked after him. He was a bright and promising child, tremendously eager to learn, and was given a traditional basic education. His first teacher was a Hāfiz, someone who had memorized the whole Quran; Panipat was “famous for the number of its Hafizes,”47 and Hali too achieved this formidable feat. Then he began to learn Persian; along with the language, he studied the history, literature, and especially poetry of Iran—but he always described these studies as “elementary.” As he grew older, he himself took the initiative in arranging for an Arabic teacher, but his lessons ended before he had a chance to make as much progress as he wished. He was left unsatisfied: “Although the spontaneous passion for learning in my heart was unbounded, I never had the chance for a regular and continuing education.”48 What he longed for was the classical Persian and Arabic training of a traditional Indo-Muslim scholar.

His brother and sisters, however, had other plans for him. When he was seventeen years old, they arranged his marriage to a cousin, Islām un-Nisā, and thus inducted him into the ranks of adulthood. They then pressured him to find work and augment the family income, which was none too large. The young Altāf Husain was a dutiful boy, and everyone in the family made sure he saw his duty clearly. Altāf Husain’s scholarly aspirations were obviously destined to wither on the vine. Given the circumstances, the time and place and culture in which he lived, this was a foregone conclusion.

Altāf Husain, however, then did the only truly astonishing, defiant, flagrant deed in his long, sober, impeccable life. He waited for a night when his new bride was at her parents’ house—and he slipped away. He was not yet eighteen, and had never been anywhere. Yet without hesitation he simply ran away from home. Hali himself, years later, gave his own account of this event: his relatives had “forced” him to marry, and unfortunately this “yoke that was placed upon my shoulders” meant that “apparently now the doors of education were closed on every side.” He took flight, and never apologized for it: “Everyone wanted me to look for a job, but my passion for learning prevailed.” Besides, he added in extenuation, “my wife’s family was comfortably off.”49

Penniless, traveling alone for greater anonymity, he set out to walk the fifty-three miles to Delhi. Even after he arrived, he was sometimes homeless, and so often hungry that his health was affected. But he was able to slake his thirst for knowledge. In later years, far from having regrets, he looked back nostalgically on this time: “I saw with my own eyes this last brilliant glow of Delhi, the thought of which makes my heart crack with regret.”50

In Delhi, he studied Arabic language and literature, including poetry and meter, at a flourishing, “very spacious and beautiful” traditional school (madrasah), the Madrasah of Husain Bakhsh.51 Many years later he described his cultural background at the time.

Although the old Delhi College was then in all its glory, I’d been brought up in a society that believed that learning was based only on knowledge of Arabic and Persian. Especially in the Panipat area, first of all nobody even thought about English education, and if people had any opinion about it at all it was as a means of getting a government job, not of acquiring any kind of knowledge. On the contrary, in fact: our religious teachers called the English schools barbarous. When I arrived in Delhi, at the school in which I had to live night and day, all the teachers and students considered graduates of the college nothing but barbarians.

Hali regretted that during his year and a half in Delhi he hadn’t even gone to look at Delhi College, and had never chanced to meet his distinguished contemporaries who were being educated there. He named three in particular: the great teacher and translator Maulvī Żakā’ullāh (1836-1907?), the famous novelist Nażīr Ahmad, and Muhammad Husain Azad.52

If he failed to meet his peers, he lost no time in seeking out the greatest of his elders: he often went to visit Ġhālib, and persuaded him to explain difficult passages in his Urdu and Persian poetry. Treating Ġhālib as an ustad, he showed him his own earliest ghazals. Ġhālib is said to have duly given him islāH, “correction,” as an ustad should, and to have encouraged him to persist with his writing. Unfortunately, none of this early poetry—written under the pen name of “Khastah”—has survived.

Hali lay low so successfully that for a year and a half his family had no idea at all where he was, or even whether he was alive or dead. There is no evidence that he would ever have voluntarily returned to them. But in 1855 they learned of his whereabouts, recaptured him, “compelled” him “forcibly, willy-nilly” (as he put it) to leave Delhi, and took him back to Panipat. He had the nerve to run away, but not the nerve to look his elders in the eye and defy them. So ended the great period of his education.

By 1856 Hali had an infant son, and he himself had recognized—or had been forced by family pressure to recognize—the need to find a job. He went alone to Hissar, without connections or references, and managed to get a position in the deputy collector’s office. The salary was small, but at least it would be steady. Hali did his work most conscientiously, and rapidly mastered the office routines. But by then it was 1857.53

1857—the end of this particular world. An upheaval like an earthquake, opening a chasm so deep that no one could see to the bottom. It was the end of the court, and thus a profound “break in cultural as well as political tradition.”54 As Andrews puts it, “The renaissance at Delhi gave a sudden illumination to the age.…Light flickered and leapt up for a brief moment before it died away.” But the light did not die of its own accord—Andrews is very clear about that. The light was killed. “More than any other single cause, the Mutiny killed it.”55

Notes

Palam, now the site of the Indira Gandhi International Airport, is on the outskirts of Delhi.

Percival Spear, The Oxford History of Modern India, 1740-1947 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1965), 37-43; Spear, Twilight of the Mughuls, 60.

Parvez, Bahādur Shāh Zafar, 272; see also 32, 344. Examples of āftāb’s Urdu ghazals appear on pp. 272 and 343.

Lutf, Gulshan-e hind, 72.

