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

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 offerings.
    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