CHAPTER THREE:
R E C O N S T R U C T I O N
The process of reconstruction had to start with basic, pragmatic concerns: finding a job, finding a way to live in the new world. In the years immediately following the Rebellion, Azad and Hali had to cut their coats according to their cloth. And since India was now to belong directly to the queen-empress, it was more and more clear that the only cloth available would be imported fabric. Quixotically aristocratic attitudes like that of Ghalib, who rejected a job because he was not formally escorted to the interview, were no longer sustainable. It was less and less possible even to please the British in classic courtly ways, with odes to Queen Victoria and ghazals in praise of the commissioner; the British had started to de-Mughalize themselves.[1]
Nor was there any real guidance from the older generation. Hali had grown up fatherless; Azad's father had been executed by the British. Moreover, Azad and Hali had both lost their much-admired ustads, the mentors who were empowered to shape and guide their literary lives. This was an irretrievable loss, for it was clear that such ustads would never be seen again. "The molds in which they were shaped have been altered, and the breezes that nourished them have changed direction," Hali later wrote of Ghalib and his circle.[2] "So there is now no hope at all of another such master of poetry being born in India," Azad later wrote of Zauq, "for he was the nightingale of a garden that has been destroyed" [420].
Still, Azad and Hali had their lives to live. We have seen that Azad, after wandering for several years, ended up in Lahore in 1864, at the age of thirty-four, with a minor clerical job in the Department of Public Instruction--a job he had worked hard to get. As it happened, Lahore's new Government College was also founded in 1864, with the remarkable Dr. G. W. Leitner as principal. Azad had been supplementing his office salary by tutoring Englishmen in Urdu; in 1864-65 he tutored Dr. Leitner, who formed an excellent opinion of him. Dr. Leitner, a scholar of Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, worked all his life to promote the development of Western learning in Indian languages. He was somewhat autocratic by temperament, but a most effective popularizer and shaper of opinion.[3]
In 1865 Dr. Leitner founded what is commonly known as the Anjuman-e Panjab, the "Punjab Society"--an organization "of which he became Secretary and, indeed, dictator."[4] Its objects were "the revival of ancient oriental learning, the advancement of popular knowledge through vernaculars, the discussion of social, literary, scientific, and political questions of interest, and the association of the learned and influential classes with the officers of the government." Over time, the Anjuman succeeded in such projects as arranging public lectures, setting up a free library and reading room, compiling educational texts and translations in Indian languages, and establishing Lahore's famous Oriental College. The Anjuman was actively supported by leading British officials, including the commissioner, the deputy commissioner, officers of the Department of Public Instruction, and even the lieutenant governor himself; it inspired the formation of similar societies in Delhi, Rawalpindi, Amritsar, Hissar, and elsewhere. The Anjuman was considered a great success: soon people in many cities began to manifest "a growing interest in vernacular literature impregnated with the spirit of the West."[5]
The Anjuman made Azad's career. He threw himself energetically into its activities from the first. Most of its thirty-five original members were directly employed by the government; in fact, as Farrukhi makes clear, "the whole Anjuman was called into being by government fiat." Azad himself, as a pillar of the Anjuman, was almost more royalist than the Queen. In the first essay he ever read before the group, in February 1865, he thanked God for the government's educational program and fully endorsed its paternalism: "If the parents don't take care of their children, who else will?" In his second essay he argued that people ought to help themselves by their own efforts, and in his third essay he discussed measures for increasing trade.[6] Azad's Anjuman activities so solidly established him that he was sent by the government on a special information-gathering tour of Central Asia in 1865, and on a mission to Calcutta in 1866. His part in the Rebellion had left him under a cloud; but now that cloud had been entirely dispelled.[7]
In 1866 Azad became a regularly paid lecturer on behalf of the Anjuman; in 1867 he became its secretary. He continued to work hard for the society. The minutes he kept show that among the subjects discussed at meetings were programs for the relief of the poor, the limitation of polygamy (to cases of the wife's illness or barrenness), the suppression of foul language among women, the reduction of marriage expenses, and the improvement of the postal service. The papers Azad read before Anjuman meetings were well received; out of a total of 142 papers the Anjuman eventually published, twenty-two were Azad's.[8] Azad was so much in favor now that in early 1867 he was invited to a party given by the lieutenant governor and presented with a "trinket" in token of his services.[9] From March through December 1867 Azad produced no fewer than thirty-six lectures and essays, on all manner of cultural and social topics; he also edited the Anjuman's journal. Gradually his lecture and essay topics came to be drawn more and more from the realm of literature.[10] He also wrote another school textbook, the extremely successful Stories of India (Qisas ul-hind).[11]
In 1869 Azad was appointed assistant professor of Arabic at Government College, on Dr. Leitner's recommendation; with this the best period of his life began. But it was never a bed of roses. In 1870 he started to edit a newspaper for the Anjuman, but the paper was soon accused of being English-influenced to an unacceptable degree; in 1871 Dr. Leitner ordered it handed over to someone else. The files of the Anjuman were also taken from Azad, and it was clear that Dr. Leitner no longer looked upon him with complete favor. Still, Azad was able to enjoy his teaching and get on with his literary work.[12] His students remembered him fondly: his lectures about Persian and Urdu poetry were fascinating, and he often treated the boys to iced lemonade after class. He became a well-known school character: he wore a long loose robe (chughah), with one sleeve "kept out of use and slung at his back," and is said to have been followed around the campus by a riding pony that he never rode. Azad not only won loud applause in the school's mushairahs, but sometimes held small Urdu mushairahs in his own classes as well.[13] His life in Lahore was now settled and productive.