Parvez, Bahādur Shāh Zafar, 38, 276.

Ibid., 38, 344.

Ibid., 234-37, 75-76, 60-74.

Na‘im Ahmad, ed., Shahr āshob (Delhi: Maktabah Jāmi‘ah, 1968), 196. The word firang, used for Europeans, is a rendering of “Frank,” and qaid-e firang, “Frankish captivity,” was considered to be an especially harsh form of imprisonment. If given a mystical reading, the verse would refer to the wretched fate of everyone born into the world.

Spear, Twilight of the Mughuls, 72-73, 30.

Fisher, A Clash of Cultures, 146.

Spear, Twilight of the Mughuls, 78.

Andrews, Zaka Ullah of Delhi, 26-27.

Peter Hardy, “Ghalib and the British,” in Ghalib: The Poet and His Age, ed. Ralph Russell, 55.

Āzād, ed., Dīvān-e Żauq, 145.

Gupta, Delhi between Two Empires, 5-8.

Spear, Twilight of the Mughuls, 194-200.

Andrews, Zaka Ullah of Delhi, 10. Sadiq (Azad, 2) also accepts the term renaissance for this period. Maulvī ‘Abd ul-Haq (quoted in Farrukhī, Āzād, 1:43-44) presents a similar picture.

Spear, Twilight of the Mughuls, 82-83.

Gupta, Delhi between Two Empires, 5.

Russell and Islam, Ghalib, 23-27.

Ibid., 52-54, 49, 90-91.

Ibid., 219.

On the forms of this manipulation, see Bernard S. Cohn, “Cloth, Clothes, and Colonialism: India in the Nineteenth Century,” in Cloth and Human Experience, ed. A. B. Weiner and J. Schneider (New York: Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, 1989), 303-53.

Russell and Islam, Ghalib, 63. This anecdote is first told by Azad (487-88), and then repeated with minor changes by Hali in Yādgār-e Ġhālib, 28-29. Russell and Islam rely on Hali’s version.

Like Ġhālib, Khusrau listed a number of anecdotes about lavish royal generosity to poets, and emphasized the eternal fame that only poets can provide. See Mirza, Life and Works of Amir Khusrau, 108-12.

Ghalib, Dastanbuy, 48.

On the poet’s role as nadīm, see Meisami, Persian Court Poetry, 6-11. Amīr Khusrau (Life and Works of Amir Khusrau, 45, 78) used nadīmī to describe his own relationship with at least one patron.

Quoted in Russell and Islam, Ghalib, 73-74.

Parvez, Bahādur Shāh Zafar, 273, 278-85.

Russell and Islam, Ghalib, 71-75.

Ibid., 84.

Ġhālib, Khutūt, 1:373-74.

It has been argued that the actual author of this tazkirah was the poet Imām Bakhsh “Sahbā’ī.” For my purposes, the identity of the author is not important.

‘Abd ul-Haq, Marhūm Dihlī Kālij, 12-13.

Sābir, Gulistān-e sukhan, 157-58, 166, 286, 337, 344-45, 390, 385. On “Farāso,” see Husain, Bahadur Shah II, xli.

“Themes” is an umbrella term, a convenient starting point, but mazmūn is difficult to translate with precision and will be discussed at length in chap. 7.

Sābir, Gulistān-e sukhan, 345-46.

Imdād Sābrī, Urdū ke akhbār navīs (Delhi: Sābrī Academy, 1973), 1: 146-48; Sadiq, Azad, 3-8. Until late 1843 the editor of record of the Dihlī Urdū Akhbār was in fact Maulvī Muhammad Bāqir’s father, Maulvī Muhammad Akbar. The Dihlī Urdū Akhbār was probably the second Urdu newspaper in India: the first, a Persian-Urdu combination, had been started in Calcutta in 1822. But another was also started in 1837, and exact dates are hard to determine. For a detailed account of the available evidence, see Khan, A History of Urdu Journalism, 25-30, 65-73, 209-10.

Khan, A History of Urdu Journalism, 74-83. See also Khvājah Ahmad Fārūqī, ed., Dihlī Urdū Akhbār (Delhi: Shu‘bah-e Urdū, Delhi University, 1972), which reproduces selections from the paper for the year 1840.

‘Abd ul-Haq, Marhūm Dihlī Kālij, 45-46.

Farrukhī, Āzād, 1:80-82, 111; Khan, A History of Urdu Journalism, 71.

Farrukhī, Āzād, 1:93.

Āzād, Dīvān-e Żauq, 2; Farrukhī, Āzād, 1:88.

For a discussion and refutation of these claims, see “‘ābid” Peshāvarī, Żauq, 69-70. See also Farrukhī, Āzād, 2:284-85.

Farrukhī, Āzād, 1:94-98. The Urdu title of the poem was “Tārīkh-einqilāb-e ‘ibrat afzā.”

Some of Panipat’s historical and religious associations are discussed in Steele, “Hali and his Muqaddamah,” 2.

Leitner, History of Indigenous Education, part 2, 14.

Hālī, Kulliyāt-e nasr, 1:334.

Ibid.

Shujā‘at ‘Alī Sandīlvī, Hālī, 19.

Leitner, History of Indigenous Education, part 2, 2.

Hālī, Kulliyāt-e nasr, 1:335.

Ibid., 1:335-36.

Spear, Twilight of the Mughuls, 83.

Andrews, Zaka Ullah of Delhi, 66.

Continues...

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