The Taste of Words: An Introduction to Urdu Poetry Read Free

proselytizers).
    In this introductory essay, I make no claims to comprehensiveness or neutrality. I just offer you a contingent and partisan analysis of what I consider to be important milestones in the dynamic trajectories of Urdu poetry .
    The period between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries CE can be said to mark Urdu’s prehistory, where the language existed primarily as consciousness rather than category. Much like Molière’s bourgeois gentleman who, when told about the distinction between prose and poetry, exclaimed ‘
Par ma foi, il y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose, sans que j’en susse rien
’ (‘Good lord, for over forty years I have been speaking prose and I did not know it’), the exponents of the new tongue in that era would be shocked to hear that they were speaking a different language, one whose name would eventually be linked to military barracks (
orda
in Turkish).
    Like all languages, Urdu emerged into consciousness primarily as speech and song, and did not detach itself from its roots in Hindavi grammar, Turkish/Pali vocabularies and plebeian deployment (as opposed to scriptural Sanskrit or courtly Persian) until the taxonomies of colonialism ripped it apart from Devanagri. If one is looking for a definite date when Urdu was born, one should consider the year 1900, in which Anthony MacDonnell’s infamous ‘Nagri resolution’ postulated that Hindi and Urdu were separate languages. But to do that would get us ahead of our story. For the moment, imagine if you will, a new way of speaking, that emerged as a fad and began spreading like wildfire across northern and western India, adopted by Sufi mendicants, bhakti singers, street balladeers and regular working folk who did not have access to more courtly languages. Imagine tradespeople, holy men and other travellers who seeded the countryside with its common metaphors, turns of phrase and grammatical peculiarities. The argot grew in usage and popularity, flying under the radar of Persian court records, classical poems in Sanskrit, and florid Turkish tracts.
    Then came Mir.
    It is difficult to understate the role played by Mir Taqi Mir in legitimizing Urdu as a language of culture as well as popular communication in the eighteenth century. I do not intend to offer biographical sketches of any poets in this introduction; I do that when I introduce their poems. But Mir was not just a person; he was also a phenomenon, a force of Urdu nature. It was he who provided innovative rhyme schemes, metaphoric codes and subject matter—a roadmap that future poets could adopt. His contemporaries like Mirza Sauda and Khwaja Dard in Delhi were able to leverage that insight into the building blocks of a tradition. Parallel movements in other parts of north India contributed to the emergence of a relatively unselfconscious mode of poetic and literary expression in the new argot. The Mir era may have been the moment when Urdu began to achieve legitimacy, when the stuffed
Farsi-daan
s of the Mughal court realized that this argot that had become the lingua franca of the subaltern class actually had poetic potential that far exceeded the derivative Persian of the court tracts, the ghostwritten princely memoirs or even the classical
mushaira
s (social gatherings where poets gathered to recite poetry, often in the form of a contest). The ghazal in the hands of Mir became a rapier, touching the vulnerable part of the listener’s heart in a way Hafiz may have touched the Persian heart, but which no Indian had replicated in Farsi. Mind you, the language was still known primarily as Rekhti, though ‘Urdu’ was now becoming an accepted word as well. Mir’s acolytes adhered faithfully to the guidelines set by his creative genius, producing what we now refer to as the ‘Delhi school’ of Urdu poetry. Outside of Delhi, there were stalwarts like Nazeer Akbarabadi writing the era’s equivalent of top hits in the
nazm
tradition, and parallel developments