HISTORICAL SURVEY OF EARLY URDU LITERATURE

           

(i) IMPORTANCE OF THE URDU LANGUAGE

THE Urdu language occupies a peculiarly important place in the life of the people of India. While languages spoken in North India and Deccan, such as Assamese, Bengali, Punjabi, Oriya, and Mahrati languages which claim Indo-Aryan descent or those prevailing in the south, such as Telugu, Canarese, or Malayalam, owning Dravidian origin, are little known outside of the limited areas to which they have severally lent their name, Urdu is not merely spoken in the land of its birth, Delhi and the surrounding country, but is widely known and understood all over India. In one or other of its dialectal variations this language is the mothertongue of over a hundred millions, or nearly a third of the population of the country. 1 In addition to this, another hundred millions use it as an indispensable second language in their daily intercourse, not only in the bazaar or marketplace, as the term " Urdu " implies, but even in polite society. 2 Indeed during recent years its influence has extended far beyond the confines of India. Afghanistan, Baluchistan, Southern Persia, Mesopotamia, Hejaz, the

[1 Nearly two -thirds of the Indian Muslims, numbering over eighty millions, and most of the Hindu urban population in the United Provinces and parts of the Eastern Punjab and the Nizam's Dominions speak it in their homes.

2 Among those who can easily understand Urdu may be included all the people whose mother -tongue is one or other of the following dialects allied to Urdu, and which are grouped together by Sir]

east coast of Africa, Burma, and the Malay Archipelago are some of the outlying countries where it is slowly making headway. It has thus not only won a more or less recognised position as the common language of India, but promises by virtue of its intrinsic qualities to play one day the role of the lingua franca of the East.

Although this extension of influence is a comparatively modern phenomenon, and the term " Urdu " l itself is also of modern application, it should not be forgotten that Urdu as a language represents but a phase the latest of course of a development of a very ancient language. Its immediate ancestor is the Brajbhdsha, which in turn can be traced back to the primary Prakrit prevalent in the Vedic period among the Aryan races who had settled down in the Madhya Desha, the Midland, or the country round about Delhi and Agra. An account of the rise and development of this Prakrit into Sanskrit and ultimately into some of the modern North Indian vernaculars, including Urdu, however interesting, does not come within the scope of our subject. 2 But the fact should be borne in mind that modern Urdu bears on it the impress both of the languages and the

[Charles Lyall under the common name of " Hindustani " or the speech of Hindustan :

" Marwari and Jaipur i (Rajputana). Brajbhasha (Mathura and Agra).

Kanauji (Lower Ganges- Jumna Doab and Western Kohilkhand). Eastern Hindi or Awadhi and Baiswari (Eastern Rohilkhandl,

Oudh, and the Benares Division of the United Provinces). Bihari (Behar or Mithila, comprising several distinct dialects).' 1 (Encycl. Brit., llth ed., Vol. XIII., Hindustani Language.) 1 Originally the name of the military headquarters of the Mongols at Qaraqoram. The term eventually came to be applied in India to the language that took its rise in the Camp of the Moghul Emperors.

8 For an account of this process, see Grierson ; Imperial Gazetteer of India, New Series, Vol. I. ch. vii. See also J.R.A.S. for 1904, pp. 435 and 457.]

thoughts of all those races, either Indian or foreign, who in the long and chequered history of India have held the mastery of Delhi or have come into contact with the life of its people. One may liken it to a huge and expansive stream into which have flowed at different stages of its progress diverse tributaries, some large, some small, some even disturbing cataracts and mountain rivulets, all bringing with them the colour of the beds through which they have passed and giving together to the principal stream a tint or hue which is altogether fascinating.

(ii) EARLY LITERATURE HINDU CONTRIBUTION 

With a long and interesting history such as this language has had, one will naturally expect to find in it a literature hoary as its age and rich as the proverbial riches of India. But, strange as it may seem, facts belie the expectation. Owing to a peculiar combination of circumstances, the original language of Delhi never could emerge till about A.D. 1100 from the position to which Sanskrit had relegated it from the very beginning, viz. of a " Prakrit " or the " natural, rustic, unartificial " tongue of the common people. Sanskrit, " polished or purified," as it means, remained all along the language of literary expression. The rise of Buddhism in the fifth century B.C., with its attempt to impart its message through the Prakrit, no doubt gave the vernacular for a while an importance such as it had never enjoyed before. And although during the succeeding centuries it received, at different times, a certain amount of attention from men of letters, it was not until the establishment of the Muslim power in India that the vernacular speech had the chance and the necessary encouragement to assume a distinctly literary character. 1

