Pollock - Literary Cultures in History. Reconstructions From South Asia (UCP) - 1

Literary Cultures
in History
Reconstructions from South Asia
EDITED BY
Sheldon Pollock
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles London
contents
list of illustrations / xi
list of contributors / xiii
preface and acknowledgments / xv
guide to pronunciation / xxi
Introduction / 1
Sheldon Pollock
part 1. globalizing literary cultures

1. Sanskrit Literary Culture from the Inside Out / 39
Sheldon Pollock
2. The Culture and Politics of Persian in Precolonial Hindustan / 131
Muzaffar Alam
3. The Historical Formation of Indian-English Literature / 199
Vinay Dharwadker
part 2. literature in southern locales

4. Three Moments in the Genealogy of Tamil Literary Culture / 271
Norman Cutler
5. Critical Tensions in the History of Kannada Literary Culture / 323
D. R. Nagaraj
6. Multiple Literary Cultures in Telugu: Court, Temple, and Public / 383
Velcheru Narayana Rao
7. Genre and Society: The Literary Culture of Premodern Kerala / 437
Rich Freeman
x contents
part 3. the centrality of borderlands

8. The Two Histories of Literary Culture in Bengal / 503
Sudipta Kaviraj
9. From Hemacandra to Hind Svaraj:
Region and Power in Gujarati Literary Culture / 567
Sitamshu Yashaschandra
10. At the Crossroads of Indic and Iranian Civilizations:
Sindhi Literary Culture / 612
Ali S. Asani
part 4. buddhist cultures and south asian literatures

11. What Is Literature in Pali? / 649
Steven Collins
12. Works and Persons in Sinhala Literary Culture / 689
Charles Hallisey
13. The Indian Literary Identity in Tibet / 747
Matthew T. Kapstein
part 5. the twinned histories of urdu and hindi

14. A Long History of Urdu Literary Culture, Part 1:
Naming and Placing a Literary Culture / 805
Shamsur Rahman Faruqi
15. A Long History of Urdu Literary Culture, Part 2:
Histories, Performances, and Masters / 864
Frances W. Pritchett
16. The Progress of Hindi, Part 1:
The Development of a Transregional Idiom / 912
Stuart McGregor
17. The Progress of Hindi, Part 2:
Hindi and the Nation / 958
Harish Trivedi
index / 1023
14
A Long History of Urdu Literary

Culture, Part 1
Naming and Placing a Literary Culture
Shamsur Rahman Faruqi
MODERN ORIGIN MYTHS OF HINDI AND URDU

Using the term “early Urdu” is not without its risks. “Urdu” as a language
name is of comparatively recent origin, and the question of what was or is
early Urdu has long since passed from the realm of history, first into the colo-
nialist constructions of the history of Urdu/Hindi, and then into the politi-
cal and emotional space of Indian (Hindu) identity in modern India. For
the average Hindi user today, it is a matter of faith to believe that the lan-
guage he knows as “Hindi” is of ancient origin and that its literature origi-
nates with Amir xhusrau (1253–1325), if not even earlier. Many such people
also believe that the pristine Hindi or “Hindvi” became Urdu sometime in
the eighteenth century, when the Muslims “decided” to veer away from Hindi
as it existed at that time and adopted a heavy, Persianized style of language,
which soon became a distinguishing characteristic of the Muslims of India.1
Even scholars often suggest or state that the language today known as Hindi
is the rightful claimant to the space in Indian literary history occupied, at
least up to the end of the seventeenth century, by the language today called
Urdu. The positing of Hindi against Urdu has had far-reaching effects on
the literary culture of Urdu, yet few of these have been documented—much
All translations from Urdu, Hindi, and Persian are mine. The transliteration scheme is that of
Pritchett 1994. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Sheldon Pollock for suggesting lines of
inquiry, to Frances Pritchett for asking the right questions and helping with editing, and to
Sunil Sharma for general assistance.
1. In recent times, this case has been most elaborately presented by Amrit Rai (see Amrit
Rai 1984). Rai’s thesis, though full of inconsistencies and tendentious speculation rather than
hard facts—and of fanciful interpretation of actual facts—was never refuted by Urdu scholars
as it should have been.
805
806 shamsur rahman faruqi
less discussed and explained in proper perspective. However, no discussion

can now afford to ignore the fact that there are two claimants to a single lin-
guistic and literary tradition, and that the whole issue is more political than
academic. I begin, therefore, with a brief historical account of the origin
myths and realities of the terms “Hindi” and “Urdu.”
Early names for the language now called Urdu were (more or less in chrono-
logical order) “Hindvi,” “Hindi,” “Dihlavi,” “Gujri,” “Dakani,” and “Rekhtah.”
In the north, both “Rekhtah” and “Hindi” were popular as names for the
same language from sometime before the eighteenth century, and the name
“Hindi” was used, in preference to “Rekhtah,” from about the mid-nineteenth
century. In fact, the spoken language was almost always referred to as
“Hindi.” Even in the early twentieth century, the name “Hindi” could be
used—as it was by Iqbal, for example —to refer to Urdu. “Hindvi” was in use
until about the end of the eighteenth century. Mu3hafi (1750–1824) says
in his first divan (poetry volume), compiled around 1785:
Oh Mu3hafi, put away Persian now,
Hindvi verse is the mode of the day.
“Urdu” as a name for the language seems to have occurred for the first
time around 1780. All, or almost all, of the earliest examples are from
Mu3hafi again. He says in his first divan:
Mu3hafi has, most surely,
a claim of superiority in Rekhtah—
That is to say, he has expert knowledge
of the language of (the) urdu.2
“Urdu” here may mean the city (of Shahjahanabad, that is, Delhi) rather
than the language. In the following instance, from the fourth divan, com-
piled around 1796, the reference seems clearly to the language name:
They put gosh and chashm everywhere in place of nak and kan,
And believe that their language is the language called “Urdu.” 3
The name “Urdu” seems to have begun its life as zaban-e urdu-e mu aª lla-e
shahjahanabad (the language of the exalted city/court of Shahjahanabad)
and originally seems to have signified Persian, not Urdu. It soon became
shortened to zaban-e urdu-e mu aª lla, then to zaban-e urdu, and then to urdu.
The authors of Hobson-Jobson cite a reference from 1560 in support of “urdu
bazaar” (camp-market). They also claim that the word urdu came to India
2. Mu3hafi [1785] 1967: 91, 38.

3. Mu3hafi [1796] 1969: 578. Gosh and chashm are the Persian, and nak and kan are the
Indic, words for “nose” and “ear.”
urdu literary culture, part 1 807
with Babur (1526), that his camp was called urdu-e mu aª lla (the exalted camp,
or court), and that the language that grew up around the court/camp was
called zaban-e urdu-e mu aª lla.4 While the citation is obviously correct, the com-
mentary of the authors is wrong for many reasons: there were plenty of Turks
in India before Babur; Babur never had an extended stay in Delhi; Hindi/
Hindvi/Dihlavi was already in use in and around Delhi before Babur. No
new language grew up in northern India as a result of the advent of the
Mughals there.
By the eighteenth century, if not sooner, the word urdu meant the city of
Delhi. It retained this sense until at least the early nineteenth century. In-
sha and Qatil say in Darya-e la/afat (The river of lightness and subtlety, 1807)
that “the residents of Murshidabad and ªA}imabad [Patna], in their own es-
timation, are competent Urdu speakers and regard their own city as the urdu”;
Insha means that they are really provincial and are not true citizens of Shah-
jahanabad. Further evidence is provided in the Persian literature of the time.
Around 1747–1752, Siraj ud-Din ªAli xhan-e Arzu (1687/88–1756), the ma-
jor linguist and Persian lexicographer of his time, composed Navadir ul-alfa}
(Rare and valuable among words), in which he constantly uses both urdu and
urdu-e mu aª lla to mean Delhi. Commenting on the word chhinel (woman of
easy virtue, harlot) for instance, he says, “ We who are from Hind and live in
the urdu-e mu aª lla do not know this word.” In another work he declares: “Thus
it is established that the most excellent and normative speech is that of the
urdu, and the Persian of this place is reliable . . . and poets of [various] places,
like xhaqani of Sharvan, and Ni}ami of Ganjah, and Sanaºi of Ghaznin, and
xhusrau of Delhi, spoke in the same established language, and that language
is the language of the urdu.”5 It is thus obvious that in the 1750s, the terms
urdu, urdu-e mu aª lla, and zaban-e urdu-e mu aª lla did not, at least among the elite,
mean the language that is known as Urdu today. The name zaban-e urdu-e
mu aª lla probably began to refer to Hindi around 1790–1795—at any rate,
no earlier than January 1772.
Although many of the Mughal royals, including Babur himself, knew Hindi
in some measure (later Mughals knew at least one Indian language quite well),
Urdu became the language used around the court only in January 1772,
when Shah ªAlam II (r. 1759–1806) moved to Delhi. The court’s official lan-
guage remained Persian, but Shah ªAlam II, because of his long sojourn in
Allahabad and his personal predilection, spoke Hindi on informal occasions.
This informal use, along with Shah ªAlam’s knowledge of languages (in-
cluding Sanskrit), patronage and love for Hindi, and practice of Hindi lit-
erature, gave the language respectability. In fact, in his prose narrative Das-
4. Yule and Burnell [1886] 1986: 646.

5. Insha and Qatil [1807] 1850: 116; xhan-e Arzu [1747–1751] 1992: 214, 32.
tanªaja ºib ul-qi3a3 (The strangest of stories), begun around 1792–1793, Shah
ªAlam identified the language of the tale as Hindi.6
For their part, the English seem to have found, from the first, a set of
names of their own liking or invention. Edward Terry, companion to Thomas
Roe at Jahangir’s court, described the language in his A Voyage to East India
(London, 1655) as “Indostan,” saying that it was a powerful language that
could say much in a few words; it had a high content of Arabic and Persian,
but was written differently from Arabic and Persian.7 In late-eighteenth-
century colonial encounters, the name that the British most favored for
Hindvi/Hindi was “Hindustani.” This was perhaps because it seemed orderly
and logical for the main language of “Hindustan” to be called “Hindustani,”
just as the language of England was English, and so on. “Hindustani” as a
language name was not entirely unknown. Sayyid Sulaiman Nadvi cites oc-
currences of it in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Persian texts; he him-
self in fact favors it over “Urdu” as a language name because of the negative
associations of the latter.8 Yet “Hindustani” never became popular: as a lan-
guage name it does not occur in any major Persian dictionary, and most na-
tive speakers preferred “Hindi” or “Rekhtah.”
The British identified what they called “Hindustani” as largely a Muslim
language, though they also granted that it was spoken, or at least understood,
all over India. Hobson-Jobson describes “Hindostanee” as
the language that the Mahommedans of Upper India, and eventually the Ma-
hommedans of the Deccan, developed out of the Hindi dialect of the Doab
chiefly, and the territory around Agra and Delhi, with a mixture of Persian vo-
cables and phrases, and a readiness to adopt other foreign words. It is also called
Oordoo, i.e., the language of the Urdu (‘Horde’) or Camp. This language was
for a long time a kind of Mahommedan lingua franca over all India, and still
possesses that character over a large part of the country, and among certain
classes.9
The Oxford English Dictionary (1993) is even more explicit than Yule and
Burnell were in 1886, defining “Hindustani” as “the language of the Mus-
lim conquerors of Hindustan, being a form of Hindi, with a large admix-
ture of Arabic, Persian, and other foreign elements; also called Urdu, i.e. za-
ban-e Urdu, language of the camp, sc. of the Mughal conquerors.” 10 Thus both
Hobson-Jobson and the Oxford English Dictionary define “Hindustani” in con-
6. Shah ªAlam II [1792–1793] 1965: 26.

7. Cohn [1985] 1994: 300. On the use of Perso-Arabic script in the fifteenth century, see
McGregor, chapter 16, this volume.
8. Sulaiman Nadvi 1939: 103–7.
9. Yule and Burnell [1886] 1986: 417–18.
10. Oxford English Dictionary 1993: 769.
formity with British perceptions or policy: namely, there are two languages—
Hindustani for the Muslims, Hindi for the Hindus.
In 1796, well before Yule and Burnell, John Gilchrist published a gram-
mar of the “Hindoostanee Language,” which included examples from “the
best poets who have composed their several works in that mixed Dialect, also
called Oordoo, or the polished language of the Court, and which even at
this day pervades with more or less purity, the vast provinces of a once pow-
erful empire.” 11 Writing somewhat grandly of the British adoption of the term
“Hindustani,” Gilchrist observed that “Hindoostan is a compound word,
equivalent to Hindoo-land or Negro- land. . . . It is chiefly inhabited by Hin-
doos and Moosalmans; whom we may safely comprise, as well as their lan-
guage, under the general, conciliating, comprehensive term Hindoostanee.”
He gives the following reasons for his terminology:
This name of the country being modern, as well as the vernacular tongue in
question, no other appeared so appropriate as it did to me, when I first en-
gaged in the study and cultivation of the language. That the natives and oth-
ers call it also Hindee, Indian, from Hind, the ancient appellation of India, can-
not be denied; but as this is apt to be confounded with Hinduwee, Hindoo,ee,
Hindvee, the derivative from Hindoo, I adhere to my original opinion, that we
should invariably discard all other denominations of the popular speech of this
country, including the unmeaning word Moors, and substitute for them Hin-
doostanee, whether the people here constantly do so or not: as they can hardly
discriminate sufficiently, to observe the use and propriety of such restrictions,
even when pointed out to them.
Hinduwee, I have treated as the exclusive property of the Hindus alone; and
have therefore constantly applied it to the old language of India, which pre-
vailed before the Moosulman invasion; and in fact, now constitutes among
them, the basis or ground-work of the Hindoostanee, a comparatively recent su-
perstructure, composed of Arabic and Persian, in which the two last may be
considered in the same relation, that Latin and French bear to English.12
In addition to cheerfully and confidently assuming the right to make de-

cisions for the natives—since they themselves apparently have no discrimi-
nation and do not know what’s good for them—Gilchrist also perpetrates a
canard on Persian and Persian speakers (among whom, at that time, there
were many Indians as well) by saying that in Persian hindu means “Negro.” 13
Though he recognizes Hindvi as the “basis or ground-work of the Hindoo-
11. Gilchrist 1796: 261.

12. Gilchrist [1798] 1802: i.
13. This canard has found echoes in the modern Indian English-language press, where ab-
surd meanings have been foisted on the Persian word hindu. The latest is by Wagish Shukla, a
normally careful and humane scholar. Reviewing Vasudha Dalmia’s book on Bharatendu Har-
ishchandra, Shukla claims that in Persian, Hindu means “nigger” (Shukla 1997).
stanee,” he omits to mention—or doesn’t know—that Hindvi was not a sep-

arate language but was merely an early name for the same language for which
he was now prescribing the name “Hindoostanee.”
Gilchrist lifted most of his theory from Nathaniel Brassey Halhed (1751–
1830), who was one of the first to have written a grammar of the Bangla lan-
guage (1778).14 Halhed identified a language called “Hindustanic” that “had
two varieties, one which was spoken over most of Hindustan proper and was
‘indubitably derived from Sanskrit.’” The other was “developed by the Mus-
lim invaders of India, who could not learn the language spoken by the Hin-
dus, who, in order to maintain the purity of their own tongue, introduced
more and more abstruse terms from Sanskrit.” Thus the Muslims introduced
“exotic” words “which they superimposed on the ‘grammatical principles of
the original Hindustanic.’” 15 Here we can see the source not only for
Gilchrist’s grand prescriptions but also for the definitions of the words “Urdu”
and “Hindustani” that we find from Fallon (1866) through Platts (1884) and
the Hobson-Jobson (1886) to the Oxford English Dictionary (1993). Fallon de-
clared “Urdu” to mean:
an army, a camp; a market. urdu,i m’alla, the royal camp or army (generally
means the city of Dihli or Shahjahanabad; and urdu,i mu’alla ki zaban, the court
language). This term is very commonly applied to the Hindustani language as
spoken by the Musalman population of India proper.
In strikingly similar language, Platts defined it as:

Army; camp; market of a camp; s.f. (urdu zaban), the Hindustani language as
spoken by the Muhammadans of India, and by Hindus who have intercourse
with them or who hold appointments in the Government courts &c. (It is com-
posed of Hindi, Arabic, and Persian, Hindi constituting the back-bone, so to
speak):—urdu-i-mu’alla, The royal camp or army (generally means the city of
Dehli or Shahjahanabad; the court language (urdu-i-mu’alla ki zaban); the Hin-
dustani language as spoken in Delhi.16
The Oxford English Dictionary identifies “Urdu” with “Hindustani,” and goes
on to distinguish “Hindustani, the lingua franca,” from the tongue that is
the official language of Pakistan!
In his Dictionary, English and Hindoostanee (Calcutta, 1790) Gilchrist de-
clares that Sanskrit was derived from “Hinduwee,” which was spoken over
much of India before the Muslim invasion. He further suggests that repeated
invasions of Muslims resulted in the creation of “Hindustani”: “Muslims re-
ferred to this language as ‘Oorduwer’ in its military form, ‘Rekhtu’ in its po-
14. Rocher 1983.

15. Cohn [1985] 1994: 298.
16. Fallon [1866] 1986: 28; Platts [1884] 1974: 40.
etical form, and ‘Hindee’ as the everyday language of the Hindoos.” 17 Worth
noting here first is the mutilation of the term urdu-e mu aª lla: Gilchrist does
not know that it is a compound, and its first part standing alone is mean-
ingless, so that no one ever wrote, or spoke, “urdu-e.” Next we might note
the entirely imaginary classification of the language: military, literary, and
Hindu. Finally, we can see here the source for Gilchrist’s confident predic-
tion that “the Hindoos will naturally lean to the Hinduwee, while the Moosul-
mans will of course be more partial to Arabic and Persian; whence two styles
arise.” 18 That the prediction found many ways of coming very nearly true
should not permit us to ignore the fact that it was based on historically false
and morally questionable premises.
Since the name “Hindustani” did not work in spite of Gilchrist’s confi-
dence, the British were obliged, eventually, to give it up. They found a better
alternative: “Urdu” was a name that did not have the faintest reverberations
of a Hindu link. On the contrary, since it was a Turkish word, its Muslim con-
nections were obvious. As we have seen, Shahjahanabad gradually came to
be called urdu-e mu aª lla, and the language spoken there became “the language
of the urdu-e mu aª lla.” And xhan-e Arzu had, of course, described Persian in
exactly the same terms. Now with the patronage and practice of Shah ªAlam
II, Hindi, rather than Persian, began to be called “the language of the urdu-e
muªalla.” Though the shortened name “Urdu” didn’t instantly become univer-
sally popular, the etymology of the word urdu, and the fact that in Rekhtah/
Hindi the word urdu did mean, among other things, “camp,” or “camp-mar-
ket,” made it easy for the British to propose that Hindi/Rekhtah was born
in Muslim army camp-markets, and that that is why it was called zaban-e urdu-e
muªalla.
The earliest printed source for this fiction from an Indian author seems
to be Mir Amman Dihlavi’s Bagh o bahar (Garden and spring), a prose romance
produced in 1803 at the College of Fort William, under Gilchrist’s direc-
tion, as a text for teaching Urdu/Hindustani to British civil servants. Mir
Amman says that he wrote the story in the “language of urdu-e mu aª lla.” He
adds that he was asked by Gilchrist to “translate” the story into “pure Indian
speech, as spoken among themselves by the people of the urdu, Hindu or
Muslim, women, men, children and young people.” In the pages following,
he proceeds to apprise the reader of the “true facts about the language of
the urdu.” He says:
Finally, Amir Taimur (with whose House the rule still remains, though only in
name), conquered India. Due to his advent, and extended sojourn here, the
bazaar of the army entered the city. And that’s why the market-place of the city
17. Cohn [1985] 1994: 304.

18. Gilchrist [1798] 1802: 2.
came to be called urdu. . . . When King Akbar ascended the throne, people of
all communities, hearing of the appreciation and free flow of generosity as prac-
ticed by that peerless House, came from all four sides of the land and gath-
ered in his Presence. But each had his distinctive talk and speech. By virtue of
their coming together for give and take, trade and commerce, question and
answer, a [new] language of the camp-market came to be established.19
Mir Amman did not tell the reader that there was a gap of a century and a
half, as well as a dynastic change, between the coming of Taimur (1398) and
the advent of Akbar (r. 1556–1605). Moreover, Akbar never lived in Delhi,
and the only time he would have had an army camping near Delhi would
have been in 1556, when he fought Hemu at Panipat, eighty kilometers away.
Most important, Mir Amman omitted to mention that the language in ques-
tion was called Hindvi/Hindi from early times, and “Hindi” was its com-
monest name in his day. But the immense success of Bagh o bahar as a school
text ultimately caused Mir Amman’s narrative to prevail, in every sense of
the word.
The story didn’t come to prevail quickly, though. A long time was required
for “Hindi” and “Urdu” to take root as the names of two different languages.
The native speaker’s resistance to the term “Urdu” may have had something
to do with the fact that the name suggested false images about the origins
and nature of the language. As late as December 1858, Ghalib was uncom-
fortable with “Urdu” as a language name, and he used it as a masculine word
in a letter to Shiv Naraºin Aram; language names are invariably feminine in
Urdu, but urdu in the sense of “camp, camp-market” is masculine. Sayyid Su-
laiman Nadvi, as we have seen, preferred “Hindustani” for just those reasons;
“Hindi,” of course, was unavailable to him by then.20
Ahad ªAli xhan Yakta, a poet and physician of Lucknow, wrote Dastur ul-
fa3ahat (The exemplar of proper speech), a small tract on Urdu syntax—he
uses both “Hindi” and “Urdu” for the language —in or before 1798.21 He
wrote the book in Lucknow and was uninfluenced by British political con-
siderations. The Dastur contains the earliest printed observations made by
a knowledgeable native Urdu speaker on the origins of Urdu:
And the reason for the appearance of this exquisite language is . . . that the
wise and the learned of the time and the age, and the masters of all arts and
sciences, persons of excellence and erudition, poets and people from good
families, wherever they were, came from all sides and all shores of the world,
traveled to this large and desire-fulfilling territory, and attained their heart-
felt wishes and purposes. And most of them adopted this paradise-adorned
19. Mir Amman [1804] 1992: 2, 6, 7–8.

20. Ghalib 1984–1993, 3: 1067; Sulaiman Nadvi 1939: 101–2.
21. Yakta [1798] 1943: 27, preface.
land as their own native place. Thus, due to their coming and going to the court,
and having to deal with the local people, it became necessary for them to con-
verse in this language.
Inevitably, during intercourse between them and these, and these and them,
in the course of conversations, they mixed in each other’s vocabulary as much
as needed, and got their business done. When this had continued over a long
span of time, a state was reached when, by virtue of absorption of words and
connections of phrases from each other, it could be described as a new lan-
guage; for neither the Arabic remained Arabic, nor Persian, Persian; nor, on
the same analogy, did the dialects and vernaculars included under the rubric
“Indian” [which had contributed to the new language] retain their original
form. But even at this time, a single mode, such as should exist, had not sta-
bilized. . . . And every community and group used to privilege its own idiom
over the others.
Yakta goes on to say that, ultimately, persons of “knowledge and wisdom, hav-
ing no choice” laid down a standard register: among its requirements was
speech that was
very clear, familiar to the temperament, and easily comprehensible to the ple-
beian and the elite. . . . But speech conforming to the above conditions is not
to be found except among those inhabitants of Shahjahanabad who reside
within the city’s ramparts, or in the language of the offspring of these honor-
able persons, who have migrated to other cities and taken up residence there.
Thus the language of those inhabitants of Lucknow who are not its ancient
residents, and were not there in the past, is nowadays closer to the standard
speech.22
These remarks are quite in accord with the privilege that the Delhi idiom
arrogated to itself soon after Hindi/Rekhtah became the main medium of
literature there. The literary culture of Delhi became, for all intents and pur-
poses, Urdu’s literary culture (as is discussed in a later section of this essay).
The British apparently had no problems with this. But stories about the ori-
gin of Urdu were another matter.
Yakta’s observations about the origin of Urdu must have been based on the
common perception of educated native speakers of those times. These per-
ceptions were hardly suitable material for stories about Urdu as the language
of “Muslim invaders” and “conquerors,” a language that only those Hindus
who were in the employ of a Muslim ruler had adopted—practically under
duress. Yakta was no linguist—historical or comparative —and did not know
that the dialect now called Khari Boli, the developed form of which is Urdu,
had existed prior to the arrival of the Muslims. Muslims functioned as cata-
22. Yakta [1798] 1943: 4–5, 5–6.

lysts in refashioning the dialect into a full-fledged language. The broad story
of Urdu’s birth and growth as given by Yakta is accurate enough, and it dif-
fers from Mir Amman’s British-approved story in every important respect.
There is evidence to suggest that the Hindus, for whose “benefit” a whole
new linguistic tradition was being constructed in the nineteenth century, were
initially not too happy either. Christopher King argues that a class of “edu-
cated Hindi speakers, committed to a style of the khari boli continuum which
differentiated them from the Urdu speakers,” had not yet arisen in the north
by the 1850s. In King’s words: “To find statements by Hindus educated in
the Sanskrit tradition, denying the existence of this new style of khari boli,
then, should come as no surprise.” He narrates an incident that shows that
young students at Benares Sanskrit College were unaware of what Europeans
meant by “Hindi”; for them, hundreds of dialects deserved the name. Nev-
ertheless, the British succeeded in a project that was motivated by colonial
arrogance and that engendered strong emotions and a special kind of faith
in “Hindi/Hindu” identity.23
At the time that modern Hindi was being groomed to occupy center stage
on the Indian linguistic and literary scene, Urdu was being denigrated on
moral and religious grounds. Bharatendu Harishchandra (1850–1885), for
instance, who is widely regarded as the father of modern standard Hindi,
was at that time not only switching from Urdu to Hindi but also writing sav-
age, if vulgar, satires mocking “the death of Urdu Begam”—among whose
mourners were Arabic, Persian, Pushto, and Panjabi, for they shared a com-
mon, “foreign,” script. Addressing the Education Commission of 1882,
Bharatendu testified (in English):
By the introduction of the Nagari character they [the Muslims] would lose en-
tirely the opportunity of plundering the world by reading one word for an-
other and misconstruing the real sense of the contents. . . . The use of Persian
letters in office is not only an injustice to Hindus, but it is a cause of annoy-
ance and inconvenience to the majority of the loyal subjects of Her Imperial
Majesty.24
23. King 1994: 90–91. Vasudha Dalmia has recently quoted Grierson (1889) as saying that
the “wonderful” hybrid language known to Europeans as “Hindi” was “invented” by the Euro-
peans themselves. She goes on to say that by the 1860s, “the nationalist supporters of Hindi”
who were involved deeply in “the creation of myths and geneologies [sic ] concerning the ori-
gin of Hindi” would have treated as “preposterous” any suggestion that “their language was an
artificial creation.” Their belief was that “Hindi was spoken in homes across the breadth of North
India and this had been the case before the Muslim invasion.” Both imperialists and national-
ists believed “the Hindus possessed a language of their own, which set them off not only from
contemporary Muslims, but also from Muslims in the past.” While the English “stressed their
own agency in the creation of their language,” the Hindus “claimed continuity through the
ages.” Dalmia 1997: 149–50.
24. Sengupta 1994: 137.
There were other anti-Urdu voices at that time, especially in Benares, but
Bharatendu Harishchandra’s diatribes stand out, coming from a creative
writer who began his career in Urdu and who still occupies a place in the
history of modern Urdu literature. As late as 1871, he wrote that his lan-
guage, and that of the women of his community, was Urdu. In fact, belong-
ing as he did to the pachhahiñ (western) branch of the Agraval clan, he may
not even have known the Benares-area folk language of his time. He cer-
tainly looked down upon the purabiya (eastern) branch of the clan.25 No other
Hindu writer seems to have switched from Urdu to Hindi in the 1880s, but
after that time the name “Hindi” began to be used less and less for Urdu. As
we have seen, the British also more or less gave up on “Hindustani” once the
name “Urdu” became almost universally popular. Writing in 1874, Platts had
compromised, titling his work A Grammar of Hindustani or Urdu. As late as
1879, Fallon had still named his work A New Hindustani English Dictionary.
But by the time Platts published his famous dictionary (1884), the new nomen-
clature was firmly in place: its title was A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi,
and English.
New Urdu writers continued to rise from among the Hindus, but the Mus-
lims, perhaps unconsciously responding to the pressure of official British
opinion, tended to exclude Hindu writers from the Urdu canon (and the
Persian canon too, but that is another story). In his enormously popular his-
tory of Urdu poetry called Ab-e hayat (Water of life, 1880), Muhammad Hu-
sain Azad (1831–1910) ignores numerous Hindu poets of the eighteenth
century, including such major figures as Sarb Sukh Divana (1727/28–1788),
Jasvant Singh Parvanah (1756/57–1813), Budh Singh Qalandar (fl. 1770s),
and Tika Ram Tasalli (fl. 1790s). Among poets nearer his own time, Azad
makes only marginal mention of Ghanshyam Lal ªA3i, a leading poet of Delhi
and a pupil of Shah Na3ir (1760?–1838). Azad found only one Hindu poet
worth more than passing mention: Daya Shankar Nasim (1811–1844), whom
he discusses anachronistically and confusingly along with Mir Hasan (1727–
1786).26
In 1893, Al/af Husain Hali (1837–1914) published his Muqaddamah-e shi ªr
o sha ªiri (Introduction to poetry and poetics), an extensive theoretical state-
ment on the nature of poetry and an indictment of Urdu poetry following
official British ideas about what was wrong with it. Next to Water of Life, the
Muqaddamah remains the outstanding work of Urdu criticism of the nine-
teenth century, commanding nearly absolute authority even now. The
Muqaddamah is dotted with references to and quotations from Urdu poets
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the exception of four ref-
25. Dalmia 1997: 118–19.

