IT was the inaugural ceremony of Tabassum Kashmiri’s scholarly work Urdu Adab ki Tareekh, a history of Urdu literature published by Sang-i-Meel, Lahore.
The function began and proceeded in the usual way we are so familiar with in respect of book launching ceremonies. Friends and contemporaries of the author came on the stage, one by one and paid compliments to him for the pains he had taken in digging out new material for the book and for writing it with a new angle. This literary history, they thought, had been written in a wider perspective keeping in view the social and political conditions of each period covered.
Dr Ikram Chughtai saw the work as a mark of distinction for the Lahore school of thought in Urdu literature, which had brought out one hundred years ago the first history of Urdu literature known as Aab-i-Hayat and now can boast of bringing out a new history.
However, the mood changed when Dr Mubarak Ali came on stage and spoke in a different tone. He was in no mood to chime in with the previous speakers in their compliments to the author. Instead, he raised questions, which amounted to a note of dissent. The man in the chair, Fateh Mohammad Malik, was quick in responding to these questions. This eventually led the author to participate in the discussion and explain his position as a literary critic. Thus, a formally arranged book launching ceremony turned into a lively debate.
Dr Mubarak Ali, as is known to us, loves to debunk the Mughals. He availed this opportunity for this purpose well. He rejected the general notion that it was an age of decline, and that Urdu poetry grew and touched its heights in times of decline and decadence.
“Whose decline?” he asked. It was, according to him, solely the decline of Mughal splendour affecting adversely the elite of Delhi alone. In the rest of India, everything was OK and life was normal. One wonders if it were really so. But the historian had evidence up his sleeve, which he had extracted from the poetry of those times.
The sense of destruction and decay, he argued, was exclusive to the poets of Delhi alone. They were bewailing the deteriorating social conditions. Nazir sitting in Akbarabad suffered from no such sense of decay. He was always in a joyous mood painting society and people in bright colours.
Dr Mubarak was very critical of the movement of linguistic purification. He was right to a great extent, in saying that this movement damaged Urdu as it in effect was an attempt to cut the language from its roots. It was in Nazir’s poetry, he said, where we find Urdu returning to its roots.
The disintegration of the Mughal Empire was, according to him, a blessing in disguise. It paved the way for the decentralization of Urdu poetry. Many poets migrated from Delhi and went to distant cities. This migratory process helped Urdu literature in finding centres other than Delhi for its development.
Fateh Mohammad Malik found himself in perfect agreement with Dr Mubarak Ali. What appealed to him most was Dr Mubarak Ali’s decentralization theory. He cited the examples of a number of poets sitting far from the city of Sauda and Mir, say, in Sindh, in Balochistan, in Punjab and writing verse in Urdu.
Most prominent among them was Sachchal Sarmast, who had an Urdu divan to his credit. Malik was angry with the literary historians for their indifference to the poets sitting far from the courts. Why should, he asked, Urdu poetry be seen and recognized with reference to the courts alone?
Tabassum Kashmiri found himself in the dock. The onus of defending other literary historians, too, had at this moment fallen upon him. But before he speaks, let me say a few words. Fateh Mohammad Malik was justified in his anger. I agree with him. But as a scholar of Urdu, he cannot be unaware of the fact that even while flourishing in the capital city of Delhi, Urdu poetry can hardly be seen as a product of royal patronage. The grand Mughal court was proud of its Persian heritage with no respect for the commoner’s language and its poetry. To be brief, Urdu poetry travelled from the steps of the Jamia Masjid and forced its way into the Red Fort at a time when it was on its last legs. Tabassum Kashmiri spoke sensibly in self-defence. “I as a historian am not concerned with what should have been. I am concerned only with what has been.” This he said with reference to the campaign of the purification of Urdu as been mentioned in the history under discussion. He insisted that he as a historian was not expected to discuss the justification or non-justification for this campaign.
He did not agree with Malik when he censured literary historians for not accommodating in their books those poets of olden times who were engaged in writing Urdu verse in different regions. He said that this activity in different regions lacked continuity. Had there been a continuity of poetic activity resulting in the emergence of a tradition of Urdu poetry, literary historians would have felt duty bound to accommodate them.
