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Of all modern Indian languages, Urdu
presents the most complete instance of syncretism. This has been vaguely
known, occasionally acknowledged, but rarely discussed in scholarly
environments.
Although it is not usually
necessary for a language to” explain" or "defend" its national
character, political and cultural circumstances have conspired, since the
middle of the 19th century, to construct a "non-Indian" character
for Urdu, so that Urdu may not be allowed to take its rightful place in the
comity of languages.
As early as 1864, we find
Rajinder Lal Mitter bringing the script of Urdu in question, and asserting
that the Nagari script was inherently superior to the Urdu script. And if the
script was inferior, it followed that the language too was inferior. Later in
that century, the Urdu script was reviled as "foreign" and
"conducive to fraud". The debate raged stronger during the last
years of the 19thcentury by which time modern Hindi was widely represented as
the proper medium for the expression of India (=Hindu)consciousness. The
slogan Hindi-Hindu-Hindustani became rallying cry for the Hindi enthusiasts.
This undermined the position of Urdu by the clear implication: What was not
Hindi was not Hindustani (=Indian) either. Some Muslim authors also muddied
the waters around that time by writing as if Urdu was an
exclusively Muslim domain and no Hindu, or for that matter, any non-Muslim
writer in Urdu deserved a place in the Urdu canon. Although this wasn’t at
all the case, it became a general assumption around the middle of the 20th century
that the case for
Pakistan was also the case for Urdu:
Pakistan was constructed as a” homeland" for the Muslims, and since Urdu
was the language of Muslims alone, its proper place was in Pakistan, not in
India.
A major reason for the creation of the
false identification of Urdu=Muslims was faulty perception of the literary
and cultural history of Urdu and failure to inquire into its early history
and nomenclature. For instance, it was widely assumed, and not by anti-Urdu
lobby alone, but also by historians and scholars of Urdu, that the word
"Urdu" means "army" and the language therefore developed
through the interaction of "Muslim invading armies” with the local
trades people. Thus two birds were killed one stone:
Urdu was the outcome of "foreign
aggression", and its character was basically "inferior." It
was therefore necessarily "gentrified" by imposing upon it a heavy
overlay of Arabic and Persian vocabulary.
In point of fact, the word "Urdu"
doesn't mean "army" in Urdu, or even in Persian. In India, it
originally meant "royal court"—a meaning testified to by Dr. John
Gilchrist in 1798—or at best it meant the rolling court maintained by Akbar
in late sixteenth century, a court that contained in full all the
elements of a stationery establishment, including an extensive market. Thus
the term began to mean, "a camp and its market". The term
"Urdu” continued to be applied to the royal court, that is,
Shajahanabad, after Shah Jahan established that city as his capital in 1648.
In Urdu, the term's first meaning was "the city of Shajahanabad",
and then "the language of the exalted city-court of
Shahajahanabad",that is, the language that was then known as
"Hindi" or "Rekhta".This meaning couldn't have developed
much earlier than the arrival and settlement of Shah Alam II in Delhi in
1771. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, we find Sirajuddin Ali
Khan-e-Arzu, the great linguist and lexicographer, declaring that Persian was
"the language of the exalted city-court (=Urdu) of Shajahanabad".
Urdu scholars appreciated that the language now called” Urdu",
during most of its history prior to the last quarter of the eighteenth
century, was not called Urdu, but Dihlavi, Hindi, Hindvi, Hindui,
Gujri, Dakani, and Rekhta. But they failed to inquire why and
how the language obtained the name
"Urdu" in preference to all others. They also failed to appreciate
that a language all but one of whose ancient names related to a city, or a
territory in India, or in fact to whole of India—at least North India—could
not have evolved in an army interacting with the local trades people. Another
failure of Urdu scholars consisted in their not appreciating the simple fact
that if the language name "Urdu" dated only to the last quarter of
the eighteenth century, it would necessarily have nothing to do with
"foreign" military or army matters, for the only foreign armies
present at that time in India were European, and no language, far less Urdu,
emerged as a result
of their interaction with the locals.