26. Azad [1880] 1967: 566, 308–9. See also Faruqi 1997b and Pritchett, chapter 15, this
volume.
erences to Daya Shankar Nasim—two of them quite perfunctory and all of

them disapproving—there is no Hindu among them.27 By the end of the cen-
tury a number of potential Urdu-readers were switching over to Hindi in
northern India, and many institutions and movements had sprung up there
to aggressively sell the Nagari script and modern Hindi. Yet the Hindu com-
munity continued to produce Urdu writers, and the end-of-century scene
included a number of dominating, or potentially dominating, Hindu liter-
ary figures in Urdu.28
In 1939, the Delhi station of All India Radio broadcast a series of six talks
entitled Hindustani kya hai (What is Hindustani?). The time and the subject
were both fraught with emotion. Urdu’s case was most forcefully presented
by Brij Mohan Dattatreyah Kaifi and ªAbd ul-Haq. But among them all, Tara
Chand came out with the most historically succinct presentation. He said:
For the Hindus, Lalluji Lal, Badal Mishra, Beni Naraºin, and others were or-
dered [by the authorities at the College of Fort William] to prepare books com-
prising prose texts. Their task was even more difficult. Braj did exist then as
the language of literature, but it had prose scarcely even in name. So what could
they do? They found a way out by adopting the language of Mir Amman, [Sher
ªAli] Afsos, and others, but they excised Arabic/Persian words from it, replac-
ing them with those of Sanskrit and Hindi [Braj, etc.]. Thus, within the 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 their faces were turned away from each other . . . and
from that day to this, we are wandering directionless, on two paths.29
Tara Chand thus clearly suggested the British political motivation; five years
later, writing his monograph The Problem of Hindustani, he blamed the mis-
guided “zeal” of some “college professors” at Fort William. His conclusion
was, however, the same: the zeal of the professors led to the creation of “a
new type of Urdu from which Persian and Arabic words were removed and
replaced by Sanskrit words.” Although this was done “ostensibly to provide
the Hindus with a language of their own,” the step had “far-reaching con-
27. Hali [1893] 1953.

28. The harm, however, had been done. True, there were historians like R. W. Frazer, who
said, “ When [Urdu was] used for literary purposes by the Mussalmans, the vocabulary employed
was mainly Persian or Arabic. When used as a lingua franca, for the people speaking the various
dialects of Hindustan, the vocabulary is mainly composed of the common words of the market-
place. . . . High Hindi is purely a book language evolved under the influence of the English who
induced native writers to compose works for general use in a form of Hindustani in which all
the words of Arabic and Persian were omitted, Sanskrit words being employed in their place.”
(If he had said “by Mussalmans and Hindus” instead of merely “by the Mussalmans,” he would
have had it exactly right.) But such voices were few and far between. See Frazer [1898] 1915:
265.
29. Maktabah Jamiªa [1939?]: 11–12.
sequences,” so that “India is still suffering from this artificial bifurcation of

tongues.” 30
The sane and dispassionate accounts of historians like Tara Chand were
not enough to uproot the plant of doubt and suspicion, especially when it
was fed and nurtured by waters from chauvinistic streams. Francis Robinson’s
conclusion that “an increasingly important development in the 1880’s and
1890’s [was] the tendency of the Hindi movement to become a communal
crusade against the Urdu language” is borne out by the report of the Edu-
cation Commission set up by the British in 1882. In his evidence before the
commission Shiv Prasad, a senior official in the Department of Education
(then called “Public Instruction”) in U.P., who had switched his support from
Urdu to Hindi, said: “For Hindus, Hindi was a language purged of all the
Arabic and Persian accretions which served to remind them of the Muslims’
supremacy while the Nagri script had a religious significance. . . . For Mus-
lims on the other hand Hindi was dirty and they thought most degrading to
learn it.” Thus, he argued, in the “second half of the nineteenth century,
Urdu and the Persian script in which it was written became a symbol of Mus-
lim power and influence.” Shiv Prasad was also unhappy over the popular-
ity of Urdu—which, he somewhat inconsistently added, was becoming a
mother tongue for the Hindus.31
One of the cultural consequences of the Hindi-Nagari movement of the
late nineteenth century was the inculcation among Urdu speakers of feel-
ings of guilt and inferiority about Urdu script and orthography. Not only
Harishchandra, as we have seen, but also other supporters of Nagari, like
Rajendralal Mitra, an influential Sanskrit scholar of early-modern Bengal,
claimed that Urdu’s script was intrinsically inferior.32 The seed for these
ideas, too, had been sown by Gilchrist, who published the Oriental Fabulist
(1803) to prove that “Hindoostanee, Persian, Arabic, Brij Bhasha, Bongla
and Sanskrit” could all be written in the roman script “with ease and correct-
ness.” The great success of the colonial discourse in India can be judged
from the fact that a modern, liberal historian like Siddiqi actually admires
Gilchrist for his proposal to romanize the script of these languages: he looks
upon it as a step toward the “unification” of the country. In fact, the roman
script cannot (without diacritics) configure many important Urdu sounds,
but the British introduced it for the army’s use anyway; apart from army
and missionary texts, however, roman script never caught on.33 Neverthe-
less, calls for “improvements” in Urdu orthography, or even script, are still
made, and not in “anti-Urdu” circles alone. The Urdu linguistic and liter-
30. Tara Chand 1944: 57–58; quoted in Farman Fa/hpuri 1977a: 53.
31. Robinson 1974: 75, 36.
32. Dalmia 1997: 132–33, 418–19.
33. Siddiqi 1963: 39–40; Willatt 1941.
ary community is perhaps the only one in the world that feels uncomfort-
able, and even guilty, about almost every aspect of its script and orthogra-
phy. To this must be added a surreptitious feeling of guilt generated by the
Urdu literary community’s almost universal belief that Urdu was a “mili-
tary language” after all.
The fault for this, I think, lies with Urdu historians from 1880 on, who
did not stop to examine the implications of the fact that if the name “Urdu”
first came into use during the last few years of the eighteenth century, as we
have seen, it could not possibly have any military implications. The only lit-
erary historian who did realize the anomaly here was Grahame Bailey. He
even offered a tentative explanation for the late appearance of the name
“Urdu.” Unfortunately, he also made a number of fanciful observations about
the origin of Urdu, and as a result his writings on this matter seem not to
have been taken seriously. Bailey argued that “Urdu was born in 1027; its
birthplace was Lahore, its parent Old Panjabi; Old Khari was its step-parent;
it had no direct relationship with Braj. The name Urdu first appears 750 years
later.” And he noted some queries:
1. Why was there a delay of centuries in giving the name Urdu?
2. If a new name had to be given in the eighteenth century, why was this
name chosen for the language when it had many, many years previously
been given up for the army?
3. If the army was not called urdu till Babur’s time, 1526, the language that
had then existed for nearly five hundred years must already have had a
name. Why was that name given up? 34
Bailey noted that the problem was easier to state than solve. Yet to him
must go the credit for at least realizing that there was a problem. Bailey in
fact did suggest an answer, but with extreme diffidence: “Jules Bloch made
a striking suggestion, which he admits is only an intuitive feeling required
to be substantiated by proof, that the name Urdu is due to Europeans.” 35
Bailey didn’t investigate Bloch’s idea further, for he felt that since Gilchrist
always called the language “Hindustani,” and in 1796 reported—as we saw
earlier—that the language was also called “Oordoo,” it could not have been
the British who introduced the name. This is quite true. But it was the British
who popularized the name, for apparently political reasons. Even Bailey fell
into the “military error” by believing that urdu means “army” and nothing
more, when in fact there is no recorded instance of this word ever being used
in the Urdu-Hindi-Rekhtah-Dakani-Gujri language to denote “army.” As borne
34. Bailey 1938: 1, 6. I am grateful to Frances Pritchett for bringing to my attention Gra-
hame Bailey’s writings on this subject.
35. Bailey 1938: 3.
out even by the definitions of the word urdu from Fallon and Platts that I
cite earlier, its most popular meaning was “the city of Shahjahanabad.”
The blame for not effectively refuting the theories about the antiquity of
modern Hindi, and even its anteriority over Urdu, must also lie with the his-
torians of Urdu—all of whom failed to address this issue scientifically and log-
ically, if they dealt with it at all. Premchand, though not a historian by any
means, had clearer ideas than they on this subject. He advocated the use of
“Hindustani”—which he defined as a simplified Urdu/Hindi—but recognized
that Hindi was not a separate language as such. In an address delivered at
Bombay in 1934, he declared, “In my view, Hindi and Urdu are one and the
same language. When they have common verbs and subjects, there can be no
doubt of their being one.” Speaking in Madras before the Dakshin Bharat
Hindi Prachar Sabha, also in 1934, he said, “The name ‘Hindi’ was given by
the Muslims, and until just fifty years ago, the language now being described
as ‘Urdu’ was called ‘Hindi’ even by the Muslims.” 36 But remarks like these
were not decisive and had no force of theory, and so fictions about Urdu’s
“Muslim military character” persisted, and are generally current even now.
BEGINNINGS
Urdu literature may have begun with Masªud Saªd Salman Lahori (1046–
1121). Nothing survives of the “Hindi” divan that he is reported to have put
together. We know about it from Muhammad ªAufi’s Lubab al-albab (The
essence of wisdom). Composed in Sindh around 1220–1227, the Lubab says
of Salman: “The quantity of his verse is greater than that of all the poets,
and he has three divans: one Arabic, the other Persian, and the third Hindvi,
and whatever from his poetry has been heard or come across [by me] is mas-
terly and most pleasing.” 37 Since the term “Hindi” was used occasionally in
the Indian medieval period to denote any Indian language, a question has
been raised by modern scholars about the Indian language in which Salman
actually wrote. xhusrau, writing a few decades after ªAufi, helps to clarify the
question.
In his Masnavi Nuh sipihr (Nine heavens, 1317–1318), xhusrau devotes
an entire long section to India. Placing the “Indian speech” above Persian and
Turkish because of its “pleasing vocabulary,” he goes on to say:
In short, it’s quite without purpose
To try and gain the heart’s pleasure
From Persian, Turkish, or Arabic.
36. Premchand 1983: 108, 124. I am grateful to Professor Jaªfar Ra{a of the University of
Allahabad for drawing my attention to these texts of Premchand.
37. Muhammad ªAufi [1220–1227] 1954: 423.
Since I am Indian, it’s better

To draw breath
From one’s own station. In this land
In every territory, there is
A language specific, and not so
By chance either. There are
Sindhi, Lahori [Panjabi], Kashmiri, Kibar [?],
Dhaur Samandari [Kannada], Telangi [Telugu], Gujar [Gujarati],
Maºbari [Tamil], Gauri [West Bengali dialect], and the languages
Of Bengal, Avadh, Delhi
And its environs, all within
Their own frontiers.
All these are Hindvi, and
Are in common use
For all purposes since antiquity.38
Some of the glosses I provide here are tentative; nevertheless, one can see
that xhusrau distinguishes Lahori (Panjabi) from other languages like
Avadhi, or the mu3/alah (specific speech) of Delhi and its surrounds.
Earlier, in the magnificent Dibachah (Preface) to Ghurrat al-kamal (The
new moon of perfection, 1294), his third divan, xhusrau said:
I am a Turk from India,
My response is Hindvi.
Egyptian candy I don’t have
For doing converse in Arabic.
I have presented to friends a few quires of [my] Hindvi verse too. Here I con-
sider it sufficient to just mention this and not give examples, for no delecta-
tion is to be had from inserting Hindvi words into sophisticated Persian, ex-
cept when needed [for explaining something.]
Since I am the Parrot of India
If you ask for the truth
Ask in Hindvi
So that I reply in dulcet tones.
He then offers “An Account of the Compilation of Three Divans” that

emphasizes his own uniqueness: “Although Masªud Saªd Salman does have
three divans, he has them in Arabic, Persian, and Hindvi.” How one wishes
xhusrau had given some examples of his own work, for almost nothing of
his “Hindvi” survives today. But his account does make two things clear:
Masªud Saªd Salman wrote in Hindvi, and so did xhusrau. The reason xhus-
rau’s Hindvi works did not survive seems to be that he didn’t write much in
Hindvi, and didn’t consider what he wrote worth saving. In Nuh sipihr, writ-
38. xhusrau [1317–1318] 1948: 179–80.

ten nearly twenty-five years later, xhusrau claimed some knowledge of San-
skrit but said nothing about being a poet in Hindvi.39
Clearly, xhusrau did not consider his Hindvi efforts worth preserving be-
cause Hindvi still had not become a respectable literary language by his time,
and he considered it suitable only for light-hearted, for-the-nonce compo-
sition. The reason Masªud Saªd Salman’s Hindvi did not survive is presum-
ably the same. We do not know the size of his divan either; it may have been
quite small, and may even have been regarded as an embarrassing oddity by
his Persianate admirers. The Ghaznavid sage and poet Sanaºi (1087/91–
1145/46), who made a collection of Salman’s poems and presented it to the
great man, apparently says nothing about his Hindvi poetry.40 The odds are
that Salman wrote in Hindvi chiefly to demonstrate his virtuosity—not an
uncommon practice in medieval literary culture in the Middle Eastern and
the Indo-Muslim milieus. He wrote in Arabic for the same reason.
The first person whose Hindvi writings survive in substantial quantity, and
with whom Urdu literature can seriously be said to begin, is Shaiwh Baha
ud-Din Bajan (1388–1506). His grandfather came from Delhi and settled
in Ahmadabad. Shaiwh Bajan was born in Ahmadabad, worked in Gujarat,
and described his language on different occasions as “Hindi,” “Dihlavi,” and
“Hindvi.” 41 Northerners—mainly army men and civil servants—first came
to Gujarat in large numbers in 1297, when ªAla ud-Din xhalji (r. 1296–1316)
annexed Gujarat after assuming the sultanate of Delhi. A larger movement
toward Gujarat from the north is reported to have taken place around 1398,
when Taimur sacked and occupied Delhi. By Shaiwh Bajan’s time there was
a considerable population of Dihlavi-speakers in Gujarat. Shaiwh Bajan was
a major Sufi of that part of the country. He collected some of his Persian
and Hindi prose and verse in an anthology that he called xhazaºin-e rahmat-
ullah (Treasures of divine mercy and compassion), in honor of his mentor,
Shaiwh Rahmatullah. In it, he included Hindi/Hindvi poems in a verse genre
called jikri (after the Perso-Arabic zikr, “remembering”). It was a genre ap-
parently much used in fourteenth-century Delhi, too.42 Shaiwh Bajan wrote:
Poems that have been composed by this faqir are called jikri in the Hindvi
tongue, and the singers of Hind [northern India] play and sing them upon
instruments, observing the discipline of the ragas. Some of these are in the
praise of Pir-e Dastgir, and of his mausoleum, or in praise of my own native
land, that is, Gujarat; some are disquisitions on my own purposes, and some
in the cause of pupils and seekers; some are on the theme of love.43
39. xhusrau [1317–1318] 1948: 63–64; 181.

40. Lewis 1995: 130–37.
41. Sherani 1966, 1: 166–68; Zaidi 1993: 47; Madani 1981: 50, 65–68.
42. Sherani 1966, 1: 176.
43. Jalibi 1977: 107.
The Shaiwh here establishes the parameters of Urdu language and liter-
ature for a long time to come: the language is Hindvi, the meters used are
both Indic and Persian, the themes of poetry are both sacred and secular.
The poetry has a strong popular base and appeal; there is an air of spiritual
devotion and Sufi purity about its transactions. Love of one’s native land is
also a notable theme.
The quality of Shaiwh Bajan’s poetry is uneven; the tone is occasionally
one of ecstasy, though the general mood is didactic. The following poem oc-
cupies a middle space between these two. It celebrates the inaccessibility of
God, yet there is a hint of desperation. Success is not certain, failure is a strong
probability. Still, there is a certain pride, a sense of distinction, in having such
a distant and forbidding Beloved:
None can walk Your path

And whoever does
Exhausts himself, walking, walking. . . .
The Brahman reads the holy texts
And loses wit and wisdom
Yogis give up deep meditation
The anchorites practice
Self-denial, and do
No good to anyone.
Philosophers
Forget philosophizing
They bare their head, trying
To keep the feet covered.
Jains, in Your service,

Suffer pain and do
The most arduous penance.
Look there —
A dervish, in a new guise
A shaven fakir; another yet,
Master of the Age, pious
In worship; and here’s another,
Become a wanderer
Shouting ha, hu, ha, hu.
There’s a frenzied one,
Openly so; another wanders
The desert, mad, unknown.
One, drunk with love,

Raves and yells,
And another falls
Unconscious.
A wanderer, with long and

Matted hair, and black
And dark as night;
Another madman gets the
Shivers, shaves his head
And says only Your name.
Secretly yet another

Pronounces words of power
And domination; and
Here’s someone else
Breathing out secret Names
Mad to capture the whole world.
Another, there, fasts and keeps
Awake, all night, every night.
And that one, there, becomes

A beggar, asking for
You alone, in alms.
Thus all groups and all bands,

All weeping and wasting away—
Pieces of chewed sugarcane.
That’s what they see

That’s what they find!
So say, O Bajan,
What can you count for?44
The preceding is a translation of a complete poem, comprising fifteen

verses (or thirty lines) of a rather short meter in the original. The meter is
Indic and reasonably regular. Bajan favors Indic meters but on occasion uses
Persian ones too. The poetry is pleasing in its simplicity, but an occasional
stunning metaphor (seekers after God end up like chewed sugarcane —with
no juice or sweetness of life left in them, and fit only for burning) enlivens
the utterance and raises its level substantively. While the poems mostly use
words sparingly, they pack in a lot of meaning. The language itself seems to
possess this characteristic, recalling Edward Terry’s observation (quoted ear-
lier) that “Indostan” “speaks much in few words.” In fact, in Shaiwh Bajan’s
time the language had not yet acquired anything from the vast, rich store of
images and metaphorical words and phrases that made Persian poetry (both
Indian and Iranian) very nearly unique in the world, in that it possesses a
huge ready-to-use vocabulary that sets up resonances of signification the mo-
ment anything from that vocabulary is used in a poem.
44. Madani 1981: 66–67; Sherani 1966, 1: 169.

Like nearly all poetry in the Indian Sufi tradition, Shaiwh Bajan’s embodies
the Islamic worldview as refracted through the prism of Indian eyes. Hindu
imagery and conventions abound in the works of early Sufi poets, and some-
times even affect their names. Shaiwh Mahmud Daryaºi (1419–1534), an-
other Sufi poet of Gujarat writing in Hindi/Hindvi, occasionally calls him-
self “Mahmud Das.” It is possible that Kabir (d. 1518) and Shaiwh ªAbd
ul-Quddus Gangohi (1455–1538) called themselves “Kabir Das” and “Alakh
Das,” respectively, for the same reason.45
By the early fifteenth century Hindvi had become so popular in Gujarat
that its vocabulary began to appear in Persian as well. In 1433–1434 a Per-
sian dictionary, Bahr al-fa}a ºil (Ocean of graces), was compiled in Gujarat by
Fa{l ud-Din Muhammad bin Qavam bin Rustam Balwhi. In addition to the
numerous Hindvi glosses of Persian words provided in it passim, it includes
a whole chapter “comprising Hindvi words used in poetry.” By the time of
Qa{i Mahmud Daryaºi (1415–1534) and Shaiwh ªAli Muhammad Jiv Gam-
dhani (d. 1565), the names “Hindvi” and “Dilhavi” seem to have generally
been given up in favor of “Gujri.” 46
Yet even much later, “Hindi” as a language name had not disappeared
from Gujarat. A maùnavi called Tariwh-e gharibi (A rare history), composed
in Gujarat between 1751 and 1757, contains the following verses:
Shoot no barbs at Hindi,
Everybody knows and explains
The Hindi meanings well.
. . . . . . . . .
And look, this Qurºan, the Book of God,
Is always explained in Hindi;
Whenever it is intended to expound
Its meanings openly, to the people,
One says and explains them
In Hindi.47
It must have been in the fifteenth century, if not earlier, that literary ac-
tivity in Hindi/Hindvi became popular in what is now called the Deccan.
The first name that we are aware of at present is that of Fawhr-e Din Ni}ami,
whose maùnavi has been tentatively called Kadam raºo padam raºo (c. 1421–
1434) after its two chief characters, since the single extant manuscript of the
poem does not have a name. It is a poem of great length; the manuscript
comprises 1032 verses (2064 lines)—and is incomplete.
The language of Kadam ra ºo padam raºo is dense and difficult, perhaps be-
45. Jalibi 1977: 113.

46. Sherani 1966, 1: 181.
47. Sherani 1966, 2: 249.
cause of the poet’s heavy preference for Telugu and tatsama -Sanskrit vo-
cabulary. Yet unlike Bajan, who rarely used Persian meters, Ni}ami composed
his poem in a standard Persian meter, and used it quite carefully. Ni}ami is
not a better poet than Shaiwh Bajan, but he tells his story reasonably well:
Kadam Raºo said, Honored Lady,
Come, and listen carefully;
I’d heard it said that women
Do deceive a lot, and I today
Saw something of your tricks;
And ever since I saw those tricks
In real life, I have been
In perplexity. What I knew
By hearsay alone, I saw with
My own eyes. And since then
My eyes have had no peace.
Two serpents I saw, one
A female, high-born, the other
A lowly male, and they together
Were playing lover-like games
Of sex, and lust. As God
Did make me King, so how
Could I see such inequity
Of pairing? I sprang at them
With my rapier drawn
To finish it off then and there.
The female fast slipped away
With her life, leaving her tail behind.48
Some of my translation here is, inevitably, tentative. But the poem has an
easy flow of rhythm, once one develops a knack for reading it aloud.
THE BIRTH OF LITERARY THEORY

The most prominent feature of Kadam raºo padam raºo is its secularity: though
it has a moral of sorts, it is basically a poem about kingcraft, miscegenation,
worldly learning, magic, and mystery. It is also consciously literary. The poet
regards the use of iham (double entendre, or punning), as the essence of
versifying:
A poem that doesn’t have
Dual-meaning words,
Such a poem does not
Attract anyone at all—
48. Ni}ami [1421–1434] 1979: 91–93.

A poem without
Words of two senses.49
xhusrau in his preface to Ghurrat al-kamal (1294) describes himself as the

inventor of a special kind of iham in poetry.50 Moreover, Fawhr-e Din Ni}ami’s
advent is parallel to, and quite independent of, Shaiwh Bajan’s. These first
stirrings of literary theory that we see in Ni}ami’s poem suggest that by his
time Hindi/Hindvi had matured as a medium for creative expression. It is
significant that the first intimations of theory that we have in Urdu do not
hark back to Iran or Arabia but were generated in India, and that it is a poet
who was the first major literary theorist of Hindi/Hindvi.
Before proceeding further it would be good to consider xhusrau’s liter-
ary theory. His ideas seem to have had a quiet but far-reaching influence on
Urdu and Indo-Persian literary practice, not always by providing direct guide-
lines but certainly by offering general support to literary activity. Ni}ami’s
stress on iham certainly owes something to xhusrau’s precept and example.
xhusrau’s influence may also be seen in the importance placed on ravani
(flowingness) in Indo-Persian and Urdu poetry. While the need for poetry
to flow easily and be amenable to public recitation must have been evident
to audiences and realized by poets from very early times, xhusrau seems to
have been the first to write about it in some detail. He created a somewhat
complex, and certainly subjective, theory of ravani—subjective enough to
remind us that he claimed to know Sanskrit and so may have been familiar
with the concept of the sah,daya, the sensitive reader of poetry.
In the preface to his Kulliyat (Collected poems), which he seems to have
compiled after 1315, xhusrau discussed and graded his own four divans on
the basis of ravani. He described the first one as “like the earth: cold, dry,
dense, and brittle.” His second divan contained ghazals that were “gentle and
soft in the imagination like water, and superior to earth, and purged of the
dust of all dense words”; they were “warm, and wet.” The third contained
“ghazals roasted and baked and most desirable . . . soft and delicate, and more
flowing and superior.” The fourth divan contained “ghazals like fire” that
could melt tender hearts, soften steely ones, and destroy loveless ones with
their “blazing flame and fiery brilliance.” 51
It is not necessary, and probably not possible, to give an exhaustive analy-
sis of the theories, allusions, and wordplay involved here. The basic theme
is that xhusrau sees ravani as a quality of the nature of fire and water. The
best ravani is like water-turned-to-heat (air) turned to water-turned-to-air-
turned-to-water. Poetry flows like the rise and fall of music—only more freely,
49. Ni}ami [1421–1434] 1979: 133.

50. xhusrau [1294] 1975: 63–64.
51. xhusrau 1967: 39–40.
because air, water, and fire essentially follow their own bent, while music is
bound by time and rhythm. The ravani of poetry transcends the bounds of
time and rhythm, merging and transmuting disparate elements.
xhusrau stresses the role of the proper temperament in the appreciation,
and also the production, of poetry. He begins the discourse on ravani by ap-
pealing to people who have the proper temperament or nature. He uses the
word tab ª, the standard word in Persian/Arabic for the poet’s “temperament.”
The root word in Arabic means “to impress something upon something,” as
with a seal or signet. Thus a person with the proper temperament would have
to have some training, or early imprinting, as well. xhusrau twice uses the
term tabª-i vaqqad (the brilliant-fiery-lively-heated-bright, hence intelligent and
perceptive, temperament)—once with regard to the reader, and elsewhere
with regard to himself. Just as the poet has the tab ª-i vaqqad that enables him
to make poems, the reader should have tab ª-i vaqqad to see and know what
the poet is doing. The resemblance here to Abhinavagupta’s notion of the
sah,daya reader who has “a heart with the keen faculty of perception” is ob-
vious.52 The idea of the union of fire and water as the essence of ravani leads
us to the notion of poetic energy. A poem that does not fully participate in
its maker’s energy as embodied in his (fiery) creative imagination, would
have less ravani. Fiery poems have the energy of movement. They cause things
to happen, yet their energy is harnessed not to causes social or moral, but
to the cause of love.
The prime importance that xhusrau placed on ravani finds echoes every-
where in Persian/Urdu poetry, culminating in the assiduous cultivation of
ravani by the Delhi Urdu poets of the early eighteenth century. One of the
earliest poets after xhusrau to place particular value on ravani was Hafi}
(1325?–1398) in a Persian verse of uncertain authenticity but significant fame:
As for him whom you call
“The Master,” were you to look
Truly with care: artificer he is,
But he has no flowingness.53
Nearer to home, Urdu poets in the Deccan, building upon the notion of ra-
vani, took the next step in syntagmatic image-making and introduced the
imagery of the ocean, and of pearls in it. Shaiwh Ahmad Gujrati, in his maù-
navi titled Yusuf zulaiwha ([Prophet] Joseph and Zuleika, 1580–1585),
praises his own poetry:
Then the shoreless ocean
Of my heart came into flood
52. Tewary 1984: 33.

53. Hafi} Shirazi n.d.: 135.
And the sky bent over

To rain down pearls.54
Mulla Vaj’hi (d. 1659?), in his long poem Qu/b mushtari (Qu/b [Shah] and
Mushtari, 1609–1610), builds further upon Shaiwh Ahmad’s imagery:
My pearls began to gleam so
That the pearls of the sea
Turned to water within
The mother of pearl.55
Nu3rati Bijapuri (1600–1674) praises his poet-king ªAli ªAdil Shah (r. 1656–
1672) in his long poem ªAli namah (Chronicle of ªAli; 1666):
Your mind is limpid, your
Temperament clear and pure,
Valuer of speech, subtle
And sharp, it can cleave
Even a hair.
. . . . .
Poetry is but a wave
From the ocean of your heart,
The army of your thoughts
Looks down upon the sky.
Earlier in the poem, the poet invokes God’s benediction:

Let my thoughts fly high, like the winds;
To my temperament give
The ocean’s perpetual wave and flow.56
In this poem Nu3rati also speaks of ma{mun (theme), as opposed to ma ªni

(meaning)—a distinction that seems to have first been made in India, per-
haps under the influence of Sanskrit, by the Persian poets of the “Indian
style” (sabk-i hindi) of his time. This distinction later became an important
part of the poetics of the Urdu ghazal in eighteenth-century Delhi.57
Vali (1665/67–1707/8) also uses the ocean-flow image to a double pur-
pose: praise of the ravani of his verse and praise of the beloved’s flowing
tresses:
In praise of your tresses
Truths and meanings, wave upon wave
54. Ahmad Gujrati [1580–1585] 1983: 215.

55. Vaj’hi [1609–1610] 1991: 56.
56. Nu3rati Bijapuri 1959: 27, 10.
57. See Frances Pritchett’s essay (chapter 15) in this volume.
Come into flow every night

Like the ocean of my temperament.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Such is the power
Of the waves of my poetry
That it would be proper for
My temperament to be compared
To an ocean.58
Urdu poets in early-eighteenth-century Delhi made ravani one of the cor-

nerstones of the new poetics that was emerging at that time. I call this po-
etics “new” in the sense that it sought, consciously or otherwise, to pull to-
gether a lot of thinking and feeling about the nature of poetry that had been
gathering in the Urdu literary culture over the centuries. Here is just one
instance, from Shakir Naji (1690?–1744); it is delightful in its own right and
also closely echoes Vali’s verse:
The flowingness of my temperament
Is no less, O Naji,
Than that of the ocean;
Were someone to write a ghazal
Like this ghazal of mine,
I would become his water carrier.59
Perhaps the single most powerful component in the matrix of Muslim lit-
erary ideas and practice is the Qurºan, which is believed to be uncreated yet
is a miracle of textual creation. Poetry tries to approximate this miracle. xhus-
rau said that all knowledge was “in the ocean of the Qurºan,” so that “if any-
one said that poetry was not in the Praised and Exalted Book, he denied the
Qurºan.” Since the Qurºan was, again by definition, also the most beautiful
text, it was proper to place both the mind and heart of poetry in the Quranic
context. This great theoretical leap was made by xhusrau in the Preface to
Ghurrat al-kamal. He pointed out that the Prophet had said “undoubtedly
wisdom is from poetry,” and not “undoubtedly poetry is from wisdom.” Thus
poetry is superior to wisdom: “A poet can be called a philosopher [hakim],
but a philosopher cannot be called a poet.” 60
xhusrau’s brilliance lay not so much in proposing a new theory as in pre-
senting a fusion of two worlds and enunciating a new argument in favor of
the fusion. The general principle that he implied here —that poetry is a body
of knowledge in its own right, and that it is concerned with larger issues and
not with the statement of “truths” seen from either a personal or an “objec-
58. Vali [1945] 1996: 239.

