The Taste of Words: An Introduction to Urdu Poetry (3 page)

By the early twentieth century, the aforementioned Anthony MacDonnell—who enacted the implicit British policy of intensifying existing Hindu–Muslim tensions to help them govern the colony with greater ease—injected language into the communal debate. In 1900, he passed the ‘Nagri Resolution’, which produced an artificial taxonomic schism between Urdu and Hindi, thereby separating the languages according to religious affiliation. Communalists on both sides of the religious divide rejoiced, but others were less sanguine. Mohsin-ul Mulk, a prominent poet-politician of the time, saw it as the beginning of the demise of Urdu, and wrote an elegy to it in the form of a couplet:

Chal saath, ke hasrat dil-e mahroom se nikle

Aashiq ka janaaza hai, zara dhoom se nikle

Walk along with that heartbroken procession awhile

It’s the funeral of a lover, bury him in style.

In the post–World War I era, Urdu seemed destined to be seen as a language of Muslims, a mantle that was almost comically at odds with its multi-religious origins. It is in this era of ambivalence that we must place Allama Mohammed Iqbal, a genius who straddled the divide between the traditions of the East and the modernist renaissance of the West. Iqbal it was who first spoke of modernist notions like selfhood (
khudi
), hitherto absent in Urdu poetry. The battle between free will and determinism, according to Iqbal, was really one the human could control:

Khudi ko kar buland itna, ke har taqdeer se pehle

Khuda bande se khud poochhe, bataa teri raza kya hai?

Exalt your Self thus, that before every twist of fate

God should say, ‘My creation, on your desire I wait.’

Iqbal flirted with the ultimate act of iconoclasm, casting Lucifer (
Iblees
) as a tragic hero. He produced imaginary conversations between God and Lenin. And it was he who, in his epic 1909 poem
Shikva
(Complaint), elevated the human being to the status of a petitioner who commented critically on God’s act of creation. While Iqbal’s poetry can be seen as a reflection on the state of Islam and of Muslims as they prepared to engage with modernity, it carried (in my opinion) less of the conservative angst of Hali and more of a globalized sentiment, as he strove to connect the experiences of South Asians with their counterparts in Central Asia, Europe and the Middle East, and envisioned a more creative engagement between ‘religions’, be they Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, modernism, or Marxism.

In the mid-twentieth century, Urdu was to receive a gift that would revive it in spectacular fashion as a language of revolution and hope, of social change and religious heresy, as a symbol of the human will to be free and as the defiant enemy of divisiveness. I am referring to the ‘progressive phase’ in which Urdu writers (and especially Urdu poets) became the vanguard of a literary movement that combined socialism, anti-colonial sentiment, inter-religious harmony, the foundation of a new nationalism, gender equality, and an ethos of a shared literary and political heritage across all Indian languages and indeed across the globe.
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The broader community of progressive poets included non-Urdu stalwarts such as Sumitranandan Pant and Maithilisharan Gupt (Hindi), Rabindranath Tagore (Bengali), Sri Sri (Telugu), Umashankar Joshi (Gujarati), Gurbaksh Singh (Punjabi) and Anna Bhau Sathe (Marathi). Hasrat Mohani, Josh Malihabadi, Firaaq Gorakhpuri, Makhdoom Mohiuddin, Sahir Ludhianvi, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Asrar-ul Haq Majaz, Ali Sardar Jafri, Jan Nisar Akhtar, Kaifi Azmi and others commandeered Urdu poetry for well over four decades, producing works that drastically altered the conventions of poetic content, while hewing true (for the most part) to the classical form. Josh summed up their agenda pithily:

Kaam hai mera taghayyur, naam mera hai shabaab

Mera naara inquilaab-o inquilaab-o inquilaab

My name is youth, and upheaval is my mission

My slogan: Revolution. Revolution. Revolution.

The Progressive Writers’ Association, which was formed in 1936, became the conduit through which a variety of poets expressed ideas that challenged the socio-cultural status quo and provided the real possibility of taking the freedom movement in the subcontinent in the direction of social justice.

Contemporary with the progressive movement (
taraqqi pasand tehreek
) were the purveyors of modernism (
jadeediyat
) who preferred to experiment with form more than content. The mutual contempt that the progressives and modernists had for each other was perhaps unfortunate, for it precluded interesting conversational possibilities between them. However, the work of modernist poets like Noon Meem Rashid, Miraji and the members of the
Halqa-e Arbaab-e Zauq
(circle of connoisseurs) has stood the test of time. Perhaps their greater contribution has been to rescue Urdu poetry from the prison of metre (
zameen
) that it had always found itself in. Jazz-like improvisations abound in the poetry of Rashid in particular, where non-linear narratives mix with layered thoughts, with the poet gleefully ‘contaminating’ conscious feelings and unconscious desires in a palimpsest of literary production.