Writing at the end of the 19thcentury, the lexicographer Syed Ahmad Dihlavi
estimated that 75% of Urdu vocables were borrowed from Sanskrit, directly or
indirectly. This fact should have been enough to bury the theory of Urdu’s
"military origin". But no one pursued the matter further. The
Urdu-Hindi controversy was given a new twist in the first half of the 20th century
by claiming that Urdu was in fact nothing but a style(shaili) of
Hindi. This implied that modern Hindi was anterior to Urdu, with the
further implication that Urdu was a comparatively late, and perhaps British
inspired, arrival onthe Indian linguistic scene. The boot was in fact on the
other leg—Modern Hindi was a style (shaili) of Urdu. Suniti Kumar
Chatterji, the greatest modern Indian linguist confirmed this:
Linguistically, it is quite correct to say that Hindi and Urdu are two forms
or styles of the same 'Western Hindi Speech'—the Khadi-Boli
Hindustani of Delhi. Urdu is not the modified, Muslimised form of
what nowadays[s] passes as Hindi, i.e.,Sanskritised Khadi Boli. It is
rather the other way about: Personalized Hindustani asit
developed in the Mogul court circles during the eighteenth century
(before that, we find [it] in the Daknispeech of the
Deccan...), ...was taken up by the Hindus...they adopted or revived the
native Nagari and began to use a highly Sanskritic vocabulary...and thus they
created the literary Hindi of today, round about 1800,mainly in Calcutta1.Chatterji's
view was a newer version of the thesis first advanced by Dr. Tara Chand, to
the effect that: They [the "Hindi" authors at the College of Fort
William] found a way out by adopting the language of Mir Amman, [ Sher Ali]
Afos, and others by excising Arabic/Persian words from it, replacing them
with those of Sanskrit and Hindi[Braj, etc.]. Thus within a space
of less than ten years, two new languages...were decked out and presented
[before the public] at the behest of the foreigner..Both were look alikes in
form and structure, but1 Suniti Kumar Chatterji, India, A
Polyglot Nation, and its Linguistic problems vis a vis National Integration, Mumbai,
Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Research Crntre, 1973, pp 50-54.
their faces were turned away from each other...and
from that day to this, we are wandering directionless, on two paths2.Some
fair minded Hindi writers accepted the above narratives as true
historical accounts of the origin of Modern Khari Boli Hindi3,
but their voices were soon forgotten, buried under the rhetoric of the
influential group of politicians, agitationists, and writers whom Alok
Rai calls "the Hindi Nationalists"4.The late adoption
of Khari Boli by what was called "Hindi” under the influence of mainly
the College of Fort William and the Christian missionaries of that time
is reflected in the fact that it took a long time for it to develop a proper
"literary language”. Francesca Orsini is struck by the fact even as late
as 1915 in Hindi literature Poetry was the medium for almost everything:
apart from literary enjoyment (rasavadan), verse was the vehicle for
religious discourse and controversy, social reform, women's uplift, and
political awakening. By contrast, in the case of Urdu, prose fiction
was already the medium of public discourse5.Urdu scholars remained generally
unaware of these socio-literary perspectives. They also seem
to have been held in thrall by the Fort William writer Mir Amman Dihlavi's
unhistorical remarks in his Bagh o Bahar (1804) where he
linked Urdu's origin and development to the advent of Mughal rule and Mughal
armies in India, especially Delhi. The most interesting part of
Mir Amman's explanation of Urdu's development is his
omission to mention the fact that the language which he describes as
"the language of urdu"[=the City of Delhi) is known as Hindi. In
fact, Mir Amman studiously abstains from naming the language and his frequent
mention of "the language of urdu" was misunderstood by later
scholars to mean "the language named Urdu". Urdu scholars were
therefore unable to resist or withstand the onslaught of the promoters of
'Hindi-Hindu-Hindustani' and the spread of misinformation about Urdu's
origins and further development as a court language, or the
2 Tara Chand, in Hindustani, A
collection of Urdu talks broadcast from All India Radio, Delhi, in 1939
and published the Maktaba Jami'a, New Delhi, n. d. (circa 1940 ), pp. 11- 3.See,
for instance the views of Ayodhya Prasad Khatri, Dhirendra Verma, Vishwa Nath
Prasad Mishra and some others as discussed by Mirza Khali Ahmad Beg in his Ek
Bhasha...Jo Mustarad Kar Di Ga'I (A Language That Was Rejected ),
Aligarh, Educational Book House, 2007, pp. 35-53.4 Alok Rai, Hindi
Nationalism, Delhi, Orient Longman, 2002. 5.Francesca Orsini, The
Hindi Public Sphere, 1920-1940, New Delhi, OUP, 2002, p. 74.
