May 21, 2008	Wednesday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 15, 1429

KARACHI: To pay homage to the late Eqbal Ahmad at a programme, a prominent scholar from India delivered a lecture on humour in Urdu prose and poetry of pre-partition India here on Tuesday.

Prof Mushirul Hasan, vice-chancellor of New Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia, a noted scholar and a well-known historian, was the speaker at the Eqbal Ahmad Distinguished Lecture series organised jointly by the Textitle Institute of Pakistan and the Eqbal Ahmad Foundation. The title of the lecture, Wit and Humour in Colonial India, was misleading for one would have expected a much larger canvas. Prof Hasan confined his talk to humour in Urdu literature and journalism of the late 19th and early 20th century India, with special reference to the weekly published from Lucknow – Awadh Punch.

The acoustics of the Arts Council were bad. The fans, which had to be switched on because the generator could not take the load of the airconditioner, were quite noisy. The KESC had assured the organisers that the power outage would end at 5.30pm but it didn’t until 7pm when the lecture was about to end.

The lecture should have been in Urdu, the speaker’s first language, the subject was humour in Urdu literature and journalism and his audience were from a country whose national language is Urdu. This was the ironical part of the evening, which started with an audio-visual presentation on Eqbal Ahmad by his granddaughter. What does the Textile Institute of Pakistan have to do with Eqbal Ahmad, some people asked the head of the institute, Zubair Bandukda, and he revealed that the late scholar had headed the institution from 1997 to 1999.

Prof Mushirul Hasan gave an informative talk about humour in Urdu poetry, prose and journalism. He referred to the likes of Chirkin and Akbar Allahabadi. About the latter, he said: “Akbar created humour by distorting words, twisting their meanings, or resorting to pun, and idiom-based or verbal jugglery. He was at his best when he turned and twisted an ordinary phrase into a striking epigram.”

He spoke at length about Munshi Sajjad Hussain, who ran Awadh Punch, a weekly that commenced publication in 1877 and continued till 1936. The weekly was inspired by the Punch published from London from 1841 until 2002. Sajjad took digs at stalwarts and like Akbar he made fun of the employees of the colonial empire who tried to ape Western culture and materialism.

The speaker made a special mention of Abdul Halim Sharar (1860-1926), the brilliant Urdu essayist-novelist, who once said: “It is true that without wit and humour speech is insipid and the company dull... The more advanced a language, the greater its ability to express wit and humour.”

The Awadh Punch’s contributors also included Pandit Ratan Nath Sarshar, who excelled in repartee and maintained his humorous tenor in his masterpiece, Fasana-i Azad, and Akbar Allahabadi. Mirza Began Sitam Zarif, Jwala Prasad Barq, Nawab Syed Muhammad Azad, and Muhammad Ali Shauq were the other well-known writers. All infused new life and elegance into Urdu prose.

In the question-answer session, Prof Hasan didn’t agree with someone who said that we from the northern part of the subcontinent were incapable of laughing at ourselves. Much of Urdu poetry, particularly Ghalib’s, is self-deprecatory, he insisted.

Referring to the high quality cartoons and caricatures published in the journal, the scholar said the lines and drawings were very skilful. The humour was subtle, which as he rightly said was the hallmark of cartoons, published in newspapers. He agreed with one of his listeners that the tradition of cartoon had weakened in not only the subcontinent but also in the UK. “We don’t get to see the likes of Laxman and Sudhir Dar,” he said, and blamed the TV culture for the disappearance of subtlety in visual contents.