The freedom movement also produced a frenzy of activity among the Urdu poets in the 1930s and 1940s. I remember my late father, who was nineteen when India achieved its freedom, declaim poems from memory that I have never seen in print (and for all I know, he never read either, but rather imbibed orally). One of them bears repeating, for it demonstrates simplicity and songlike rhythm. It was a taunt directed at a well-dressed Englishman, invoking an old Urdu term that referred to disloyal people as ‘white-blooded’:

Ye
coat
bhi sufaid, ye patloon bhi sufaid

Teri sufaid
hat
ka hai oon bhi sufaid

Khud jism bhi sufaid hai, aur is ke saath saath

Main to ye jaanta hoon, tera khoon bhi sufaid

White is your coat and white your pants flat

As is the white wool on your white hat

Your body is white and I do know that

Your blood is white, you betrayer rat.

Literary critics might think such verse doggerel, but when situated in its milieu, it carries the resonance, meaning and anger of a population that was ready to set itself free from the yoke of foreigners. As the mid 1940s appeared, the Urdu poets of that generation sharpened their quills and began to ready themselves to write panegyrics to the newborn nation.

However, just as 1857 had once snuffed out the renaissance of Urdu poetry, 1947 was another catastrophic moment. The dawn of independence brought with it not the red horizon of a new day, but a horizon reddened with the blood of Partition. Like the last gasp of a dying taper, poets wrote expressive poems about their grief at the moment their hopes were betrayed. In Faiz’s words: ‘
Vo intezaar tha jis ka, ye vo sahar to nahin
’ (‘This is not the dawn that we had awaited’). Or in Josh’s grieving hyperbole: ‘
Apna gala kharosh-e tarannum se phat gayaa / Talvaar se bachaa, to rag-e gul se kat gayaa
’ (‘Our throat was torn by a song sharp as a stinging nettle / It evaded the sword, but was slit by a rose petal’).

The Partition geographically divided a poetic fraternity, and produced different tensions on both sides of the border. While the Urduwalas on the Indian side had to contend with a new regime of suspicion and intolerance, the Pakistani poets (especially the progressives) faced persecution by the elite class for advocating social change and wealth redistribution. The wars between India and Pakistan, the decline of social patronage, the inability to replicate the critical mass of readers and enthusiasts, combined with the general disappointment of the failed promise of decolonization, freedom and nationalism, led to another wasted opportunity for Urdu.

But like the survivor it always was, Urdu found itself a new champion in India—in the film industry.
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The language of what is popularly known as Hindi cinema has always been friendly to Urdu expression. The producers of Indian cinema commissioned songs by Urdu poets, thereby not only providing them with livelihood opportunities, but also serving to keep Urdu idioms alive in popular usage. When Javed Akhtar uses Persianized phrases like ‘
Aql-o-hosh nameedanam
’ (‘Wisdom and consciousness are lost’) before exhorting the ‘hot girls’ to put their hands up and the ‘cool boys’ to make some noise in the 2007 film
Om Shanti Om
, he is participating in a longer tradition, where the rhythms of popular culture have been infiltrated by Urdu. This tradition of course dates back well over fifty years. For instance, while Sahir Ludhianvi was composing urgent political poems like his anti-war opus
Parchhaiyan
(Silhouettes) in the 1950s, he was also getting Johnny Walker in the 1957 film
Pyaasa
to suggest:

Sar jo tera chakraaye, ya dil dooba jaaye,

Aaja pyare paas hamaare, kaahe ghabraae, kaahe ghabraae

If your head spins, or your heart sinks, my dear

Come to me [have a massage], why fear, why fear?