[1 The term " Prakrit " is retained throughout to denote the vernacular speech for the sake of clearness, although it was known by different names at different stages of its progress. See Grierson, Imperial Gazetteer of India, Vol. I. ch. v ]

The Muslims who, from the eleventh century onwards, began to pour into India from the North-west, first under the " Afghans " and then under the " Moguls," came of different races : nevertheless, they had together a distinctive character of their own which marked them out as a class of people differing from those of the soil, not merely in physical appearance, strength or endurance, but also in their language, religion, culture, and in their general outlook on life. These invaders, unlike the Greeks under Alexander or the British in our own time, chose to settle down in India and make it their home. The contact and intercourse which, in consequence, followed between the two peoples, whether in times of war or of peace, covering a period of over 800 years, have naturally and inevitably produced far-reaching effects on the language and literature of the country.

The new-comers brought with them a highly developed language of their own, viz. Persian, which, in spite of the fact that some of them were originally born to one or other of the Turanian dialects of Central Asia, they all claimed as their common speech. This Persian which they employed was not the Persian spoken in the time of the Sasanians (A.D. 229-652) or in earlier periods, but the Persian which, as the result of Arab conquest of Persia and its acceptance of the religion of the Arabs, had grown into a form of speech which clearly bore on it the hall-mark of Islam. 1 The Muslim invaders were proud of this language and disdained to invoke the help of Sanskrit for literary or administrative purposes. So great was the vogue given by them to Persian, that not only during the days of their long domination of nearly 500 years, but even under British rule down to 1832, it remained the language of the Court and of the Administration.

[1 See Browne, A Literary History of Persia, Vol. II. pp. 4-6. Also Muhammad Husayn Azad, SaJ&unddn-i-Fars, Third Lecture, Lahore, 1898.]

Under such conditions, what an enormous influence must Persian have exercised on the language and literature of the country ! The Muslim emperors, especially the Moguls, were great patrons of learning. With all their loyalty and adherence to their national language, they never forgot the interests of the indigenous literatures, particularly of Brajbhdsha, the vernacular of Delhi. In fact, it was part of their official policy to encourage and foster it by holding out liberal rewards to men of talent whose writings in the vernacular speech deserved recognition, and by conferring upon them the title of Kabi Raj, or Poet Laureate. The example of the emperors was followed by the Governors and prominent noblemen, both Hindu and Muslim, who took pride in keeping with them laureates of their own who would sing their praise and beguile their idle hours. Prominent among those who flourished at the Mogul Court may be mentioned Raja Birbal, Tan Sen x Ganga Prasad, Sundar, and the Tripathi Brothers. These Hindu poets, out of regard for their patrons, whom they were intent on pleasing, tried to make their productions more and more intelligible to the latter by the incorporation into their writings of words and phrases and literary ideas borrowed from Persian and through Persian from Arabic. Partly because of this conscious effort, and partly because of the atmospheric influence due to an increasing intercourse between the rulers and the ruled, not only was the Brajbhdsha gradually Persianised, but the literature in it and in the allied dialects which was produced during the early Muslim rule, whether under Court influence or independent of it, was greatly affected by the impact of Muslim thought and Muslim culture.

This literature, which is the precursor of Urdu literature, may be classified into three groups. The first consists of bardic chronicles like those of Chand Bardoi and Jayanaik (twelfth century) and Sarang Dhar (fourteenth century) 

written under the stress of a national struggle with the invader. The second consists of devotional hymns and religious songs, such as those of Kablr (1440-1518), the founder of the sect of Kabirpanth, Guru Nanak (14691538), the originator of Sikhism, and Tulsl Das (1532-1623), the author of the great religious epic of Ramayan, all intended to supply the growing popular need for spiritual knowledge and guidance which was not easily accessible through Sanskrit and which was in a measure denied under the old Brahminic ideals. The last group is composed of erotic poetry.

This literature, it should be noticed, is almost entirely in verse. It is written in the indigenous script, the Nagari, and follows indigenous rules of prosody and composition. Although some of the writers, such as Kablr, of whom mention is already made, and Malik Muhammad Jayasi, author of the famous romance Padmdwatl, wore Muslims, and although this literature, which now goes under the name of Hindi, bears clear traces of Muslim influence, it is, nevertheless, in form, in substance and in purpose, essentially a Hindu contribution. A large majority of the Muslim settlers neither thought very much of it nor took any part in its cultivation. The best period of this literature lasted from the middle of the twelfth to the close of the sixteenth century. 1