In 1870, Hali too arrived in Lahore. He had been looking for a job, and had just found one with the Punjab Government Book Depot. His new job involved going over books that had been translated from English into Urdu, editing them and checking them for mistakes. "I stayed in Lahore and did this work for almost four years," Hali later wrote. "From it I acquired a general feeling for English literature, and somehow or other my admiration for Eastern--and above all Persian--literature began gradually to diminish."[14]
Azad and Hali met for the first time in Lahore. It might have been social contacts that brought them together, or perhaps it was the Anjuman and its activities. Sharing as they did a deep, nostalgic love for the old lost Delhi, and seeing eye-to-eye on many literary questions, they became friends; and their friendship endured through the years.
= = = = = = =
On May 9, 1874, Azad delivered to the Anjuman his famous lecture on the reform of Urdu poetry. The audience included a number of Englishmen of high official rank (director of public instruction, high court judge, secretary of the Punjab government, colonel, commissioner, deputy commissioner). The text of Azad's speech was printed the next day in a local newspaper, and there is no doubt about the boldness of his message: he called for a new Urdu poetry and a new poetics, both based on English models. The traditional adornments of poetry have now fallen into desuetude, he argued. "New kinds of jewelry and robes of honor, suited to the conditions of the present day, are shut up in the storage-trunks of English--which are lying right here beside us, but we don't realize it."[15]
In the course of his speech he accused classical Urdu poetry of ignoring the Indic side of its heritage, the colloquial language of Braj Bhasha with its simplicity and expressive vigor, in favor of the charms of Persian: Urdu poets had "reproduced in Urdu a photograph (fotograf) of all the meters, and interesting and colorful ideas, and types of literary composition, found in Persian." This had indeed given Urdu not only sophistication and polish but also "the power of expressing, through metaphors and similes, extremely subtle and refined thoughts." However, it had also led to the growth of dark, obscure tangles of poetic verbiage, in which meaning had been reduced to a kind of firefly: "now it lights up, now it vanishes."[16] Moreover, the verses in this rich language were devoted to an extremely narrow, limited circle of traditional mazmuns, mostly those of love: "some to the joy of union, many to longings, even more to bewailing separation; to wine, to the cupbearer, the spring, the autumn, complaints against the heavens, and flattery of the powerful"--all "absolutely imaginary" topics. Urdu poetry languished in captivity within this "limited circle" of related themes, and must be helped to break free.[17]
At the heart of Azad's talk was an emotional plea for a radically new vision of the nature and goals of poetry:
Oh gardeners of the Garden of Eloquence! Eloquence is not something that flies along on the wings of exaggeration and high-flying fancy, or races off on the wings of rhyme, or climbs to the heavens by the force of verbal ingenuity, or sinks beneath a dense layer of metaphors. The meaning of eloquence is that happiness or sorrow, attraction or repulsion, fear or anger toward something--in short, whatever feeling is in our heart--should as we express it arouse in the listeners' hearts the same effect, the same emotion, the same fervor, as would be created by seeing the thing itself.[18]The touchstone of poetry was thus to be its power to express and communicate natural feelings--feelings, reactions to the world, which are first present in the poet's heart, and are then passed on to the listeners as well. Verbal adornments in poetry were to be treated like salt in food: they should be used in small, judiciously planned quantities.
Azad made it clear that he did not underestimate the difficulty of this task, or the seductive power of the old poetry. But he warned that if the effort was not made, the old poetry would decay into hopeless obsolescence, and Urdu would end up with no poetry at all. He then explained candidly, "Although some of my countrymen and myself have long been aware of these matters, the reason I speak about them now is that I see that lately our government, and its officers whose hearts have taken responsibility for our education, have turned their attention in this direction."[19]
Azad's speech was followed by the remarks of Colonel W. R. M. Holroyd, the director of public instruction. Speaking in English, Colonel Holroyd began, "This meeting has been called to discover means for the development of Urdu poetry which is in a state of decadence today." Quoting the lieutenant governor, Colonel Holroyd emphasized the usefulness of poetry as a teaching tool and deplored the dearth of poetry suitable for the classroom. To fill this need, he suggested that verses from Mir, Zauq, Ghalib, and others should be compiled, "aiming at moral instruction, and presenting a natural picture of our feelings and thoughts."[20]
At the end of his speech Colonel Holroyd proposed that the Anjuman should start a new mushairah series, but that instead of setting the traditional formal pattern line (misra-e t?arah) to which all the poetry should conform, the Anjuman should "propose a certain subject on which the poets should write." He had high ambitions for this scheme: "Should this proposal succeed, the year 1874 would be a landmark in the history of India, and people would remember the poets through whose efforts poetry rose out of decadence and reached the height of perfection." He concluded, "I propose that we should hold monthly meetings, and that for the next month the poets should write in praise of the rainy season."[21] This meeting turned out to be the most memorable and controversial in the Anjuman's whole history.