language of a handful of urban elite
continues to prevail in many circles even to this day. Although Urdu
was never the court language at any Mughal or its subsidiary court, its
phenomenal growth over five centuries throughout the Indian
sub-continent is often likely to be explained to have come to pass as a
result of "court patronage".
The following facts stand out:
(1) Shaikh Baha'uddin Bajan
(1388-1506) was the first substantial poet in the language that he called
"Hindi and Gujri". He was a Gujarati sufi and lover of music, hence
the name "Bajan". In each of his short Hindi poems he has specified
the particular raga in which the poem is to be sung: he
specifies, for instance, Sabahi, Lalit, Bhopali, Bhairaun, Bilawal, so forth
as the ragas appropriate to the poems. He also wrote a longish poem JangNama,
depicting a dispute between the sari and the peshwaz (akind
of shalwar), and another dispute between the choli and
the tahband. This shows that the Urdu poet was fully steeped in
the local culture and his frames of reference were not Iranian or Arabic.
(2) At about the same time as Shaikh
Bajan in Gujarat and Burhanpur (1421-1434), we have Fakhr-e Din
Nizami, a poet fromthe Deccan proper who has left a long narrative poem on
statecraft, miscegenation, and love. Fully derived from local lore and customs,
the poem called Kadam Rao Padam Rao has nothing overtly
"Muslim" about it.
(3) Sufis became almost the first
users of the new language because they needed to talk to the common people
who were not necessarily conversant with Persian. Hindi/Hindvi/Gujri on the
other hand had become the most widely understood language in Gujarat.
According to Satish Mishra of the University of Baroda, the language was
used:By the Sultan and his court in Ahmedabad, Arab and Persian traders in
the coastalmarts..., by the Sufis and other Muslim preachers, and
finally the large mass of immigrants who had come in with Ala'uddin Khalji
and his subsequent waves...Thus while Persian was the accepted language for
official and formal intercourse, for informal occasions Gujri became the
common language6. 6.Satish Mishra, in
his English Introduction to Abbas Ali's poem Qissah-e Ghamgin (Tale
of Sorrow), 1779, Baroda, M. S. University,
The extent to much did the Sufi
writers, and by extension, their followers and readers practice and promote a
world view that had equal space for Hindus and Muslims can be judged from
poems likeHindu Muslim Yakrang Namah (Epistle on the Ones of
Hindus and Muslims) by Shah Ghulam Husain Chisti Ellichpuri (d.1795), a noted
Sufi of Central India. The first two verses of the poem are:
These two came from the same
plac, the world of humans, they were named Muslim, or Hindu, The potter made
the pans from one earth who's is the Mulla, who the Brahmin?7
Syncretism was thus at the very core
of Urdu. It was not something added on as an afterthought.
(4) It has been argued by some that
Urdu may have begun as a force of syncretism, but a change of course was
effected by the poets of Delhi who consciously decided to weed out local
(=Indic)elements from the Urdu vocabulary, and thus promoted the adoption of
a non-Hindu, if not an anti-Hindu tone of thought and speech.
This argument has no historical base and is in fact the result of
uncritical and tendentious reading of available evidence.
