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Urdu Literary Culture:
The Syncretic Tradition Shamsur Rahman
Faruqi
Urdu Literary Culture: The Syncretic
Tradition
Keynote Address,
Shibli Academy, Azamgarh
December 17, 2008
Of all
modern Indian languages, Urdu presents the most complete instance of
syncretism. This has been vaguely known, occasionally acknowledged, but
rarely discussed in scholarly environments.
Although
it is not usually necessary for a language to” explain" or "defend" its
national character, political and cultural circumstances have conspired,
since the middle of the 19th century, to construct a "non-Indian"
character for Urdu, so that Urdu may not be allowed to take its rightful
place in the comity of languages.
As early
as 1864, we find Rajinder Lal Mitter bringing the script of Urdu in
question, and asserting that the Nagari script was inherently superior
to the Urdu script. And if the script was inferior, it followed that the
language too was inferior. Later in that century, the Urdu script was
reviled as "foreign" and "conducive to fraud". The debate raged stronger
during the last years of the 19thcentury
by which time modern Hindi was widely represented as the proper medium
for the expression of India (=Hindu)consciousness. The slogan
Hindi-Hindu-Hindustani became rallying cry for the Hindi enthusiasts.
This undermined the position of Urdu by the clear implication: What was
not Hindi was not Hindustani (=Indian) either. Some Muslim authors also
muddied the waters around that time by writing as if Urdu was
an exclusively Muslim domain and no Hindu, or for that matter, any
non-Muslim writer in Urdu deserved a place in the Urdu canon. Although
this wasn’t at all the case, it became a general assumption around the
middle of the 20th century that the
case for
Pakistan
was also the case for Urdu: Pakistan was constructed as a” homeland" for
the Muslims, and since Urdu was the language of Muslims alone, its
proper place was in Pakistan, not in India.
A major
reason for the creation of the false identification ofUrdu=Muslims was
faulty perception of the literary and cultural history of Urdu and
failure to inquire into its early history and nomenclature. For
instance, it was widely assumed, and not by anti-Urdu lobby alone, but
also by historians and scholars of Urdu, that the word "urdu"
means "army" and the language therefore developed through the
interaction of "Muslim invading armies” with the local trades people.
Thus two birds were killed one stone:
Urdu was
the outcome of "foreign aggression", and its character was basically
"inferior." It was therefore necessarily "gentrified" by imposing upon
it a heavy overlay of Arabic and Persian vocabulary.
In point
of fact, the word "urdu" doesn't mean "army" in Urdu, or even in
Persian. In India, it originally meant "royal court"—a meaning testified
to by Dr. John Gilchrist in 1798—or at best it meant the rolling court
maintained by Akbar in late sixteenth century, a court that
contained in full all the elements of a stationery establishment,
including an extensive market. Thus the term began to mean, "a camp and
its market". The term "Urdu” continued to be applied to the royal court,
that is, Shajahanabad, after Shah Jahan established that city as his
capital in 1648. In Urdu, the term's first meaning was "the city of
Shajahanabad", and then "the language of the exalted city-court of
Shahajahanabad",that is, the language that was then known as "Hindi" or
"Rekhta".This meaning couldn't have developed much earlier than the
arrival and settlement of Shah Alam II in Delhi in 1771. Around the
middle of the eighteenth century, we find Sirajuddin Ali Khan-e-Arzu,
the great linguist and lexicographer, declaring that Persian was
"the language of the exalted city-court (=urdu) of Shajahanabad". Urdu
scholars appreciated that the language now called” Urdu", during
most of its history prior to the last quarter of the eighteenth century,
was not called Urdu, but Dihlavi, Hindi, Hindvi, Hindui, Gujri,
Dakani, and Rekhta. But they failed to inquire why and how
the language obtained the name "Urdu" in preference to all others. They
also failed to appreciate that a language all but one of whose ancient
names related to a city, or a territory in India, or in fact to whole of
India—at least North India—could not have evolved in an army interacting
