As those who have read the whole of Umrao Jan Ada in Urdu
may recall, this verse appears as the epigraph to the final chapter.
There it neatly evokes Umrao Jan's complex reaction to reading for
the first time the ghosted autobiography of herself whose progressive
compilation by Rusva, as heroine and narrator tease each other in
exchanges richly decorated with verses, makes this wonderfully teasing
novel so much more than some straightforwardly documentary "Life
Story of a Courtesan ." It has to be said, though, that no one
yet seems to have done critical justice to the many fascinating qualities
of Rusva's unique masterpiece with its multiply layered narrative
and the ingenious intermingling of verse and prose which is first
established in the opening lengthy description of a musha'ira.
Nor are these qualities fully captured in either of the two available
English translations, whether Khushwant Singh and M A Hussaini's The
Courtesan of Lucknow (Delhi 1961) or David Matthews' Umrao
Jan Ada (Delhi 1996). Since there is thus really no substitute
for reading the novel in the original Urdu, there is perhaps still
a place for the extended Urdu-English glossary which I compiled so
long ago and which has now unexpectedly been given a fresh lease of
life for the twenty-first century through being posted on the internet.
In something of the same way as Umrao Jan was moved to reflect on
the vicissitudes of her dramatic life by reading Rusva's account of
it, this unforeseen chance to look again after a number of years at
my Revised Notes prompts a number of reflections on the now distant
circumstances in which they were produced.
I was appointed to the SOAS staff in 1966, the year after David Matthews
had joined the Urdu section then headed by Ralph Russell. In a way
hardly imaginable today, we both came as autodidacts without any prior
formal qualifications in Urdu, and once appointed were very much left
to get on with the business of training ourselves to be scholars and
teachers of the subject. Since we found that much of Ralph's energies
as a teacher had been absorbed by the production of a large but highly
idiosyncratic first year language course, the most useful task for
us to begin with seemed to be the production of Urdu-English word-lists.
These had the double purpose of first closely familiarizing ourselves
with a range of literary texts, then helping our students to get to
grips with them more easily. Since this was long before the modern
flexible approach to language-based courses, with its wide range of
student choice and emphasis on practical skills, our students, like
most of those in British university language departments at the time,
were expected to get through a generously prescribed selection of
mostly pre-modern literary texts, and so naturally welcomed all the
aids which we could give them.
In the beginning, these word-lists were of a fairly primitive kind,
being written out by hand and directly run off as roneos from stencils
for cheap sale to students as ring-bound volumes. But once this preliminary
set of teaching aids was built up, we were able to move on to bringing
out revisions. The "Revised Notes" to Umrao Jan Ada were
the product of this second phase of our production of teaching materials
to support the study of Urdu literary texts. Numbered in the series
as Book XIII, ring-bound and numbered in two parts as Volumes 1 and
2, they are so entitled because they were designed to replace a hand-written
glossary which had been produced by David Matthews as an earlier volume
in the series.
Produced in the early 1970s, these two bulky volumes are in more
ways than one evocative of that period in SOAS history, which is described
in my chapter on "Language Studies" inSOAS since the
Sixties, edited by David Arnold and myself (London 2003). Generous
government funding, to which I owed my own appointment, fostered a
comfortable if rather conservative institutional culture, from which
most of the urgencies of present-day academic life were pleasantly
removed. With relatively large numbers of staff and small numbers
of students, not to speak of the absence of the modern imperative
to publish, there was then plenty of time for such tasks as the compilation
of these large glossaries.
This was also a time when the influence was still felt of the forceful
personality of the linguist J. R. Firth, although he had by then retired
from the SOAS academic staff. One of his hobby horses was the use
of a phonetic script for the languages of India which would avoid
the use of diacritic dots and macrons through the adoption of special
conventions like the adoption of "Welsh" y and
w for the short i and u, and the use of
numerous special phonetic characters. This Firthian transcription,
used in T.G. Bailey's old Teach Yourself Urdu and in Ralph
Russell's Urdu course, was still generally favoured in the department,
whose office possessed a specially customized manual Imperial typewriter
with double-shift keys containing the schwa, the long-tailed retroflexes,
and all the other special characters which the system required.
Our long-serving departmental secretary Susan Madigan was an expert
operator of this rather clumsy machine, and the clarity and accuracy
of the typescript is testimony to her unusual skill. This was of course
a time long before the era of the word processor, so the glossary
was produced by typing out my original manuscript onto stencils from
which the print-outs were then run off by roneo. In those days, though,
the sheer amount of energy that had to go into the production of this
sort of thing was of course taken for granted. If my "Revised
Notes " to Umrao Jan Ada have any particular value,
this is due to the special circumstances in which the material for
them was initially gathered.