59. Naji 1989: 342.
60. xhusrau [1294] 1975: 20, 18–19. See also Jamal Husain 1993.
tive” standpoint—was implied in the literary theory of the Arabs and was not
too far from that of the Indian tradition. For both bodies of theory saw po-
ems as meaningful, but not information-giving, texts. It is in this context that
xhusrau’s role in formulating the literary taste of Urdu seems most significant.
It is a measure of the special value placed by the Indo-Muslim poetic cul-
ture on the generation of meaning that among the “firsts” in poetry of which
xhusrau is especially proud is a special kind of pun (iham); he relates pun-
ning directly to the generation of meaning. He says in the Preface:
Before now, the tongue of the poets, which is the hair-dresser and adorner of
poetry, did hair-splitting in iham such that two subtle points resulted. This ser-
vant, by his sharp pen, split the point of the hair of meaning such that seven
subtle points were obtained from one hair. . . . In brief, if in times before, the
image presented by iham had two faces, and whoever looked was astonished,
xhusrau’s temperament has devised an iham having more reflectivity than the
mirror. For in the mirror, there is only one image, and it cannot show more
than one idea. Yet this [iham of mine] is a mirror such that if you place one
face before it, seven proper and bright ideas appear.
Your intrepid falcon, playing
With its own life, would engage
The Simurgh in mortal combat
Were you to set, O massive-headed
Lion, your falcon to hunt.61
xhusrau proceeds to show that through one change in punctuation and

the polysemy of three of the words, this verse generates six meanings. His
original claim was seven meanings, so the text at this point must be defec-
tive. From the verse as given in the text, however, one can actually generate
eight meanings; my translation brings out only one of them (see the dis-
cussion of iham later in the chapter).
While the nature of the language in which literature was being produced
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was never in doubt—it was a language
of the common people, different from other, preexisting languages, and it
did not yet have many intellectual pretensions—the name of the language
continued to be dual until quite late, in the Deccan as well as in north In-
dia. People must have been traveling back and forth between the north and
the south (which at that time included Gujarat) starting with the reign of
Muhammad Tughlaq, who in 1327 shifted the headquarters of the sultanate
from Delhi in the north to Daulatabad in Maharashtra. Although he reversed
this decision in 1335, travelers’ transactions between the two parts of the
country continued—especially because it was the elite of Delhi who had been
61. xhusrau [1275] 1975: 56.

uprooted, and they naturally had large retinues. Not all of their numerous
clients, pupils, and camp followers went back to Delhi; some retained their
connections in the south, at least for some time. These persons must have
described their language as Hindi/Hindvi/Dihlavi or Gujri, depending on
where they came from.
Even native south-India-born speakers of the language are on record as
describing their language as Gujri. Examples can be found in the work of
the Sufi Shah Burhan ud-Din Janam (d. 1582?), who was born in south In-
dia.62 Hindvi poetry had already established a powerful presence in the south
by the time of Fawhr-e Din Ni}ami and Miranji Shams ul- ªUshshaq (d. 1496),
the father and mentor of Burhan ud-Din Janam. Miranji identifies his lan-
guage as “Hindi.” Janam calls his “Gujri” and “Hindi” on different occasions.
It is obvious that Janam is making a point in literary theory: in describing
his language as Gujri/Hindi, he is establishing his connections with the Sufi,
other-worldly, creative literary modes of the Gujri poets, rather than with the
this-worldly, essentially nonreligious though didactic world of literary activ-
ity constructed by Ni}ami and his successors.
The Gujarati Sufi Shaiwh xhub Muhammad Cisti (1539–1614) was the
greatest Gujri poet, and a major poet by any consideration. He wrote his long
poem (or series of short, connected poems) called xhub tarang (Wave of
beauty) in 1578. In addition to being one of the greatest poems of the mys-
tical-intellectual tradition—strongly reminiscent of the style of Shaiwh Muhyi
ud-Din ibn ªArabi—xhub tarang also contains brilliant thoughts on the na-
ture of poetry. Its author was aware of the interpenetrative transactions that
were gradually building up a body of Hindi/Gujri language and literature.
Arabia and Iran were not remote or threatening father-figures but active con-
tributors, and the end result of these interactions was a distinct, though lo-
cal, identity. He says in xhub tarang:
Like the speech
Flowing from my mouth:
Arabia and Iran join in it
To become one.
. . . . . .
The speech that flows
From the heart,
The speech of Arabia and Iran:
Listen, listen to the speech
Of Gujarat.63
62. Jalibi 1977: 129.

63. xhub Muhammad Cisti [1578] 1993: 247–48.
xhub Muhammad Cisti also wrote Chhand Chhandañ, a verse treatise in

which he attempts to collate the systems of Sanskrit and Persian prosody. The
opening verse is:
Say bismillah, and name this
Chhand chhandañ, a book
About the piñgal and ªaru{
And the tal adhyayah.64
xhub Muhammad Cisti evinces the same interest in the “poetryness” of

verse, poetic devices, and poetic grammar that characterizes xhusrau’s lit-
erary thought; Chhand chhandañ apparently influenced the poetry and po-
etics of the Deccani king and poet Muhammad Quli Qu/b Shah (r. 1580–
1611), who was the first to put together a complete divan in Urdu/Hindi/
Dakani. In another work, Bhaºo bhed (Mysteries of the modes), the Shaiwh
discusses tropes and figures of speech: he defines each figure in Persian and
Gujri, then illustrates it from his Gujri poems.65 xhusrau and xhub Muham-
mad Cisti thus emerge as the earliest literary theorists in Urdu. As we shall
see, Cisti seems to have set the trend for literary thought in the century that
followed.
Shaiwh Ahmad Gujrati (b. c. 1539), in his longish maùnavi Yusuf zulaiwha
(1580–1585), spoke extensively about poetry, language, and his own views
on how to write poems:
Since I had both
Natural and acquired capacity
For writing poems, I was long
In the company of learned men,
And imbibed some of their color
Into my own being.
. . . . . . .
I spent many days learning
Syntax, many I spent
Internalizing its voice, like a balance
In my own heart; many days
I spent learning grammar, whose texts
Quite conquered me. I heard
Disquisitions on the science of figures too,
And picked up pearls of logic there.
My teacher taught me religious
64. Sherani 1966, 1: 197–200. Chhand chhandañ = metrics, meters, or stanzas on metrics;
piñgal = Sanskrit prosody; ªaru{ = prosody (a general term, here applied to Perso-Arabic-Hindvi
metrics); tal adhyayah = section or chapter on (musical) beats. The book as it exists, however,
only has two parts, one on aª ru{ and the other on piñgal. Remarks on musical beats are passim.
65. Sherani 1966, 1: 199–200; ªAbd ul-Haq 1968: 67–68.
Philosophy and mysticism;

I obtained instruction in science
And the arts, basics of thought
And belief; and juristic texts
Also took many of my days.
I have enjoyed the essence
Of prosody and rhyme, and worked
Hard to internalize them. I am
Acquainted with astrology, medicine;
Having become a lover of Juice and Essence,
I have drunk deep of many such.
. . . . . . . . . . .
So many qualities one must have,
And so much learning, before
One can tell the story of a Prophet.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Telugu, and Sanskrit, I know well
And have heard poets and pandits;
I have read a lot of Persian,
And studied a bit of Arabic poetry too.66
This redoubtable inventory of skills and attainments may not have been
typical, but it certainly described Shaiwh Ahmad, whose reputation spread
well beyond Gujarat early in his own lifetime. The Shaiwh was invited by King
Muhammad Quli Qu/b Shah of Golconda to be his court poet, a position he
assumed in 1580–1581. Shaiwh Ahmad’s list shows that literature in Hindvi/
Gujri had now evolved in sophistication and refinement. It was no longer
merely a spontaneous affair of the heart but had become a serious discipline.
He describes the work that a truly accomplished poet can do:
It’s not difficult for me to compose
In all the genres of poetry there are.
I can use rare thoughts, and rare modes,
Rare and novel tropes and figures.
My themes, auspicious, bright, would show
The light of the sky on this
Lowly earth.
. . . . .
As my words fly out high they see
This whole world as one particle.
They cleave the depth of the netherworld,
The height of the sky, unraveling them
Like the strands of a thread.67
66. Ahmad Gujrati [1580–1585] 1983: 234.

67. Ahmad Gujrati [1580–1585] 1983: 235.
The Shaiwh mentions allegory, imagination, metaphor, and subtlety of thought

as his special qualities:
If I were to write in the mode of metaphor
And simile, I would make a new world,
A world different from this; sometimes
I’d separate life from the living;
Sometimes I’d take away
The life of the Light of life. Sometimes
I’d show the earth as high
As the sky, and sometimes I would
Spread out the sky like the earth.
. . . . . . . . . . .
I would depict thoughts, subtle and delicate
Like finely carded cotton.
One could see the soul of an angel,
But not my thoughts.
. . . . . . .
I thought, if I could find the poems
Made by xhusrau or Ni}ami,
I should quickly put them
Into Hindvi. So one day a friend
Lent me Jami’s Yusuf zulaiwha,
And I began to do it
In the Hindvi tongue, with strong meter,
And similes, and tropes, and figures.
I should not be Jami’s slave, but follow him
In some places, and not follow him
In some. I should extract whatever
Poetry Jami had, and add some of my own.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I should bring in fewer
Arabic words in the tale, nor mix
Persian and Arabic overmuch.
I shouldn’t elide, or twist words
To fit the meter, or write
Incoherently.68
Sanskrit, Telugu, Arabic, Persian, are all grist for this poet’s mill, and he is
not in awe of or inclined to privilege any particular linguistic tradition. He
acknowledges xhusrau and Ni}ami and Jami but is quite prepared to improve
upon them. His language has a literary and linguistic milieu of its own, with
no need to be propped up by foreign importations.
Poetry, for Shaiwh Ahmad, is the business of creating new worlds, revers-
68. Ahmad Gujrati [1580–1585] 1983: 237.

ing the order of things so as to make them anew. While his general debt to
Arabic and Sanskrit poetics is obvious, it is hard to pinpoint exactly where
their influence lies. Rather, there is an air of assimilation, an indirect inti-
mation of connections and continuities. Like xhusrau in his Persian, Shaiwh
Ahmad is constructing not so much from the past as for the benefit of the
present and the future. Anticipations of what will come to be called the “In-
dian style” of Persian poetry can be seen. They are not dominant yet, but
they are clearly the most prominent element in the Shaiwh’s poetics. The
emphasis on abstract, subtle thought; the centrality of metaphor; the global
reach of the imagination; and the value placed on figures of speech—all these
are characteristics of the “Indian style.”
Shaiwh Ahmad’s concern for the language —avoiding too much Arabic
and Persian, not distorting pronunciation to suit the meter, not resorting to
elisions or compressions—indicates a maturity and stabilization of linguis-
tic usage. But this was perhaps more in theory than practice, for Gujri and
Dakani poets are notoriously free with pronunciation, keeping it firmly sub-
servient to the exigencies of meter or even topic. Often the same word is
pronounced in two or three ways in the same text within a brief space, mak-
ing metrical reading extremely difficult. Yet the theoretical interest evinced
by the Shaiwh in keeping a “standard” pronunciation intact suggests the faint
beginnings of what in the late nineteenth century became an obsession with
“purity” and “correctness” in language.
Vaj’hi, writing his maùnavi Qu/b mushtari some twenty-five years later
(1609–1610), shows this concern more strongly:
One who has no sense of coherence
In speech should have nothing to do
With writing poems. And one should not
Have the greed to say too much, either.
If said well, even one single verse
Will suffice. If you have the art,
Use finesse and subtlety. For
One does not stuff bags full with color.
The difficult part of the art of poetry
Is to make both word and meaning
Coincide. Use only such words
In your poems as have been used
By none but the masters.
. . . . . . . . .
If you knew the grammar
Of poetry, you would use
Hand-picked words, lofty themes.
Even if there’s but one powerful theme,
It enhances the pleasure of the speech.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
If your beloved is beautiful like the sun,

And if you further beautify her face,
It is like Light upon Light. Even if
A woman had a thousand flaws,
She would look good if she knew
The art of self-adornment.69
One can see a number of new things happening here. In addition to shar-
ing Shaiwh Ahmad’s interest in words and their correctness in usage, Vaj’hi
is also concerned with the parole of the ustad (master, mentor). The use of
words not used by the ustads is not to be encouraged. He places a special
value on beauty of speech for its own sake: a fine theme is doubly valuable
if well expressed, but even a poor theme gains substantial beauty if expressed
with élan and style. Vaj’hi proposes something like the notion of sahitya
(equality of words and meaning), as well as the idea that poetry is an exer-
cise in words.70 Vaj’hi died about 1660, leaving Gujri/Hindvi/Dakani able
to boast a fully fledged literature in prose and verse. The Gujri impulse in
fact reached its peak with Shaiwh xhub Muhammad Cisti.
The literary theory that provided meaning and justification to the prac-
tices of the two and a half centuries that preceded his own time is summed
up by #anªati Bijapuri in his maùnavi Qi33ah-e bena}ir (A peerless story,
1644–1645). #anªati does not seem to have added anything substantial of his
own to the ongoing construction of the poetics for Hindvi literature, but he
did say some interesting things about the language that he used. His remarks
have almost a normative force:
I did not put much of Sanskrit in it.
I kept the poem free
Of verbosity. Dakhani comes
Easy to one who doesn’t have Persian.
For it has the content of Sanskrit, but
With a flavor of ease. Having made it easy
In Dakhani, I put into it
Tens and scores of prominent
And elegant devices.71
Note that while Vaj’hi calls his language “Hindi,” #anªati calls his “Dakhani”—
and he sets it up in opposition and apposition to Persian, as xhub Muham-
mad Cisti did for Gujri. For #anªati, poems should have an indigenous air,
with neither too much Sanskrit nor too much Persian. But there is still room
for elegant and noticeable devices, and fine artifice. Poetry, for #anªati, is the
69. Vaj’hi [1609–1610] 1991: 53–54.

70. Cf. Pollock, chapter 1, this volume.
71. Jalibi 1977: 273.
soul and apogee of all human endeavor. It does not need ratification from
outside authority. Nor does the poetics genuflect before the ancients, San-
skrit and Perso-Arabic. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about early Urdu
literary theory is its air of independence. This tradition of independent
thought continued in the south until its last great classical writer, Maulana
Baqar Agah (1746–1808).
THE EMERGENCE AND DOMINANCE OF REKHTAH IN THE NORTH

Literary activity in Gujri/Hindi continued to flourish. As we have seen, the
author of Tariwh-e gharibi (1751–1757) in Gujarat justified the use of Hindi
in strong terms. By the later eighteenth century, ªAbd ul-Vali ªUzlat (1692/
93–1775) had made his powerful mark, traveling from his birthplace in Surat
to Delhi and then to the Deccan proper, adorning literary and intellectual
gatherings all over the place. His poetry provided continuities with that of
Vali and became an important learning source for the writers who followed.
The preface that he appended to his Divan (1758–1759) is the first Urdu
prose of its kind.
Prose of many kinds seems to have made hesitant beginnings at about this
time in the north. The earliest known work is Fa{li’s Karbal katha (Story of
Karbala, c. 1732), a translation of a Persian religious narrative. Then there
are two dastans: Nau /arz-e mura33aª (A new ornamented style, 1775) by ªA/a
Husain Tahsin, and Qi33ah-e mehr afroz o dilbar (The story of Mahr Afroz and
Dilbar, c. 1731–1755) by ªIsavi xhan Bahadur. The names of Harihar Par-
shad Sañbhali (fl. 1730s) and Bindraban Mathravi (d. 1757), and of a prose
work by each of them, also appear. Nothing else is known of them. Sauda
(1706?–1781) wrote an Urdu prose preface for his Kulliyat.
By the time of ªUzlat’s death in 1775, the Delhi idiom had become dom-
inant in most of the Urdu world, and a separate Gujri tradition ceased to ex-
ist by the end of the eighteenth century. ªUzlat described his language as
Hindi.72 This, coupled with the example of Tariwh-e gharibi, suggests that “Gu-
jri” as a language name had fallen into disuse by about the 1760s.
The reasons for the gap in the north from Masªud Saªd Salman (1046–
1121) to xhusrau (1253–1325), and then the second period of silence, bro-
ken only in Gujarat in the early fifteenth century, can now be summarized
as follows: Masªud Saªd Salman’s and xhusrau’s efforts were casual and were
not in accordance with any established mode of writing. The fact that there
was literary activity in Avadhi in the fourteenth century (Mulla Daºud’s poem
Chandaºin in 1379), but not in Urdu, shows that Urdu did not have literary
status at that time. Urdu did not attain the status of a literary language un-
72. Jalibi 1984: 1006–7.

til the Sufis took it up in Gujarat in the fifteenth century, closely followed by
the Dakanis. No Sufi seems to have made Hindi/Hindvi a vehicle for liter-
ary expression in the north before Shaiwh ªAbd ul-Quddus Gañgohi (1455–
1538) and Kabir (d. 1518); neither, however, wrote in the mainline Khari
Boli Hindi/Hindvi that we know as Urdu today. The reason that the Sufis
did not adopt this language in the early centuries may have been the popu-
larity and general understandability of Persian in the north, which obviated
the need for the Sufis to use Hindi/Hindvi for their popular discourse.
The earliest literary text in Hindi/Hindvi extant in the north is Muham-
mad Af{al’s 325-verse maùnavi Bikat kahani (Story of misery, 1625). Also
known as Af{al Gopal, Muhammad Af{al (d. 1625/6) was not a Sufi in the
strict sense, but he seems to have been the kind of lover that Sufis are be-
lieved to be. All we know of the poet is that he died in 1625; the poem itself
is generally assumed to have been completed not long before his death. It
is a major work and needs to be examined separately; that it is not strictly a
religious poem is one of the more interesting things about it.
The seventeenth century did see some literary activity in the north, though
of generally indifferent quality. Most of it was folk-religious in character, and
almost all of it took place in the century’s last quarter. Raushan ªAli wrote
his long Jang namah (Chronicle of battle), also called ªAshur namah (Chron-
icle of ten days), in verse, in 1688–1689; Ismaªil Amrohvi wrote a maùnavi
called Vafat namah-e bibi fatimah (Chronicle of the death of Bibi Fatimah) in
1693–1694. Both are folk-religious poems. The former is closely modeled
on Miskin’s Jang namah-e muhammad hanif (Chronicle of the battle of Muham-
mad Hanif, 1681) in Gujri.73 The closeness between the dates of composi-
tion of Raushan ªAli’s and Miskin’s poems suggests direct influence. If this
is so, there must have been literary contact of a fairly immediate kind be-
tween the south and the north in the last part of the seventeenth century.
Miskin describes his language as Gujri, while Raushan ªAli describes his, in
various instances, as Hindi, Hindustani, and Hindvi.74 The fact that Raushan
ªAli identifies the language he uses by a different name even though he closely
follows Miskin suggests that he considered his tradition different and sepa-
rate from Gujri.
Apart from these folk-religious poems of the last quarter of the seventeenth
century—and one other manuscript of folk-religious poems that cannot be
dated with certainty75—no literary work survives between Af{al at the be-
ginning of the seventeenth century and Jaªfar Zatalli (1659?–1713), the first
writer in the north to write exclusively in Urdu, at the century’s end. Yet the
work of neither of them offers any clues to, or hints about, the great efflores-
73. Madani 1990: 15, 25–26.

74. Madani 1990: 25; Jalibi 1984: 47.
75. Adib 1984: 17–18, 25.
cence that was to take place in Delhi early in the eighteenth century, and
that would go on undiminished, through war and strife, civil commotion,
political disintegration, and foreign sway, for one hundred and fifty years.
In the early centuries of Hindi/Hindvi, there seems to have been an os-
mosis of that language into Persian on a scale that has not yet been fully ap-
preciated. Persian’s second oldest dictionary—the first to be prepared in
India—is Farhang-i qavvas, compiled by Fawhr ud-Din Qavvas Ghaznavi in ªAla
ud-Din xhalji’s time (1296–1316). It was followed by two other extant dic-
tionaries in the fourteenth century, and three in the fifteenth century. All
these dictionaries include many Hindi/Hindvi words as lexical or glossarial
items. Persian dictionaries of great depth and range continued to be produced
in India until well into the nineteenth century; most if not all of them were
designed for an Indian readership, and they generally expected a high de-
gree of sophistication from their users, especially from the sixteenth century
onwards. It is thus not surprising that Persian-Urdu or Urdu-Persian glossaries
were an important early linguistic activity in Hindi/Hindvi in the north. Thus
Hakim Yusufi (fl. 1490–1530) wrote a “long poem” (qa3idah) “about Hindi
words” that glosses a number of Hindi/Hindvi verbs and nouns in Persian;
in 1553, Ajay Chand Bhatnagar compiled a more complete glossary in verse.
The point is that in the north, up to the seventeenth century, most pro-
ducers and consumers of Hindi/Hindvi literature, and followers of the dis-
courses of the Sufis and other holy people, knew enough Persian not to need
a local language for instruction and delectation. Persian, it seems, was a lo-
cal language for most if not all of them. This would also account for the emer-
gence of Rekhtah—first as a genre, then as the name of the language in which
the rewhtah text was composed, and finally as the term for any poem com-
posed in Rekhtah.
One of the several meanings of rewhtah is “mixed”—in particular, the mix-
ture of lime and mortar used for building activity. Thus rewhtah became the
name for a poem in which either Hindi/Hindvi was added to a Persian tem-
plate or Persian was added to a Hindi/Hindvi template. The rewhtah mode
is evident in the earliest Urdu poetry in the north, including even such a so-
phisticated poem as Af{al’s Bikat kahani. Bikat kahani has 325 two-line verses;
of these, 41 are entirely in Persian; 20 have one line of Urdu and one of Per-
sian; and in another 20, half of one line is Persian, the other half being Urdu.
Even more complex combinations are possible: for example, in line 1 of verse
14, the first four words are Persian, the rest Urdu, while line two is entirely
in Urdu; in verse 15, the first line is all Persian except for one Urdu word,
artificially Persianized, and the second line is entirely Urdu except for the
penultimate word, which is Persian though assimilable in Urdu.76
76. Sherani 1966, 2: 104–5.

The Persian-based popularity of rewhtah in the north seems to have re-

tarded the growth of Hindi/Hindvi literature. Though not unknown in the
south, rewhtah never had much of a presence there. The Persianization of
the north may have been the result of snobbery or of the immense prestige
of “Indian style” Persian poets in that part of the country. Evidence of the
tilt in Persian’s favor can be seen in the distinction between rewhtah and ghazal
that was long made in the north. But the important distinction was that rewh-
tah, whether in mixed language or plain Hindi/Hindvi, was in early decades
not considered ghazal, even if it was in the ghazal form. The term ghazal was
reserved for the Persian ghazal alone. Consider the following verse of Qaºim
Chandpuri (1722/25–1795):
Qaºim, it was I
Who gave rewhtah the manner
Of a ghazal. Otherwise
It was but a feeble thing
In the language of the Deccan.77
No one seems to have asked what Qaºim meant by giving rewhtah “the man-
ner of a ghazal.” Surely there were a lot of ghazals in both Dakani and North
Indian Hindi/Hindvi before Qaºim Chandpuri? His own ustads, Sauda
(1706–1781) and Dard (1720–1785) would have been right there when he
wrote this verse, probably before 1760. It should be obvious that he meant
Persian when he said ghazal, even if his ustads would have considered this
boast to be in bad taste since it belittled their own achievements.
The issue is settled beyond doubt by Mu3hafi. In his eighth divan, which
would have been compiled in the early 1820s, we find the verse:
Mu3hafi, my rewhtah is
Better than ghazal —
For what purpose should
One now be
A devotee
Of xhusrau and Saªdi?78
While Delhi claims, almost imperialistically, to be the pristine seat of Urdu

literature, and while this claim colors and affects the literary culture of Urdu
in many ways, the fact remains that Delhi began with a bias against Dakani/
Hindvi and patronized the hybrid genre rewhtah for a long time, even nam-
ing the language “Rekhtah” (which also means “poured, scattered, dropped”)
as if to reflect its lowly origins. Considering this bias, it is not surprising that
77. Qaºim Chandpuri 1965: 215.

78. Mu3hafi [1878] 1990: 52.
there was very little Urdu literature in and around Delhi before 1700. The
surprising thing is that there was as much as there was.
Perhaps in an effort to nullify its Dakani/Gujri-linked past, or perhaps as
a defense mechanism, Delhi’s literary culture developed an arrogance, and
consequently an indifference, toward non-Delhi kinds of literature. It was
an attitude that survived well into the twentieth century. Even Delhi litera-
ture, if it didn’t conform to “ghazal standards,” was not accommodated in
the contemporary or historical canon. Poets like Af{al and Jaªfar Zatalli suf-
fered neglect, and even contempt, at Delhi’s hands. Very few tazkirahs (an-
thologies) mention these two poets. To this day, the former remains practi-
cally unknown in academia, and the latter is mentioned, if at all, with an air
of disapproval and disgust.
Yet both Af{al and Zatalli are major poets. Af{al was also the pioneer of
the barah masah genre (a kind of “shepherd’s calendar”) in Urdu. Af{al’s po-
etry is recognized, though very briefly, by Mir Hasan, who wrote in his tazki-
rah (completed about 1774–1778) that Af{al’s Bikat kahani had been com-
posed “about his own state” and was written in “half Persian and half Hindi,
but popularity is a gift of God.” 79 Mir Hasan’s observations show a hint of
disapproval because Af{al wrote in the classic rewhtah mode, which had fallen
into disuse (and in fact, disrepute) by that time. Mir Hasan’s remarks may
have actually turned potential readers away from Bikat kahani. The poem is
not autobiographical, as Mir Hasan assumed. It is a first-person narrative told
by a lovelorn woman. The poem abounds in lively, colorful imagery and has
the easy flow and controlled passion characteristic of major love poetry.
Jaªfar Zatalli was perhaps the greatest Urdu satirist, and that is saying a
great deal, considering that Urdu is particularly rich in satire and humor of
all kinds. But Zatalli was more than a satirist—he was a lover of words, and
of bawdiness and pornography (both soft and hard), which he used as both
a weapon of satire and a means of expressing his spirits, high or low. He was
a master of variety and technique, and a profound student of life and politics.
Both Af{al and Zatalli are important linguistically because they use a lan-
guage that is fledging itself out of its somewhat tawdry rewhtah form and is
on its way to becoming the nearly perfect medium that it did become within
about four decades of Zatalli’s death. Zatalli’s vocabulary is larger—and there-
fore much more varied—than that of Af{al. His career marks the major
watershed in the history of Urdu literature, and not only in the north. The
skills developed over the previous two centuries and more may not all have
been available to Zatalli; and in any case, there was little humor or satire in
Gujri and Dakani. Zatalli must have learned from his great Persian prede-
79. Mir Hasan [1774–1778] 1922: 41.

cessors, especially Fauqi Yazadi, an Iranian who spent some time in India
during Akbar’s reign. Fauqi and Zatalli share, among other things, a procliv-
ity for pornography for the sake of fun as much as for the sake of satire and
lampoon.
Compared to Gujri and Dakani, the language of both Af{al and Zatalli
sounds less outlandish to modern northern ears. The reason is that it has very
little tatsama -Sanskrit, Telugu, Marathi, or Gujarati in its vocabulary. The Per-
sian component of their language —the effect of rewhtah or of direct natural
absorption or both—is familiar enough; so is the Braj and Avadhi compo-
nent. A good bit of their vocabulary, which was retained by Delhi writers over
much of the eighteenth century, has been lost to mainline (Delhi-Lucknow)
Urdu, but it survives in the Urdu spoken in eastern India and is also com-
prehensible to Urdu speakers in the south today. This suggests that except
for the strong southern content, the register of Hindi and Dakani was much
the same in the seventeenth century. The language of Delhi changed sub-
stantially between 1760 and 1810, while that of the east and the south re-
mained comparatively stable. Parochialism and a chauvinistic belief in the
superiority of their own idiom and usage —which became the hallmark of
the speakers of the Delhi register of Hindi/Rekhtah in later years—is no-
where in evidence before the 1750s. In fact, if there was an upper register
before the mid-eighteenth century, it must have been located in the south.
By the middle of the seventeenth century, the “Indian style” was the or-
der of the day in Persian poetry everywhere in Iran, Turkey, and Indo-Muslim
India. The influence of Sanskrit, Braj, and Avadhi on Indo-Muslim literary
thought had begun more than a century earlier and had assumed a distinct
and strong presence during Akbar’s reign. By the 1640s, Panditaraja Ja-
gannatha was writing poetry in Dara Shikoh’s and Shahjahan’s courts. His
poetry in Sanskrit is clearly imbued with Persian influences, and most po-
etry of the Indian style in Persian should find responsive echoes in Sanskrit-
trained ears.80
If the prestige and popularity of Persian retarded the growth of Hindi/
Rekhtah literature in the north, the influence and power of the Indian-style
Persian poetry nevertheless had salubrious effects on Rekhtah/Hindi poetry
and theory when Rekhtah/Hindi came into its own in Delhi in the late 1600s.
Shah Mubarak Abru (1683/85–1733) was the first major poet in Delhi in
the 1700s. He must have begun writing poetry late in the seventeenth cen-
tury, and he is generally regarded as having adopted iham extremely early
in his career. We have seen that xhusrau claimed to be the inventor of a highly
elaborate kind of iham in poetry. But the immediate influence on Abru seems
to have been Sanskrit through Brajbhasha (Abru came from Gwalior, an im-
80. See chapter 2, by Alam, and chapter 1, by Pollock, in this volume.

portant Braj area) and Indian-style Persian poetry. Even Muhammad Hu-
sain Azad, who criticized Urdu poetry for being too Iran-oriented, ac-
knowledged that iham must have come into Urdu poetry from Sanskrit.81
Abru, and indeed whoever entered upon the business of poetry in
Dakani/Hindi/Rekhtah in the early eighteenth century, came under the
influence of Vali, and in many ways Vali has been the poet of all Urdu poets
since the first decade of the eighteenth century.
VALI’S LITERARY REVOLUTION

According to an estimate made in 1966, there were extant at that time sixty-
five dated manuscripts and fifty-three undated manuscripts of Vali’s divan
in libraries and similar collections; his verses also appear in numerous an-
thologies. Nur ul-Hasan Hashmi, the leading Vali expert of our time, says
that these numbers, though huge by ordinary standards, are still less than
the actual corpus of Vali’s extant manuscripts, which should run to over two
hundred.82
Vali was born somewhere around 1665–1667, and he died most proba-
bly in 1707–1708. However, dates as disparate as 1720 through 1725, and
even 1735, have been proposed as the year of his death. In fact, determin-
ing a late date for Vali’s death is a political, rather than scholarly, issue; for
one of the most famous stories about Vali is that he was advised by Shah Gul-
shan, a saint and poet who lived in Delhi, to give up his Dakani style and
adopt the style and the themes of the Persians. Thus the longer Vali lived af-
ter he putatively received Shah Gulshan’s advice, the easier it is to show that
his poetry was Persian/Delhi-inspired, and so to reduce his status as an orig-
inal poet who influenced the poets of Delhi.83 The year 1707/8 seems the
most likely year of Vali’s death, however, because the oldest extant manu-
script of his divan is dated 26 Rabiª ul-Avval, 1120 hijri, which corresponds
to July 15, 1708. This manuscript contains all the poetry that we at present
know to be Vali’s; it stands to reason therefore, especially in view of his great
fame, that he was not alive and composing poetry much later than that date.
Vali’s popularity is obviously attributable to the quality and the influence
of his poetry. For he was not a Sufi or a religious leader whose works and
words would have been lovingly and carefully preserved by his followers. Judg-
ing from the number of male (and maybe female) friends and lovers that
he celebrates in his divan, he must have been a man of the world, and of his
time —a period when the expression of physical love in poetry was much
less inhibited than became the rule in Urdu culture from about the mid-
81. Azad [1880] 1967: 99.