Azad was immediately attacked by a number of his contemporaries for his proposed new poetics. He was accused of writing a language that was "outwardly Urdu and inwardly English, such as the present rulers want to create." His rejection of the traditional repertoire of poetic adornments and figures of speech was "as if some beautiful woman were stripped of her jewelry and clothing, and made to stand absolutely naked." After all, "without metaphors and similes, there's no pleasure in poetry!" And far from being restricted to themes of love, "Urdu poetry has incorporated every kind and every sort of mazmun, so excellently and subtly that if a hundred societies are formed, and make such futile efforts for a hundred years, and give out a hundred thousand rupees as a reward, they still won't be able to improve on it!" In short, Azad was exhorted to honor Zauq and Ghalib, and to stop trying to "ruin Urdu poetry by remaking it in the English style."[22] He also, however, received a certain amount of support.[23]
As for Hali, he seems to have welcomed the new mushairah series.[24] A quarter of a century later, he diplomatically divided the credit for the initiative: "Under the auspices of Colonel Holroyd, director of public instruction, Punjab, Maulvi Muhammad Husain Azad fulfilled his longstanding desire--that is to say, in 1874 the foundation was laid for a mushairah absolutely new of its kind in India." Hali noted that he himself had shared in the mushairah series by writing four masnavis--on "The Rainy Season," "Hope," "Patriotism," and "Justice."[25] He spelled out the goal of the project: "that Asian poetry, which has become entirely the domain of love and exaggeration, might be broadened as much as possible, and that its foundation might be laid on realities and events."[26] And he specifically urged the organization of more such "new-style mushairahs."[27]
The Anjuman's new mushairahs proceeded exactly along the lines laid down by Colonel Holroyd. After the first one praised "The Rainy Season," the second addressed itself to "Winter." This second mushairah went so well that the official journal of the Anjuman predicted full success in "removing from Urdu poetry licentious subjects and obscene images, and replacing them by scenes descriptive of things in this world." After the third mushairah, on "Hope," a sarcastic newspaper article sneered that "the poets of the Punjab and of Delhi have well understood the intention of the director of public instruction"--which was that they should "abandon the mention of wine and song" in order to "describe the phenomena of nature."[28]
Then followed "Patriotism," "Peace," "Justice," "Compassion," "Contentment," and "Civilization." By this time, a great many poets were attending, some from far away; and still others who were unable to attend sent their poems to be read. But many of the poems were full of the "worn-out mazmuns" that Azad wished to drive out of circulation. At the fourth mushairah, people were said to have listened "all ears" to Hali's poem on "Patriotism," while when Azad's turn came his delivery was praised but his poem found to be in need of islah. At the fifth mushairah, a modernist newspaper correspondent complained that Hali was still using the old mazmuns: he "again mentioned wine and drunkenness, the nightingale and the rose, and destroyed the hopes one had conceived for his talent." By the sixth mushairah it was reported that "Hali's poem was, as usual, the high point," and he was praised as "the only glory of these gatherings." Strict generic standards were maintained: some poets who had inappropriately brought odes or satires (hajv) were forbidden to recite them. Colonel Holroyd was very pleased with the mushairahs.[29] And he was not the only one: at some point Hali wrote a brief but extravagant Persian poem, "Verse-sequence in Praise of the Kindness and Generosity of the Honorable Colonel Holroyd."[30]
But the mushairahs became the center of much controversy. It was announced that poets who distinguished themselves would be awarded not merely prizes but monthly stipends as well, and this raised the stakes considerably. A newspaper called Panjabi Akhbar began a kind of vendetta against Azad, making a series of charges: that he was an incompetent poet and no real shagird of Zauq's, but only a kind of young "nephew"; that he was arrogant and put on superior airs; that he presided over the mushairahs in a biased way; that he quarreled with senior poets, who he feared would eclipse him; that he used his influence unfairly, to manipulate the prize giving in favor of junior poets; that he made the mushairahs "the resort of youngsters, green-grocers, and confectioners," among whom he could easily shine.[31] Azad's own poems were repeatedly subjected to the most exacting kind of islah and were invariably found by hostile critics to be wanting. One criticism was especially ironic: Azad, who reproached Urdu poetry for excessive borrowing of imagery from Persian, was accused of depicting, in his own long masnavi on "Winter," entirely foreign and fantastic scenes. "Has there ever been such cold in our country, that the rivers froze into ice, and people began crossing them without boats?" Azad's reindeer, sleighs, and perpetual snows came in for marked disapproval.[32]
Azad felt the attacks keenly, especially since it happened that no shagird or admirer came forward at the time to respond on his behalf. However, he behaved with dignity in this difficult situation. He has been accused by Abd ul-Haq of being jealous of Hali's greater popularity as a poet. Whether or not this was the case, he apparently did think that the venomous newspaper articles, although they appeared anonymously, were composed by a shagird of Hali's. Azad seems to have felt that if Hali didn't encourage the newspaper attacks, neither did he do anything to discourage them. For a time there was a coolness between the two. But, as Farrukhi points out, it could not have been of major importance, for ten years later they were still exchanging warm and friendly letters.[33]
