History of Urdu poetry

Urdu language and literature, beyond their spatial confines, have been more heard of than read. With the publication of some notable translations, some of them in the recent past, a new literary culture seems to be emerging from the canons of the old. Modern Urdu poetry, of which this is the first comprehensive selection, has its own tradition of the new. It has developed through stages of a variegated literary history. This history has absorbed both the native and non- native elements of writing in Arabic and Persian, and the Urdu language has survived through several crises and controversies. Some of these are related to its growth and development, its use by the British to divide the Hindus and the Muslims. it estrangement in the land of its birth following the Partition of India and its interaction with Hindi once akin but now an alien counterpart. Even with the extinction of those generations of Sikhs in Punjab, Muslims in Bengal and Hindus elsewhere, who nurtured the language with love and for whom it was the mark of a cultivated man, the language has survived and developed. It is now the cultural legacy of India and the adopted national identity of Pakistan, and significant new literature has emerged in both countries.


Literary centre : Deccan, Delhi and Lucknow
Literature in Urdu grew at three different centres: Deccan, Delhi and Lucknow. As it happened, the Deccan emerged as the earliest centre, even though the language had first developed in northern India, as a result of an interesting linguistic interaction between the natives and the Muslim conquerors from Central Asia, who settled there in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, The period stretching roughly from the middle of the fourteenth centuries to the middle of the eighteenth produce a number of poets. They are claimed both by Urdu and Hindi literary historians, but Quli Qutub Shah (1565-1611) is generally acknowledged as the first notable poet, like Chaucer is English, with a volume of significant poetry in a language later named Urdu. He was followed by several others, among whom Wali Deccani (1635-1707) and Siraj Aurangabadi ( 1715-1763) deserves special mention. Delhi emerged as another significant centre with Mirza Mohammad Rafi Sauda (1713-80), Khwaja Mir Dard (1721-85), Mir Taqi Mir (1722-1810), Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797-1869) and Nawab Mirza Khan Dagh (1831-1905). It reached its height of excellence during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Lucknow made its way as the third important centre with Ghulam Hamdani Mushafi (1725-1824), Inshallah Khan Insha (1757-1817), Khwaja Haidar Ali Atish (1778-1846), Iman Baksh Nasikh (1787-1838), Mir Babr Ali Anis (1802-74) and Mirza Salamat Ali Dabir (1803-1875). These literary capitals, where the classical tradition developed, had their individual stylistic and thematic identities, but broadly it may be said that the ghazal (love lyric) reached its zenith with Mir and Ghalib, qasida (panegyric) with Sauda, mathnawi (romance) with Mir Hasan and marthiya (elegy) with Anis and Dabir.

Hali and Iqbal : new poetry in Urdu
In the period that followed, and before the launching of the Progressive Writers Movement in the 30s, mention should be made of Altaf Husain Hali (1837-1914) and Mohammad Iqbal (1877-1938). Hali was a poet of the newer socio-cultural concerns and advocated 'natural poetry' that had an ameliorative purpose. His Musaddas is an important example of this. He was also a theorist who opened new frontiers in Urdu criticism with his Moqaddama-e-Sher-o-Shairi (Preface to Poetry) which equals Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads in importance, and even surpasses it in certain respects. He realized that with the impact of the West a new perspective was required. He, along with Mohammad Husain Azad (1830-1910), laid the foundations of a new poetry in 1867 under the auspices of Anjuman-e-Punjab, Lahore. Azad had asserted in the same year that Urdu poets should come out of the grooves of responses conditioned by Persian culture and root their works in the ethos of the land. Seeing no response to his pleas, he reiterated the same point seven years later on May 8, 1874 during his address on the occasion of the first mushaira of the Anjuman. These appeals failed to make and impact as sensibilities rooted in particular tradition are not easily altered even by impassioned pleas. Hali, creating a new taste for his age. Iqbal, with his remarkable religio-philosphical vision, and Josh Malihabadi (1838-1982), with his nationalistic and political fervour, produced exceptionally eloquent kinds of poetry that continue to reverberate over the years. Iqbal remained the most influential poet to achieve artistic excellence while putting forward a philosophical point of view, and his poetry, quite often, acquired the status of the accepted truth. A host of others Urdu poets and translators of English poetry who appeared on the literary scene during the first quarter of this century experimented with non-traditional poetic forms but they ultimately echoed sentiments and adopted forms that were more or less tradition-bound. They also looked towards the West, the traditional source of literary influence, but that was a world apart and too far to seek, They could reach only the Romantics who had already become outmoded in an age identified with Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. A characteristically modern poem in form and value, tone and tenor, remained at best an intriguing possibility.