with the local trades people. Another failure of Urdu scholars consisted
in their not appreciating the simple fact that if the language name
"Urdu" dated only to the last quarter of the eighteenth century, it
would necessarily have nothing to do with "foreign" military or army
matters, for the only foreign armies present at that time in India were
European, and no language, far less Urdu, emerged as a result
of their
interaction with the locals. Writing at the end of the 19thcentury,
the lexicographer Syed Ahmad Dihlavi estimated that 75% of Urdu vocables
were borrowed from Sanskrit, directly or indirectly. This fact should
have been enough to bury the theory of Urdu’s "military origin". But no
one pursued the matter further. The Urdu-Hindi controversy was given a
new twist in the first half of the 20th
century by claiming that Urdu was in fact nothing but a style
(shaili) of Hindi. This implied that modern Hindi was anterior to
Urdu, with the further implication that Urdu was a comparatively late,
and perhaps British inspired, arrival onthe Indian linguistic scene. The
boot was in fact on the other leg—Modern Hindi was a style (shaili)
of Urdu. Suniti Kumar Chatterji, the greatest modern Indian linguist
confirmed this: Linguistically, it is quite correct to say that Hindi
and Urdu are two forms or styles of the same 'Western Hindi Speech'—the
Khadi-Boli Hindustani of Delhi. Urdu is not the modified,
Muslimised form of what nowaday[s] passes as Hindi, i.e.,
Sanskritised Khadi Boli. It is rather the other way about:
Persianized Hindustani asit developed in the Mogul court circles
during the eighteenth century (before that,
we find [it] in the Dakni speech of the Deccan...), ...was
taken up by the Hindus...they adopted or revived the native Nagari and
began to use a highly Sanskritic vocabulary...and thus they created the
literary Hindi of today, round about 1800,mainly in Calcutta1.Chatterji's
view was a newer version of the thesis first advanced by Dr. Tara Chand,
to the effect that: They [the "Hindi" authors at the College of Fort
William] found a way out by adopting the language of Mir Amman, [ Sher
Ali] Afos, and others by excising Arabic/Persian words from it,
replacing them with those of Sanskrit and Hindi[Braj, etc.]. Thus
within a space of less than ten years, two new languages...were
decked out and presented [before the public] at the behest of the
foreigner..Both were look alikes in form and structure, but
1 Suniti Kumar Chatterji, India, A Polyglot Nation, and its
Linguistic problems vis a vis National Integration, Mumbai, Mahatma
Gandhi Memorial Research Crntre, 1973, pp 50-54.
their
faces were turned away from each
other...and from that day to this, we are wandering directionless, on
two paths2.Some fair minded Hindi
writers accepted the above narratives as true historical
accounts of the origin of Modern Khari Boli Hindi3,
but their voices were soon forgotten, buried under the rhetoric of the
influential group of politicians, agitationists, and
writers whom Alok Rai calls "the Hindi Nationalists"4.The
late adoption of Khari Boli by what was called "Hindi” under the
influence of mainly the College of Fort William and the Christian
missionaries of that time is reflected in the fact that it took a long
time for it to develop a proper "literary language”. Francesca Orsini is
struck by the fact even as late as 1915 in Hindi literature Poetry was
the medium for almost everything: apart from literary enjoyment (rasavadan),
verse was the vehicle for religious discourse and controversy, social
reform, women's uplift, and political awakening. By contrast, in
the case of Urdu, prose fiction was already the medium of public
discourse5.Urdu scholars remained generally unaware of these socio-literary
perspectives. They also seem to have been held in
thrall by the Fort William writer Mir Amman Dihlavi's unhistorical
remarks in his Bagh o Bahar (1804) where he linked Urdu's
origin and development to the advent of Mughal rule and Mughal armies in
India, especially Delhi. The most interesting part of Mir
Amman's explanation of Urdu's
development is his omission to mention the fact that the
language which he describes as "the language of urdu"[=the City of
Delhi) is known as Hindi. In fact, Mir Amman studiously abstains from
naming the language and his frequent mention of "the language of urdu"
was misunderstood by later scholars to mean "the language named Urdu".