One person who did encourage and support Azad was Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan. He advised Azad to ignore the critics, and recommended a strong and simple literary creed: "Bring your work even closer to nature (nechar). The extent to which a work comes close to nature is the extent to which it gives pleasure." Sir Sayyid took the same line in an article in his own journal Tahzib ul-Akhlaq (The Cultivation of Morality) in 1875: he praised Hali, invoked Milton and Shakespeare, and called for a "natural poetry" (necharal poitri).[34] Another journal under his influence lamented the dearth in Urdu of poetry "with a feeling for nature" and maintained that the date of the first "mushairah for natural poetry" marked "the beginning of the improvement of Urdu." It urged Urdu poets to "turn at last toward natural subjects and seek inspiration from the ideas of Milton and Shakespeare"--to write not just about "love and imagination," but about "real events" and "visible objects."[35]
It seems that there were nine mushairahs altogether, ending in March 1875. Why did they end? Certainly the mushairah series generated a damaging competition for money and prestige; personal conflicts and rivalries were responsible for many of the attacks on Azad's leadership. Sadiq argues that the mushairah series ended because it could not please its audience: "the academic verse it produced failed to touch the heart of the generation to which it was addressed."[36] According to Dr. Leitner, the "collapse" came because the series aggravated its participants: the "poets did not want to be told by any one that they had, hitherto, debased their genius by celebrating love"; they refused to accept "dictation in poetic inspiration."[37] Taking a longer view, Farrukhi maintains that the mushairah series ended not because it failed, but because it succeeded. The officers of the Department of Public Instruction "came to feel that it had fulfilled its purpose": the new literary movement had now been well launched and was gradually spreading by itself.[38] The Anjuman's own journal indeed proclaimed success: the mushairahs "will leave permanent traces" on the young; thus "the moral purpose which the founders of the mushairah had in view above all else will be attained."[39]
And what of the real, inner relationship of Azad and Hali to all this? Sadiq takes a cynical view: far from being "a spontaneous growth" based on real cultural needs, the new poetry was "an exotic tended and watered by official patronage." Government patronage was the crucial factor, and government employees could not afford to disregard it. "The fact is that both Azad and Hali wrote to order at this stage."[40] Farrukhi takes a more generous view: though all the government really wanted was some new textbooks for use in the schools, Azad himself saw his chance and "took advantage of this movement" for his own purposes, seeking to "turn the face of Urdu poetry in a new direction," widen its range, and free it from its narrow circle of concerns. Azad had in fact expressed some such wish as early as 1867.[41] As we have seen, Salihah Abid Husain makes similar claims for Hali.
The psychological truth of the situation is surely impossible to disentangle. People tend to adjust their behavior to suit the strong concerns of powerful patrons: it would not be surprising, under the circumstances, if Azad or Hali had indeed in some fashion "written to order." But people also tend to identify with the institutions that shape their lives: Azad and Hali would have been unusual if they had been entirely unaffected by the milieu of the Department of Public Instruction, especially when Colonel Holroyd's views were couched in a rhetoric of solicitous concern for Urdu and its "decadent" condition.
In fact, both Azad and Hali were deeply ambivalent about the loss of the old poetry and its projected replacement with the new. Hali, even as he participated in the new mushairah series, also recited at another Lahore mushairah during the same year an elegy that mourned the irretrievable loss of the old world of Delhi. "Oh friend, don't speak of Delhi as it used to be, / I cannot possibly bear to hear this story." Hali identified the loss of the poets of the pre-1857 generation in Delhi with the loss of poetry itself: "Poetry is already dead, now it will never live again, friends, / Don't torment your heart by remembering and remembering it."[42] Azad's own inner turmoil was even more poignant. As Farrukhi puts it all too accurately, "He struggled his whole life long to adopt a Western way of thinking; he advocated the development of new concepts and new principles; but mentally he lived in the past."[43]
= = = = = = =
The new mushairahs ended after less than a year, but the conflicts which they precipitated lived on--and gathered strength. Both Azad and Hali spent much of the rest of their lives with literary storms swirling around them. They never entirely stopped trying to reconstruct the endangered mansion of Urdu poetry. Which of the old timbers should be reinforced and refinished, and which ones were hopelessly rotten and had to be removed? After the restoration, what new kind of structural integrity could be achieved? If it was not quite necessary to destroy the mansion in order to save it, it was certainly necessary to pull down parts of it in order to shore up the rest. The cause was urgent, and it absorbed the fullest energies of these two powerful minds.