Hindi movies have used classical Urdu poems in set situations; we may remember Deepak Parashar pining for Salma Agha in the 1982 film
Nikaah
while Ghulam Ali belted out ‘
Chupke chupke raat din aansoo bahaana yaad hai
’ (‘Nights and days of quiet tear-shedding, I still remember’) from a ghazal, written originally by Hasrat Mohani a century ago. Likewise, the cognoscenti may recall the 1963 film
Gumraah
where a dashing Sunil Dutt sits at the piano and suggests to Sadhana, ‘
Chalo ek baar phir se ajnabi ban jaayen hum dono
’ (‘Come, let us become strangers again’), B.R. Chopra having reworked a previously published and already famous nazm by Sahir Ludhianvi into its narrative. More importantly, Urdu poets like Sahir, Majrooh, Kaifi, Shakeel Badayuni and others were able to infuse the idiomatic conventions of classical Urdu poetry into popular consciousness, a task that Javed Akhtar and Gulzar continue admirably today. Film music also led the way for an explosion of non-filmi music, where Urdu poetry also found representation and a place for international crossover. Pakistani singers like Ghulam Ali, Mehdi Hasan, Abida Parveen, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the Sabri Brothers, Iqbal Bano, Nayyara Noor and a host of others became household names in India, competing with such local stalwarts as Jagjit Singh, Panjak Udhas and others.

Two other movements deserve mention. In the 1960s, several Urdu poets, whose aesthetic inclinations were linked to the aforementioned Halqa-e Arbaab-e Zauq, intensified the infusion of modernist metaphor in Urdu poetry. Their efforts were championed by the literary journal
Shabkhoon
(Night Attack), under the stewardship of Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, and in Pakistan by journals such as
Auraq
(Pages) edited by Dr Wazir Agha. The neo-modern wave in Urdu poetry fostered a conscious union between the craft of the poet and the self-conscious language of the literary critic. The traditions of jadeediyat were strengthened, poets felt free to use free verse (
aazad nazm
) rather than the constricting boundaries of rhyme and metre, and the symbols of personal metaphysics were valued over the collectivist ethos of progressivism. Across the Atlantic, academics in the US supported these movements through journals such as
Mahfil
and the
Annual of Urdu Studies.
It was through the support of such institutions that the postmodernist turn also reached Urdu literature, where the weariness with the metanarratives of progressivism produced poems that shrugged off the imperatives of representation, and crafted an uber-personal literary ethos.

In a rather different vein, in the southern part of the subcontinent, poets from the Dakkani tradition like Sulaiman Khateeb and Sarwar Danda produced exquisite social commentaries through humorous poetry (
mazaahiya shaayiri
) that expressed through irony and wistfulness those sentiments that might have shattered the heart if spoken of directly. Protagonists of this craft in the Deccan—like Siraj Nirmali, Paagal Adilabadi, Himayatullah and Mujtaba Husain—deserve place in the Urdu canon. Their defiantly plebeian aesthetic
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connected with their audience (for theirs was first and foremost an oral tradition), and perhaps struck a middle road between the programmatic socialism of the progressives and the self-absorbed ruminations of the modernists. It is a tragic matter that the canon, which is conditioned to view aesthetic experimentation with simplicity as aesthetic failure, was never able to value the Dakkani humorists in its conventional scale.
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Discerning readers who have come thus far in the narrative may notice a significant omission—not a single woman poet has been mentioned in the discussion yet. Was there a paucity of women poets writing Urdu poetry all these years? Were they of inferior quality compared to the masters mentioned thus far? I am inclined to answer both questions with an emphatic no, but the reality is that the work of women poets in the seventeenth–eighteenth centuries has been under-represented, and is difficult to find. To the extent that I have not made extra efforts to find it, I acknowledge my intellectual laziness, and promise to redress this in future offerings. I had heard of the poet Saeedunnisa Hirma, who wrote in the nineteenth century, but her work has been tough to locate. Also, as a Hyderabadi, I had heard of the eighteenth-century courtesan poet Mahlaqa Bai ‘Chanda’ (1767–1824), who not only wrote poetry (her Persian
deevan
was published in 1797 and a posthumous Urdu collection appeared in the mid-nineteenth century), but was a patron of the arts, and sustained several poets
.
Zahida Khatoon Shervani, another Dakkani poet, wrote
Aaeena-e Haram
, a collection of poems, in 1927. I am also acquainted with
Baharistan-e Naz
, a collection of Urdu poetry by women, and plan to do some justice to this aspect and fill the gaping hole in my own understanding as well as the representation of women poets in classical Urdu poetry in future work. I will settle now for an apology and a promise to correct the gender imbalance in my account of Urdu poetry.
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Happily, I have been able to include a variety of twentieth-century Urdu women poets in this collection, many of whom write bravely and eloquently not just about love and romance but also about patriarchy, oppression and political engagement in a way that enhances our understanding of current social and political challenges and represents the best that Urdu poetry has to offer today.