82. Vali [1945] 1996: 13–14; from the introduction.
83. Jalibi 1977: 534–39; ªI3mat Javed 1992: 337–54.
nineteenth century onward. Besides being a poet and a man of the world,
Vali was a man of learning; he was from Gujarat, or Aurangabad, or both.
He revolutionized Urdu poetry. Standard Urdu literary historiography and
thought have tried their best, over the last two and a half centuries, to di-
minish Vali’s achievement—for he was an outsider, and a Dakani to boot,
and it must have been gall and wormwood to the “Mirzas” of the educated
upper classes and ustads of Delhi to have to acknowledge the primacy and
the leadership of such a person.
Even many of the earliest Delhi poets, who would have felt most keenly
the positive impact of Vali, were deeply ambivalent about him, and they ac-
knowledged their debt to him in equivocal language:
Abru, your poetry is
Like a Prophet’s miracle,
And Vali’s, like the miracle
Of a mere saint.84
Vali is the master in Rekhtah,

So who can write
An answer to him?
Yet to write with
Diligent care and search
Gives success, given
A little inspiration.85
Were someone to go and recite
Naji’s verse on Vali’s grave,
Vali would rip open his own shroud
And spring from his resting place
Crying, “ Well said!” 86
Hatim is not all that insufficient
To give peace to my heart,
Yet Vali is the true Prince
Of poetry in this world.87
Shah Hatim in fact said of himself, “In Persian poetry, [Hatim] is a fol-
lower of #aºib, and in Rekhtah, [he] considers Vali the ustad.” 88 Shah Hatim,
most generous of poets, is the only one whose tribute to Vali is not left-handed.
The later masters, particularly Mir (1722–1810) and Qaºim Chandpuri,
took the lead in belittling the achievement of Vali by introducing the story
84. Abru 1990: 271.

85. Abru 1990: 295.
86. Naji 1989: 349.
87. Shah Hatim 1991: 58.
88. Shah Hatim [1755–1756] 1975: 39.
of Saªdullah Gulshan advising Vali. The story is, in brief: Vali came to Delhi
in 1700—as we know from Qaºim—and met Gulshan, who looked at his po-
etry and advised him to “appropriate” themes and images from the Persians,
thus enriching his own poetry. Vali took the advice seriously and implemented
it successfully. Then when his divan arrived in Delhi in the second regnal
year of Emperor Muhammad Shah (1720–1721), it took Delhi by storm, and
everybody, young and old, adopted Vali’s style of poetry.89
One is bound to wonder why Shah Gulshan would have waited for some-
body—whether Vali or someone else —to come from outside Delhi to be the
recipient of his somewhat unethical advice. Delhi at that time —in fact, at
any time —was home to numerous poets. Most of them wrote in Persian and
also tried their hand at a bit of Rekhtah. They were perfectly fluent in Per-
sian and knew Persian poetry as well as Shah Gulshan did. And if there were
more suitable recipients for such advice, there were also more suitable ad-
visers. Among the major Persian poets in Delhi at the end of the seventeenth
century, Mirza ªAbd ul-Qadir Bedil (1644–1720) and Muhammad Af{al Sar-
whush (1640–1714) commanded greater respect and a larger following than
anyone else. Bedil was in fact at the apogee of his illustrious career during
the 1700s and even wrote a bit of Rekhtah himself. Gulshan himself was Be-
dil’s follower, or perhaps even his pupil, in Persian poetry.
To be sure, Vali must have called on Shah Gulshan, if the latter was in
Delhi when Vali came there. Gulshan came from Burhanpur, Gujarat, and
traveled at least once to Ahmadabad, where Vali may have met him. There
is a small Persian prose tract composed by someone called Vali who describes
himself as a pupil of Gulshan. According to Madani, the master-pupil con-
nection between Vali and Gulshan would have been for Persian and would
have begun at Ahmadabad or Burhanpur.90 On balance, then, the likelihood
of Vali having known Gulshan from before his visit to Delhi in 1700 is strong
enough to cast serious doubt on the stories narrated by Mir and Qaºim about
Vali and Gulshan.
I call these accounts “stories” because the details of Qaºim’s version are
very different from those of Mir’s. Qaºim completed his tazkirah in 1754. He
is reputed to have been at the task earlier than Mir. Nevertheless, neither
Mir nor Qaºim was even born when Vali came to Delhi, so neither had any
more personal knowledge than the other. Qaºim tells an even more curious
tale. Recognizing that a poet who had attained the mature (by the reckon-
ing of the time) age of thirty-three or thirty-five —Vali was born around
1665–1667—wasn’t a likely candidate for patronizing, somewhat avuncular
advice from a comparative stranger, Qaºim stipulates that Vali was not yet a
poet before that momentous meeting with Gulshan:
89. Mir [1752] 1972: 91; Mu3hafi [1794–1795] 1933: 80.

90. Vali [1945] 1996: 40–41; Madani 1981: 86–87.
[Vali] used occasionally to compose a couple or so of Persian shi ªr s in praise

of the beauty of [a young Sayyid called Mir Abuºl-Maªali]. On arrival here [in
Delhi], when he gained entrance to the presence of Ha{rat Shaiwh Saªdullah
Gulshan, the latter commanded him to compose poetry in Rekhtah, and by
way of education, gave away to him the following opening verse, which he com-
posed [there and then]:
Were I to set down on paper
The praises of the beloved’s
Miraculous beauty, I would
Spontaneously convert the paper
Into the White Hand of Moses.
In short, it was due to the inspiration of the Ha{rat’s tongue that Vali’s poetry
became so well-loved that each and every verse in his divan is brighter than the
horizon of sunrise, and he wrote Rekhtah with such expressive power and grace
that many ustads even of that time began to compose in Rekhtah.91
This tale might be more plausible than Mir’s, except that we know Vali
was already a poet of substantial repute when he visited Delhi in 1700–1701.
While it is impossible to date all of his poetry accurately, references to con-
temporaries who died before 1700 clearly establish that he was a serious
Rekhtah/Hindi poet before 1700. There is, for example, the following ag-
onistic reference to the famous Indo-Persian poet Na3ir ªAli, who died in
1696:
Were I to send this line
To Na3ir ªAli, he would upon
Hearing it, spring up excited
Like a streak of lightning.92
Other knowledgeable tazkirah writers do not support the story of Shah Gul-
shan’s advice; one in fact explicitly rejects it, sneering, “Let the truth or false-
hood of this statement be on the original narrator’s head.” 93
It is extremely unlikely that Vali’s poetry owes anything to Shah Gulshan’s
instruction or example. Apart from the Dakani tradition and language in his
blood, and the part that Gujri played in his nurture, he had Hasan Shauqi
(d. 1633?) as his exemplar. Shauqi was in Ahmadnagar (then in Golconda),
91. Qaºim Chandpuri [1754] 1968: 105. It is impossible to render this beautiful verse sat-
isfactorily in English. “ White Hand of Moses” refers to a miracle granted to Moses by God at
Sinai. He was asked to put his right hand under his collar. It came out entirely white, “without
stain, or evil” (Qurºan 27.12).
92. Vali [1945] 1996: 196.
93. Amrullah Ilahabadi [1778–1780] 1968: 123. For others who do not support this story,
see Shafiq Aurangabadi [1762] 1968: 82–84, and Mir Hasan [1774–1778] 1922: 204.
but his reputation seems to have been widespread. The main characteristics
of Shauqi’s poetry are a richness of sensuous imagery and a language com-
paratively free of hard Telugu and tatsama - Sanskrit influences. An extreme
case of these influences is the work of Fawhr-e Din Ni}ami; more moderate
but still fairly heavy influence is evident in the writing of Nu3rati, perhaps the
greatest Dakani poet. By comparison, Vali’s language tilted more toward the
Persian-mixed Rekhtah of Delhi. Most of the Dakani component of Vali’s lan-
guage is tadbhava; and a good bit of it is to be found in Delhi’s register as well.
It appears that a strain of Dakani/Hindvi developed in and around Au-
rangabad after Aurangzeb and his vast armies had established a presence
there. This happened even before he took the throne at Delhi. His campaigns
in the Deccan continued through his long reign (1658–1707). ªAbd us-Sat-
tar #iddiqi, perhaps the greatest modern comparative linguist in Urdu, says:
It seems clear that by the end of the tenth century hijri [1590/91], there were
two forms of the Hindustani language in the Deccan. One, which was current
in Dravidian[-dominated] areas of the Deccan, outside the territory of Daulata-
bad, and found few opportunities to renew its connections with the language
of Delhi. . . . The other form of the language was that which was prevalent in
Daulatabad and its surrounds. The Mughals turned towards the Deccan in the
beginning of the eleventh hijri century [end of the 1590s], and their influence
grew fast. They also made Daulatabad their headquarters, and Aurangzeb, too,
established the city of Aurangabad just a few miles from there. People from
Delhi came to Aurangabad in very large numbers in the times of Shahjahan
and Aurangzeb, and brought Delhi’s high Urdu with them. It renewed and re-
furbished the language of the territory of Daulatabad, and the Aurangabadis
happily adopted the new language of Delhi. And that is the language that we
find in Vali; and but for some minor differences, it was the language spoken
in Delhi in Vali’s time.94
ªAbd us-Sattar #iddiqi may have simplified the case a bit, but the picture
he presents is broadly accurate. Shafiq Aurangabadi writes about Nu3rati that
his poems come “heavy on the tongue because of their being in the mode
of the Dakanis.” Maulvi ªAbd ul-Haq, who spent a substantial part of his life
in Aurangabad, says that in the first half of the eighteenth century the lan-
guage registers of Delhi and Aurangabad were practically indistinguishable.
Once the Deccan became more or less independent of Delhi in the 1750s,
the language of the Daulatabad-Aurangabad area lost touch with Delhi and
gradually tilted back to the main Dakani mode.95
Hasan Shauqi’s poetry is comparatively gentler on the Aurangabadi ear.
94. Vali [1945] 1996: 61–62.

95. Shafiq Aurangabadi [1762] 1968: 80; Tamanna Aurangabadi [1780–1781] 1936: ze.
Hasan Shauqi is the only Dakani/Hindi/Rekhtah poet whom Vali mentions

as a rival, or as worthy of comparison with himself:
It’s quite proper, O Vali,
If Hasan Shauqi should come
Back from the dead, eager
For my poems.96
All the others whom Vali ever mentions as equals or inferiors—and he

names quite a few—are Persian poets. In a remarkable ghazal he fits the
names of numerous Persian poets in a series, using them, through word-
play, as words of praise for the beloved. Apart from Shauqi, the only Dakani/
Hindi/Rekhtah poet whose name he brings in is Shah Gulshan, and he can
be described as a Hindi/Rekhtah poet only by courtesy.97
So what did Vali do? He showed that Rekhtah/Hindi was capable of great
poetry, just as Gujri/Hindi and Dakani/Hindi were. He also showed that
Rekhtah/Hindi could rival, if not surpass, Indo-Persian poetry in sophisti-
cation of imagery, complexity and abstractness of metaphor, and the “cre-
ation of themes” (ma{mun afirini). Historically, perhaps his most important
contribution was to infuse among Rekhtah poets the sense of a new poetics—
a poetics that owed as much to the Indian-style Persian poetry, and through
it to Sanskrit, too, as it did to his Dakani predecessors:
O Vali, the tongue of the master poet
Is the candle that lights up
The assembly of meanings.
. . . . . . . . .
The beloved has made her place
In Vali’s heart and soul
Like meaning in the word.
. . . . . . . . .
The way for new themes
Is not closed;
Doors of poetry
Are open forever.
. . . . . .
The beloved
whose name is Meaning reveals
Herself, bright, when the tongue
Removes the curtain from
The face of Poetry.
. . . . . . .
96. Vali [1945] 1996: 243.

97. Vali [1945] 1996: 292.
Poetry is
Unique in the world, there is
No answer to poetry.98
THE NEW LITERARY CULTURE

By the early eighteenth century, many Indians—especially in the north but
also in the Aurangabad area—regarded themselves as having a native
speaker’s competence in Persian; I have given some details of the confident
eighteenth-century Indian Persian literary culture in a recent article. Most
of the earliest Rekhtah writers in Delhi were Persian poets who wrote in
Rekhtah only on the side. That this was the case until much later in Au-
rangabad too is evidenced in a tazkirah by Shafiq Aurangabadi. He comments
that he began writing poetry in Persian by the age of twelve (he was born in
1745), had no taste for Rekhtah, and in fact looked down upon it. When
Rekhtah poetry became extremely popular among his friends, he too turned
to it, but not without considerable mental conflict and anguish.99
The new wave of Rekhtah/Hindi writers who began to arrive on the scene
in the early 1700s—and whose poetry received a much-needed boost from
the example of Vali—wrote more Rekhtah than Persian.100 Yet Persian did
not become the mere second string to the Delhi poet’s bow until much later.
There was not much “high” literary activity in Rekhtah before the impact
of Vali was felt in Delhi. As we saw earlier, until quite late in Delhi’s literary
culture ghazal meant only “Persian ghazal.” Young writers who were turning
to Rekhtah at the turn of the century in Delhi were perhaps more com-
fortable in Persian than in Rekhtah. Thus, when poets began composing in
Rekhtah in large numbers, they needed guides or mentors to put them
through their paces, whence was born the institution of ustad and shagird
(pupil, disciple), which is unique to Urdu literary culture and did not even
exist in Dakani or Gujri.
Once established, the custom of forming ustad-shagird relationships spread
fast. In the beginning it certainly met a felt need: a literary community was
giving up a foreign language in which it was comfortable in favor of the local
98. Vali [1945] 1996: 286, 203, 177 (these page numbers correspond to the first, second,
and last three quoted verses, respectively).
99. Shafiq Aurangabadi [1762] 1968: 9. For more on Indian Persian literary culture, see
Faruqi 1998.
100. By the mid-eighteenth century the Hindus, too, who had also been concentrating on
Persian, began to adopt Rekhtah. In the beginning, major figures like Sarb Sukh Divana (1727/
28–1788/89) were bilingual in Urdu and Persian; Divana established a long and illustrious line
of shagirds through his own shagirds, especially Jaªfar ªAli Hasrat (d. 1791/92). By the end of the
century, Hindus were active participants in the Urdu creative scene, a situation that, happily,
continues to this day, in spite of politically motivated efforts to alter it.
language —the literary codes of which were seen as more or less indepen-
dent, so that they needed to be specially learned. What began as a need, how-
ever, soon became a fashion, and then a minor industry and a source of patron-
age. Loyalties were generated and abrogated; feuds began to occur between
ustads, and between shagirds of the same ustad; and poetic genealogy became
an important part of a poet’s literary status. Within this new system, codes
of conduct and protocols of behavior—such as the musha ªirah, or literary
gathering—were developed. These were mostly in place by the 1760s, soon
spreading to all Rekhtah/Hindi centers: Lucknow, Benares, Allahabad, Murshi-
dabad, Patna, Aurangabad, Hyderabad, Surat, Rampur, Madras, and so on.101
One important manifestation of this new Urdu literary culture was its al-
most morbid obsession with “correctness” in language. Undue —and some-
times even almost mindless—emphasis on “correct” or “standard, sanctioned”
speech in poetry and prose, and even in everyday converse, has been one of
the most interesting and least understood aspects of Urdu culture from the
mid-eighteenth century onward. Persian’s immense prestige (“Persian” here
includes Arabic) may account for a part of this emphasis. The idea seems to
have been to make Rekhtah approximate to the Persian of a native Persian
speaker. This was elitism of a sort, and may well have been meant to be ex-
actly that.
Shah Hatim is reputed to be the person with whom all this began. He did
recommend using words in accordance with their original Arabic/Persian
pronunciation—something that, as we have seen, the Dakanis also recom-
mended, but never practiced. Hatim also suggested removal of hindvi bhakha
words from the Rekhtah/Hindi poet’s active vocabulary. But the suspicion
remains that all this may have been a defensive ploy for creating a distance
between the language of Vali and that of Delhi. For Hatim also emphasized,
in no uncertain terms, the primacy of established idiom over bookish idiom.
And Hatim, too, does not seem to have been at all faithful to his own pre-
scriptions. In the selection from his divan called Divan zadah (1755/56),
which he made by “purging” his older poetry of usages of which he now dis-
approved, one can find numerous examples of the very things that he was
seeking to remove from the language of poetry.
101. Examples of poetic genealogy still occur: a poet from Maharashtra recently claimed
to trace his poetic lineage back to Sauda (d. 1781) and Dard (d. 1785). See Ibrahim Ashk 1996: 4.
The mushaªirah had been in existence in India since the sixteenth century, but had been
confined to Persian recitation alone. The new literary community of the North, gaining
confidence gradually, instituted mushaªirahs in Rekhtah as well. It was common until the 1920s,
if not even later, for Persian poetry to be recited at Urdu musha ªirahs without the audience or
the poet feeling any incongruity. Until the 1950s and even later, individual Urdu poets’ collec-
tions (including mine) often contained a bit of Persian poetry too (Faruqi 1997a). For a full dis-
cussion of the mushaªirah, as well as the full literary and cultural dimensions of the ustad-shagird
relationship, see Pritchett, chapter 15, this volume.
Compared to the prescriptions, however self-contradictory, of Hatim,

Vali’s approach was freer and more relaxed: both local and Arabic/Persian
pronunciation had equal right in the language; words used by the common
people did not need to be avoided. This was the credo in Rekhtah also, but
Vali, because of his influence and popularity, was the great exemplar who
was to be imitated—and also denied. This tension comes through clearly in
Shah Hatim’s preface to the Divan zadah:
This servant [Shah Hatim] . . . during the past ten or twelve years, has given
up many words. He has favored such Arabic and Persian words as are easy to
understand and are in common use, and has also favored the idiom of Delhi,
which the Mirzas of Hind [the north] and the nonreligious standard speakers
[rind] have in their use; and [he] has stopped using the language of all and
sundry areas, and also the Hindvi that is called the bhakha; [he] has adopted
only such a register as is understood by the common people, and is liked by
the elite.102
One can see Hatim’s dilemma: he wants to hunt with the hounds and run
with the hare. He doesn’t want to declare independence from Vali, but he
also wants to emphasize his own Delhi-ness. He wants to use Arabic and Per-
sian vocabulary, but only such as can be commonly understood. (Vali, by con-
trast, was quite fond of Arabic phrases.) He wants to use language that is so-
phisticated and secular, language used by the Mirzas and rinds (educated,
more or less free-living, nonreligious frequenters of wine houses and mar-
ket places) of the north, but the language should also be understandable to
the common people of Delhi. He doesn’t want to use Brajbhasha, the lan-
guage of areas to the south of Delhi (that is, toward Aurangabad) from which
both Dakani and Rekhtah had derived a number of tatsama words. (Vali’s
language, by contrast, abounds in tatsama words.)
Hatim’s agenda was basically twofold: its negative part was his (un)con-
scious desire to move away from Vali; its positive part was his wish to bring
the language of poetry into line with that of the Mirzas, the rinds, and the
common people of Delhi. Balancing all these elements was a task, but great
poets like Mir performed it very well. Unfortunately, it was the least impor-
tant and the least right-minded part of Shah Hatim’s agenda—namely, down-
playing the value of tatsama words—that caught the eye and fancy of many
later historians. What was an attempt to arrive at a secular, urbanized and
urbane, modern-idiomatic, and literate yet not overburdened language was
seen and hailed as exclusionism and “reformism,” as if the language were a
criminal or a patient who needed reform or healing and it was the duty of
the poet to perform this task.
There is no doubt that the proportion of tatsama vocabulary declined in
102. Shah Hatim [1755–1756] 1975: 40.

Rekhtah/Hindi over the second half of the eighteenth century. But was it
because of Hatim, or for other reasons not yet discovered? Was Hatim de-
scribing in the guise of prescription, and was the language at that time chang-
ing faster than we make allowance for? One would need more evidence than
is available at present to ascribe the decline in the number of tatsama words
in literary Urdu to the “exclusionism” and “reforms” inaugurated by Hatim.
In any case, Urdu literary culture from the late eighteenth century on-
ward does place an unfortunate stress, which is also entirely disproportion-
ate to their value, on “purism,” “language reform,” “purging the language
of undesirable usages,” and—worst of all—privileging all Persian-Arabic over
all Urdu. Urdu is the only language whose writers have prided themselves
on “deleting” or “excising” words and phrases from their active vocabulary.
Instead of taking pride in the enlargement of vocabulary, they took joy in
limiting the horizon of language, to the extent of banishing many words used
even by literate speakers or their own ustads. Why this Persian-privileging and
“purifying” process came into existence, and why Urdu writers themselves
took an active part in establishing and perpetuating it, is a question that I
have addressed, though not entirely solved, elsewhere.103
The linguistic restrictiveness of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Urdu
contrasts most starkly with the steady expansion of literary theory that we
see from Vali (1665/57–1707) to Shah Na3ir (1755?–1838) and Shaiwh
Nasiwh (1776–1838). The first major discovery in the field of literary the-
ory was that a distinction could be made between ma{mun (theme) and maªni
(meaning). Classical Arab and Iranian theorists use the term maªni to mean
“theme, content.” As late as 1752, we find Tek Chand Bahar in Bahar-i aª jam
defining the word ma ªni as “synonym of ma{mun.” Barely fifty years later, Shams
al-lughat, the next great Persian dictionary compiled in India, defines maªni
as “that which is connoted by the word.” The idea that a poem could be about
something (ma{mun, theme), and could mean something different, or more
(ma ªni, meaning), may have come from the Sanskrit tradition. One is re-
minded of Anandavardhana’s classification of different kinds of meanings
(literal, secondary, implied) and surpluses of meaning.104
In Urdu, Mulla Nu3rati Bijapuri (1600–1674) seems to have been the first
103. Faruqi 1998. Mu3hafi [1878] 1990 deals with the limitations placed on language. Of
course, the power of langue is always greater than that of parole, and Urdu is no exception. Thou-
sands of “incorrect” or “questionable” words and phrases entered even the literary language,
despite the restrictions, and continue to enter even now. Yet many of the taboos that originated
in the early nineteenth century are still in place. In theory, and also to a large extent in prac-
tice, Urdu literary idiom remains the most restrictive kind imaginable.
104. Bahar [1752] 1865–1866, 2: 614; Shams al-lughat [1804–1805] 1891–1892, 2: 252;
Todorov 1986: 12–13, 27.
to use the term ma{mun in the sense of “theme, idea.” Since he does so a
number of times, and usually in the context of poetic excellence, he is doubt-
less making a point in literary theory:
Reveal, O Lord, on the screen
Of my poetic thought
The freshness and virginity
Of all my themes.
. . . . . .
Your manner is new,
And your speech
Appeals to the heart.
Your themes are lofty
And colorful.
. . . . .
I spoke throughout
By means of new themes, and thus
Revealed the power
Of God’s inspiration.
. . . . . . .
New, fresh themes
Are my weapons
To cool and kill
My opponent’s breath.105
Nu3rati, a man of great learning, may have known Sanskrit. Or he may

have picked up a point or two from Telugu-speaking literary friends, or from
Kannada—he was originally from an area which is now in Karnataka (as, for
that matter, Bijapur is too). In any case, he would have been aware that such a
distinction was being made, or assumed, by his “Indian style” Persian-writing
colleagues—and he himself said that he made Dakani poetry resemble that
of Persian. More importantly, he also said in his Gulshan-e ªishq (Garden of
love, 1657) that there are many “Hindi” (Indian) excellences that cannot
be properly transported into Persian, and he, Nu3rati, having discovered the
essence of both, had created a new kind of poetry by mixing the essence of
one with the other.106
The introduction of this far-reaching distinction between theme and
meaning made several things possible. It was recognized, for instance, that
while themes were theoretically infinite, very few of them were acceptable
in poetry. Thus the creation of themes (ma{mun afirini) —the search for new,
105. Nu3rati Bijapuri 1959: 9, 27, 425, 426. In the second verse quoted, he praises the poet-
king ªAli ªAdil Shah II.
106. Jalibi 1977: 335.
acceptable themes, or for new ways to express old themes—became a noble

occupation for the poet.107 This gave rise to a mode called whiyal bandi (cap-
turing imaginary, abstract, elusive themes), in which the theme’s novelty or
far-fetchedness became an objective for its own sake (although far-fetched
or novel themes also had to pass the test of acceptability). The mode —though
not the term—seems to have begun with the Indian-style Persian poets of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Urdu, traces of this manner can
be found in Vali, ªAbd ul-Vali Uzlat, and Mir. By the end of the eighteenth
century, it was firmly in position as the ruling mode of the day.
Praising the beloved’s beauty, for instance, was a major theme. Praising
the beauty of her face was a major subtheme. Praising the eyes, lips, cheeks,
and so forth, were major sub-subthemes. Praising something that was not in
any of the conceivable categories presented several challenges: one had to
find such a thing; then one needed to imagine, or find, some praiseworthy
aspect of it; and then, hardest of all, one needed to invent terms of praise
that conformed to the dictates of convention. This is how Mir looks at the
beloved’s pockmarked face:
They weren’t so plentiful,
The pockmarks on your face —
Who has been planting
His glances on your face?108
This is brilliant, for it implies beauty both before and after disfigurement by
smallpox. But the verse turns upon a wordplay: in Urdu, one of the ways to
convey the act of looking intently at something is to say “bury/embed/plant
the eyes or the glances in/on something.” Jurºat (1748–1809) imagines a direr
situation, but doesn’t quite achieve the image that could bring off the de-
sired effect:
The body of that rosy-Rose
Bathed in the efflorescence
Of smallpox: like the action
Of the moth on bright velvet.109
Jurºat uses for the beloved the word gul, which means “rose, flower,” and
also “scar, spot.” This is happy wordplay, but the image of the rose-body
107. Ali Jawad Zaidi says that Urdu poets of the early eighteenth century adopted the art
of ma{mun afirini and complex craftsmanship as a conscious design, and the underlying theory
“was not different from what Bhamaha had developed in the seventh century. . . . The tradi-
tion that travelled from Sanskrit to Persian, and from thence to Urdu, may have kept changing
its form and structure, but not its spirit.” Zaidi 1970: 41.
108. Mir [1796?] 1968: 389.
109. Jurºat 1971: 175.
doesn’t go well with that of velvet. Now consider Nasiwh, greatest of the whiyal
band poets:
When blisters of smallpox
Appeared on the beloved’s face,
The bulbuls were deceived:
Dewdrops on rose petals, surely?110
Like Mir, Nasiwh introduces an outsider into the story; the difference is
that in Mir, the outsider causes the harm, and in causing it reaffirms the “look-
ability” of the beloved’s face. In Nasiwh, the outsider presents another’s point
of view. The subtlety is that the other is the bulbul, or nightingale, the quin-
tessential lover, while the rose is the quintessential beloved. Thus the
beloved’s ravaged face is not really ravaged; the bulbul takes it for rose petals
bathed in dew. Both the shi rª s (verses) also affirm the beloved’s delicateness
by suggestion (kinayah), but in different ways: in the Mir verse, the beloved
is so delicate that the onlooker’s glances, like needles, hurt and cause breaks
under the skin. In the Nasiwh verse, the delicate, rosy smoothness of the skin
causes the blisters to glow like dewdrops.111
Consideration of whiyal bandi takes us nearly half a century ahead in my
narrative, however, for whiyal bandi came into its own toward the end of the
eighteenth century. The main mode of early-eighteenth-century poets was
iham. If whiyal bandi sought to push to the limit the poet’s innovativeness (and
in fact also his luck), it was the frequent use of iham (wordplay generated by
the intent to deceive) that characterized the earliest major effort to make
poems yield more meaning than they at first glance seemed to possess. This
was called ma ªni afirini (creation of meanings)—as opposed to ma{mun afirini
(creation of themes). In the textbook definition of iham, the poet uses a word
that has two meanings, one of which is remoter and less used than the other,
and the remoter one is the intended meaning. The mind of the listener/
reader naturally associates the word in question with the more immediate
meaning and is thus deceived, or else the listener doubts that he has heard
the verse correctly. Poets of the early eighteenth century, however, did much
more than this. In the hands of Vali and the Delhi poets iham came to in-
clude many kinds of wordplay that showed greater creativity than the con-
ventional definition of iham allowed for. For instance, they concocted situa-
tions in which the two meanings of the crucial word were equally strong,
making it impossible to decide which was the poet’s intended meaning; or
110. Nasiwh 1847: 19.

111. It must be remembered that many shi ªr s of whiyal bandi sound faintly (or even strongly)
bizarre in English translation today. One is tempted to believe, though, that they would not
sound entirely outlandish to “thinking poets” (in Coleridge’s words) like John Donne or other
metaphysical poets.
in which the crucial word had more than two meanings, all of them more
or less relevant to the poem’s discourse.112
Let us now take a look at an instance of iham. For obvious reasons, iham
does not fare well in translation, and excellence has to be traded off for trans-
latability. Abru says:
I hacked through life in every way,
Dying, and having to live again
Is Doomsday.113
I will now supply, in order from obvious to less obvious, the aspects of mean-
ing that are lost in translation: “I hacked through life in every way”: (1) I
tried all ways of living a life; (2) I suffered all kinds of hardship. “Dying, and
having to live again”: (1) being resurrected; (2) dying by inches, again; (3)
engaging in the cycle of living and dying over and over again. “Doomsday”:
(1) the day of resurrection, when all the dead will be brought back to life;
(2) a major calamity; (3) a great deed; (4) a cruelty.
The main point about iham is that it intends to deceive or surprise the
reader/listener, to create a happy effect of wit, and, ultimately, to explore
new dimensions of meaning and the limits of language.114 It was also rec-
ognized, however, that some poems appeal directly to the emotions though
their meaning, at least at first flush, and perhaps always, is not very clear or
does not seem valuable. The quality that makes this possible is kaifiyat, a state
of subtle and delicious enjoyment such as one derives from tragedy or a sad
piece of music. Kaifiyat does not permit sentimentality in the sense of extra-
vagance in words—that is, words that are larger and louder than the emo-
tion that the poem is trying to convey. Kaifiyat makes no overt appeal to the
listener/reader’s emotions; in many cases, the protagonist/speaker’s own
mood or state of mind may be difficult to fathom, and it is always complex
enough to discourage a direct, linear interpretation.
The concept of kaifiyat resembles the Sanskrit concept of dhvani (sug-
gestion) in some respects. Krishnamoorthy has noted that Abhinavagupta
112. Faruqi 1997b.