Urdu scholars were therefore unable to resist or withstand the onslaught
of the promoters of 'Hindi-Hindu-Hindustani' and the spread of
misinformation about Urdu's origins and further development as a
court language, or the
2
Tara Chand, in Hindustani,
A collection of Urdu talks broadcast from All India Radio,
Delhi, in 1939 and published the Maktaba Jami'a, New Delhi, n. d. (circa
1940 ), pp. 11-
3.See,
for instance the views of Ayodhya Prasad Khatri, Dhirendra Verma, Vishwa
Nath Prasad Mishra and some others as discussed by Mirza Khali Ahmad Beg
in his Ek Bhasha...Jo Mustarad Kar Di Ga'I (A Language That Was
Rejected ), Aligarh, Educational Book House, 2007, pp. 35-53.
4 Alok Rai, Hindi Nationalism, Delhi, Orient Longman, 2002.
5.Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere, 1920-1940, New
Delhi, OUP, 2002, p. 74.
language
of a handful of urban elite continues to prevail in many circles
even to this day. Although Urdu was never the court language at any
Mughal or its subsidiary court, its phenomenal growth over
five centuries throughout the Indian sub-continent is often likely to be
explained to have come to pass as a result of "court patronage".
The
following facts stand out:
(1)
Shaikh Baha'uddin Bajan (1388-1506) was the first substantial poet in
the language that he called "Hindi and Gujri". He was a Gujarati sufi
and lover of music, hence the name "Bajan". In each of his short Hindi
poems he has specified the particular raga in which the poem
is to be sung: he specifies, for instance, Sabahi, Lalit, Bhopali,
Bhairaun, Bilawal, so forth as the ragas appropriate to the poems. He
also wrote a longish poem JangNama, depicting a dispute
between the sari and the peshwaz (akind of shalwar), and
another dispute between the choli and the tahband. This
shows that the Urdu poet was fully steeped in the local culture and his
frames of reference were not Iranian or Arabic.
(2) At
about the same time as Shaikh Bajan in Gujarat and Burhanpur
(1421-1434), we have Fakhr-e Din Nizami, a poet fromthe Deccan proper
who has left a long narrative poem on statecraft, miscegenation, and
love. Fully derived from local lore and customs, the poem called
Kadam Rao Padam Rao has nothing overtly "Muslim" about it.
(3) Sufis
became almost the first users of the new language because they needed to
talk to the common people who were not necessarily conversant with
Persian. Hindi/Hindvi/Gujri on the other hand had become the most widely
understood language in Gujarat. According to Satish Mishra of the
University of Baroda, the language was used:By the Sultan and his court
in Ahmedabad, Arab and Persian traders in the coastalmarts..., by the
Sufis and other Muslim preachers, and finally the large mass of
immigrants who had come in with Ala'uddin Khalji and his subsequent
waves...Thus while Persian was the accepted language for official and
formal intercourse, for informal occasions Gujri became the common
language6.
6.Satish Mishra, in his English Introduction to Abbas Ali's poem
Qissah-e Ghamgin (Tale of Sorrow), 1779, Baroda, M. S. University,
The
extent to much did the Sufi writers, and by extension, their followers
and readers practice and promote a world view that had equal space for
Hindus and Muslims can be judged from poems like Hindu Muslim Yakrang
Namah (Epistle on the Ones of Hindus and Muslims) by Shah Ghulam
Husain Chisti Ellichpuri (d.1795), a noted Sufi of Central India. The
first two verses of the poem are:
These
two came from the same place,
the world of humans, they were named Muslim, or Hindu;
The potter made the pans from one earth
who's is the Mulla, who the Brahmin?7
Syncretism was thus at the very core of Urdu. It was not something added
on as an afterthought.
(4) It
has been argued by some that Urdu may have begun as a force of
syncretism, but a change of course was effected by the poets of Delhi
who consciously decided to weed out local (=Indic)elements from the Urdu
vocabulary, and thus promoted the adoption of a non-Hindu, if not an
anti-Hindu tone of thought and speech. This argument has no
historical base and is in fact the result of uncritical and
tendentious reading of available evidence.
