Altaf Husain 'Hali' (that pen-name
means 'Contemporary') is well known as a progressive poet and literary
theorist, and as an ally of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan's who became a
wholehearted supporter of the Aligarh Movement. Sir Sayyid, desperately
eager to offer westernizing opportunities to the 'sharif' class
of young Muslim men, had little time to concern himself either with
the education of the lower classes, or with women's education. He
felt that a kind of 'trickle-down' effect would lead to the spread
of educational opportunities over time. Up to a point, he was right.
Sir Sayyid founded the
Aligarh M.A.O College in 1878; a group of early Aligarh graduates,
with Hali's wholehearted support, founded the Aligarh Girls' School
in 1905. Hali composed the poem "Justice for the Silent"
in honor of the occasion; he ended it with praise for the generous
financial contributions of the Begam of Bhopal.
This original 1905 text
comes from the .*Digital
Library of India*, a project that would be magnificent if it
weren't so appallingly badly catalogued. Here's the *exact
location* for Hali's poem. I've provided the 1905 text on this
site. I've given it in my own flexible script version (viewable
also in Devanagari, or Roman script with diacritics), but I recommend
using the 1905 Urdu text if you can.
The 1905 text is clear
and accurate, but also offers valuable practice in reading older
styles of Urdu script. A particular eccentricity of this text is
that when 'here' [yahaa;N] and 'there' [vahaa;N]
are to be metrically shortened from short-long to simply long, the
spelling is not changed (as it normally would be) to yaa;N
and vaa;N . For a discussion of other archaic
features of earlier Urdu texts, see *Urdu
Script, section 15*.
Gail Minault translates
chup kii daad as 'In Praise of the Silent',
and this isn't wrong, especially since the earlier stanzas, as she
points out, are a generalized tribute to women as unsung heroines
of society. But daad is praise only by extension,
in the special sense of 'doing justice to'. I decided to translate
the title more literally, especially since the occurrence of the
phrase in Stanza 7, and the general tone of the later stanzas, make
it clear that Hali had in mind the redressing of grievances, and
the belated recognition of the full human rights of half the human
race.
The swingy rhythm and complex
internal rhymes give the poem a lively, popular tone. It aims to
be moving and inspiring, touching and celebratory. There are also
nice bits of wordplay, as in the two senses of jaanib
that are used in Stanza 8, verse 8. Hali's work and thought span
the temporal and political gap between Ghalib, whose admiring autobiography
he wrote, and the later poetry of the Progressives.
The addition of the 'Assemblies
of Women', in Gail Minault's translation, and the 'Quatrains' in
G. E. Ward's translation, will help to put the poem in a larger
perspective of Hali's work.