113. Abru 1990: 270.
114. Even in its most elementary form, iham was regarded as 3anªat-e maªnavi (a figure per-
taining to meaning, an arthalañkara), and not just a frivolity, as modern Urdu critics seem to
have unanimously concluded. A similar prejudice has been held against Sanskrit 4le3a, which
deploys a number of strategies remarkably like iham. Theorists have disagreed on the question
of what produces polysemy in Sanskrit. Udbhata seems to have denied even two senses to a word,
holding that in case of 4le3a, “the words should be regarded as different when they have dif-
ferent senses, even though their forms may be the same.” The position of Mammata was closer
to the concept of iham as defined in the books: one word, two meanings (Kunjunni Raja [1963]
1995: 44–45). In the hands of the Urdu poet, an iham-based utterance could convey many more
than just two meanings; this is less common in Sanskrit.
appreciated in a poem “the vital animation provided by the emotional con-

tent described in all its variety, including states of mind,” and that Abhinava-
gupta cited as an example Bhattenduraja’s description of the physical and
emotional responses of the village girls when they first see the god K,3na in
his full youth. Krishnamoorthy paraphrases Abhinavagupta’s comments on
Bhattenduraja’s muktaka (independent stanza) as follows: “For one who can-
not respond to the intensity of love in this stanza, it cannot have any poetic
value. There is no recognisable figure of speech beyond two common-place
similes, nor any highly striking poetic gem embodying the rasa of 4,ñgara or
love.” 115
While dhvani is a more comprehensive concept than kaifiyat, what Abhi-
navagupta seems to be describing here is precisely what most often happens
in a verse with kaifiyat.116 The absence of striking metaphors or images makes
a verse of kaifiyat even harder to translate than an iham -bearing verse; here
is one such example:
I looked at her, and sighed a sigh
I looked at her with longing, once.117
The mood of a kaifiyat -bearing verse can be compared to that of an accom-

plished Elizabethan lyric or song. This view would be somewhat reduction-
istic if applied always—especially to a truly great poet like Mir, whose kaifiyat
poems are found very often to hold complex meanings, too. It does, how-
ever, generally hold true for verses like the one quoted here.
I round out this discussion of kaifiyat with an example from a ghazal by
Mir, in his third divan, compiled around 1785:
I wept away all the blood there was
In my heart; where is any drop left now?
Sorrow turned me to water
And my life flowed away,
What is there left of me now?118
The interrogative has a rhetorical power in Urdu that the English transla-
tion cannot match. Yet if not the rhetorical power, perhaps some of the pen-
sive, bitter-heavy mood does come through—the voice of one who has seen
all weariness, all departures, and all journeys. Mir gives free rein to his in-
stinct for wordplay even in such situations.
I devote so much space to whiyal bandi and kaifiyat because whiyal bandi, if
at all known to modern Urdu scholars, is one of the unmentionables of Urdu
115. Krishnamoorthy 1985: 193–95.

116. Pritchett 1994: 119–22.
117. Mu3hafi [1796] 1971, 3: 443.
118. Mir [1796?] 1968: 556.
poetry; hardly any critic has had the courage to recognize that Ghalib—
whom most people today regard as the greatest Urdu poet—was a whiyal band
to the core. As for kaifiyat, the term is unknown, and modern poets like Fi-
raq Gorawhpuri (1896–1982), some of whose poetry evinces the quality of
kaifiyat, have been praised for entirely the wrong reasons.
Another concept, not fully developed or realized but clearly present in
poets from Mir to Shah Na3ir and even Ghalib, was that of shorish, or shor
angezi. The phrase shor angez has been present in Persian since at least the
sixteenth century and seems to have become a technical term by the end of
the seventeenth century. A poem was considered shor angez if it had the qual-
ity of passionate yet impersonal comment on the outside universe, or the ex-
ternal scheme of things.119 Also important were notions concerning the
grammar of poetry, like rab/ (connection between the two lines of a verse)
and concepts flowing from iham, such as ri aª yat (consonance) and munasibat
(affinity), both of which pertain to the play of words in extending or
strengthening the meaning in a poem.
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15
A Long History of Urdu Literary

Culture, Part 2
Histories, Performances, and Masters
Frances W. Pritchett
Like almost all other Urdu literary genres, the tazkirah (anthology) tradition
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was taken over from Persian; in
fact, until well into the nineteenth century most tazkirahs of Urdu poetry
were themselves written in Persian.1 Etymologically, tazkirah is derived from
an Arabic root meaning “to mention, to remember.” Historically, the liter-
ary ta|kirah grows out of the ubiquitous little “notebook” (baya{) that lovers
of poetry carried around with them for recording verses that caught their
fancy. A typical notebook would include some verses by its owner and oth-
ers by poets living and dead, both Persian and Urdu. More serious—or more
organized—students might compile notebooks devoted only to certain
kinds of poetry: to the work of living poets, for example, or the finest poets,
or poets from a particular city, or women poets, or poets in a certain genre.
There were a great many occasional poets, but only a few of them had be-
come “possessors of a volume” (3ahib-e divan) by collecting a substantial body
of their own poetry and arranging it for dissemination in manuscript form.
Compilers of notebooks were thus often moved to perform a public service
by sharing their work with a wider circle. With the addition of a certain
amount—sometimes a very small amount—of introductory or identifying
information about the poets, a notebook could become a tazkirah. Tazkirahs
circulated in manuscript form, and as printing presses became more com-
mon in north India they gradually began to be printed as well.2
I thank Philip Lutgendorf and Carla Petievich for their close readings of this paper and most
helpful comments on it.
1. It should be kept in mind, however, that the first tazkirahs of Persian poetry were Indian:
they were composed in Sindh in the early thirteenth century. See Alam, chapter 2, this volume.
The transliteration scheme employed here is that of Pritchett 1994.
2. Khan 1991.
864
Since tazkirahs both define and embody the parameters of this literary cul-
ture, they are excellent tools with which to understand it. They can illustrate
for us its highly formalized, remarkably coherent vision of poetry. By no co-
incidence, Urdu criticism—that is, literary criticism of Urdu literature writ-
ten in Urdu—has adopted over the last century the term “classical” (klasiki)
as a rubric for the poetry of this period. For the purposes of this essay, then,
and to avoid definitional ambiguities, “classical” refers to the poetry created
by this literary culture in north India between the early eighteenth century
and the late nineteenth century. The poets of this literary culture were con-
scious of sharing both a vocabulary of inherited forms (genres, meters,
themes, imagery) and a set of authoritative ancestors to be emulated (cer-
tain earlier Persian and Urdu poets); they were committed to mastering and
augmenting a single, much-cherished canon, so that the memorization of
thousands of Urdu and Persian verses lay at the heart of their training. They
even shared, as we will see, an unusually codified approach to poetic prac-
tice: a formidable apprenticeship system to which much importance was given
and an institutionalized set of regular gatherings for recitation and discus-
sion. All these elements were already fully present—albeit still somewhat
new—by the time of the first three tazkirahs (1752) and were present still—
albeit somewhat on the decline —at the time of the last tazkirah (1880).3 Both
before the early eighteenth century and after the late nineteenth century,
the absence of not just some but most of the elements in this cluster is equally
striking. The sudden, seemingly full-fledged appearance of this literary cul-
ture, and then its relatively abrupt and thoroughgoing disappearance, give
it clearly marked boundaries; it thus becomes, for comparative purposes, a
very suitable case study.
All the tazkirahs document and record this literary culture —but not, of
course, always in the same way. Their origin in the ubiquitous personal “note-
book” explains one of their most conspicuous traits: their individuality, their
insouciance, the insistence of each one on defining its own approach to its
own group of poets. These idiosyncrasies can be clearly seen in their various
styles of organization. Although the majority arrange their contents in al-
phabetical order by the first letter of each poet’s pen name —and thus are
emphatically ahistorical—this scheme is by no means universal; no fewer than
twenty out of the sixty-eight or so surviving tazkirahs adopt other systems.
The earliest three tazkirahs, all completed in 1752, present their poets in a
largely random order. The fourth, completed only months later in 1752, is
alphabetical. The compiler of the fifth, completed in 1754–1755 but begun
3. The fact that two of the three earliest tazkirahs claim to be the first tazkirah of Urdu po-
ets makes it probable that we are indeed seeing the beginning of the genre, rather than sim-
ply its earliest surviving examples. However, early tazkirahs also refer to other early tazkirahs not
now extant (Akbar Haidari Kashmiri 1995: 13).
866 frances w. pritchett
as early as 1744, already felt able to present the poets in an “early, middle,
late” sequence.4
In this study I examine two tazkirahs in some detail, within the context of
their tradition; I also consider the kinds of attack to which they have been
subject since the death of their literary culture. These two tazkirahs are op-
posite enough in certain respects to reveal the whole range of the genre.
The first is very early and helps to define its tradition; the second is quite
late and shows us the literary culture in its fullest flower. The first works se-
lectively and haphazardly; the second is encyclopedic and tightly organized.
The first is acerbic, sharp, austere, authoritative; the second is casual, snob-
bish, gossipy, conventional in its judgments. The first is famous for pro-
nouncements; the second, for anecdotes. The first grapples with questions
of origin; the second is intensely present-minded. Both make legitimate
claims to linguistic and literary innovation. And beneath the level of their
differences, both reveal the contours of the same brilliantly accomplished
literary culture, and show its trajectory during the two centuries of its cre-
ative life.
MIR’S TAZKIRAH
Among the earliest group of three tazkirahs, one stands out as the first tazki-
rah par excellence. It opened up the tradition as decisively as Ab-e hayat (Water
of life, 1880), the last tazkirah and the first literary history, eventually closed
it down. This primal tazkirah, Nikat al-shuªara (Fine points about the poets,
1752), is a literary as well as historical document of the first magnitude. In
it, one of the two greatest poets of the tradition, Muhammad Taqi “Mir” (1722–
1810), gives us not only his selection of poets worth mentioning but also lit-
erary judgments about the nature and quality of their work, often illustrated
with “corrections” (i3lah) that he felt would improve individual verses.
Mir is well aware that he stands near the beginning of a tradition. He in-
troduces his tazkirah on that basis:
Let it not remain hidden that in the art of rewhtah —which is poetry of the Per-
sian style in the language of the exalted city [urdu-e mu ªalla, lit. “exalted en-
campment”] of Shahjahanabad in Delhi—until now no book has been com-
posed through which the circumstances [hal] of the poets of this art would
remain on the page of the time. Therefore this ta|kirah, of which the name is
Nikat al-shuªara, is being written.
Although rewhtah is from the Deccan, nevertheless, since no writer of tightly
connected [marbu/] poetry has arisen from that region, their names have not
been placed at the beginning. And the temperament of this inadequate one
[the author] is also not inclined in such a direction, for [recording] the cir-
4. Farman Fathpuri 1972: 93–133.

cumstances of a number of them would be bothersome. Still, the circumstances

of some of them will be recorded, God Most High willing.
I hope that whichever connoisseur of poetry [3ahib-e suwhan] this book
reaches will bestow on it a glance of favor.5
Mir thus begins by pithily defining rewhtah (mixed), the commonest name in
his time for what we now call “Urdu” poetry: rewhtah is poetry made by shap-
ing Delhi urban language in the literary mold of Persian.6
After this definition, however, Mir must deal with an uncomfortable fact:
the existence of at least several centuries’ worth of “Dakani” Urdu poetry
composed in the Deccan (in Golconda and Bijapur) and elsewhere (notably,
in Gujarat).7 Within a few brief sentences Mir performs several contortions
as he seeks to explain how he has dealt with the Dakani poets. Rewhtah —the
poetry, not the language itself—is “from” (az) the Deccan, he acknowledges.
However, no writer of “tightly connected” (marbu/) poetry (a term we will ex-
amine later) has appeared there. Therefore he has not given Dakani poetry
pride of place in his tazkirah. Moreover, he himself is not a researcher by tem-
perament; thus he is not inclined to trouble himself (or his readers?) with a
systematic study of these second-rate poets. Still, he plans to include “some
of them.”
Mir does indeed include a fair number of Dakani poets; almost a third of
the 105 poets in his tazkirah are southerners. One such Dakani poet was ªAbd
ul-Vali ªUzlat, a personal friend whose “notebook” Mir gratefully mined for
information (87–102). But for over two-thirds of the Dakani poets he includes,
Mir gives little or no biographical information and records only a verse or
two. Plainly Dakani poets are quite numerous, but Mir does not know—and
obviously does not want to know—much about them. They cannot be omit-
ted, but neither are they fully accepted as peers, much less ancestors.8
Mir’s complaint that most Dakani poets do not write “tightly connected”
poetry shows that he was thinking chiefly of the ghazal, which in any case was
by far the most important genre in his literary culture. The ghazal was in-
corporated, along with so much else, from Persian; but once again, to give
the picture its due complexity, it should be noted that one of the very ear-
5. Mir [1935] 1979: 9. Further references to this text are given parenthetically.
6. The later—and clearly tendentious—British misunderstanding of the term urdu-e mu-
ªalla as “army camp” instead of “royal court” is discussed by Faruqi in chapter 14, this volume.
7. Zaidi 1993: 36–55; Faruqi, chapter 14, this volume.
8. Some of the contours of this vexed relationship have been mapped by Petievich 1990,
1999; and by Faruqi in chapter 14, this volume. Their explorations of these complex regional
and cultural tensions, though inevitably speculative at times, perform an invaluable service,
opening up crucial, long-ignored areas of literary and cultural history, and showing the kinds
of research that must be done before we can claim any adequate historical understanding of
the situation.
liest important founders of Persian ghazal, Masªud-e Saªd Salman (c. 1046–
1121), was a Ghaznavid court poet in Lahore.9 The ghazal is a brief lyric poem,
generally romantic and/or mystical in tone, evoking the moods of a pas-
sionate lover separated from his beloved. Each two-line verse (shi ªr) of the
ghazal was in the same strictly determined Perso-Arabic syllabic meter, and
the second line of each verse ended with a rhyming syllable (qafiyah), followed
by an optional (but very common) refrain (radif ) one or more syllables long.
To set the pattern in oral performance, the first verse usually included the
rhyming element(s) at the end of both lines. The last verse usually included
the pen name (tawhallu3) of the poet. Each verse was semantically indepen-
dent, so that the unit of recitation, quotation, and analysis was almost always
the individual two-line verse, not the whole ghazal.10 This independence made
the marbu/ quality of each verse an obvious criterion for critical judgment.
In the conclusion to his tazkirah, Mir carefully delineates the contours of
this ghazal -centered literary universe. He divides rewhtah into six types: first,
verses in which one line is Persian and one Urdu; second, verses in which
half of each line is Persian and half Urdu; third, verses in which Persian verbs
and particles are used, a “detestable” practice; fourth, verses in which Per-
sian grammatical structures (tarkib) are brought in, a dubious practice to be
adopted only within strict limits; fifth, verses based on iham, the use of “a
word fundamental to the verse, [in which] that word should have two mean-
ings, one obvious and one remote, and the poet should intend the remote
meaning, not the obvious one.” The sixth and last type, “the style that I have
adopted,” is “based on the use of ‘all verbal devices’ [3anªat].” Mir explains:
“By all verbal devices is meant alliteration; metrical and semantic parallelism
in rhymed phrases [tar3i ª]; simile; limpidity of diction; eloquent word choice
[ fa3ahat]; rhetoric [balaghat]; portrayals of love affairs [ada bandi]; imagina-
tion [whiyal]; and so on” (161).
The first four of these categories consist of verses so closely bound to Per-
sian that they contain whole chunks of the language, or at least incorporate
its grammatical forms and structures. Poetry like this represents rewhtah’s
earliest history: Mir attributes occasional macaronic verses of the first type
to Amir xhusrau (1253–1325), the poet to whom he gives pride of place —
in lieu of the Dakani poets—by putting him first in the tazkirah (10). The
fifth category describes a specialized form of punning that had been highly
fashionable in Mir’s youth; after its particular vogue had passed, it was des-
tined to remain, along with other forms of wordplay, central to the techni-
cal repertoire.
Mir reserves his sixth category for himself; and in his own poetry he wants
9. Lewis 1995: 58.

10. Pritchett 1993.
to have it all. He claims to use in his work the whole available repertoire of
verbal devices and techniques. The subtlety and complexity of his poetry
have recently been analyzed with a sophistication of which he would certainly
have approved.11 And as we have seen, Mir particularly values poetry with
complex internal connectedness; his primary reproach against Dakani po-
ets is that they fail to create it. Later in the tazkirah he returns with special
emphasis to this point, acknowledging that there are a few exceptions but
repeating his scornful assertion that most Dakanis are “poets of no stand-
ing” who merely “go on writing verses” without knowing how to make them
marbu/. About one verse by a Dakani poet he complains even more sarcasti-
cally, “The relationship between the two lines of this verse —praise be to God,
there’s not a trace!” (87, 91).
Mir in his tazkirah outlines the terrain of his own literary culture not merely
theoretically, but historically and practically as well. He is highly aware of po-
etic lineages: where possible, he always names the ustads of the poets he in-
cludes. The ustad -shagird, or master-pupil, relationship was a systematically
cultivated and much-cherished part of the north Indian Urdu tradition—
and, apparently, of no other ghazal tradition, including the Indo-Persian.12
This apprenticeship system transmitted over time a command of the tech-
nical repertoire of verbal devices, as exemplified in verses from the classical
poetic canon. At the heart of the system was the process of “correction” by
which the ustad improved the shagird’s poetry. It appears that in practice the
most common kind of correction involved changing only a word or two, and
that the chief goal of such changes was generally to make the two lines of
the verse more tightly connected.13
Mir also attaches much importance to another institution that is especially—
though not uniquely, since Persian and especially Indo-Persian examples have
been reported—characteristic of the north Indian Urdu tradition: the mu-
sha ªirah, or regular gathering for poetic recitation and discussion.14 Mir him-
self hosted one such musha ªirah and carefully recorded in his tazkirah the man-
ner in which this came about. The poet Mir “Dard” (1721–1785), whom Mir
venerated as a Sufi master, handed it over to him:
And the poetic gathering for rewhtah at this servant’s house that is regularly
fixed for the fifteenth day of each month, in reality is attached and affiliated
only to him. For before that, this gathering used to be fixed at his house.
Through the revolving of unstable time, that gathering was broken up. Thus,
since he had heartfelt love for this unworthy one, he said, “If you fix this gath-
11. Faruqi 1990–1994.

12. Faruqi advances a thoughtful hypothesis about how this unique ustad-shagird institu-
tion came about. See Faruqi, chapter 14, this volume.
13. #afdar Mirzapuri [1918, 1928] 1992.
14. Zaidi 1992.
ering for your house, it will be a good thing.” Keeping in mind the love of this
gracious one, it was thus arranged. (50)
Even at this early stage musha ªirahs must have been omnipresent, for Mir
casually mentions several others. “Four or five years ago there used to be a
gathering of rewhtah companions at Jaªfar ªAli xhan’s house —God knows what
happened that caused it to break up”; “In the old days, for several months
he [the poet ‘Kafir’] had fixed a gathering for rewhtah at his house; finally his
rakish habits caused it to break up”; “I used to see him [the poet ‘ªAjiz’] in
Hafi} Halim’s musha ªirah” (127, 135–36).
This latter instance seems to be almost the only time Mir actually uses the
word musha ªirah for such sessions; usually there is some general term for
“gathering” (majlis; jalsah; more rarely, majmaª), and once he even experiments
with murawhitah —which, he explains, has been devised to refer to a gather-
ing for rewhtah “on the analogy of musha ªirah” (since the latter term refers to
a gathering for poetry [shi ªr] in general, 134). The institution thus plainly
antedates the fixing of its name: there were well-established musha ªirahs be-
fore there was even a well-established name for them. While many South
Asian literary cultures have featured occasional gatherings for literary perfor-
mance (e.g., the go3thi in Malayalam, the arañkerram in Tamil, the kavigan in
Bangla), and a few have even had regular ones (e.g., the kind sponsored by
Vastupala in thirteenth-century Gujarat), these have generally been under
the control of a courtly patron or outside authority. Urdu musha ªirahs, how-
ever, even when sponsored by patrons, have been largely controlled by the
poets themselves, and have had, as we will see, many of the features of tech-
nical workshops.
THE EXEMPLARY SAJJAD

One of Mir’s favorite poets, and a personal friend as well, was called Sajjad
(d. 1806?). In describing Sajjad, Mir reveals many facets of his own under-
standing of rewhtah and its proper practice:
Mir Sajjad is from Akbarabad [Agra]; he is a seeker of knowledge, has ability,
and is an excellent poet of rewhtah. He is a shagird of Miyañ Abru, and uses the
pen-name “Sajjad.” He is a very good man, and his poetry has already arrived
at the level of ustad -ship: it is extremely well composed, and possesses themes
[maªni]. His speech is not that of just anybody. When a piece of white paper is
placed before him, then his colorful thought becomes the shadow of the [fer-
tilizing] rain cloud on the garden of searching [for new themes]. Enjoyable
construction [bandish] is a servant to his every line. His every verse in a short
meter runs a razor across the liver; the language of his expression, in its refined-
ness, is the jugular vein of poetry. Injustice is another thing; otherwise [to the
fair-minded] the depth [tahdari] of his poetry is manifest. To anyone who knows
his hair-splitting temperament, his verse is coiled and burnt, like a hair
touched by flame.
Formerly there used to be at his house a gathering of friends and a rewhtah -
recitation assembly. This servant too used to go. For the present, because of
some misfortunes our meetings have been somewhat reduced, from both sides.
May God keep him well. (60)15
According to Mir, a good verse is intellectually piquant: it shows a mas-

tery over great “hordes” of themes, and it arranges them to create fresh ef-
fects. It is vividly imagined: a colorful mind-born garden is made to bloom
on the white page. It is tightly constructed: every line is inventive and is en-
joyably presented. It is powerful as a razor—literally, a surgical lancet—on
flesh, and delicate as the jugular vein. To ascribe to the poet a “hair-splitting
temperament” is actually a compliment to his subtlety and fine powers of
discrimination. His verses are “coiled”—convoluted, complex, full of multi-
ple meanings—and also “burnt,” like the suffering heart of the archetypal
lover. Intellectually piquant, vividly imagined, tightly constructed, emotion-
ally powerful, layered with “coiled” and intertwined meanings—this, in Mir’s
eyes, is the ideal ghazal verse.
Here we also see Mir displaying his own love for subtle, elegant wordplay.
Although he is writing—in Persian—what we would think of as critical or
analytical commentary, he conveys his meaning by playing with metaphors
that themselves are directly part of the ghazal universe. And in a markedly
belletristic way, he creates constant echoes and resonances in his own prose.
For example, Mir praises Sajjad for his sophisticated literary sensibility by
attributing to him a “hair-splitting” (mu shigaf ) temperament. Then he de-
scribes his poetry as multilayered, convoluted, “coiled” (pechdar); and also as
emotionally intense —passionate and pain-filled, literally, “burnt” (sowhtah),
like the archetypal lover’s heart. Both of these qualities are captured when
he calls Sajjad’s verse a “hair touched by flame” (mu-i atash didah): As every-
one in the ghazal world knows, a hair singed by a flame will instantly form a
tight curl, and the curl itself will be dark and ashy. Such use of a series of
words drawn from the same domain, while conducting discourse of an os-
tensibly unrelated kind, is a form of elegance much valued in the medieval
Persian prose tradition. Since it is supererogatory, it feels luxurious and aris-
tocratic: it gives the mind two (or more) pleasures for the price of one.
After this introduction, Mir provides us with many samples of Sajjad’s po-
etry. Most of them, of course, are single verses or selected small groups of
15. I am grateful to Shamsur Rahman Faruqi for help in interpreting this and other ex-
amples of Mir’s difficult Persian, and for many other kinds of advice and counsel about this pa-
per. Faruqi’s work shows that the word ma ªni, literally “meaning,” here refers to what later came
to be called ma{mun, or “theme” (Faruqi 1997: 14–25).
verses rather than whole ghazals. With the very first such sample Mir offers
us his own “correction” as well. It involves, as many corrections do, a change
in a single word, and it seeks to tighten the verse internally. Sajjad’s verse,
followed by Mir’s comment, is:
Don’t demand your deserts from these infidel idols, for here if anyone
Dies of their tyranny then they say justice was done.16
Although false [ba/il] is false, nevertheless in the first line, in place of “infidel”
[kafir], according to the belief of this faqir, the word “false” [ba/il] is true [haq].
(60)
The beloved, in ghazal convention, is well-known to be an idol: beautiful,

cruel, demanding, treacherous, a false god who diverts one’s attention from
the true God.17
Mir’s words here have two dimensions. Ba/il (false, vain) in the first line
would be a better adjective for “idols,” since it would doubly echo the “true”
in the second line: haq has a range of meanings, including truth, justice, and
God. This pairing of opposites would increase the marbu/ quality of the verse,
thus enhancing its excellence. But Mir is also showing once again his own
delight in clever wordplay: he is using a form of allusive double meaning
({ilaª) much appreciated in the medieval Persian literary tradition. Since the
verse is about true and false religious faith, justice and injustice, his word
choices are similarly focused. He makes a point of playing with paradox: in-
stead of saying that the word “false” is more suitable, he says that although
“false is false,” nevertheless “false is true.” And he introduces religious dou-
ble meanings by contrasting “false” with haq, “truth, justice, God.” Appro-
priately for the domain of meaning, he refers to himself as “this faqir ” and
speaks of his literary judgment as his “belief.” Even as he uses language an-
alytically, he uses it playfully and creatively as well.
MIR AND YAQIN

Mir not only gives us the exemplary Sajjad, he presents an anti-hero as well:
the poet Inªamullah xhan “ Yaqin” (1727?–1755). Yaqin “has compiled a di-
van and is very famous,” as Mir acknowledges; his ustad was the prestigious
Mirza “Ma}har.” Moreover, his late father was humane, sociable, hospitable,
poetically inclined, and a personal friend of Mir’s. How then, Mir implies,
can the son have gone so wrong? “People have told me that Mirza Ma}har
used to compose verses and give them to him, and he counted them as his
16. kafir butoñ se dad nah chaho kih yañ ko ºi / mar ja sitam se un ke to kahte haiñ haq hu ºa.
17. Here as always, the beloved is grammatically masculine, very probably to achieve a “de-
sirable state of nonparticularity” (Hali [1893] 1969: 133) and abstraction.
own legacy.” This Mir finds hard to believe —he is even “inclined to laugh”—
because “everything else can be inherited except poetry” (80–81).
He then proceeds to denigrate Yaqin’s character and abilities as thor-
oughly as possible. Yaqin surrounds himself with flatterers: “To make a long
story short, he has taken up some petty and worthless people [as admirers]—
if you and I wanted, we too could take up such people.” He is arrogant: “He
thinks so highly of himself that in his presence even the pride of Pharaoh
would appear as humility.” And his incompetence is manifest, for “on meet-
ing this person you instantly realize that he has absolutely no taste in the un-
derstanding of poetry,” and in fact “everyone agrees” that his poetry “is not
free of flaws.” Mir can even offer proof: he reports that the poet “Ùaqib” once
went to Yaqin’s house “only to test him,” and “fixed the pattern for a ghazal ”
to be composed on the spot by both poets. The result? Ùaqib “composed a
whole ghazal in good order—and not even a single line of verse from him!”
(80–81).
Mir’s primary accusation, bolstered by snide anecdotes, is direct and highly
insulting—that Yaqin simply appropriated his ustad Ma}har’s verses and
claimed them as his own (the accusation seems to have been quite false).
While such behavior in a senior poet was unforgivable, more subtle kinds of
appropriation were a major source of tension within the tradition. The cor-
pus of Persian ghazal was immense and prestigious and was constantly being
augmented by contemporary Indo-Persian poets. What if a poet in effect
translated (or perhaps “transcreated”) a Persian verse into Urdu? If this hap-
pened deliberately, it was “plagiarism” (sarqah) and was held to be culpable.
But what if such duplication happened accidentally? Then it was a case of
“coincidence” (tavarud), in which parallel thought processes applied to the
same material led to similar results. Such cases were an inevitable result of
the way ghazal poetry worked. The semantically independent, internally
unified, metrically tight verses were ideally designed for memorization. Po-
ets were trained in part by memorizing literally thousands of such (Persian
and Urdu) verses. Since the individual two-line verses were not semantically
bound to the particular ghazal in which they occurred, they required a great
deal of prior knowledge on the part of the audience. This knowledge in-
cluded a map of the interrelated, metaphorically based “themes”—usually
called ma{mun, though sometimes the term maªni was used—that constituted
the ghazal universe.18 The sharing of these themes meant that poets were al-
ways echoing or evoking (if not on the verge of “plagiarizing”) each other’s
verses.
Mir then shows us an example of such interrelated themes: two verses that
share their basic imagery, but not culpably. One of Yaqin’s opening verses,
18. “Themes” is of course an unsatisfactorily broad translation for ma{mun. Cf. n. 15.
included among the samples of his poetry, reminds Mir of one of his own.
But the two make very different use of their basic thematic matter. Mir cites
the two verses side by side:
This utterance of a naked madman [majnun] pleases me —
How long can one always keep on ripping? I’ve passed beyond my collar.19
This faqir has a verse very near to this one, with almost the same theme [maªni],
and in my opinion it is better in quality:
Rip upon rip appeared, as fast as I had them sewn up—
Now I’ve washed my hands of my collar itself. (86)20
The very word for madness, junun, evokes Majnun (the “mad one,” lit.
the “jinn -possessed”), the classic mad lover of Arabic-Persian-Turkish-Urdu
literary tradition. And with the theme of madness we are at the heart of the
ghazal ’s system of imagery: the lover, if not always mad, is always on the verge
of madness.
For the ghazal is always exploring borderline cases—and, in the process,
playing with borderlines. The ghazal looks for borderlines in order to trans-
gress them; the ghazal poet makes some of his best hay in fields where the
wild paradox grows. This is why in the ghazal universe there is no coziness,
no rootedness, no wives and children, no normalcy or domestic tranquility
whatsoever. Instead there is transgression beyond all plausibility. Poets en-
vision themselves as madmen; as drunkards, wastrels, or reprobates; as
infidels or apostates from Islam; as criminals facing execution; as mystical
seekers claiming direct access to God; as voices speaking from beyond the
grave; and as lovers always of forbidden and unsuitable beloveds (courtesans,
unavailable ladies in pardah, beautiful boys). For as Azad shrewdly observes
in Ab-e hayat, “In presenting everyday topics, the impact of the expressive power
is extremely weak.” By contrast, he says, the use of “matters that are contrary
to good manners” creates a kind of “heat and quickness of language”—so
that “the urge evoked in the poet’s heart mingles with the emotional effect
of the poetry to create a little tickle in the armpits even of sleepers.” 21
Ghazal convention prescribes that a mad lover will rip apart the neck-open-
ing of his kurta because he feels himself suffocating and needs more air; he
will then proceed to tear at his clothing more generally, because those in
grief and despair rend their garments, and because madmen are known to
tear their clothes off. Majnun, as everyone in the ghazal world knows, fled
19. mujhe yih bat whush a ºi hai ik majnun-e ªuryañ se / kiya kije kahañ tak chak ham guzre gare-
bañ se. (Amending bayabañ—in this context obviously a calligraphic error—to garebañ, and a ºe
to a ºi.)
20. chak par chak hu ºa juñ juñ silaya ham ne / ab gareban hi se hath uthaya ham ne.
21. Azad [1880, 1883] 1982: 302.
to the wilderness after he lost his beloved Laila. There he lived quite alone,
except for the sympathetic wild animals whom he charmed with his songs
of love. He rent his garments until he was virtually naked. Yaqin’s verse imag-
ines an encounter with a naked madman, a “jinn -possessed” (majnun) one.
The madman complains, “How long can one always keep on ripping?” Be-
yond the collar, what does one do next?
This noninformative (inshaºiyah) mode of speech, questioning or specu-
lative or exclamatory, is a fundamental device of the ghazal and is far more
versatile than any factual or informative (whabariyah) statement. In fact such
inshaºiyah speech is multifaceted in Urdu (and Persian) in a way that can
hardly be captured in English, since it is made possible by grammatical sim-
plicities and the absence of punctuation.22 Such radical multivalence is part
of the ghazal’s “meaning creation” (ma ªni afirini) —its love for extracting the
maximum number of meanings from the fewest possible words.
Yaqin offers us inshaºiyah discourse in the form of a rhetorical question that
remains unanswered: How long can one keep ripping one’s garment—be-
fore what? Before it falls apart into shreds and one is left entirely a “naked
madman”? Before one loses patience and tears it off and flings it away? Be-
fore one’s passion enters a new phase and ripping a garment no longer suffices
to express it? Before one reaches a state so transcendent that one no longer
attaches any importance to clothing at all? And how does this question fit to-
gether with the final brief whabariyah statement, “I’ve passed beyond my col-
lar”? Does he rip other things now? Other garments? His own flesh?
Yaqin’s is not a bad verse, but Mir is right to prefer his own. He knows
that a twist is needed to establish originality—the introduction of some new
thought, or even some especially suggestive new word. “A fresh word is equal
to a ma{mun,” as Shah Jahan’s poet laureate Abu ?alib “Kalim” put it.23 Mir’s
verse seems to regard the whole process of garment-ripping in a way more
mystified than mystical. He is actually trying to keep the neck-opening of
his kurta mended, it seems, but every time he gets a rent stitched up, another
one appears. Because he is so absent-minded, so heedless, so lost in his in-
ner desolation, he finds that these rips just seem to happen of themselves,
with no indication of the cause. His reaction to the situation is one of
bafflement, impatience, and ultimate indifference —he has “lifted his hand
from” (se hath uthana) his collar entirely. I have translated this phrase with
the comparable English idiom, “wash one’s hands of,” to show its colloquial
meaning: to give up on, to renounce, to abandon all concern for.
Mir has thus achieved an elegant kind of “meaning-creation”: he has
arranged for a common phrase to be read both literally and idiomatically—
22. Faruqi 1993: 23–37; Pritchett 1994: 106–10.