More
important, if the Muslims struck their own path and left the Hindus to
develop their "Hindi language", as Amrit Rai has argued, how is it that
notable Hindu names in Urdu literature begin to appear in the
eighteenth century at precisely the time when according to Amrit
Rai the great Muslim shift occurred? Here are some of the Hindu names
prominent in Urdu literature in the second half of the eighteenth
century: Munshi Jaswant Rai, poet and courtier(Active in Carnatac, now
known as Tamil Nadu, in the 1700's)
Hari Har
Parshad Sambhali, Historian, fl.1730-1750
Aftab Rai Ruswa, Poet, d. 1747Brindaban Das Mathravi, Historian, d.1757
Raja RamNarain Mauzun, Poet, d. 1763
Maharaja Shitab Rai, Poet, d. 1773
Sarb Sukh
Divanah, Poet, 1727?-1788/89
Budh Singh Qalandar, Poet, Nanak Panthi Sufi, d. 1780's
Tirambak Das Zarrah, Poet, d. 1785
Kanji Mal Saba, Poet, fl. 1780's
Balmukund Huzur, Poet, fl. 1770-1790
1975, pp. 21-22.
7.Muhammad Kalim Zia, Shah Ghulam Husain Chishti Ellichpuri, Hayat,
Shakhsiyat aur Karname, Bhiwandi, Takmil Publications, 2001, p.63.
Lachhmi
Narain Shafiq Aurangabadi, Poet 1745-1808
Raja Kishan Das Raja, Poet, 1782-1823
All these
writers were bilingual in Persian and Urdu, like hundreds of others.
Some of them wrote in both Persian and Urdu, and would have been
exclusively Persian writers but for the strong pull that
Hindi (=Urdu) exercised on them, and they were not in or from Delhi
alone. There were many more like them, I mention only a few, and
by the nineteenth century it was virtually a flood of non-Muslims, and
not Hindus alone, who were writing in Hindi(=Urdu). A biographical
dictionary (tazkirah) of poets active in Allahabad, compiled in
183 18, records the names of
seventy poets, of whom a round dozen are Hindu.
(5)
Needless to say, since Urdu's literary forms and conventions
were mostly borrowed from Persian, Urdu's literary language leans
heavily on Persian. But this is no more than what can be said about
English literature: almost all its classical forms and genres of
literature and classical conventions, all its mythological idiom and
metaphor, all its metres, are directly borrowed from Greek, Latin, and
Italian. English continues to use Greek metres with their original
entirely incomprehensible Greek names, though Greek matre is strictly
quantitative and English metre is almost purely qualitative. This does
not make English literature less English, and this should give pause for
a moment of thought to opponents of Urdu metre who decry it as foreign.
In the field of forms and genres, in spite of its heavy borrowing
from Persian, the thought processes, the worldview, the vision,
reflected in the Persian poetry produced in India by both Indians and
Iranians is practically incomprehensible and even unpleasant to the
Iranian mind. If such is the case of Indian Persian, one can imagine how
far from its Iranian sources Urdu poetry would be. It is by no means
Iranian, far less Arabic poetry. It is exclusively Indian.(6)
Non-Persian and exclusively local themes, allusions, idioms and proverbs
are not by any means scarce in Urdu. Urdu poets, even up to the modern
times, wrote on or used Hindu themes and religious experience as freely
as they would use Persian themes, images, and Muslim religious
experience. Hindu themes, names and images start occurring in Urdu
poetry from its very inception. Nizami's Kadam Rao Padam Rao
mentioned above, and the poems of Shah Bajan both make ample use of
Hindu ideas and images.9 The
tradition doesn't stop here. It goes right through the whole of Urdu's
ongoing journey in the path of assimilation and syncretism. In the
modern times, examples of Hasrat Mohani (1875-1951) and Swami
8.Tazkira-e
Shaukat-e Nadiri
by Mirza Kalb-e
Husain Khan Bahadur, ed.
Shah Abdus
Salam,Lucknow, Danish Mahal, 1984.
9.For
a detailed, if not very analytical discussion of this aspect of Urdu
poetry, see Syed Yahya Nasheet, Usturi Fikr o Faksafa, Urdu Sha'iri
Men, Pune, Usul Publications, 2008.
Marehravi
(1892-1960) and the immensely popular Bekal Utsahi (1925-) come readily
to mind.While Bekal Utsahi uses rural Hindu images and themes freely,
and his name itself has a "Hindu" flavour, Swami Marehravi's
name also has a bit of "Hinduness". He came from a
distinguish and ancient family of Sufi saints and he was most notable
for his use of Braj words and idioms and themes to the exclusion of
Iranian or other local Indian sources.