More important, if the Muslims struck
their own path and left the Hindus to develop their "Hindi
language", as Amrit Rai has argued, how is it that notable Hindu names
in Urdu literature begin to appear in the eighteenth century at
precisely the time when according to Amrit Rai the great Muslim shift
occurred? Here are some of the Hindu names prominent in Urdu literature in
the second half of the eighteenth century: Munshi Jaswant Rai, poet and
courtier(Active in Carnatac, now known as Tamil Nadu, in the 1700's)
Hari Har Parshad Sambhali, Historian, fl.1730-1750
Aftab Rai Ruswa, Poet, d. 1747Brindaban Das Mathravi, Historian, d.1757 Raja RamNarain Mauzun, Poet, d. 1763 Maharaja
Shitab Rai, Poet, d. 1773
Sarb Sukh Divanah, Poet,
1727?-1788/89 Budh Singh Qalandar, Poet, Nanak Panthi Sufi, d. 1780's Tirambak Das Zarrah, Poet, d. 1785 Kanji
Mal Saba, Poet, fl. 1780's Balmukund Huzur, Poet, fl. 1770-17901975,
pp. 21-22. 7.Muhammad Kalim Zia, Shah Ghulam Husain
Chishti Ellichpuri, Hayat, Shakhsiyat aur Karname, Bhiwandi, Takmil
Publications, 2001, p.63.Lachhmi Narain Shafiq Aurangabadi, Poet 1745-1808, Raja Kishan Das Raja, Poet, 1782-1823
All these writers were bilingual in
Persian and Urdu, like hundreds of others. Some of them wrote in both Persian
and Urdu, and would have been exclusively Persian writers but for the strong
pull that Hindi (=Urdu) exercised on them, and they were not in or
from Delhi alone. There were many more like them, I mention only a few,
and by the nineteenth century it was virtually a flood of
non-Muslims, and not Hindus alone, who were writing in Hindi(=Urdu). A
biographical dictionary (tazkirah) of poets active in Allahabad,
compiled in 183 18, records the names of seventy poets, of whom a round
dozen are Hindu.
(5) Needless to say, since Urdu's
literary forms and conventions were mostly borrowed from Persian,
Urdu's literary language leans heavily on Persian. But this is no more than
what can be said about English literature: almost all its classical forms and
genres of literature and classical conventions, all its mythological idiom
and metaphor, all its metres, are directly borrowed from Greek, Latin, and Italian.
English continues to use Greek metres with their original entirely
incomprehensible Greek names, though Greek matre is strictly quantitative and
English metre is almost purely qualitative. This does not make English
literature less English, and this should give pause for a moment of thought
to opponents of Urdu metre who decry it as foreign. In the field of forms and
genres, in spite of its heavy borrowing from Persian, the thought
processes, the worldview, the vision, reflected in the Persian poetry
produced in India by both Indians and Iranians is practically
incomprehensible and even unpleasant to the Iranian mind. If such is the case
of Indian Persian, one can imagine how far from its Iranian sources Urdu
poetry would be. It is by no means Iranian, far less Arabic poetry. It is
exclusively Indian.(6) Non-Persian and exclusively local themes, allusions,
idioms and proverbs are not by any means scarce in Urdu. Urdu poets, even up
to the modern times, wrote on or used Hindu themes and religious experience
as freely as they would use Persian themes, images, and Muslim religious
experience. Hindu themes, names and images start occurring in Urdu poetry
from its very inception. Nizami's Kadam Rao Padam Rao mentioned
above, and the poems of Shah Bajan both make ample use of Hindu ideas and
images.9 The tradition doesn't stop here. It goes right through the
whole of Urdu's ongoing journey in the path of assimilation and syncretism.
In the modern times, examples of Hasrat Mohani (1875-1951) and Swami 8.Tazkira-e Shaukat-e Nadiri by Mirza
Kalb-e Husain Khan Bahadur, ed. Shah Abdus Salam,Lucknow,
Danish Mahal, 1984. 9.For a detailed, if not very analytical discussion
of this aspect of Urdu poetry, see Syed Yahya
Nasheet, Usturi Fikr o Faksafa, Urdu Sha'iri Men,
Pune, Usul Publications, 2008.
Marehravi (1892-1960) and the
immensely popular Bekal Utsahi (1925-) come readily to mind.While Bekal
Utsahi uses rural Hindu images and themes freely, and his name itself has a
"Hindu" flavour, Swami Marehravi's name also has a bit of
"Hinduness". He came from a distinguish and ancient family of
Sufi saints and he was most notable for his use of Braj words and idioms and
themes to the exclusion of Iranian or other local Indian sources.