Azad stayed on in Lahore for the rest of his life. For years he taught at Government College, and wrote books. Most conspicuously, he wrote school textbooks; they gained him a great popular reputation, and Stories of India was a perennial favorite. By the early 1880s he had written twenty-three textbooks in all, of which eighteen were published in his lifetime. Most were in Urdu, with a few devoted to Persian or Arabic language and literature. Azad's prose style, in his textbooks as elsewhere, won him lasting fame. "In addition to being the greatest prose stylist of Urdu, Azad is our most important educational writer as well."[44]
From about 1875 to 1877 Azad worked on The Wonder-World of Thought (Nairang-e khiyal) (1880), a set of thirteen allegorical essays, mostly by Samuel Johnson (seven) and Joseph Addison (four), that he translated--or rather transcreated--into Urdu.[45] These selections were introduced by two prefatory essays, in which Azad further developed the basic themes of his "new poetry" lecture of 1874. He continued to urge radically Westernizing approaches to poetic problems: "Just as English arts and sciences are improving our clothing, houses, conditions, thoughts, and knowledge, in the same way English literature too goes on giving islah to our literature." He concluded with an exhortation to writers of Urdu: they must create such a powerful and living language that the Indians will think the age of Mir has come again, and "the English will say, `Shakespeare's soul has emerged in India.'"[46] Hali wrote a review in which he strongly praised The Wonder-World of Thought; he spoke of Azad as writing a new and useful kind of book, seeking to "express the poetic thought of a broad, learned, refined, and regulated language like English, by means of a limited and unregulated and imperfect and unlearned language like Urdu."[47]
Also in 1880, Azad published his masterpiece, Water of Life (Ab-e hayat). It was a magnificent achievement, recognized widely and immediately as the definitive history of Urdu poetry. Hali wrote a long and glowingly favorable review.[48] Water of Life at once became, and has remained, the single most influential sourcebook for both anecdotes and historical theories about Urdu poetry. The first edition sold out quickly. Azad published a much revised and expanded second edition in 1883; Hali was one of the friends and correspondents who helped him gather new material for it. Both The Wonder-World of Thought and Water of Life were incorporated into the official Punjab University examination curriculum. Sadiq calls Water of Life "one of the most brilliant reconstructions of the past that we possess."[49] If Azad had done nothing else except write this book, he would still be one of the most important figures in Urdu literature.
Azad's life had always had rocky patches, and it became even rockier toward the end. In 1875 one of his sons died, and 1876 another son died as well. Azad's relationship with Dr. Leitner deteriorated further: Dr. Leitner, with whom he had had an unsatisfactory collaboration on a book, now found him "as inaccurate as he is occasionally brilliant," given to "intrigue," and definitely "unworthy of trust."[50] In 1877 a beloved aunt who ran his household died. In 1883 Government College was placed under the jurisdiction of Punjab University; with his exuberant gift for metaphor, Azad envisioned the university as a frightful witch eating the college alive. He was anxious about his job, but then in 1884 he was finally confirmed as a professor of Urdu in the university. At about this period his house caught fire. And--the worst blow of all--his beloved and talented daughter Amat us-Sakinah suddenly died. As the grieving father wrote, "she was in truth more precious than seven sons, when I was writing she was my right hand; her death has shattered my heart." Azad was so affected by this blow that for a time he lost his mental balance.[51]
Obtaining leave from his teaching position, he planned a trip to Iran, his family's ancestral home, to gather books for his library. His nine-month tour in 1885-86 included visits to a number of cities in Iran, then a return through Afghanistan. The trip was generally successful, and Azad lectured and wrote about his travel experiences. In 1887 he began working to create the "Azad Library." He obtained a small grant of government land for it and managed to pay for the library building himself. The library, and the rare books with which he endowed it, were much praised; Azad was soon awarded the honorific title "Sun among the Learned" (Shams ul-ulama).[52] Azad also finished work on two books about the Persian language, literature, and culture, for which he had been collecting material for many years. Of these, On Iranian Poets (Sukhandan-e fars) was much the more important. It was completed in 1887, but was not published until 1907--fully twenty years later.[53]
The reason for this hiatus was the tragedy of Azad's later life: the attacks of insanity that began increasingly to afflict him. His madness came on gradually, but he was legally certified in 1890 and was retired on a pension. For the last two decades of his life, intervals of complete lucidity alternated with abrupt descents into madness. Farrukhi suggests several causes: his too-intense work on editing the ghazals of Zauq; his grief over his daughter's death; and his sufferings during 1857. Moreover, he had had "fifteen or sixteen" children, but except for one surviving son, Agha Ibrahim, he saw them all die "before his eyes" at early ages. His madness took pathetic forms. Sometimes he used a planchet to summon the spirits of Mir and other Urdu poets. Sometimes, suffering terribly from insomnia, he paced the floor all night, reciting verses, calling on the great ustads, hearing their voices, replying to their words. In one fit of madness he even set out on foot for Delhi.[54]