(7) The
seventeenth century saw the rise of what can bestbe d escribed as "folk
poetry" in Urdu with Muhammad Afzal's Bikat Kahani (1625), a
Barah Masa type of poem whose language is a free mixture of
Urdu and Persian. Much of the satirical writing of Jafar Zatalli
(1658-1713) has strong a folky flavour, but the
Marsia
poems which were being written in the South in the mainline Dakani
register of the language, acquired a much more folky character and
metres in the North, especially from toward the end of the seventeenth
century. The same is true of the JangNamah poems:
semi-Muslim-religious in character, they were written in a lower key
of the language everywhere from Gujarat to the northern part of the
country. All these folk-style poems were imitated and developed in folk
songs for specific occasions: births,deaths, departures,
marriages, seasons, so forth. These folk songs are not confined to the
North alone. Maimunah Dalvi has compiled
a
voluminous compendium of Urdu folk songs from the Kokan and Mumbai area
in South-Western India.10
(8) Urdu
has a rich tradition of translations from non-Muslim religious texts of
all descriptions. Shrimad Bhagwat Gitais a case in point, of
which there at least fifty translations extant inUrdu. Syed Yahya
Nasheet mentions a Dakani poet Syed Mubin's (around late
seventeenth-early eighteenth century) translation
called Krishna Gita, Arjun Gita11.
One of the notable recent translations is by the Pakistani
poet and scholar Shanul Haq Haqqi(1917-2005) who translated from the
original Sanskrit into Urduverse with remarkable felicity12.
Even more important perhaps is amore recent
translation of the Gita in Urdu verse, again from Pakistan.
Muhammad Ajmal Khan's effort has in fact been rated by Intizar Husain as
better than that of Shanul Haq Haqqee.13Pandit
Habibur Rahman Shastri translated substantial portions of the Upanishads
and other sacred Hindu texts14.Bisheshwar
Parshad Munavvar Lakhnavi produced a fine verse translation of the
10
Maimunah Dalvi, Kokan aur Mumbai ke Urdu Lok Git, Mumbai,
Print & Art Consultancy,2001.47.
Nasheet, p. 1
12.Bhagwad Gita,
Translated from the Sanskrit by Shanul Haq Haqqi, New Delhi, Anjuman
Taraqqi-e Urdu, (Hind),
13.Intizar
Husain, "Gita ka Ek Naya Tarjama" in Duniyazad¸ Karachi, no. 22,
July, 2008, Ed. Asif
Farrukhi.
Dhammapada15. Among the Sikh
Scriptures, Khwajah Dil Muhammad translated the Jap Ji Sahib in
1945. He also translated the Sikh Muni Sahib16
(circa 1942). Khwajah Dil Muhammad's verse
translation of the Gita, appropriately named Dil ki Gita
was extremely popular and is in print even now17.
A memorable modern verse translation of the Gita was done by
Satya Parkash Mahtab Pasruri who has avoided all Persianisms and
Arabicisms and has still produced a flowing, mellifluous work18.It's
not that such translations became important and numerous only in the
twentieth century. Tota Ram Shayan (d.1880) produced an extremely
competent translation of the Mahabharata in verse, based on a
Persian abridgement and the original Sanskrit, it still covers 330 large
size pages, each page containing four densely written columns19.
More than a century earlier, the Tamil Sufi saint Shah Turab
Khata'i (b. 1688, fl. 1730-50), born inmodern Tamil Nadu, settled
in Tanjore, and devoted himself to literary and sufistic pursuits.
Around 1745, he translated into Hindi (=Urdu) the Manachay
Sloka, a classic of Marathi Bhakti poetry by Sant Ramdas20.
From mid nineteenth century in fact began a new age of
translations from English and other European languages, and it was not
just poetry or fiction, but also hard sciences that were translated.
Thus proper translations, not just adaptations began in Urdu literary
culture in the middle of the eighteenth century and continue to be one
of its glories to this day.