My initial appointment to the SOAS staff was to a three-year training
Fellowship in Indian Studies. After a first year in London largely
spent reading Urdu texts, and compiling glossaries for some of these,
I was sent to South Asia for the year 1967-68. Most of this immensely
valuable time was spent in Lahore, where I first developed the interest
in Panjabi which has been a central concern of my academic career,
starting with my first published article "Panjabi in Lahore ,"
which appeared in Modern Asian Studies 4 (1970). But while
Panjabi was my particular enthusiasm, part of the purpose of the year
was to receive further training in Urdu. This was arranged for me
with various teachers by Professor Ibadat Barelvi, who had worked
with Ralph Russell at SOAS, and who was then head of the Urdu department
in Oriental College. As is often the way with such ad hoc arrangements,
some of the training I received seemed a little eccentric, like the
hours spent in the Oriental College gardens with a lecturer in the
department who thought that the close study of Muhammad Husain Azad's
poems in the Victorian mode was the best way to train a young Englishman
to appreciate what was best in Urdu literature.
But with one teacher, perhaps partly because he was not himself an
academic, things turned out very much better. Through a private arrangement,
the person assigned to read novels with me was Hakim Habib Ash'ar
Dihlavi, and I not only count the months which I spent working with
him among the most valuable parts of my professional training, but
have also always remained grateful for the unique insights which he
helped give me into the values of Urdu literary culture, of which
he was himself a distinguished representative. A member of the family
of the famous Hakim Ajmal Khan, his maternal grandfather, he migrated
to Lahore after partition, but maintained the proud appearance and
attitudes of a gentleman of Delhi, with his spare frame always impeccably
turned out in achkan and tang pyjama, and his mind always keenly aware
of the Panjabi milieu as definitely Other. "How, Mr Shackle,"
he would say, "would you as an Englishman feel if you found
you had to spend your life among Texans? "
Besides being known as a leading hakim, Habib Ash'ar was an active
and widely respected member of the Urdu literary life of Lahore. Besides
being co-editor with Ahmad Nadim Qasmi of the long-running literary
journal Funun, he was a pioneering translator into Urdu of
Kahlil Gibran, and produced an edition of the Urdu divan
of Nawab Mustafa Khan Shefta, the one-time patron of Hali, for the
Meri Library series (Lahore 1965). But such are the vicissitudes to
which literary reputations are subject that in the holdings of the
British Library he seems to be represented only in his professional
capacity as a hakim by his book Husn-o Sihhat, "Beauty
and Health" (Lahore 1966).
We used to meet three times a week, variously in Oriental College,
in Hakim Sahib's downtown homeopathic clinic and dispensary, and in
the comfortable house in the then-fashionable suburb of Gulberg owned
by his prosperous cousin, whose generous hospitality was extended
among other notable figures to the poet Josh. Amongst the texts which
I had been set to work through with him, I remember his impatience
with the preachifying content of Nazir Ahmad's Taubat un Nasuh,
in spite of its ostentatious use of Delhi idiom. Once we had got through
it, he suggested we move for relief to the Urdu version of Nishtar
published by the Majlis-e Taraqqi-e Adab, another novel set in the
world of the courtesan originally written in Persian, and which I
believe has now been translated into English by Qurratulain Hyder.
This proved much more fun, not least because the numerous mistakes
in the printing of the Persian verses with which the novel is filled
kept him reaching for the works of Naziri and others, so that I came
to learn as much Persian as I did Urdu, and have never lost the Indian
pronunciation of Persian which I first acquired from him in those
sessions.
Of all the texts we read together, though, we both enjoyed Umrao
Jan Ada the most. After I had prepared as carefully as I could
in advance with the aid of a dictionary, Hakim Sahib would then explain
the puzzles I still had, besides filling me in on many other points
which I would then write up, and which were eventually incorporated
into the "Revised Notes ." If when looking through these
again, I have more than once been struck by a qualitative difference
in learning from the other glossaries which we produced at the time,
I am equally well aware of just whose learning they reproduce.
I hope therefore that those who use the glossary to study one of
the finest evocations of old Lucknow will recall the anonymous but
indispensable contribution made to it by an outstanding representative
of old Delhi, the late Hakim Habib Ash'ar, whose subsequent death
sadly prevented me from ever seeing him again after the year in which
we worked together, but whose memory I am grateful at last to have
been able to record here.
C.S.
10 July 2006