23. Faruqi 1981: 40.
such that both readings are entirely suitable to the verse, though exactly con-
trary in meaning. Idiomatically, “I’ve lifted my hand from my collar” would
mean “I’ve washed my hands of my collar”—I’ve given up on it, I’m disgusted
with it—let it suffer rip after rip, let it need mending, let it fall apart entirely,
I don’t care what becomes of it! I’ve abandoned the collar to its fate, and
those rips that keep appearing will no doubt finish it off. Literally, however,
“I’ve lifted my hand from my collar” would of course mean “I’ve ceased to
touch my collar”—I’m no longer constantly ripping it open, I’m leaving my
collar alone. And the addition of “now” (ab) seems to imply a change of state.
Perhaps I do dimly realize that it was my hand all along that was causing the
rips? If Mir considers his verse superior to Yaqin’s, this witty and effective
play on a common expression is surely a large part of the reason.
There is more to be said about this verse, of course —the small (and al-
most untranslatable) particle hi itself provides a range of possible fresh em-
phases. This tiny particle can either emphasize (“I’ve washed my hands of
my collar ”) or restrict (“I’ve washed my hands of my collar alone”) the word
it follows. If it is read emphatically, it adds an expressive note of impatience
and even exasperation to the verse. Read as restrictive, however, and with
the literal rather than idiomatic form of the phrase, it implies “I’m keeping
my hands off only my collar”—that is, I will rend the rest of my clothing, and
maybe even tear my hair, it is only my especially vulnerable collar from which
I will now keep my hands away. But in any case, pity the poor translator! How
to convey all these nuances and possibilities in a single English line? Plainly,
it cannot be done. Even hi itself involves such a wide range of choices: “just,”
“very,” “exactly,” “indeed,” “truly,” “only,” “alone,” “merely,” “solely,” “altogether,”
“outright.”24
Moreover, these multiple interpretive possibilities are not adventitious or
casual: they are absolutely fundamental to the genre. Classical poets gener-
ally go out of their way not to provide us with any interpretive help in choos-
ing among such multiply arrayed meanings. Not only does nothing in this
verse —and nothing we know about Mir generally—enable us to decisively
choose one interpretation out of the range of possibilities; but even worse,
everything we know about this verse, and about these poets generally, tells us
that they were extremely proud of their ability to lead us into exactly this sort
of interpretive bind—and then leave us there. (Which is why the modern ten-
dency among editors to guide our interpretations by inserting Western-style
punctuation is such a sad sign of cultural ignorance and loss.) One’s mind
must be left to ricochet around among the various possibilities without being
able to come to any resolution. This undecidability forms part of the piquant
and inexhaustible quality of many of the best classical ghazal verses.
24. Platts [1884] 1968: 1243.

MIR’S ARROGANCE
Mir felt, however, that such subtleties of poetic analysis were not for just any-
one. As we have seen, in his introduction he hoped that not just any random
reader but any “connoisseur of poetry” would look on his tazkirah with fa-
vor. And in his conclusion he warns off outsiders in no uncertain terms: “The
meaning of these words the one whom I’m addressing understands; I do not
address the common people [ aª vam]. What I have written is a warrant [sanad]
for my friends, it is not for just anybody.” He does make some room for other
views of poetry: “The field of poetry is wide, and I am well aware of the
color/changefulness of the garden of the manifest” (161). But the univer-
sality (of using all verbal devices) and the complexity (of making verses in-
ternally marbu/ ) that he claims as his own appear to relegate other kinds of
poetry to a second-class status.
While defining his own poetics Mir thus makes a strong, if not quite ex-
plicit, claim to superiority. The force of that claim is increased by his fear-
less and famously impatient literary judgments about other poets. Not only
is Yaqin such a fake that he doesn’t have even the smallest trace of poetic
understanding, but “Hashmat,” too, is a vulgar chatterer who “makes inap-
propriate objections to people like us”; and perhaps worst of all, the hapless
“ ªUshshaq” (“Lovers”), a Khatri, not only has a foolish pen name but “com-
poses verses of rewhtah that are extremely non-marbu/” (80, 102, 136). Such
pronouncements soon inspired the composition of several other tazkirahs,
as indignant poets leaped to the defense of those whom Mir had ignored or
slighted.
Mir’s poetic judgments are unaffected by the aristocratic birth, courtly
rank, or wealth of those he judges. In his tazkirah he includes soldiers, Sufis,
and poor men in need of patronage as readily as he does the rich and pow-
erful. Mir also declines to be morally selective: the poet “Hatim” is “ignorant”
and “arrogant.” But never mind: “ What do we have to do with such things?
He has a lot of poetry—his divan, up to the letter mim, is in my hands” (75).
It is Hatim’s poetry, not his allegedly deficient character, that is important.
Mir was supremely confident in making such decrees. He was able to lay down
the law—and back it with the remarkable quality and impressive quantity of
his own verse. He composed six divans in his long lifetime, and his fame
eclipsed that of nearly all his rivals. The figure of Mir the irascible purist be-
came legendary within the tradition.
For this unique stature Mir paid an ironic price. In a kind of posthumous
co-optation he was made the sponsor of a radical linguistic “Delhi chauvin-
ism.” Many anecdotes, which were given their canonical form in Ab-e hayat
and are still widely known, illustrate the curmudgeonly attitudes later at-
tributed to him. While traveling to Lucknow Mir is made to rebuff the friendly
chitchat of a commoner who is sharing his oxcart. The commoner says, “ Your
Honor, what’s the harm? It’s a pastime while traveling—we can entertain our-
selves a bit with conversation.” Mir replies angrily, “ Well, for you it’s a pas-
time; as for me, it corrupts my language!”25
In Lucknow itself Mir is made to snub the local aristocrats even more point-
edly than he did his humble traveling companion. When some “nobles and
important people of Lucknow” call on him and courteously request him to
recite some verses for them, he puts them off repeatedly, at length telling
them, “Noble gentlemen, my verses are not such as you will understand.”
Finally, feeling a bit piqued, they said, “ Your Honor! We understand the [Per-
sian] poetry of Anvari and xhaqani. Why will we not understand your noble
utterance?” Mir Sahib said, “That’s true. But for their poetry commentaries,
vocabularies, and dictionaries are available. And for my poetry there is only
the idiom of the people of Urdu, or the stairs of the Jamaª Masjid [in Delhi].
And these are beyond your reach.”26
In this and many similar displays of “Delhi chauvinism,” the austere, severe,
dignified poet from the venerable but decaying Mughal city is made to look
down his nose at Lucknow, which is seen as a lively but frivolous new center
of wealth and patronage.
The “Mir” of later tradition in fact becomes the consummate Dihlavi poet;
he is made to insist that one must be an educated, language-conscious, na-
tive speaker of upper-class Delhi Urdu before one can become a poet of
rewhtah —or even, apparently, genuinely appreciate rewhtah. In view of Mir’s
own life, this would have been an extraordinary attitude for him to adopt:
after all, he himself, as Carla Petievich points out, “was born in Agra, moved
to Delhi when he was nine years old, returned to Agra during the invasion
of Nadir Shah in 1739, returned to Delhi thereafter, and spent the last thirty
years of his life (1781–1810) in Lucknow.” 27 Analyzing the “two schools” the-
ory that later became such a commonplace of Urdu critical tradition,
Petievich shows that this Delhi-Lucknow polarization is full of cultural, his-
torical, and psychological interest—every kind of interest, in short, except
the literary kind.
But of course the Mir revealed in Nikat al-shuªara itself would never have
dreamed of taking such a “Delhi chauvinist” stance. The poets he includes
in his tazkirah come from various cities, yet there is no hint that the native
or lifelong Dihlavis are in any way superior to the others. The only outsiders
who trouble him are the Dakani poets; and with them, his struggle is never
finally resolved. Moreover, it is clear that Mir did not value the use of “pure”
idiom above everything else. His favored poet, Sajjad, once again provides
25. Azad [1880, 1883] 1982: 195–96.

26. Azad [1880, 1883] 1982: 209.
27. Petievich 1992: 90.
a case in point: in one verse Sajjad takes liberties with an idiomatic expres-
sion. Mir comments: “In an idiom, making such a change is not permissi-
ble”; and he quotes the correct expression. Then he continues: “But when
a poet obtains masterful usage in poetry, he is forgiven” (70). The real Mir
is interested in Delhi court language not as an end in itself, but for the lit-
erary use one can make of it.
The other later, widespread canard about Mir depicts him as a naively
suffering (real-life) lover by temperament, full of pathos, innocence, and
simplicity—a poet who placed a supreme value on intense emotional sin-
cerity and disdained all mere wordplay and verbal artifice. This image of Mir
is so patently false that even the few passages from his tazkirah that we have
examined thus far serve effectively to discredit it. Remarkably, this view per-
sists in many popular and some scholarly quarters, despite the existence of
ample evidence to refute it and virtually none (except literal readings of the
stylized tropes in certain carefully chosen verses) to back it up. This view
forms part of a wider vision of “natural poetry” that came to dominate mod-
ern Urdu criticism, most unfortunately for the ghazal, after the shock of 1857
and the end of the tazkirah tradition in 1880.28
FORT WILLIAM COLLEGE: AN INTERLUDE

Appropriately enough in view of his status, Mir became the first Urdu poet
whose complete works were typeset and printed. The voluminous Koolliyati
Meer Tyqee (Complete works of Mir Taqi, 1811), an immense project, was a
collaborative effort by no fewer than four editors.29 The honor of preparing
and publishing this work goes, like many other oft-begrudged honors, to Fort
William College in Calcutta, which was originally set up in 1800 as a language
training institute for British colonial administrators. During its first two
decades Fort William published many works designed for use as language
textbooks—and perhaps, subliminally at least, as role models. Urdu at this
time was like a “lively boy,” says Ab-e hayat, who “was delighting everyone, in
poets’ gatherings and the courts of the wealthy, with the mischievous pranks
of his youth.” Overseeing this boy, however, was a “wise European” who was
“seated with a telescope atop the fort of Fort William in Calcutta.” This Eu-
ropean “looked—and his hawk-like glance deduced that the boy was promis-
ing, but needed training.” 30
Since the Urdu ghazal tradition was so well established by the beginning
28. On this extremely distorted image of Mir, see Pritchett 1979; for an example of the per-
sistence of this view, see Russell and Islam 1968, and Russell 1992; on “natural poetry” and
modern Urdu criticism, see Hali [1893] 1969.
29. Das 1978: 159
30. Azad [1880, 1883] 1982: 24.
of the nineteenth century, for Fort William to publish its great master Mir
no doubt seemed an obvious choice. Far more characteristically innovative
was the publishing of a tazkirah of Urdu poets written in Urdu instead of Per-
sian, under the sponsorship of Fort William’s “professor of the Hindoosta-
nee language,” the redoubtable John Borthwick Gilchrist.31 This work was
compiled by Haidar Bawhsh “Haidari,” a regular Fort William “moonshee”
(munshi, or scribe) who taught, wrote, and prepared textbooks for the stu-
dents’ use; it was published as part of a larger work, Guldastah-e haidari
(Haidari’s anthology), in 1803. Another similar, though much shorter, tazki-
rah in Urdu was prepared at almost the same time by Mirza ªAli “Lu/f,” an
author loosely affiliated with Fort William, but it was not published until a cen-
tury later. This work by Lu/f contains one fascinating assertion: that Mir him-
self once “appeared before Colonel Scott with a view to literary employment
at Fort William College, but because of his old age he could not be selected.” 32
In his early years Mir had helped to draw the boundaries of rewhtah, sep-
arating it politely but firmly from the enveloping Persian medium in which
it had been born; in his tazkirah, written when he was thirty, the word “En-
glish” never occurs. Near the end of his long life, when he was eighty or so,
we see him reacting to the first delicate literary probes and proddings from
the English world—and reacting perhaps even favorably, if Lu/f ’s account
can be relied upon. Mir died in 1810; the printed version of his complete
works appeared in 1811. A watershed of sorts; or as a larger watershed one
might choose the year 1803, the year in which Lord Lake took Delhi—and
in which Haidari’s work became not only the first tazkirah of Urdu poets to
be published but also the first to be composed in Urdu rather than Persian
(since Lu/f ’s was for the most part a brief and very direct translation from a
Persian source).
Yet on the whole, even after 1803, the new British rulers of Delhi took
pains to be as unobtrusive as possible. As one historian has noted, in study-
ing the early nineteenth century “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.” Or as Azad himself put it, “Those were the
days when if a European was seen in Delhi, people considered him an ex-
traordinary sample of God’s handiwork, and pointed him out to each other:
‘Look, there goes a European!’” 33
For after all, the fact that Fort William College commissioned, prepared,
and published so many ground-breaking, precedent-setting books does not
mean that people paid much attention to them, or that those who did read
31. Siddiqi 1963.

32. Farman Fathpuri 1972: 210–13, 221–25. I quote from page 212.
33. Hardy 1972: 55; Azad [1863] 1933: 145.
them—especially in the early decades of the century—found them to be any-

thing more than curiosities.34 The ghazal was the genre of choice, and “the
number of Urdu poets was much greater than the number of Persian po-
ets”; but when it came to prose, “the whole country was interested only in
reading and writing in Persian,” according to the Lakhnavi historical writer
ªAbd ul-Halim “Sharar” (1860–1926). And although Fort William Urdu prose
works “may have impressed the English in those days, they did not—and
could not—impress anyone among the Hindustani literary people.” For “at
that time the effect of English education had not changed the country’s lit-
erary taste,” and Persian’s rhymed prose, flowing diction, and artistic use of
repetition “dwelt in imaginations and minds.” Even the powerful tradition
of Urdu prose romance, or dastan, became a significant written genre only
relatively late in the nineteenth century.35
Urdu poetry and Urdu prose thus had radically different histories in north
India. The tazkirahs tell us that when Vali Dakani came north in the early
eighteenth century, his poetry spread like wildfire, and rewhtah at once be-
gan to supplant Persian as the poetry of choice: Vali had been the first to
“match Persian stride for stride.” The result was that “when his divan arrived
in Delhi, Eagerness took it with the hands of respect, and Judgment regarded
it with the eyes of attention; Pleasure read it aloud.” 36 But when Fort William
provided similarly exemplary Urdu prose texts (not only for tazkirahs but for
other genres as well), and even conveniently published them, the resulting
works had almost no impact—and in fact were rather condescendingly ig-
nored for decades. Lovers of rewhtah preferred to embed their verses in a ma-
trix of Persian prose. Tazkirahs of Urdu poetry continued to be written in
Persian: eleven of them survive from the first four decades of the nineteenth
century, along with only one very halfhearted Urdu work, really more of a
“notebook,” and even that one was linked to Fort William patronage.37
Not until the 1840s was the grip of Persian prose finally broken: starting
in that decade, well over half the tazkirahs of Urdu poets began to be writ-
ten in languages other than Persian. Garcin de Tassy composed a massive
and important tazkirah of sorts (1839–1847) in French, and Alois Sprenger
produced a tazkirah (1850) in English. But most, of course, were in Urdu.
Of the three Urdu tazkirahs composed in the 1840s, two were small pro-
ductions (twelve poets in one, thirty-seven in the other) by Delhi authors
34. Sadiq [1964] 1984: 290–91.

35. I quote from Sharar [c. 1913–1920] 1963: 181–83. There is also a useful English trans-
lation of Sharar’s work that can be relied on for most purposes (Sharar 1975), but I have not
quoted it in this paper because I want to stay closer to the literal wording of the original. On
the dastan, see Pritchett 1991: 21–28.
36. Azad [1880, 1883] 1982: 87.
37. Farman Fathpuri 1972: 252–55.
closely associated with the British-sponsored Delhi College.38 Thus the au-
thor of the third could almost claim to have written the first truly “indige-
nous” Urdu tazkirah of Urdu poets, the first one not to be directly inspired,
or even indirectly influenced, by British patronage.
xHUSH MAªR IKAH-E ZEBA

This third tazkirah compiled in the 1840s, xhush ma ªrikah-e zeba (A fine and
appropriate martial encounter, 1846), by Saªadat xhan “Na3ir,” is a particu-
larly notable example of the genre. We do not know when Na3ir was born;
we know only that he died between 1857 and 1871. He was a Lakhnavi, and
a very religious Shiite; he was lively, sociably inclined, a lover of anecdotes.
He had all the outward requisites of poetic status: he was accepted as a sha-
gird by a well-known ustad, Mirza “Mu|nib,” and in turn had shagirds of his
own. He composed a number of divans of Urdu poetry, using almost every
genre available; most of these are now lost. But clearly he had “no special
rank” as a poet. He occasionally composed in Persian, and he translated from
Persian. His only published work was the Urdu prose romance Qi33ah agar o
gul (The story of Aloe and Rose, 1846).39
His lengthy tazkirah was completed in 1846—or rather, reached a stage
its author initially deemed complete, for its name is a chronogram (tariwh)
encoding that year. But the text’s history is one of steady expansion in man-
uscript form over the following fifteen years or more. Four manuscripts ex-
ist, each subsequent one containing significant authorial revisions; each in-
cludes a different number of poets and slightly varies the selection of poets,
although the general trend is toward expansion and improved organization
over time.40 This situation was common in the tazkirah genre, especially in
its earlier years: since publication was not generally intended, the tazkirah
was disseminated by repeated copying and recopying—and what author
could resist the chance to make improvements? One could add new poets
one had recently discovered, or include dates of death (along with the tra-
ditional chronograms that encoded them) for poets who had recently died.
Na3ir took advantage of the chance to do even more: within his remarkable
ustad-shagird structure he added a city-by-city grouping of poets as well.41 The
overall number of poets contained in the four manuscripts taken together
is 824—a total that is large but not, by tazkirah standards, extraordinary.
Na3ir’s own account of his work is casual, offhand, almost perfunctory.
Some tazkirah writers started with the creation of Adam and the whole of hu-
38. Farman Fathpuri 1972: 303–12, 366–72, 313–28.

39. xhvajah 1972: 17–39.
40. xhvajah 1972: 82–105.
41. xhvajah 1972: 101–3.
man literary history; offered glimpses of selected high points of Arabic, Per-
sian, and Indian poetry; explicated their views on poetic theory; or gave ac-
counts of their own lives—and only after dozens of pages got around to the
tazkirah itself. Na3ir, by contrast, introduces his massive volume with the
briefest possible description of his project:
For some time this unworthy one had the idea of compiling a ta|kirah of the
poets of Hind. But because of a lack of information about the circumstances
of the early poets, this intention was not fulfilled. In those days when the ta|ki-
rah compiled by the late Miyañ Mu3hafi #ahib came to hand, the importuni-
ties of enthusiasm roused courage to action. And in contrast to Miyañ #ahib,
whose ta|kirah is in the Persian language, this faqir wrote in Hindi, for unifor-
mity [yakrangi] is better than diversity [dorangi]; and he did not retain the rule
of alphabetical order, so that wherever one would find the name of a shagird,
it would be written under the ustad’s name. And so that the [use of the] Hindi
language and the manner of [arranging] the poets’ names would be my in-
vention. And those poets whose ustad and shagird relationships are not known,
and their names and identities not understood—it would conclude with them.
I begin it with Mirza Rafiª us-Sauda, first because he is the founding elder of
composition in rewhtah, and second because the lineage [silsilah] of this in-
significant one’s shagirdi goes back to him.42
Three sweeping claims are made here, and all deserve scrutiny: that Na3ir
invented the use of “Hindi” rather than Persian for tazkirahs; that he invented
the organization of poets according to lineages; and that Sauda is the found-
ing elder of Urdu poetry.
Na3ir wishes to write a tazkirah of the “poets of Hind,” or India—so what
more logical language to use than the “language of Hind,” or “Hindi”? Aban-
doning the Persian language used by almost all of his predecessors is an act
justified in a single phrase: he chooses Hindi because “uniformity is better
than diversity.” It can be seen already in this brief preface that Na3ir is by no
means a theorist: he obviously loves order and organization, but he feels no
need to explain his methodology at length. Perhaps he feels that simplify-
ing and rationalizing the process of tazkirah -writing is a self-evidently desir-
able goal: why use two languages when you only need one?
And of course, Na3ir participates in the wider rethinking of Persian that
was going on in his time and place. Less than a decade later, another Urdu
tazkirah writer, in Delhi, described his own sense of the situation: “A number
of right-seeing companions showed me the way: Persian is the merchandise
of the shop of others, and the capital of the trading of strangers; accom-
plishment in it requires a whole long lifetime, and some sweet-singing guide
from among the nightingale-voiced ones of the garden of Iran.” Instead, one
42. Na3ir 1972: 1:1. I give further references to volume and page number in the text.
should concentrate one’s efforts on Urdu: if Urdu could “manage to become

clean and trim,” then “Persian would be devoid of radiance before it, and
Afghan Persian [Dari] would go out of use by comparison to it.” 43 Persian,
however beautiful, is ultimately the property of others; Rekhtah/Hindi/Urdu,
with its great potential, is the proper locally owned field for literary work.
“Hindi” as the “language of Hind” could—and did—play an obvious role
as an umbrella term. Like the term bhasha, or bhakha, “(colloquial) language,”
it could mean whatever a given writer and audience understood by it. Until
a much later point in the nineteenth century Hindi was the most common
name, in the literary culture we are examining, for the language we now call
Urdu—a language that used the Delhi region’s Khari Boli grammar and the
Persianized range of its vocabulary, and was written in a modified form of
the Persian script. There was no confusion with what is now called Hindi—
the Khari Boli grammar written in Devanagari script—simply because as a lit-
erary presence that language scarcely existed.44 Na3ir uses “Hindi” very often
in the course of his tazkirah, while “Urdu” occurs only rarely; the other term
he uses—once in his brief preface and often at other points in his tazkirah—
is of course “Rekhtah.”
Na3ir claims to be the first tazkirah writer to use the “Hindi” (= Urdu =
Rekhtah) language rather than Persian. This claim is unfounded. However,
he must have believed it, or at least expected his readers to believe it; oth-
erwise as a proud boast in his preface it makes no sense. And indeed his claim
may well have reflected his knowledge, for three of the five earlier Urdu tazki-
rahs had been composed long ago—thirty to forty years previously—and far
away, in Calcutta. He might well not have known of them. The other two
tazkirahs were only slightly earlier than his own, so that the periods of com-
position undoubtedly overlapped, and they were much smaller productions.
Moreover, they were by Delhi authors—and while Delhi was not so far from
Lucknow, local chauvinism and mutual rivalries were not exactly unknown.
As we have seen, all five earlier Urdu tazkirahs had been produced under
markedly Westernizing auspices; thus the semilegitimacy with which Na3ir
could have claimed to be writing the first truly “indigenous” Urdu tazkirah
of Urdu poets.
But of course such subtle and hairsplitting claims were outside his purview.
Na3ir was not a scholar, as his own preface makes clear. He says he was un-
able to write his tazkirah until he obtained information about the early po-
ets; once he obtained Mu3hafi’s tazkirah, he immediately set to work. At the
end of the tazkirah (2: 585) he reports his laborious acquisition of only four
sources: Mu3hafi’s two tazkirahs, Sheftah’s, and Sarvar’s. He refers much more
43. #abir [1854–1855] 1966: 15.