At another time, he managed somehow to reach Aligarh, where he appeared without warning at the house of the amazed Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan. He told his host that Abul-Fazl and other spirits had been speaking to him--dictating a book, which he was taking down in their own words. This book, The Court of Akbar (Darbar-e akbari), grew into a massively long and extravagant paean to Akbar for his religious tolerance and other qualities. It was colorful, vivid, anecdotal, idealizing, repetitive, full of long authorial asides--and so seductively written that it won immediate popularity and remains a favorite today. Azad worked on it at intervals for twelve years, and it was finally published in 1898. All accounts agree that Azad's madness was fitful: for five minutes, ten minutes, half an hour, he would be entirely his normal self, then suddenly an attack would overcome him. But remarkably enough, he not only continued to write, creating a series of bizarre and fascinating books, but produced some works that were actually published. Over the years, though, the lucid intervals grew fewer, and the madness worse.[55] Azad died in Lahore in 1910, at the age of eighty. Hali enshrined the date of his death in a chronogram: "Urdu literature has ended."[56]
= = = = = = =
While Azad lived and died in Lahore, Hali never did feel at home there; he missed Delhi, and seized the first possible chance to go back. This chance came in 1875, when he was offered the post of head Arabic teacher in the Delhi Anglo-Arabic College. Hali taught in this school for the next twelve years. His growing admiration for Sir Sayyid, combined with the influence of the Lahore mushairah series, made him dissatisfied with the state of Indo-Muslim poetry and culture in general. This discontent gave rise to his most famous poem, usually known as the Musaddas-e Hali (1879). In 456 six-line stanzas (musaddas) the poem, which Hali called "Madd o jazr-e Islam" (The High Tide and Low Tide of Islam), deplored the "present decline and lowness of the Muslims' condition."[57] The Musaddas was published first in Sir Sayyid's reformist journal Tahzib ul-Akhlaq, and then--since it became a tremendous popular success--over and over again in pamphlet form. Azad is said to have snidely compared the didactic verse of the Musaddas to the bland, boring flavor of roasted chick-peas: it was, he reportedly said, neither sweet nor spicy.[58]
Hali next wrote a book that looked backwards: it was The Life of Sadi (Hayat-e Sadi) (1884-86), an admiring biographical and literary study of the great thirteenth-century Persian poet. At about the same time, he endured a heavy personal grief: his beloved older brother fell sick, came to Delhi for treatment, and died after a protracted illness. In 1887 Hali received a notable reward for his literary achievements: he was granted a pension for life by Sir Asman Jah, chief minister of the state of Hyderabad. The arrangement was mediated by Sir Sayyid, who asked Hali how much the pension should be; with characteristic simplicity, Hali named exactly the amount of his salary as a teacher. Hali then retired from the Anglo-Arabic College and returned to Panipat, where he lived for the rest of his life.[59] But he did travel a bit, especially to Aligarh, where he served as a kind of poet laureate for Sir Sayyid's controversial Muhammedan Anglo-Oriental (M.A.O.) College: he composed and recited suitable poems to mark important events in the life of the college.[60]
Hali's poems gradually grew so numerous that it was time for them to be collected and published in a volume. This volume reflected the duality of his poetic history and sensibility. It contained unabashedly traditional poems: many ghazals (including the one containing his elegiac lament for Delhi), some quatrains (rubai), odes, and chronograms. But it also included a number of poems that, while they observed the rules of traditional forms like the verse-sequence and the tarkib band, were nevertheless very much in a new style: passionately hortatory and didactic, seeking to inspire action in the real world. While some of these poems were moralistic in a general way--urging, for example, courtesy, dignified behavior, kindness to servants, cleanliness, financial prudence, better treatment of women--others were more partisan and contentious. Hali defended Sir Sayyid by name against charges of irreligious behavior; he went on the attack against Sir Sayyid's enemies; he paid tribute to the M.A.O. College; he composed long versified addresses for meetings of the Muhammedan Educational Conference. He also called for poetic renewal ("The Decline of the Poetry of Delhi") and took a surprisingly strong nationalist line ("The Freedom of England and the Slavery of India").[61]
By way of a preface to this volume, Hali wrote a long essay known as the Introduction (Muqaddamah) (1893), setting forth his own views on poetry. This essay became a small book in itself, and is by far the most influential work of Urdu literary criticism ever written. It will be discussed at length in the final part of the present study.