(7) The seventeenth century saw the
rise of what can bestbe d escribed as "folk poetry" in Urdu with
Muhammad Afzal's Bikat Kahani (1625), a Barah
Masa type of poem whose language is a free mixture of Urdu and
Persian. Much of the satirical writing of Jafar Zatalli (1658-1713) has
strong a folky flavour, but the
Marsia poems which
were being written in the South in the mainline Dakani register of the
language, acquired a much more folky character and metres in the North,
especially from toward the end of the seventeenth century. The same is true
of the JangNamah poems: semi-Muslim-religious in character,
they were written in a lower key of the language everywhere from
Gujarat to the northern part of the country. All these folk-style poems were
imitated and developed in folk songs for specific occasions: births,deaths,
departures, marriages, seasons, so forth. These folk songs are
not confined to the North alone. Maimunah Dalvi has compiled
a voluminous compendium of Urdu folk
songs from the Kokan and Mumbai area in South-Western India.10
(8) Urdu has a rich tradition of
translations from non-Muslim religious texts of all descriptions. Shrimad
Bhagwat Gitais a case in point, of which there at least fifty
translations extant inUrdu. Syed Yahya Nasheet mentions a Dakani poet Syed
Mubin's (around late seventeenth-early eighteenth century) translation
called Krishna Gita, Arjun Gita11. One of the
notable recent translations is by the Pakistani poet and scholar Shanul Haq
Haqqi(1917-2005) who translated from the original Sanskrit into Urduverse
with remarkable felicity12. Even more important perhaps is
amore recent translation of the Gita in Urdu verse, again
from Pakistan. Muhammad Ajmal Khan's effort has in fact been rated by Intizar
Husain as better than that of Shanul Haq Haqqee.13Pandit Habibur Rahman
Shastri translated substantial portions of the Upanishads and other sacred
Hindu texts14.Bisheshwar Parshad Munavvar Lakhnavi produced a fine verse translation
of the 10 Maimunah Dalvi, Kokan aur Mumbai ke Urdu Lok Git, Mumbai,
Print & Art Consultancy,2001.47. Nasheet, p. 1 12.Bhagwad
Gita, Translated from the Sanskrit by Shanul Haq Haqqi, New Delhi,
Anjuman Taraqqi-e Urdu, (Hind), 13.Intizar
Husain, "Gita ka Ek Naya Tarjama" in Duniyazad¸ Karachi,
no. 22, July, 2008, Ed. Asif Farrukhi.
Dhammapada15. Among the
Sikh Scriptures, Khwajah Dil Muhammad translated the Jap Ji
Sahib in 1945. He also translated the Sikh Muni Sahib16 (circa
1942). Khwajah Dil Muhammad's verse translation of the Gita,
appropriately named Dil ki Gita was extremely popular and is
in print even now17. A memorable modern verse translation of the Gita was
done by Satya Parkash Mahtab Pasruri who has avoided all Persianisms and
Arabicisms and has still produced a flowing, mellifluous work18.It's not that
such translations became important and numerous only in the twentieth
century. Tota Ram Shayan (d.1880) produced an extremely competent translation
of the Mahabharata in verse, based on a Persian abridgement
and the original Sanskrit, it still covers 330 large size pages, each page
containing four densely written columns19. More than a century earlier,
the Tamil Sufi saint Shah Turab Khata'i (b. 1688, fl. 1730-50), born
inmodern Tamil Nadu, settled in Tanjore, and devoted himself to literary and
sufistic pursuits. Around 1745, he translated into Hindi (=Urdu)
the Manachay Sloka, a classic of Marathi Bhakti poetry by
Sant Ramdas20. From mid nineteenth century in fact began a new age of
translations from English and other European languages, and it was not just
poetry or fiction, but also hard sciences that were translated. Thus proper
translations, not just adaptations began in Urdu literary culture in the
middle of the eighteenth century and continue to be one of its glories to
this day.