44. King 1994.
often to Mu3hafi, but he uses the others also, and he is indebted directly or
indirectly to several more tazkirahs as well. Of course, in his world manuscripts
were hand-copied, and were rarer and more difficult not only to obtain, but
even to know about, than we usually remember. But even by the standards
of his own time, he was definitely unscholarly, as his editor Mushfiq xhvajah
notes with disapproval. He ignored a number of the most famous and valu-
able tazkirahs—ones that were “not so rare and inaccessible that Na3ir wouldn’t
have obtained them if he had searched.” His basic practice was to use “for
one poet, material from one tazkirah.” And even then, he was careless:
“Mu3hafi’s tazkirahs were before him—at least Na3ir could have copied down
from them the poets’ birth and death dates; but he didn’t even do that much.”
He had “no special principle before him” as he described some poets in one
sentence and others in a number of pages, and gave very few or very many
samples of their work.45
In one respect, however, Na3ir was the most rigorous of Urdu tazkirah writ-
ers. While the great majority of tazkirahs were alphabetical, roughly chrono-
logical, idiosyncratic, or even random in their listing of poets, Na3ir’s alone
was based as scrupulously as possible on the poetic lineage (silsilah), the chain
of transmission over time from ustad to shagird. There was a certain logic to
this organization, since in the north Indian Urdu ghazal tradition these re-
lationships were so highly developed and so uniquely important. In his in-
troduction Na3ir claims, as we have seen, to have invented this approach to
tazkirah organization; and this time his claim seems to be quite legitimate.
He thus begins his tazkirah with the great ustad Sauda, both “because he is
the founding elder of composition in rewhtah” and because “the lineage of
this insignificant one’s shagirdi goes back to him.” Na3ir documents this lat-
ter claim with pride: the lineage runs from Mirza Muhammad Rafiª “Sauda”
(1706?–1781), Mir’s great contemporary, through Mirza Ahsan ªAli “Ahsan,”
to Mirza Muhammad Hasan “Mu|nib,” to Na3ir himself. As can be seen, Na3ir
places himself in the fourth literary generation, so that his two shagirds—one
of whom was a nawab from whom he received a regular stipend (1: 81–82)—
then fall into the fifth. The maximum depth of this whole “family tree” of
lineages is (in some cases) seven ustad -to-shagird “generations,” mapped over
a period of roughly a century and a half.
Within this “family tree” one at once notices the immense disproportion
between quality and quantity. Most of the poets on Na3ir’s list are minor and
are now deservedly forgotten. Of the lineages founded by the two greatest
poets in the classical Urdu tradition, Mir and his successor, Mirza Asadullah
xhan “Ghalib” (1797–1869), Mir’s had no more than thirteen poets while
Ghalib’s had—according to Na3ir—exactly one. Among the other major po-
45. xhvajah 1972: 55–56, 69.

ets, Sauda, Na3ir’s own ustad, had sixty-five shagirds over four generations;
and xhvajah Mir “Dard” (1720–1785) had seventy-two over seven genera-
tions; these numbers sound reasonable. But the lineage of Shaiwh Ghulam
Hamadani “Mu3hafi” (1750–1824), author of Na3ir’s favorite tazkirah sources,
ended up with no fewer than 341 poets over six generations, or well over
half of the 595 poets who are included in the whole set of lineages. Many
chance factors were involved: ustads who lived longer, who lived in impor-
tant cities, who had sociable dispositions, whose poetry was widely popular,
who needed the extra money, obviously ended up with more shagirds—and
even one or two talented and energetic shagirds could be the makings of an
impressive lineage. And poets who composed their own tazkirahs of Urdu
poets—Mu3hafi himself composed not one but two—could make sure that
everyone knew the full list of their shagirds.
Above all, from Na3ir’s tazkirah one can clearly see how widespread the
lineage network was and how fast it ramified: how many hundreds of poets
needed or wanted to have an ustad, and how commonly they sought a close
relationship with an available local poet, no matter how minor, rather than
claiming affiliation with a greater poet more distant in place and time. Plainly
these ustad-shagird relationships were generally based not so much on pres-
tige or literary fame as on local access and personal affinity. One can also
see from Na3ir’s presentation how the lines of power ran: it was not the us-
tad who needed the shagirds, to enhance his prestige; rather, it was the sha-
girds who needed the ustad, to train them in the skills of poetry-composi-
tion. In Na3ir’s view, wherever one finds the name of a shagird, one should
find it linked to the name of his ustad.
Na3ir takes this linkage very seriously and recognizes that its intimacy lends
itself to abuse. About one verse attributed to Qaºim he says pointedly, “I have
seen this verse in Sauda’s divan also”—and he adds, with a heavily sarcastic
disapproval reminiscent of Mir’s, “There’s no harm, because the shagird ac-
quires ownership of the ustad’s property!” (1: 25). Although they could not
(legitimately) inherit poetry, shagirds could be heirs in many other senses—
and this was true even if they were women, and even if they were courtesans
(/avaºif ). Na3ir tells an anecdote about the courtesan Bega “Shirin,” shagird
of the poet “Bahr”:
One day Mir Vazir “#aba” said to me, “I have heard that Shirin’s poetry has
been [favorably] mentioned in the musha ªirah. It’s a pity that she is not among
the descendants of Shaiwh ‘Nasiwh,’ so that his name would have remained ra-
diant.” Miyañ Bahr said, “Pupils too have the status of sons, his name will re-
main established through us.” And he said to Shirin, “ You too, through con-
nection with me, are his granddaughter.” (2: 582)
The practical uses of such close relationships between ustad and shagird were,
as we will see, manifold.
Like any family tree, this one invites questions about its beginnings and
ends. Where did the primal ancestors come from, and what happened over
time to the descendants? In the case of classical Urdu poetry, the latter ques-
tion is relatively easy to answer: a decade after Na3ir’s genealogical chart had
first been drawn up, the family was killed off, or at least mortally wounded.
The shock of the “Mutiny” of 1857 (the “First War of Indian Independence”),
and especially its bloody aftermath, in which the British avenged themselves
with particular harshness on the Indo-Muslim elites, gave rise to forms of
political, economic, social, and cultural restructuring that produced a no-
table literary restructuring as well. Azad’s Ab-e hayat (1880) is generally held
to be the last tazkirah; by no coincidence, this crucial canon-forming work—
which is heavily indebted, as many have recognized, to Na3ir’s own lively and
anecdotal narrative style —is also the first modern literary history. Ab-e hayat
looms over the tazkirah tradition and acts as a hinge between the old liter-
ary world and the new. Na3ir too, like Azad, lived to see the deathblow given
to his literary culture. He initially completed his tazkirah in 1846, a decade
before the Mutiny; but some of his addenda were made after 1857, and he
may have been alive as late as 1871, to see that what Azad called “the page
of the times” had been turned—and turned with (literally) a vengeance.46
The question of origins is, however, more vexed. As we have seen, Na3ir
identifies Sauda, the head of his own lineage, as the founder of “composi-
tion in rewhtah” (rewhtah goºi), and begins his tazkirah with him. Introducing
Sauda, Na3ir reports that Sauda’s father was from Isfahan and that his mother
came from a distinguished family. He then simply endows him—by means
of an anecdote found nowhere else in the Urdu tradition47—with a divine
gift for poetry:
A radiant faqir used to bestow a gaze of attention on the aforementioned Mirza
[Sauda]. After the death of [Sauda’s] venerable father, he said to this solitary
pearl, “This is the time when the prayer of the needy would be accepted and
granted in the Court of the Fulfiller of Needs. Whatever you wish, ask for it.”
He petitioned: “Thanks to you I am free from care. If you insist, then please
bestow on me the wealth of speech, the expression of which is poetry compo-
sition.” This one whose prayers are granted smiled on him, and as a pen name
for this careless madman he brought to his lips the word “Sauda” [madness].
(1: 3)
The faqir also bestowed on him undying, universal fame “throughout the four
quarters of Hindustan”—a fame, Na3ir notes, that Sauda indeed possesses,
for he is known and revered “in every house.” After the faqir ’s blessing Sauda
went directly to Delhi, the “seat of the kingdom, where all the people of tal-
46. xhvajah 1972: 17, 60–61, 83–84; Azad [1880, 1883] 1982: 4.
47. Shamim Inhonvi 1971: 25.
ent and accomplishment were gathered,” and dazzled everyone with his po-
etic powers (1: 3–4). Na3ir does not even trouble to tell us where Sauda lived
before he went to Delhi: his life was his literary life, and his literary life be-
gan with his trip to Delhi.
In other tazkirahs, as we have seen, (north Indian) Urdu poetry tends
to begin with Vali. Azad in Ab-e hayat, for example, describes Vali as the
“Adam of the race of Urdu poetry” and meditates at length on his role as
its founder, the person who “brought all the meters of Persian into Urdu,”
who imported the ghazal itself and “opened the road” for the other gen-
res.48 Since Urdu poetry had a history of several prior centuries in Gujarat
and the Deccan, however, Vali could at the most have been a kind of Noah,
restarting poetry in the north after a great flood of forgetting had wiped
the slate clean of Deccani literary activity. Mir was too close to his Dakani
predecessors to simply overlook them; by Na3ir’s time, such erasure was
much easier to perform. But Na3ir takes the amnesiac process a step fur-
ther, for he is not even interested in Vali; we learn in passing only that “the
foundation of rewhtah was laid by him” (2: 568). Instead, Na3ir blithely be-
gins his lineages a generation later, with Sauda and his peers. He then jump-
starts the tradition with the faqir ’s divine gift to Sauda: the invention or
founding of Urdu poetry.
The point is not that Na3ir has some particular revisionist view of early
Urdu literary history. Rather, he seems to have almost no interest in it. He
simply bundles it all up and makes it a transaction between God (through a
faqir ) and his own founding ustad, Sauda. His view of Urdu poetry is syn-
chronic, and his interest in his own contemporaries is far more compelling
than his commitment to the past. His only recognition of Persian, the an-
cestral language, is to boast of his originality in replacing it with “Hindi” in
his tazkirah. He is not anxious about the past, because he sees the present ef-
fortlessly assimilating it, using it, and evolving beyond it. And he does not
even have much time for the past, because the present is so fruitful and the
poetry so obviously flourishing. Sauda is revered “in every house” in all quar-
ters of Hindustan; other great poets are equally universal in their appeal (1:
348–49), and more and more shagirds flock to the available ustads. Arrang-
ing the poets into lineages is, among other things, a way to organize the pro-
liferation of poets that Na3ir sees all around him. It is a way of putting one’s
house in order to serve the needs of the present; it is a display of one’s own
inventive energy and zeal. Through such a unique achievement, even a poet
of secondary talent could hope to make a name for himself.
Not surprisingly, Na3ir the Lakhnavi paints an exceptionally harsh por-
trait of Mir, who was not only Sauda’s great contemporary and rival but had
48. Azad [1880, 1883] 1982: 83.

also by then been co-opted into appearing as the quintessential Dihlavi poet.
When Na3ir tells the story of Mir and the commoner in the oxcart, he de-
scribes the man as a grocer (baniya) and makes Mir recoil from the mere sight
of the man’s face and keep his eyes fastidiously averted for the duration of
the trip (1: 141). He also depicts Mir as arrogant in the extreme, to both his
peers and his patrons. In Lucknow, Mir “Soz,” Nawab A3if ud-Daulah’s us-
tad, is asked to recite a few ghazals and is then lavishly praised by the nawab.
Both Mir Soz’s “presumption” and the nawab’s praise displease Mir. He says
to Mir Soz, “ You’re not ashamed of such presumption?”—and proceeds to
clarify his point: “About your venerable status and nobility there is no doubt,
but in poetic rank no one equals Mir!” (1: 143–44). Na3ir thus, by no coin-
cidence, heightens the contrast between the arrogant Mir and the carefree
and casual Sauda.
Na3ir devotes to ustads like Sauda and Mir, and to some personal friends
as well, a number of pages of anecdotal narrative; but most poets receive very
brief entries. Na3ir generally introduces his poets with a flourish: in many
cases, with traditional (though often low-quality) Persianized rhymed prose
(saj ª). Here is his account of an extremely unimportant poet: “A poet with
distinction [imtiyaz]; Mir Amanat ªAli, pen name “Distinguished” [mumtaz];
being Sauda’s shagird was his source of pride [naz].” 49 This, followed by a
single verse as a select sample of his work, is all we hear about Mumtaz (1:
22–23). Rather than being credited with any special “distinction,” this poet
is plainly being introduced with resonant sound effects. Na3ir is a circus ring-
master presenting his performers with a flourish: “thrilling—chilling—
high-flying—death-defying!” As Na3ir says of another poet’s work, the verses
are recorded “so that the reader may enjoy them”; but the truth is more com-
plex. Poets’ verses are their memorials (yadgar), and minor poets may well live
on only in such references as this; it is an almost poignant service for a tazki-
rah writer to preserve their names. Na3ir says of yet another poet, “Some of
his verses are recorded so that he will still continue to be mentioned [|ikr us
ka baqi rahe]” (1: 393, 390). \ikr is of course the literal root of the tazkirah.
In the case of a major poet, however, such rhymed prose not only proves
no barrier to communication, but in fact is often used for especially formal
pronouncements. After a few sentences of (unrhymed) biographical infor-
mation, Na3ir presents to us his great contemporary, the Lakhnavi ustad
xhvajah Haidar ªAli “Atash” (1777–1847): “Now the mansion of rewhtah is es-
tablished on this sound pillar; despite his venerable age, a maker of every
verse in a romantic style; a perfect knower of divine mysteries; few are aus-
tere and pious like the xhvajah #ahib; and his poetry is all select; it is so fa-
49. sha ªir-e ba imtiyaz / Mir Amanat ªAli tawhallu3 Mumtaz / shagirdi-e Sauda us ka mayah-e naz.
(Line breaks have been imposed to show the rhyme.)
mous that there is no need to collect it” (2: 1).50 The (non)relationship of
poetry to personal biography in this literary culture is here perfectly illus-
trated. Na3ir admires Atash for his status as a venerable elder, his mystical
knowledge, his austerity and piety, his religious qualities—and for his nev-
ertheless making (experiencing, interpreting) “every verse in a romantic
style.” The word “romantic” [ aª shiqanah ] literally means lover-like, and Na3ir
makes it clear that the lover-like qualities should inhere in the poetry and
the interpretation of the poetry, not in the life of the poet. If Atash invari-
ably created and experienced poetry romantically despite his piety, venera-
bility, and old age, this was a piquant and exemplary personal achievement.
It demonstrates once again the entirely nonnaturalistic poetics of the clas-
sical ghazal, which were later to be so sadly misconstrued by the cult of “nat-
ural poetry.”
Na3ir was also adept at using rhymed prose for the occasional hatchet job.
Here he introduces one of his least favorite poets: “Accustomed to [im-
proper] intervention and appropriation; Mir Husain ªAli ‘Taºassuf ’; a shagird
of Mir Sher ªAli ‘Afsos,’ extremely self-regarding and self-willed; the souls of
the departed are in pain because of him; very wrongly he made objections
to the ustads’ verses; and he put together a brief pamphlet to mislead every-
body” (1: 244).51 Na3ir intends to refute this pamphlet in detail: he provides
a series of examples that shed light both on his own view of poetry and on
the kinds of literary debate in which his culture constantly engaged.
One of Na3ir’s examples of Taºassuf ’s folly deals with his analysis of a verse
by the revered ustad Atash—a verse that Na3ir singles out for its excellence:
A verse of xhvajah Atash’s that is one of the best verses:
I am crazy about hunting the bird of madness
I am making a snare from the threads of my collar.52
About this by way of regret [taºassuf ] he says, “I hope that the possessors of in-
telligence will consider what a defect can be seen in the meaning of this intro-
ductory verse. If the bird of madness has not yet been captured, then no per-
son in his senses pulls out threads from his collar, which is the work of a
madman. And if it has already been captured, then to procure the equipment
for hunting is a vain action. If he had said it like this, it would have been better:
50. ab bina-e rewhtah is rukn-e salim se pa ºedar / bavajud piranah sali ke /ar}-e ªashiqanah par har
shi ªr ka shi ªar / ªarif-e kamil / qani ª aur mutavakkil / xhvajah #ahib sa kamyab / aur kalam un ka sab
intiwhab / is qadar mashhur kih use hajat jam ªa karne ki nahiñ.
51. ªadi-e dawhl o ta3arruf / Mir Husain ªAli Ta ºassuf / shagird-e Mir Sher ªAli Afsos nihayat whud-
bin aur whud-pasand / arvah-e marhumañ us se dardmand / nahaq nahaq ustadoñ ke ash ªar par i ªtira{
kiya / aur risalah-e muwhta3ar fareb-e ªavam ko tartib diya.
52. sauda hu ºa hai murgh-e junuñ ke shikar ka / phanda bana raha huñ garebañ ke tar ka. The
word sauda, “madness,” I have translated as “to be crazy about,” in order to capture the pun-
ning effect that our own idiom also conveys.
Whoever might be crazy about hunting the bird of madness

Let him make a snare from the threads of my collar.”
The correction that this self-deluded one has done —if he [the “I” of the verse]
is a madman, how would he have a collar? And if he is not a madman and is
in his senses, since when is the act of a madman done by a man in his senses?
If in xhvajah #ahib’s verse he had already finished with his madness, then the
objection would have been appropriate. (1: 245)
Atash’s verse invokes the complex interplay between madness as an over-

powering force that nullifies all personal choice and madness as an object of
the lover’s personal choice —one that he voluntarily and even urgently pur-
sues. Taºassuf is right to put his finger on the paradoxical nature of this inter-
action but wrong to consider it a defect. Atash is exploring, and relishing, the
process by which the lover goes mad—a process both voluntary and beyond
all volition, a process of his eagerly making a snare for something that has al-
ready captured him. The verse also highlights the wordplay embodied in the
common idiom sauda hona, “to be crazy (about).” Since everyone in Na3ir’s
world shares all of this background information already, the discussion is de-
voted only to matters of overall poetic effect and interpretation: does the verse
create a clumsily flat contradiction, or an elegantly unresolvable paradox?
Through this kind of extremely abstract argument the treatment of ghazal
themes (ma{mun) at the broadest level is refined and developed. At a slightly
lower level of generality, Na3ir also offers, in another of his refutations of
the presumptuous Taºassuf, an argument about logical and semantic “fit”:
Now please listen: About Shaiwh Nasiwh he writes, “His poetry is ‘the shop
grand, the food bland.’” Accordingly, this verse is taken as proof:
My intoxication and awareness are the same state —
I never had a dream that my fortune was awake.
He says, “In this verse the defect is present, that the first line has no connec-
tion [rab/] with the second line. In the first line the theme of madness is found,
and in the second fate and destiny. He should have said,
No one thought my sleep to be any different from wakefulness—
My heedlessness and awareness are the same state.”
Someone should ask that incoherent one: When heedlessness, awareness,

dream, wakefulness—four things—are present in one verse, how can there not
be connection? And when that madman likens the theme of the first line to
madness—is madness mentioned in it, or bad fortune? And the lack of con-
nection in the first line of his own verse is manifest: its theme has been badly
fitted in. (1: 246–47)
The two lines of a ghazal verse form in every sense an independent mini-
poem and must be related to each other in some clear and poetically effec-
tive way, so that they have “connection” (rab/). We have seen Mir’s heavy em-
phasis on the cultivation of marbu/ poetry—poetry that possesses rab/.
Nasiwh’s first line suggests that the speaker is deeply mad—in fact he is never
not mad, so that he has no intervals of lucidity. His “intoxication” of mad-
ness is identical with his normal awareness. He is so far from aspiring to bet-
ter fortune that even in his dreams he never imagines that his fortune would
“awaken” and would bring him good luck. Nasiwh’s verse is undoubtedly more
piquant than Taºassuf ’s pedestrian reworking. (And by playfully calling
Taºssuf “that incoherent [berab/] one” and “that madman,” Na3ir too, like Mir,
ties his critical language directly into the content of his discussion.) But the
point is that here the argument is at the level of the line: the success or fail-
ure of the “connection” between the two lines that should make them marbu/,
the fitting in (bañdhna) of a theme into an individual line. The question is
one of nuts and bolts, of technical skill in verse construction.
MUSHAªI RAH S
Such disputes were sooner or later brought into the central institution of
this literary culture: the poetry recitation session, or musha ªirah, venue for
legendary rivalries, definitive site of the “fine and appropriate martial en-
counter” of Na3ir’s title. Here the battles often came down to a level even
more detailed and finicky, as individual words were called into question. Al-
most all musha ªirahs were “patterned” (/arhi), which meant that an exemplary
line from a verse was announced in advance, and all the poets recited fresh
verses composed for the occasion in that specified meter and rhyme scheme.
In one of his vivid anecdotes about musha ªirah behavior, Na3ir narrates such
a “martial encounter.” This anecdote shows us Shaiwh Imam Bawhsh “Nasiwh”
(1776–1838), one of the ustads criticized by Taºassuf, assuming the offen-
sive in his turn. Na3ir writes in his account of Mauji Ram “Mauji”:
These few verses are his memorial:
When that unveiled one went to bathe beneath the water
Then because of the color of her face a rose [gulab] bloomed beneath the
water.
When in a state of despair I wept from thirst

There appeared there the wave of a mirage beneath the water.
Tears flowed from the weeping eyes in such a way

Just as water would flow from a fountain under water.
This pattern [/arh] was that of Mirza Jaªfar #ahib’s musha ªirah. Mirza Haji “Qa-
mar” and Mir Mu}affar Husain “[amir” wanted to have Mauji Ram disgraced
through the lips of Mirza Qatil. Mirza Qatil, in the open musha ªirah, made the
following objection to [his ghazal ]: that to call a rose [gul] a gulab is contrary
to usage; and a fountain is outside the water; and that a mirage is only [in] a
desert—what connection does sand have with waves? When Mirza #ahib made
these objections against it in the open musha ªirah, Shaiwh Imam Bawhsh Nasiwh
found his temerity extremely displeasing. Mauji Ram took his plea to [his us-
tad ] Miyañ Mu3hafi. Miyañ #ahib said, “Friendship ought not to be spoiled be-
cause of a shagird; one can acquire many such [shagirds].” When Nasiwh heard
that Mu3hafi was not supporting Mauji, he himself sent for Mauji, wrote these
questions and answers on a folded paper, and gave it to him. At the next gath-
ering, he read it in the open musha ªirah:
O most eloquent of the eloquent, Mirza Qatil #ahib, when you made these ob-
jections to this lowly one’s ghazal, that to call a rose gulab is contrary to usage and
has not entered into Urdu—it is strange that a poet like you, the pride of the age,
would say such a nonsensical thing. Do you not know that in the idiom of the
people of Hind, cold weather during the spring season is called gulabi jara, and
rose-color is called gulabi? Not to mention that Mir Muhammad Taqi, who has
no equal or peer in the language of rewhtah, says, [he quotes verses by Mir, Ma}har,
and Mu3hafi illustrating these usages of gulab]. And when you said that a foun-
tain is outside the water, in fact Saªdi, in the Gulistan, has committed this ‘mis-
take’: [he quotes an illustrative Persian verse]. And when you said that a mirage
is only in a desert and asked what connection it has with a wave —Na3ir ªAli says
[he quotes an illustrative Persian verse]. This is the answer to every one of your
objections. (1: 514–16)
Here Nasiwh offers two kinds of evidence: that of colloquial language, and
that of poetic authority (sanad). In the case of a disputed usage, citing in-
stances from the work of recognized ustads in the tradition is an extremely
powerful form of legitimation. Of the five examples he offers, three are in
Urdu and two are in Persian. One of the Urdu examples is by Ma}har, who
is much better known as a Persian poet. Of the two Persian examples, the
first is by an Iranian and the second by an Indo-Persian poet. The inter-
penetration of the Indo-Persian and Urdu ghazal traditions could hardly be
clearer; in fact Qatil himself, at whom this argument is directed, was known—
by Na3ir himself (1: 296–97), among others—chiefly as a Persian ghazal poet.
But the relationship with Persian was increasingly fraught: Ghalib, for ex-
ample, made a point of scoffing at Qatil’s Persian scholarship, claiming to
respect only the Persian of native speakers—an attitude that led to a bitter
and prolonged literary war.53
Once Nasiwh has demolished Qatil’s objections to Mauji’s ghazal, he pro-
ceeds to carry the war into the enemy’s territory:
53. “In some gathering Mirza recited a Persian ghazal. Some persons objected to one word
in it. And the objection was according to the rule that Mirza Qatil had written in one of his
pamphlets. When Mirza heard it, he said, ‘Who is Qatil? And what do I have to do with Qatil?
He was a Khatri from Faridabad. I have no respect for anyone except native speakers.’ Most of
those people were pupils of Mirza Qatil. Thus, they averted their eyes from the rules of hospi-
tality, and tumult and turmoil arose among great and small” (Azad [1880, 1883] 1982: 505).
For further discussion of these issues, see Faruqi 1998.
And the second ghazal, composed by [amir, that you claim is free of defects—
in one verse of it are [grounds for] two objections:
Even in their homeland the distracted ones [sargashtagoñ] find no peace at all
As the fish’s restlessness [i{/irab] is not diminished beneath the water.
My dear sir, no poet has spoken of the restlessness of a fish under water, for
the reason that a fish finds no rest anywhere except in the water. And if i{/irab
is used in the meaning of “speed”—well, there is a big difference between “rest-
lessness” and “speed.” Sargashtah is singular; when you form its plural, instead
of [the final] he, the Persian kaf [= gaf ] and alif nun will come, and it will be
sargashtagan. Where has the invention of sargashtagoñ come from? Those who
know the Urdu language in this age are Miyañ Mu3hafi and Inshaºallah xhan;
it is vain for you to intervene where you have no standing. Your Persian is no
doubt famous—let the Isfahanis enjoy it! Beyond that, you can have only our
greetings and respects! (1: 516–17)
As can be seen, the “objections” here are made at a very precise and even
nit-picking level. Nasiwh not only criticizes the description of fish as show-
ing “restlessness” under water, but even takes exception to a grammatical
form: sargashtah has been given an Urdu oblique plural ending instead of a
Persian one. His tone toward Qatil is withering: Qatil may know Persian, but
he should not plume himself on his Urdu, since the true contemporary us-
tads for Urdu are Mu3hafi and Insha. Persian and Urdu interpenetrate, but
Urdu maintains its own standards of mastery, and over time the relationship
becomes more and more contentious—for despite many vicissitudes and
purist fantasies,54 Urdu, as can be seen, is increasingly asserting its autonomy.
SOCIAL CONTEXTS
Musha ªirahs were not only complex competitive arenas and technical work-
shops but hothouses of gossip and general social rivalry as well. From Na3ir’s
tazkirah we can obtain an unusually complete and lively impression of the
societal range of Urdu poetry in the Lucknow of his time. The love of sto-
ries and anecdotes and small local details that Na3ir shows in his tazkirah is
unmatched (until Ab-e hayat ) in the tradition and is one of the special dis-
tinguishing features of his work. His contemporaries hated his tazkirah for
its candidly gossipy stories and casually—or gleefully—unflattering anec-
dotes;55 they could not have imagined how much we in our time would value
it for exactly that kind of insider’s approach.
In Na3ir’s world there were numerous Hindu poets; Mauji Ram Mauji was
of course among them. Mirza Muhammad Hasan Qatil (1757/58–1818) was
54. Faruqi 1998.

55. xhvajah 1972: 40–46.
himself a convert from Hinduism. Na3ir is especially strong on the Lucknow

poets of his own time: for about one hundred of them he is our only source
of knowledge.56 He records about forty-five poets who seem from their names
to be Hindu and seven poets named “Singh” of whom one or two were per-
haps Sikhs. (Some tazkirah writers, by contrast, tend more or less to ignore
Hindu poets.)57 Na3ir also includes another Hindu poet who had become a
Muslim, as well as a Muslim poet who “through his evil fortune” had been
converted to Christianity (1: 275, 1: 38). He provides brief accounts of four-
teen women poets (2: 577–83, 2: 628); for only two of them does he name
ustads. Of them all, the most fully described is the courtesan Shirin, hero-
ine of the anecdote about the “sonship” of shagirds—a relationship in which
her ustad, Bahr, as we have seen, most specifically included her.
Na3ir also mentions a few poets from humble backgrounds, including a
barber (1: 47–48), a herald (1: 204), a perfumer (1: 248), a member of the
lowly Hindu porter (kahar) caste (1: 421), a watchmaker (2: 99), a shoe mer-
chant (2: 397), and a jeweler’s son (2: 513–14). It is clear that their relatively
low social status does not exactly disqualify them from being poets, but it
does let them in for patronizing treatment. Na3ir is rather surprised by their
achievements, and seeks to use them as a moral lesson. The poet “Hajjam”
(“Barber”), for example, “obtained improvement [i3lah] by trimming the
beard of Mirza Rafiª Sauda.” Na3ir enjoys his pun on the barbers’ idiomatic
use of the word i3lah to mean “trimming or shaving the hair.” And as we might
expect, Na3ir proceeds to assign all the credit to Sauda: “The company of
accomplished people has the quality of a philosopher’s stone: iron, although
it is black inside, becomes pure gold, just as this craftsman obtained the wealth
of the coin of poetry, and received praise and applause in all Shahjahanabad
[Delhi]” (1: 48). Of “Mujrim” Na3ir says, “Although he is a shoe merchant
in Dalal Bazaar, in the mold of his temperament verses are well formed.” In
this case, the credit goes to his city: “And what a cultivated city Lucknow is,
that nobles from elsewhere are consumed with jealousy over the eloquent
word choice [ fa3ahat] of our craftsmen!” (2: 397). Na3ir’s use of “mold” and
“well formed” also wittily evokes the shoemaker’s craft, in the style of allu-
sive double-meaning much appreciated in the Persianized literary tradition.
Among all these humble poets, particularly fascinating is Aftab Raºe “Rusva”
[“Disgraced”], who according to Na3ir amply lived up to his pen name:
He was a jeweler’s son; through the zeal and ambition of love he gave up name
and honor, and wandered in streets and markets. Street urchins used to present
him with a drum and a cowrie shell; with a garland of cowrie shells around his
neck, this verse was on his lips:
56. xhvajah 1972: 41.

57. Farman Fathpuri 1972: 596.
He was disgraced [rusva], he was ruined, he became a vagabond—

Whoever passed through love’s way.
Due to his distractedness, he left Shahjahanabad [Delhi] and came to Amroha.

Since in those days men from Delhi were honored and esteemed everywhere,
he settled down in a Sayyid’s house. One day he sent a youth to get wine, and
the youth became absorbed in childish games. This verse was on his lips at every
moment:
The boy went away to get wine —how can there be entertainment?
I give up the thought of wine —may the boy be well!
When he was dying, he requested his drinking companions to bathe his corpse
in wine [rather than water]; his drinking companions acted on his request.
These two or three verses, which are the pearls of his temperament, are noted
by way of memorial: [Na3ir quotes two verses]. (2: 513–14)
Here is almost the archetype of the ghazal ’s classic lover-protagonist: wan-

dering, half-mad, disgraced, flaunting his intoxication, violating worldly
and religious norms—living out ghazal conventions, it would seem, in his ac-
tual life.
What is striking about this anecdote is its tone —elegiac, austere, free of
the moralizing or condemnation of which Na3ir is exceedingly capable. For
Na3ir is never one to mince words: he gleefully offers critical anecdotes and
makes sweeping, hostile judgments about two dozen or so poets, many of
whom he accuses of arrogance, use of vulgar and abusive language, ingrat-
itude toward noble and generous patrons—or sexual pursuit of boys. Con-
cerning eight or nine poets (out of 824) Na3ir records that they loved boys.
In some cases he clearly disapproves of this behavior. About “Fidvi” Lahori,
whom he dislikes, he writes: “In his mind, his claim to poetry was beyond all
limits; and passing beyond the level of poetry, he set his foot on the path of
love of boys (amrad parasti). This vile practice caused many conflicts within
his family; his body was pulverized with wounds, but he didn’t have the
strength to give up this weakness” (1: 126). But in the case of Na3ir’s own
close friend “ ªA}har,” his tone is much more indulgent: “In the season of his
youth he was restless with love for smooth-faced [beardless] ones, and un-
able to control his love of boys who were the envy of Houris” (2: 154).
What can be made of anecdotal commentary like this? It is not necessary
to affirm the historical truth of such anecdotes to find them significant; and
in fact, many of the most famous literary anecdotes, especially those in Ab-e
hayat, have been amply discredited.58 In this case, it is the doubleness of per-
spective that is so piquant. For the tazkirah tradition situates itself right at the
intersection of social reality and literary convention: it reports—anecdotally
58. Vadud [1942–1943] 1984.

at least—on the poets, as well as on their poetry. When a sexual predilec-

tion for boys is considered in its actual social context of lived behavior (as
in the case of Fidvi), Na3ir often views it as repugnant. But when the love of
beautiful boys is considered abstractly or distantly (as in the case of ªA}har)
or is allegorized into an archetypal life of alienation, suffering, and death
(as in the case of Rusva), it arouses no such disgust. It seems then to become
assimilated into the ghazal ’s poetic universe, along with madness, drunken-
ness, outcast status, apostasy from Islam, sacrificial death, and other themes
of transgression.59
As we have seen in Na3ir’s treatment of Atash, the romantic and passion-
ate behavior attributed to the ideal-typical lover was emphatically not to be
conflated with the real life of this venerable and elderly ustad. Still, especially
in the case of minor poets, the tazkirahs’ anecdotal approach often faces two
ways. Azad says of a certain minor poet who died young: “He was himself
beautiful, and loved to look at beautiful ones, and finally gave up his life in
the grief of separation.” 60 Is this biography or a romantic play on a literary
archetype? In the case of the extremely numerous minor poets, about whom
often little was known except as vague gossip and rumor, such conflation
was understandable; and of course nobody bothered about it, since people
read tazkirahs for literary pleasure —for good poetry and good anecdotes,
not precise factual information. Only with the cult of “natural poetry” from
the late nineteenth century onward did such biography and pseudobiog-
raphy become reified in the naive way that continues to be troubling to many
ghazal -lovers.
Many of Na3ir’s characteristic attitudes converge in a unique and often-
cited passage, in which he observes with considerable disdain a new perfor-
mance genre that was destined to become the start of the dramatic tradition
in Urdu.61 His report takes the form of an eyewitness account—and it is the
only one we possess. Sayyid Agha Hasan “Amanat” (1815–1858) had com-
posed, Na3ir tells us, a maùnavi—an extended poem, often narrative, in
rhymed couplets—called Indar sabha (Indra’s assembly) “in the manner of
a rahas.” A rahas was a kind of performance involving K,3na and the gopis
that was invented by Vajid ªAli Shah (r. 1850–1856) and staged by him in his
court at Lucknow. Amanat’s work, in its new performance mode, now
opened this genre to an unprecedentedly wide audience:
And in this maùnavi he composed ghazals and holis and thumris and chhand in
the [Braj] Bhakha language. Thus when they heard it Panáit Kashmiri and Bi-
hari the Porter and Mir Hafi} selected some beautiful children and lovely moon-
59. Schimmel 1992.