During his later life, Hali lived more and more in retirement. By 1896 he had prepared a small separate house, where he could live and work apart from his family and visitors. There he completed his other greatest literary achievement, A Memoir of Ghalib (Yadgar-e Ghalib) (1897); it contained anecdotes, selected verses, and a lucid, unpretentious, deeply affectionate portrait of Ghalib as a person. Today, this elegant and nostalgic memoir is perhaps even more popular than the Introduction.[62]
Hali had long had a close, mutually admiring friendship with Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan. When Sir Sayyid died in 1898, Hali lost the man who was the ustad of his mature years, the most vigorous and unfailing supporter of his all-too-controversial literary work. In his last major work, An Immortal Life (Hayat-e javed) (1901), Hali paid tribute to his close friend and mentor. To his disappointment, this biography never found much favor with the public; its thousand-page length and hero-worshiping tone were perhaps largely responsible.
In 1904 Hali was officially awarded the title of Shams ul-ulama--the same title that had been bestowed on Azad. He continued to write much occasional verse and many essays along reformist lines. One of his favorite causes was the education of women. His didactic novel Conversations among Women (Majalis un-nisa) (1904-5), originally written during his days in Lahore, earned a government prize of Rs. 400 arranged by Colonel Holroyd and was widely used in girls' schools; his poem "In Praise of the Silent" ("Chup ki dad") (1906) paid homage to women's unsung virtues and contributions to human welfare.[63] Like Azad, he always managed to make time to write school textbooks; the range and extent of his literary output is remarkable.[64] And he too, like Azad, founded a library--using money he collected from the citizens of Panipat in memory of Queen Victoria when she died in 1901.[65] For the occasion, he composed two elegies in her honor.[66] Hali died in 1914.
= = = = = = =
Azad and Hali were denied by history the chance to feel about Urdu poetry the way the great classical ustads had felt. They were unable to feel the supreme confidence shown by Ghalib when writing to Bahadur Shah--a confidence that impatiently assumed both his individual mastery, and the self-evident, unchallengeable excellence of the literary tradition within which he worked. Azad and Hali were of the generation hardest hit by the deep slash of 1857. Their lives were almost cut in half by its force. They had grown up in the old world, which they had deeply loved. They were forced to witness its terrible death throes; and then they had to live most of their lives in the new world.
They not only saw their culture being torn apart in the outer world,
but felt it collapsing within their hearts. Both of them devoted their
best energies to shoring up a framework within which the past could survive--and
on which the future could build. This sense of mission gave a compelling
sincerity and urgency to their arguments. Moreover, both were immensely
talented: they managed to give their words an impetus that remains powerful
even a century later. To a surprising extent, Urdu poetry is still imagined
and described in the very terms they used; the house still stands as they
reconstructed it.
FOOTNOTES
[1]:For a study of this process see Bernard S. Cohn, "Representing Authority in Victorian India," in The Invention of Tradition, ed. by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 165-209.
[2]:Hali, Yadgar-e Ghalib, p. 2.
[3]:Sadiq, Azad, pp. 20-23; Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 1, pp. 137-149.
[4]:J. F. Bruce, A History of the University of the Panjab (Lahore: Ishwar Das, 1933), p. 7.
[5]:Sadiq, Azad, p. 24. Actually, the full name of the organization was the Anjuman-e Matalib-e Mufidah-e Panjab, the "Society for Projects for the Welfare of the Punjab," but this name never became widely used: Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 1, p. 150.
[6]:Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 1, p. 154; see also pp. 150-156.
[7]:Sadiq, Azad, pp. 25-27; Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 1, pp. 164-190.
[8]:Sadiq, Azad, pp. 24-26.
[9]:Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 1, pp. 193-194. The nature of this "trinket" (triñkat) is not clear.
[10]:Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 1, pp. 193-198.
[11]:Sadiq, Azad, pp. 27-28. Technically, what he wrote was part 2 of a three-part series.
[12]:Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 1, pp. 214-221.
[13]:Herbert L. O. Garrett and Abdul Hamid, A History of Government College Lahore, 1864-1964 (Lahore: Government College, 1964), pp. 29-31, 60-61. See also pp. 20-21 and 42 for further student reminiscences about Azad.
[14]:Hali, Kulliyat-e nasr, vol. 1, p. 339.
[15]:Azad, Nazm-e Azad, p. 46.
[16]:Azad, Nazm-e Azad, pp. 42-44.
[17]:Azad, Nazm-e Azad, pp. 47-48.
[18]:Azad, Nazm-e Azad, p. 45. Azad's term fasahat, which I have here translated as "eloquence," is almost impossible to convey properly in English; something like "appropriate speech" might be the best rendering.
[19]:Azad, Nazm-e Azad, p. 50.
[20]:Sadiq, Azad, p. 32.
[21]:Sadiq, Azad, p. 32.
[22]:Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 1, pp. 241-243.
[23]:Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 1, pp. 248-251.