(iii) EARLY LITERATURE MUSLIM CONTRIBUTION

 By this time, owing to the forces described above, Brajbhdsha had been gradually so permeated with words and expressions of Persian origin that the Muslims had no difficulty in getting naturalised to it. In fact by the beginning of the seventeenth century, when Shah Jahan came to power, a very large section of the Muslims, whether descendants of the early invaders or new converts to their faith, 

[1 See F. E. Keay, Hindi Literature, Calciitta, 1916.]

living either in the metropolis and the surrounding country or in the distant colonies of the south where it had been carried by Muslim armies during the earlier reigns, had come to employ in their homes, and in their daily intercourse outside, only this new form of BrajbhasJia, which by now had assumed a new name, Urdu or the language of the camp or of its mixed population. 1 Persian had, of course, still its sway : it was still the language of the Court and of the Administration and the only language in which it was considered proper to undertake any serious literature and even ordinary correspondence. But as a spoken tongue on any large scale, among Muslims, its days were past. Urdu had usurped its place.

When this stage in its progress was reached, the literary class among Muslims naturally felt a fancy to adopt it for literary purposes. There was, however, a strong prejudice among the orthodox against such a course. To them Urdu was still a hybrid and rustic jargon unworthy of literary cultivation. This prejudice was strongest in the metropolis, where there was always a large conservative element worshipping antiquated i deals. The response to this new craving in literature, therefore, came not from Delhi, where the Urdu language had its birth, but from the Deccan, whore, under the local dialectical appellation of Dakhani, it had found a stronghold in the independent Muslim Courts of South India, where Persian had long ceased to be a spoken language. 2 Prominent among those who were associated with this movement is the name of Shams Waliu'llah (16801720) of Aurangabad, who during the reign of the Mogul Emperor, Muhammad Shah, migrated to Delhi and paved the way for the rise of those successive generations of literary men who, during an amazingly short period, have

[1 See Mir Amman's preface to Bagh o Bahdr.

2 See Sir Charles Lyall in Encyd. Brit., llth ed., Vol. XIII;]

succeeded in raising the rugged speech of Delhi to the status of a first-rate literary language.  The honour and credit of this achievement is shared between Delhi and Lucknow, the two great centres of Muslim culture and learning. But Delhi seems to deserve it more than Lucknow, for it was in Delhi that the pioneers of this early Urdu literature were born or flourished, men like Mir Dard, Rafi' u 's-Sawda, Mir Taqi, Qalandar Bakhsh Jur'at, Mir Hasan, Shah NaIr, M'umin Khan, Shaykh Ibrahim Zawq and Asadu'llah Khan Ghalib, who, whatever their limitations and weaknesses, have rendered distinct service to the cause of literature by purifying, polishing, enriching and preparing the language to serve in the hands of those who came after them, during the present days of English influence, as a satisfactory and healthy medium of literary expression.

The characteristics of their literature, so far as relevant to the subject of our inquiry, will be discussed in the following chapter. But mention should be made here of the fact that the main stimulus to the growth of this literature was supplied by Muslim writers who were not particularly conversant with indigenous script and indigenous literature. They knew but one script and knew but one literature, viz. the Islamic Persian. So when the inclination was felt to attempt literary composition in the new language, they naturally adopted the Persian script and followed the Persian literary ideals. The step had its own points of strength and weakness. The strength lay in the fact that the writers had ready to hand, for use, approved models and a full-fledged system of prosody and literary technique, and its weakness in the blind faith with which they regarded this system as immutable and all-sufficient and in the timidity and lack of vision to strike a new line of their own.

What followed was, that until the advent of English influence, all that went under the name of Urdu literature, which is entirely in verse, was all imitative, artificial and uninspiring. This was as it should have been. For if literature is the reflex of national life, it should not be surprising that Urdu literature of the first 150 years, beginning approximately with the decline of the great Mogul Empire and ending with its final tragic disappearance in 1857, was a literature groaning, like the degenerate Muslim society of the times, under its own dead weight and yet not knowing that it was groaning. Hedged in by hard-andfast rules, revelling in a narrow circle of thin and hackneyed ideas, and making a virtue of extravagance, meaningless subtleties, far-fetched conceits and empty declamation, this early literature dragged on a dreary existence till at one time, after the great Indian Mutiny, when the fortunes of Islam in India were at their lowest ebb, it almost seemed that the shadow of death was fast closing around it. 1

Fortunately, however, this did not come to pass. For with the final establishment of the British power in India and the restoration of peace and order, there began to flow into the country diverse influences of Western culture and Western literary ideals which speedily infused fresh life into the withering plant of Urdu literature, and stimulated its growth with surprising rapidity.

[1 See also Introduction to Ab~i-ljayat % Lahore, 1883.]