(9) Urdu
is the only modern Indian language to whose literature people of all
religions and all literate communities have made substantial
contribution: Hindus of all persuasions, Muslims of all sects,
Roman Catholic, Protestant, other Christian denominations, Sikhs, Jains,
Parsis, all have drunk from its well and all have poured their ambrosia
in it. Urdu is the only truly nationally integrated language. As
testified to by John Gilchrist(1796)21
and nearly a century later by Yule and Burnell in
their
14
Habibur Rahman Shastri, A'ina-e Haqiqat¸being an Urdu prose
translation with commentary of selected mantras of the
Upanishad,Aligarh, Anjuman Taraqqi-e Urdu, 1958.
15
Dhampad¸
Trs. Bisheshwar Parshad Munavvar, Aligarh, Anjuman
Taraqqi-e Urdu, 1954.
16
Nasheet, pp.
70-81.
17
Khwajah Dil Muhammad, Dil ki Gita, Lahore, Khwajah Book
Depot, n.d. Also see Nasheet, pp. 46-50.
18
Satya Prakash Mahtab Pasruri, Gita, Hindustani Nazm Men,
Delhi, Naveentam Prakashan, 1964.
19
Tota Ram Shayan,
Mahabaharat Manzum, Lucknow, Naval Kishor Press, 6th
rept., Sept. 1905.
20
Shah Turab Khata'i, Man Samjhavan, ed. Abdus Sattar Dalvi,
Mumbai, Maktaba Jami'a, 1965.
21
John Borthwick Gilchrist, A Grammar of the Hindoostanee Language,
or Part Third of Volume First, of a system of Hindoostanee
Philology, Calcutta, at the Chronicle Press, 1796,
p.261.
Hobson
Jobson (1886)22, it was
spoken all over the country and continued to be so spoken until well
into the 20th century. It was only
from the first half of the twentieth century that it fell on evil days
and it is the duty of all Indians to rehabilitate it in the national
consciousness as a treasure worthy of our great country.
I feel
that I cannot conclude this brief keynote address without quoting
Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) and his friend Swami Ram Tirath (1870-1906)
the famous Vedanti philosopher and poet who died by drowning. The first
four she'rs of Iqbal's elegy on Swami Ram Tirath are:
Restless droplet, you now embrace the ocean,
You were a pearl; now you're the rarest pearl that none
can claim to find,
Oh, with what elan you ripped off the mysteries
of colour, and fragrance! And I am still
A prisoner of the distinctions of colour, and fragrance.
Dying, life's feverish tumult became the uproar
of the day of Rising Up. This spark burnt away
To become the fire that destroyed Azar's house of Idolatry.
To cancel out the being is the marvelous act
Of the heart that knows. In the river of
No is hidden
The pearl of There's no God but God23.
Let me
now quote from an Urdu ghazal of Swami Ram Tirath:
What a
rare strange landscape, that Ram is in me
and I am in Ram,
Nothing can be seen, but there's a brightness
that Ram is in me
and I am in Ram,
I am the album of the portraits of Beauty, and of Love,
All secrets, and all submittings are from me
I am mad with love of my own face, for Ram is in me
and I am in Ram,
The world is Ram's mirror, he's visible in every figure and form,
When the Truth-seeing eye opened, I saw that
Ram is in me
and I am in Ram,
There's no letting up the Sacred light, the heart
22
Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, Hobson Jobson, Delhi, Rupa &
Co., 1986 [orig. pub.1886],
p. 417.
23 Muhammad Iqbal,
Kulliyat-e Iqbal, Urdu, Lahore, Iqbal Academy of Pakistan, 2000, pp,
139-140.
Has
become the consuming lightning-fire of Sinai
With restless vibrant beating the heart itself
Cried out, Ram is in me
and I am in Ram 24.
It is
difficult to believe that there can be any other modern Indian language
which can show two such contemporaneous but separate examples of
literary, cultural and philosophic fusion of two entirely distinct and
powerful literary-cultural traditions as exemplified by the poems quoted
by me above. Such examples are
by no
means rare in Urdu, the citadel of syncretism in literary and linguistic
culture.
Shamsur
Rahman Faruqi,
December, 2008.
24 Quoted by Shamsur Rahman
Faruqi, She'r-e Shor Angez, Vol. IV, New Delhi, Council for the
Promotion of Urdu, revised ed. 2008, p. 149.
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