[24]:Salihah Abid Husain, Yadgar-e Hali, p. 35.
[25]:Hali, Kulliyat-e nasr, vol. 1, pp. 339-340.
[26]:1Hali, Kulliyat-e nazm, vol. 1, p. 51.
[27]:Hali, Makatib, p. 50.
[28]:Joseph Héliodore Garcin de Tassy, La langue et la littérature hindoustanies en 1874: Revue annuelle (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1875), pp. 26-28.
[29]:Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 1, pp. 257-278. Garcin de Tassy, La langue et la littérature...en 1874, pp. 29-32.
[30]:Hali, Kulliyat-e nazm, vol. 2, p. 415.
[31]:Sadiq, Azad, pp. 33-39.
[32]:Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 1, p. 255.
[33]:Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 1, pp. 287-293.
[34]:Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 1, pp. 279-282. The Avadh Panch in fact lampooned Sir Sayyid as a nechari yogi; its caricature of him is reproduced in Lelyveld, Aligarh's First Generation, p. 140.
[35]:Joseph Héliodore Garcin de Tassy, La langue et la littérature hindoustanies en 1875: Revue annuelle (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1876), pp. 20-22. In Aligarh, Sir Sayyid is said to have entirely banned the recitation of ghazals at college functions, seeking to replace them with poetry that "contained criticism of life and was purposeful and inspiring": see S. K. Bhatnagar, History of the M. A. O. College Aligarh (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1969), p. viii.
[36]:Sadiq, Azad, p. 39.
[37]:Leitner, History of Indigenous Education, part 1, p. 71.
[38]:Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 1, pp. 289-290.
[39]:Garcin de Tassy, La Langue et la littérature...en 1875, pp. 19-20.
[40]:Sadiq, Azad, p. 31.
[41]:Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 1, pp. 233-234.
[42]:This elegy, informally entitled "Nauhah-e dihli" (A lament for Delhi), is translated in Gupta, Delhi, pp. xviii-xix. It forms a verse-sequence within a ghazal; Hali published it in his first collection in 1893: Hali, Divan-e Hali, pp. 87-89.
[43]:Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 2, p. 618.
[44]:Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 2, p. 638; see also pp. 606-607.
[45]:Azad implies that he might have done this work by writing from oral dictation of some sort: see Sadiq, Azad, pp. 43-45 (a full list of the essays and their sources appears on page 44). But Azad apparently had a reasonable reading and even writing knowledge of English; see Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 2, pp. 347-348.
[46]:Azad, Nairang-e khiyal, pp. 11, 27.
[47]:Hali, Kulliyat-e nasr, vol 2, p. 182.
[48]:Hali, Kulliyat-e nasr, vol. 2, pp. 184-194.
[49]:Sadiq, Azad, p. 48.
[50]:Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 1, pp. 302-303. Dr. Leitner has been described as a self-willed, erratic, and "tendentious" administrator, whose own scholarly contributions have proved to be "more specious than was apparent to his contemporaries": see J. F. Bruce, A History of the University of the Panjab, pp. 88-92.
[51]:Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 1, pp. 324-325; see also pp. 314-315, 323.
[52]:Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 1, pp. 326-354.
[53]:Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 2, p. 373; Muhammad Husain Azad, Sukhandan-e fars (Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Urdu Academy, 1979).
[54]:Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 1, pp. 356-360, 362-363.
[55]:Farrukhi, Azad, vol. 1, pp. 371-376.
[56]:Hali, Kulliyat-e nasr, vol. 1, p. 340n.
[57]:Hali, Kulliyat-e nasr, vol. 1, p. 340.
[58]:Garrett and Hamid, A History of Government College, p. 30.
[59]:Salihah Abid Husain, Yadgar-e Hali, pp. 41-43.
[60]:S. K. Bhatnagar, History of the M. A. O. College Aligarh, pp. 47, 99-100, 147.
[61]:Hali, Divan-e Hali: on Sir Sayyid: pp. 23, 26, 30-31; on the M. A. O. College: pp. 170-171, 178-182, 182-183; addresses to the Muhammadan Educational Conference: pp. 183-190, 201-205; on poetic renewal: pp. 28-29; on nationalism: pp. 25, 27-28, 37.
[62]:Salihah Abid Husain, Yadgar-e Hali, pp. 44-45. An English version of Yadgar-e Ghalib, pewpared by K. H. Qadiri, has recently been published. However, many of Hali's words and Ghalib's poems have been omitted from it--in favor of the translator's own literary comments and interpretations, which have been woven most confusingly into a text full of odd translations and typographical errors.
[63]:Both these works appear in Hali, Voices of Silence, trans. Gail Minault.
[64]:A full bibliography is given in Shujaat Ali Sandilvi, Hali, pp. 77-92.
[65]:Salihah Abid Husain, Yadgar-e Hali, pp. 52-53.
[66]:Hali, Kulliyat-e nazm, vol. 1, pp. 349-357.