60. Azad [1880, 1883] 1982: 186.
61. Sharar [c. 1913–1920] 1963: 173–75.
faced boys and had the boys memorize the maùnavi, and educated them in
singing and dancing, and set up a rahas. And they were retained for fifteen ru-
pees a day. Accordingly, people saw this new-style gathering and liked it very
much, and thousands of common [bazari] people began to come for it. One
day the author of this ta|kirah too went to this rahas gathering of the Indar sabha.
I saw that thousands of people were mad and crazy for those beautiful boys.
As the verse says:
There was such a crowd of moon-faced ones
That I was afraid my heart would be ground to pieces.
And Miyañ Amanat was seated on a high platform, and a beautiful moon-faced
boy sang before him. When I saw this, after watching for a while I came away
to my home.
Lest we should fail to note his disapproving tone, Na3ir adds a final verdict:
“Just as thousands of women became prostitutes [ fahishah] through Mir
Hasan’s maùnavi, so through this maùnavi, Indar sabha, thousands of men be-
came sodomites [lu/i] and catamites [mughlam], and sodomy became wide-
spread” (1: 231).
Na3ir’s comparison is to Mir Hasan’s Sihr ul-bayan (Magic of discourse),
which is by far the most famous maùnavi in Urdu. Yet in his account of Mir
Hasan, Na3ir has lavish praise for the maùnavi and not a word to say about
its alleged corrupting tendencies (1: 41–42). Apparently Amanat’s work ir-
ritates Na3ir and inclines him to dark mutterings. Even in the midst of his
petulance he cannot help inserting a verse, but that does not change his ba-
sic mood. For in this performance he sees what might be called a real-world
vulgarization of the love of beautiful boys: instead of being abstract poetic
visions of beauty, desire, and transgression, here the boys are present in the
flesh, in quantity, singing romantic verses before a huge audience of excited
common people. Instead of remaining a sophisticated genre, recited in set-
tings controlled by poets and elite patrons, here the maùnavi is filled with
colloquial verse forms and acted out as popular entertainment. Instead of a
few commoners’ being generously allowed to join the company of poets, here
a veteran poet himself presides over the offering of his work for mass con-
sumption and patronage.62 Here is the beginning of something new, the seed
of Urdu drama from which would grow the Parsi theater and so much else
besides; Na3ir seems to sense this, and he is not amused.
USTADS, SHAGIRDS, AND POETRY-MAKING

We have noticed the confrontational aspects of the tradition—the way the
musha ªirah functioned as an arena for many kinds of conflict and rivalry. But
62. Hanson 1998.

the warmer and more supportive side of the literary experience should not
be overlooked. Impromptu composition was highly valued, and many op-
portunities were available for the poet to show his skill. Above all, well-earned
praise from one’s ustad was sweet beyond measure. Na3ir describes, with a
becoming show of modesty, one such achievement of his own that earned
his ustad’s praise:
One day [a shagird named] “?apish” came to Ha{rat Ustad [Mu|nib], having
composed this line and petitioning for the second line:
Sir, please just shoot your arrow with a bit of care.
As it happened, this humble one too was in attendance at that time. From my
lips, without thought or hesitation, there emerged:
Some awestruck one might be in the guise of a gazelle.
The ustad was extremely pleased with the second line and gave the highest
praise and applause to my inventiveness. (1: 67–68)
What does it mean to “shoot with care”? To avoid hitting an innocent passerby
who stands transfixed by the sight of the beloved’s beauty? Or to shoot ac-
curately for a clean kill, to spare the hopelessly infatuated lover any prolonged
suffering? Both at once, of course. This is part of the elegance of kinayah,
“implication,” one of the recognized ways to make a small two-line poem feel
packed with meaning.63
While the shagird might pull off such feats occasionally, for an experienced
and long-practiced ustad these subtleties were routine. An ustad was a price-
less resource: by changing a single word, he could raise the verse from the realm
of the ordinary into a much finer and more complex state. Taking a mediocre
verse, the ustad “adorned it with the jewels of correction” (2: 310–11). Many
of Na3ir’s anecdotes illustrate such skills.
Whichever taciturn one [kam suwhan] I address would speak out—
There is such accomplishment in me that a picture would speak out.
Miyañ “Dilgir” #ahib used to say, “One day I was in attendance upon Shaiwh
Nasiwh, when Mir Saªadat ªAli “Taskin” arrived. The Shaiwh #ahib said, “Please
recite something.” Dilgir #ahib recited the verse above. The Shaiwh said, “ Your
verse is good. If in place of ‘taciturn’ [kam suwhan] there were ‘tongueless’ [be
zabañ], then your accomplishment would be manifest and the verse would be-
come peerless.” Dilgir #ahib accepted his alteration. (1: 175–76)
The difference between “taciturn” and “tongueless” is the difference between

an improbability (a reticent, silent person speaks) and an impossibility (a
tongueless person speaks; a picture speaks). The claim is now a miraculous
63. Faruqi 1990–1994, 2: 136.

one, parallel to that in the second line —and a far more suggestive and com-
pelling verse has been created.
The emphasis on ghazal verses as independent two-line poems naturally
encouraged the cult of rab/ and the creation of various kinds of “implica-
tion” and multivalence and subtlety in small amounts of verbal space. It also
lent itself to a focus on the smallest possible verbal space, the single perfect
word—the word that brings the whole verse to life and delights the audience.
As we have seen, Mir reserved a separate category of Urdu poetry for verses
based on iham, the use of a “word fundamental to the verse” that would “have
two meanings, one obvious and one remote, and the poet should intend the
remote meaning, not the obvious one.” Such verses carry an obvious one-
two punch, since they first notably misdirect—and then abruptly correct—
the audience. Na3ir, too, recognizes iham as a special style characteristic of
certain poets (1: 491, 1: 505, 2: 142). In one case, he links it explicitly with
the pursuit of meaning, describing a poet as not only an iham - creator but
also a ma ªni band, a “capturer/depicter of meaning” (2: 419). After the early
vogue for iham had passed, the concept remained as one of the technical de-
vices in the ghazal repertoire; it was merely one rather specialized form of
“meaning-creation.” 64
Ghalib, the last great master of classical ghazal, was famous for this kind
of convoluted, metaphysical, “difficult” poetry. He famously declared poetry
to be “the creation of meanings [maªni afirini], not the measuring out of
rhymes.” But the love of wordplay and complexity certainly goes back at least
to Mir, who, as we have seen, claimed all verbal resources as his own.
A single utterance has any number of aspects, Mir
What a variety of things I constantly say with the tongue of the pen!
And again:
Every verse is coiled [pechdar] like a lock of hair
Mir’s speech is of an extraordinary kind.
Not only examples of such complex poetry, but also specific references to it
and claims of prowess in it, are found in the work of virtually all the great
Urdu (and Indo-Persian) poets. Samayasundar’s legendary feat, at Akbar’s
court in Lahore, of drawing more than eight hundred thousand meanings
from an eight-word sentence, might in fact be considered a sort of limit case
of maªni afirini.65
Moreover, this love of wordplay, implication, and verbal complexity was
64. Faruqi 1997; Faruqi, chapter 14, this volume.

65. In this paragraph I quote from Ghalib 1969, 1: 114–15, and Mir 1983: 553, 615; on
wordplay in Urdu poetry, see Faruqi 1990–1994, 3: 129–31.
no mere elite pastime: at least in nineteenth-century Delhi and Lucknow it

was by all accounts a widespread taste that pervaded the popular culture.
According to Sharar, wordplay with double meanings ({ilaª) was a specialty
of Amanat, the author of the Indar sabha; but even his expertise was outdone
by the skill of the people of Lucknow in general. Sharar names several pop-
ular Lakhnavi genres of wit and quick repartee (e.g., phabti, tuk bandi ) and
singles out for particular praise the cry of a street vendor:
A street vendor was selling sugarcane in the market. This was his cry: “Hey
friends, who will capture a kite?” Can any metaphor be more enjoyable than
this? The most refined metaphor is that in which the name neither of the thing
itself, nor of the metaphorical thing, appears. Only some special feature of the
metaphorical thing is mentioned, to give pleasure in the speaking. What bet-
ter example can there be of this than his not mentioning the name of sugar-
cane, or of the bamboo with which kites are captured, but only saying, “ Who
will capture a kite?”
The bamboo pole with which kites are captured is a metaphor for the tall
sugarcane; and the pole itself is not even named, but only suggested. Sharar
reports that no simile could be more to the taste of the common people
(bazari log) than this, and that “hundreds, thousands” of such examples could
be heard “night and day” in popular conversation.66
A disdain for “mere” wordplay is by now deeply engrained in the poetic
sensibilities of modern Urdu-speakers. Yet, as Shamsur Rahman Faruqi
points out, it is quite wrong to conceive of such wordplay as some kind of
lacy ornamental frippery unrelated to the real world. “ Wordplay tells us
much about language and its possibilities, its colorful varieties, its subtleties.”
And since language itself is not merely a most important part of our world,
but is also actually constitutive of that world, none of its creative and ex-
pressive possibilities should be overlooked.67 Wordplay is, in short, always
meaning-play as well. The poets and audiences of the classical Urdu ghazal
were well aware of its multivalent powers, and valued it accordingly. Their
heirs live in a literary universe that is, by comparison, much simpler, flatter,
and more impoverished.
THE LAST TA\KIRAH?

Na3ir’s tazkirah was initially completed in 1846, and a decade later the Mutiny
swept away the world of classical Urdu poetry. Old “Mughal” Delhi was de-
stroyed, its poets dispersed. The young Muhammad Husain Azad, whose fa-
ther was executed by the British for participation in the rebellion, fled the
66. Sharar [c. 1913–1920] 1963: 189–93.

67. Faruqi 1997: 46.
city on foot with his whole extended family. Placing them in safety with
friends, he wandered for several years, avoiding arrest, until he settled in La-
hore and eventually got a job with the Department of Public Instruction.
There he lived for the rest of his life, and there he wrote, among many other
works, Ab-e hayat (Water of life)—for he knew that “poetry is water of life to
the spirit.” 68 He explained his purpose in this work by analyzing the tradi-
tional cultural role of the tazkirah:
Moreover, those with new-style educations, whose minds are illumined by light
from English lanterns, complain that our ta|kirahs describe neither a poet’s
biography, nor his temperament, character, and habits; nor do they reveal the
merits of his work, or its strong and weak points, or the relationship between
him and his contemporaries and between his poetry and their poetry. In fact
they even go so far as to omit the dates of his birth and death. Although this
complaint is not entirely without foundation, the truth is that information of
this kind is generally available in families, and through accomplished mem-
bers of distinguished families and their circles of acquaintances. It’s partly that
such people have been disheartened at the reversal in the times and have given
up on literature, and partly that knowledge and its forms of communication
take new paths with every day’s experience.
Tazkirahs, in other words, had always been supplemented by oral narrative

and anecdote —stories about the poets were “the small change of gossip, suit-
able tidbits to be enjoyed when groups of friends were gathered together,”
so that “it never occurred to people to write about these things in books” in
any systematic manner. Could anyone have known “that the page of the times
would be turned—that the old families would be destroyed, and their off-
spring so ignorant that they would no longer know even their own family
traditions?” 69
Azad emphasized the value of the new technology of printing, and he pro-
posed to use it to create a new super-tazkirah. “All these thoughts made it in-
cumbent upon me to collect what I knew about the elders or had found in
various references in different tazkirahs and write it down in one place.” More-
over, he would strive for a degree of narrative continuity that traditional tazki-
rahs had never remotely desired: “And insofar as possible I should write in
such a way that speaking, moving, walking pictures of their lives should ap-
pear before us and attain immortal life.” As he sought to renew, vindicate,
and purify Urdu poetry, he had a clearly proclaimed agenda: Persian was
over and done with, while “the English language is a magic world of progress
and reform.” 70 In Ab-e hayat Azad created the ultimate tazkirah —it was at once
68. Azad, quoted in Pritchett 1994: 50.

69. Azad [1880, 1883] 1982: 3–4. (Source for all quotations in the paragraph.)
70. Azad [1880, 1883] 1982: 4.
the self-proclaimed culmination of the tradition, the preeminent canon-form-

ing work, a severe and sweeping criticism of the classical poetry, and the first
real linguistic and literary history of Urdu. After this immensely transfor-
mative work, neither the tazkirah tradition nor the classical poetry could ever
look the same again.
BEYOND THE TAZKIRAH TRADITION

In the aftermath of the cataclysmic events of 1857 and their lasting effects,
and in the aftermath of Ab-e hayat, what now survives of this particular lit-
erary culture? Certainly much of it is long gone, and over the past century
and a quarter its surviving texts have been widely misunderstood and mis-
judged.71 Azad and his followers crammed the classical ghazal willy-nilly into
a Victorian and naively realistic mold; when they found parts that didn’t
fit, they were quite prepared to cut them off and cast them aside. The fact
that Mir wrote verses in which the beloved was a beautiful boy was never a
problem within the stylized and well-understood world of the ghazal; since
Azad’s time, however, it has made many critics uncomfortable, and such
verses are routinely edited out of anthologies. Mir was proud of his verses
based on wordplay and punning; nowadays some consider it insulting to
his “simplicity” and “sincerity” even to point out that such verses exist. Mod-
ern Urdu readers are thus left with a monumental legacy of literary achieve-
ment, and on the whole, a very inadequate critical apparatus for making
sense of it.
And what of the other “classical” genres? Our discussion here has given
them short shrift in order to look as closely as possible at the ghazal -based
heart of this literary culture. The generic spectrum of classical Urdu poetry
has been described, and its famous ustads enumerated, in considerable de-
tail elsewhere; accounts are available both in Urdu and in English.72 Like
the ghazal, the other genres too have had their various problems with the
post-1857 tendencies—moralistic, realist, nationalist—of the Urdu critical
tradition. Ram Babu Saksena, in one of the earliest Urdu literary histories
to be written in English, accused all the poetic genres en masse of a “servile
imitation” of Persian poetry that made them, as he explained in carefully
numbered categories, (1) unreal; (2) rhetorical; (3) conventional; (4) me-
chanical, artificial, and sensual; and (5) unnatural—for Persian poetry was
often “vitiated and perverse.” 73
71. Pritchett 1994.

72. For Urdu, see Shamim Ahmad 1981, and Faruqi 1981; for English, see Schimmel 1975,
and Zaidi 1993.
73. Saksena [1927] 1990: 23–25. Ralph Russell has addressed this pervasive hostility in a
wryly funny article, “How Not to Write the History of Urdu Literature” (Russell 1987).
And the situation is not all that different even today. The panegyric qa3idah
has been found demeaningly effusive and implausibly hyperbolic; the satiric
hajv has “degenerated” and consists of “coarse and vulgar lampoons”; the
Shiite Karbala-lament, or marùiyah, with its weeping and fainting heroes, is
accused of excessive pathos and a lack of “manliness”; the prose romance
(dastan) is castigated for displaying “a complete lack of historical sense,” and
its looming presence is denigrated or even largely ignored.74 All these com-
mon attitudes are easy to illustrate from a single widely known literary his-
tory, Professor Muhammad Sadiq’s—and that too, sadly enough, is the very
one the English-language reader is most likely to encounter in a Western
library.
The trajectory of the shahr ashob (“city-destruction”) genre is particularly
illustrative of the changing times: from its Turkish origins as a sexy, witty,
wordplay-filled inventory of beautiful boys (whose looks made them “city-
destroyers”) and their various professions, the genre evolved into a still-witty
“world-turned-upside-down” poem in which the poet exulted in his verbal
prowess and gloated over his upstart rivals or expressed a variety of other
opinions about different professions and classes in his city (the world might
be going to hell, but his art remained supreme). It also came to include some
melancholy, rather abstract, ghazal -influenced evocations of the utter ruin
of a city. Over time, critics have increasingly sought to reify such accounts
as much as possible and to view the genre as one filled with actual, reliable
historical descriptions of urban decay.75
Whatever have been the vicissitudes of other genres, however, the ghazal
remains in a class by itself. According to that same authoritative literary his-
tory by Muhammad Sadiq, the ghazal is guilty of a uniquely long list of of-
fenses. Because the ghazal was “tainted with narrowness and artificiality at
the very outset of its career,” it “lacks freshness”; it “has no local colour”; its
deficiency in “truthfulness,” “sincerity,” and a “personal note” has made much
of it into a “museum piece.” Its imagery is “fixed and stereotyped”; it is “in-
capable of showing any feeling for nature”; it is a “patchwork of disconnected
and often contradictory thoughts and feelings.” Its love is “a torture, a dis-
ease,” a “morbid and perverse passion”—a view that is a “legacy from Per-
sia” and is “ultimately traceable to homosexual love.” Furthermore, over time
the ghazal has gone from bad to worse: it has developed “wholly in the di-
rection of fantasy and unreality” in the course of its “downward career.” For
all these reasons, in short, the ghazal “stands very low in the hierarchy of lit-
erary forms.” 76
The ghazal remains in a class by itself, moreover, not only because of its
74. Sadiq [1964] 1984: 38–40, 211–212, 55.

75. Naªim Ahmad 1979; Pritchett 1984.
76. Sadiq [1964] 1984: 14–19, 24, 27, 29, 20.
historical preeminence or the widespread modern discomfort with its “im-

moral” themes and “unnatural” poetics. The other important traditional gen-
res all involved units of composition longer than the two-line verses of the
ghazal and were by comparison less performative, less orally focused, less ag-
onistic, less versatile. Textual and attributional problems in most of the longer
genres were also less pervasive: since longer works were fewer and more con-
spicuous, their authorship was easier to establish, and they were more likely
to circulate in writing than orally. In the case of the other literary forms, there
was much less need (or use) for a special genre of record and dissemination
like the tazkirah. For although other genres were involved in a secondary way,
the whole interlocked literary culture of ustad, shagird, and musha ªirah doc-
umented in the tazkirahs was primarily devoted to the cultivation of the ghazal
as an elite oral performance genre.
Once the page of history had been turned on that culture, how could the
ghazal live? How could it maintain its subtlety and complexity, and how could
the necessary level of connoisseurship be inculcated in its audience? After
Ab-e hayat, people continued to write works that called themselves tazkirahs,
like ªAbd ul-Hayy’s Gul-e ra ªna (The graceful rose, 1921–1922), Lalah Sri
Ram’s multi-volume xhumwhanah-e javed (The eternal winehouse, 1906–
1926), and many other less famous examples. Such works are produced to
this day.77 But authors could no longer write a tazkirah naturally and unself-
consciously; they always had to take into account, for better or worse, the all-
pervasive influence of Ab-e hayat, with its naive and ruthlessly Westernizing
notions of literary history.
And how to make up for the even more irretrievable loss of those bear-
ers of oral tradition, the great ustads of the past? Once the aftermath of 1857
had destroyed the patronage system—and in fact the whole culture —that
had sustained such ustads, what was to be done? For decades people mourned
the loss of the old ustad-shagird lineages, and of the poetic world they had
constituted. Attenuated ustad-shagird relationships continued to exist, but the
heart had gone out of it all. The power of collective nostalgia eventually pro-
duced a remarkable monument: a work called Mashsha/ah-e suwhan (The
adorner of poetry) by “#afdar” Mirzapuri, of which the first part was pub-
lished in 1918 and the second part in 1928. According to Maulvi ªAbd ul-
Haq, the first part sold so briskly that within a few years not a copy was to be
had anywhere. Starting in 1927, therefore, ªAbd ul-Haq serialized the sec-
ond part in his journal Urdu, since he considered the work so important. It
offered an anthology of the great ustads’ corrections, he explained, and
showed their extraordinary technical skill: “how changing only one word,
77. On Gul-e ra ªna and xhumwhanah-e javed, see Saksena [1927] 1990: 311–12; on less fa-
mous examples, see ªIshrat [1918] 1928; on more recent works, see Jauhar Deºobandi 1985.
or rearranging the words, or taking out an unsuitable word and putting in

a suitable one, lifts the level of the verse and the ma{mun to a new height.” 78
Readers so appreciated the first volume, #afdar wrote, that they helped lo-
cate much new material in letters and other sources for the second volume;
while the first volume featured only seventeen ustads, the second volume con-
tained exemplary corrections by fully sixty-one ustads.79
At about the same time, Muhammad ªAbd ul-ªAla “Shauq” Sandilvi devised
a fascinating experiment, poised between the old ways and the new. He com-
posed sixteen ghazals and sent them, with polite and deferential letters, to
a number of well-known poets, asking for correction. Then he took the re-
sponses of forty-two of these ustads, juxtaposed their corrections to each verse,
and turned the whole thing into a very well-received book. Even today sim-
ilar attempts continue to be published: corrections made by revered poets—
including “corrections” of the corrections of earlier ustads —are sometimes
compiled and analyzed, as was recently done in the case of “Abr” Ahsani Gun-
nauri (1898–1973).80
If ustad-shagird relationships and the correction process survive in a kind
of ghostly conceptual limbo, the musha ªirah itself is far more vigorously
present. Reformist musha ªirahs with an assigned topic (“Patriotism,” “The
Rainy Season”) rather than a pattern line were part of the “natural poetry”
movement from its earliest days. It is true that nowadays in films and books
people look nostalgically to the past, imagining consummate musha ªirahs as
they never were but should have been. But important modern musha ªirahs
too have been studied.81 Modern public musha ªirahs now take place in every
city in the world where Urdu-speakers are at all numerous and organized;
many readers of this volume will be able to find them if they look. They are
now usually not private affairs but open public performances funded through
donations and ticket sales; they are single events rather than regular meet-
ings; they are no longer “patterned” but are free-form; they do not feature
criticism or analysis of the poetry but instead are run by specially adept “com-
peres” who know how best to entertain the audience.82
The ghazal itself thrives nowadays not only among popular and crowd-
pleasing “musha iªrah poets” (as they are sometimes called) but among serious
poets as well; a list of names could be provided that would include almost
78. #afdar Mirzapuri [1918, 1928] 1992, 2: 8.

79. Pritchett 1994: 82–84.
80. Shauq Sandilvi [1926] 1986; on “Abr” Ahsani Gunnauri, see Cisti 1990.
81. On the natural poetry movement, see Pritchett 1994: 35–39; for examples of nostal-
gically imagined musha ªirahs, see Farhatullah Beg [1935–1936?] 1986, and Qamber 1979; on
modern musha ªirahs, see Sarvar Taunsvi 1991, and Zaidi 1992: 189–248.
82. Rahman 1983; Naim 1989.
every notable Urdu poet of the twentieth century. But these more serious
poets cannot write with the expectation of oral performance, the way the
classical poets could. They cannot assume, for example, that the audience
would hear the first line of each verse several times, so that the audience
would be held in a state of suspense before being granted access to the sec-
ond line, as would have been the case in a classical musha ªirah; some recita-
tion styles actually turned musha ªirah performance into almost a musical
genre.83 Nowadays, serious modern ghazals tend inevitably to be “eye poetry”
meant to be experienced first and foremost on the printed page. This in it-
self marks them off very sharply from their classical predecessors.
In any case, in numbers and influence serious ghazals pale by comparison
to the extraordinarily pervasive mass-market, “pop” ghazal phenomenon. If
Ghalib’s life is made, or rather remade —extremely and implausibly democ-
ratized, romanticized, and nationalized—into films and television serials, if
his ghazals are sung (sometimes rather inaccurately) by Jag jit and Chitra
Singh, is this a gain or a loss to historical memory? A gain, no doubt, but a
bittersweet one. Anita Desai’s novel In Custody (1984), and the successful Urdu
film Hifa}at (Protection) that was made from it, are seen by some as a trash-
ing of the old literary culture, by others as a nostalgic lament at its decline.
“Hindi” (actually, Hindi-Urdu) films are full of filmi ghazals of a naive, ro-
mantic, simplistic kind—but can the ghazal still be itself, after such a sacrifice
of depth for the sake of maximum breadth of appeal? The ghazal thrives in
modern “cassette culture,” 84 and now on CDs as well. An astonishing num-
ber of informative and interpretive websites—mostly amateurish but clearly
labors of love —are devoted to both classical and pop ghazals, as anyone with
a web browser can easily discover. Only the ghazal’s modern readers and hear-
ers can decide its current health, and so far they seem to show an undimin-
ished enthusiasm.
Modern ghazal is now a living genre in Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Panjabi,
and other languages, with its own history in each one. And even more strik-
ingly, we are seeing an attempted leap by the ghazal into English—not through
translation, but as a genuine indigenized genre. Translations have a long his-
tory: some Persian ghazals of Hafi} Shirazi were translated into Latin and pub-
lished by Sir William Jones as early as 1771; Hafi}’s whole divan was published
in German in 1812–1813, and influenced Goethe. English translations of
Urdu ghazals have included unsatisfactory versions too numerous to mention,
a few textbooks for students, and one volume of literarily excellent but highly
inaccurate “transcreations” by modern English poets working from literal
83. Qureshi 1989: 175–89.

84. Manuel 1993: 89–104.
translations. Now, however, the Indian-American poet and translator Agha

Shahid Ali has been making serious efforts to work with a “ghazal” genre in
English by preserving the repeated element (radif ) at the end of each verse.85
His efforts seem to be increasingly well received. And why should they not?
English can surely make room for the ghazal, and the ghazal can no doubt
make itself at home in one more new language.
Vali, himself a mediator between different times, places, and literary styles,
has laid the groundwork beautifully:
The road to fresh ma{muns is never closed—
Till Doomsday the gate of poetry is open.86
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Sources in English
Ahmad, Aijaz, ed. 1971. Ghazals of Ghalib. New York: Columbia University Press.
Ali, Agha Shahid. 1997. The Country without a Post Office: Poems. New York: W. W.
Norton.
Barker, Muhammad Abd-Al-Rahman, et al. 1977. Classical Urdu Poetry. 3 vols. Ithaca,
N.Y.: Spoken Language Services, Inc.
Das, Sisir Kumar. 1978. Sahibs and Munshis: An Account of the College of Fort William.
New Delhi: Orion Publications Private Limited.
Desai, Anita. 1984. In Custody. London: Heinemann.
Faruqi, Shamsur Rahman. 1998. “Privilege without Power: The Strange Case of Per-
sian (and Urdu) in Nineteenth Century India.” Annual of Urdu Studies 13: 3–30.
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Literary Cultures

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

part 1. globalizing literary cultures

part 2. literature in southern locales

part 3. the centrality of borderlands

part 4. buddhist cultures and south asian literatures

part 5. the twinned histories of urdu and hindi

A Long History of Urdu Literary

MODERN ORIGIN MYTHS OF HINDI AND URDU

less discussed and explained in proper perspective. However, no discussion

2. Mu3hafi [1785] 1967: 91, 38.

4. Yule and Burnell [1886] 1986: 646.

6. Shah ªAlam II [1792–1793] 1965: 26.

In addition to cheerfully and confidently assuming the right to make de-

11. Gilchrist 1796: 261.

stanee,” he omits to mention—or doesn’t know—that Hindvi was not a sep-

In strikingly similar language, Platts defined it as:

14. Rocher 1983.

17. Cohn [1985] 1994: 304.

19. Mir Amman [1804] 1992: 2, 6, 7–8.

22. Yakta [1798] 1943: 4–5, 5–6.

25. Dalmia 1997: 118–19.

erences to Daya Shankar Nasim—two of them quite perfunctory and all of

27. Hali [1893] 1953.

sequences,” so that “India is still suffering from this artificial bifurcation of

Since I am Indian, it’s better

He then offers “An Account of the Compilation of Three Divans” that

38. xhusrau [1317–1318] 1948: 179–80.

39. xhusrau [1317–1318] 1948: 63–64; 181.

None can walk Your path

Jains, in Your service,

One, drunk with love,

A wanderer, with long and

Secretly yet another

And that one, there, becomes

Thus all groups and all bands,

That’s what they see

The preceding is a translation of a complete poem, comprising fifteen

44. Madani 1981: 66–67; Sherani 1966, 1: 169.

45. Jalibi 1977: 113.

THE BIRTH OF LITERARY THEORY

48. Ni}ami [1421–1434] 1979: 91–93.

xhusrau in his preface to Ghurrat al-kamal (1294) describes himself as the

49. Ni}ami [1421–1434] 1979: 133.

52. Tewary 1984: 33.

And the sky bent over

Earlier in the poem, the poet invokes God’s benediction:

In this poem Nu3rati also speaks of ma{mun (theme), as opposed to ma ªni

54. Ahmad Gujrati [1580–1585] 1983: 215.

Come into flow every night

Urdu poets in early-eighteenth-century Delhi made ravani one of the cor-

58. Vali [1945] 1996: 239.

xhusrau proceeds to show that through one change in punctuation and

61. xhusrau [1275] 1975: 56.

62. Jalibi 1977: 129.

xhub Muhammad Cisti also wrote Chhand Chhandañ, a verse treatise in

xhub Muhammad Cisti evinces the same interest in the “poetryness” of

Philosophy and mysticism;