Progressive Writers Movement
The 1930s emerged as the archway for entry into a new world and achieve the unachieved. Some young Indians-- Sajjad Zaheer, Mulk Raj Anand, and Mohammad Deen Taseer-- who wee then studying in London, musing on the role of literature in a fast-changing world, came up with a manifesto for what came to be known as the Progressive Writers Movement. Even before this, Sajjad Zaheer, during his stay in India had published Angare (Embers), an anthology of short stories, with explicit sexual references and an attack on the decadent moral order. The book had to be banned, like Lady Chatterley's Lover, but the stories had an impact, as they were thematically interesting and technically innovative. The reader had suddenly become exposed to the worlds of Freud, Lawrence, Joyce and Woolf. There was a world of new values waiting to be explored by an emotionally charged and intellectually agile reader. the Progressive Writers Movement was launched at the right time. This was the precise hour to shed the age-old traditions, take leave to the clichés, proposed new theories, and explore a new world order.
Akhter Husain Raipuri, in his well-timed Adab aur Inqilab (Literature and Revolution) published in 1934, discarded the classical Urdu poets, including Mir and Ghalib, as degenerate representative of a feudalistic culture. This rejection was, however, based on extra-critical considerations as he was more intent on popularizing Marxist thought in literature. Premchand's famous presidential address to the conference of Progressive Writers Association in Lucknow two years later in 1936, came as a more precise call to relate literature to social reality. ' We will have to change the standards of beauty, ' he had said, and beauty of him was that which Eliot identified as ' boredom and horror' in his own context. The movement focussed on poverty, social backwardness, decadent morality, political exploitation; it dreamt of an ideal society and a just political system.
Every rebel was, therefore, a progressive writer and vice-versa during those exhilarating days. He was basically wedded to the idea of political and social revolution. He drew his inspiration from Marx. He rejected the striving for individual signatures, new modes of expression and new experiments in form. It was important for the poet to denote rather than connote, and to appeal to the larger humanity rather than to the individual. Falling victim of these errors before long, the movement alienated some noted poets, the most important of them being N. M. Rashed (1910-75) and Miraji (1912-49), who came together to lead a group called Halqa-e-Arbab-e-Zauq (Circle of Connoisseurs) in 1939. The progressive writers insistence on ideology and the impatience of those who cared more for art are reminiscent of the British poets of the 1930s and the later stance of W. H. Auden.
Faiz Ahmad Faiz (1911-84) is the most prominent and the finest of the poets who subscribed to the progressive ideology. he was singularly successful in striking a balance between art an ideas. He was drew upon sources other than Urdu and Persian and imparted an individual tone to his poetry. he did not raise slogans; he only uttered soft notes of expostulation. he was inspired more by the spirit of liberation than by slogans raised elsewhere. Prominent among other progressive poets were Asrarul Haq Majaz (1908-56), Makhdoom Mohiuddin (1908-69), Ali Sardar jafri (b.1913), Jan Nisar Akhter (1914-76), Kaifi Azmi (b.1918) and Sahir Ludhianawi (1921-80). They are mentioned here not only for the individual qualities of their poetry by also for their importance in this movement at a particular juncture in literary history. Despite the deep political complexion of the Progressive Writers Movement, it prominence was a short-lived affair. The next generation of poets expressed certain misgivings about their emphasis on class struggle in a materialistic and scientific world. The new poet wished to shake off all external shackles and apprehend his own experience for himself.