(9) Urdu is the only modern Indian
language to whose literature people of all religions and all literate
communities have made substantial contribution: Hindus of all persuasions,
Muslims of all sects, Roman Catholic, Protestant, other Christian
denominations, Sikhs, Jains, Parsis, all have drunk from its well and all
have poured their ambrosia in it. Urdu is the only truly nationally
integrated language. As testified to by John Gilchrist(1796)21 and
nearly a century later by Yule and Burnell in their14 Habibur
Rahman Shastri, A'ina-e Haqiqat¸being an Urdu prose translation
with commentary of selected mantras of the
Upanishad,Aligarh, Anjuman Taraqqi-e Urdu, 1958. 15 Dhampad¸ Trs.
Bisheshwar Parshad Munavvar, Aligarh, Anjuman Taraqqi-e Urdu, 1954. 16 Nasheet, pp. 70-81.17 Khwajah
Dil Muhammad, Dil ki Gita, Lahore, Khwajah Book Depot,
n.d. Also see Nasheet, pp. 46-50. 18 Satya Prakash Mahtab
Pasruri, Gita, Hindustani Nazm Men, Delhi, Naveentam Prakashan,
1964. 19 Tota
Ram Shayan,Mahabaharat Manzum, Lucknow, Naval Kishor Press, 6th rept.,
Sept. 1905. 20 Shah Turab Khata'i, Man Samjhavan, ed.
Abdus Sattar Dalvi, Mumbai, Maktaba Jami'a, 1965. 21 John Borthwick
Gilchrist, A Grammar of the Hindoostanee Language, or Part
Third of Volume First, of a system of Hindoostanee Philology, Calcutta,
at the Chronicle Press, 1796, p.261.
Hobson Jobson (1886)22, it
was spoken all over the country and continued to be so spoken until well into
the 20th century. It was only from the first half of the twentieth
century that it fell on evil days and it is the duty of all Indians to
rehabilitate it in the national consciousness as a treasure worthy of our
great country.
I feel that I cannot conclude this
brief keynote address without quoting Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) and
his friend Swami Ram Tirath (1870-1906) the famous Vedanti philosopher and
poet who died by drowning. The first four she'rs of Iqbal's elegy on
Swami Ram Tirath are:
Restless droplet, you now
embrace the ocean, You
were a pearl; now you're the rarest pearl that none can claim to
find, Oh, with what elan you ripped off the mysteries of colour, and fragrance!
And I am still A prisoner of the distinctions of colour, and fragrance Dying;
life's feverish tumult became the uproar of the day of Rising Up. This spark
burnt away
To become the fire that destroyed Azar's house of Idolatry To cancel out the
being is the marvelous act Of the heart that knows. In the river
of No is hidden The pearl of There's no God
but God23Let me now quote from an Urdu ghazal of Swami Ram Tirath:
What a rare strange landscape, that
Ram is in me and I am in Ram,Nothing can be seen, but there's a brightness
that Ram is in me and I am in Ram, I am the album of the portraits
of Beauty, and of Love, All secrets, and all submitting’s are from
me am mad with love of my own face, for Ram is in me and I
am in Ram, The world is Ram's mirror, he's visible in every figure and
form, When the Truth-seeing eye opened, I saw that Ram
is in me and I am in Ram, There's no letting up the Sacred light, the
heart 22 Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell, Hobson Jobson, Delhi,
Rupa & Co., 1986 [orig.
pub.1886], p. 417. 23 Muhammad Iqbal, Kulliyat-e Iqbal, Urdu, Lahore,
Iqbal Academy of Pakistan, 2000, pp, 139-140.Has become the consuming
lightning-fire of Sinai With restless vibrant beating the heart
itself Cried out, Ram is in me and I am in Ram 24.
It is difficult to believe that there
can be any other modern Indian language which can show two such
contemporaneous but separate examples of literary, cultural and philosophic
fusion of two entirely distinct and powerful literary-cultural traditions as
exemplified by the poems quoted by me above. Such examples areby no means
rare in Urdu, the citadel of syncretism in literary and linguistic culture.
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Thursday, January 10, 2013
Urdu Miscellaneous: Urdu Literary Culture: The Syncretic Tradition
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