WHILE going through the latest issue of The Annual of Urdu Studies, I was reminded of a couplet from Maulana Hali:


Shehr main kholi hai Hali nai dukan sub sai alag,
Mal hai nayab per gahak hain aksar be-khabar.


Prof Mohammad Umar Memon, the editor of this journal, can well share this assertion Maulana Hali had made in his own time. In fact, this journal, published in English, has been conceived differently from the ones we have been reading in Urdu. It has been conceived in a way as to “enable scholars working on Urdu humanities in the broadest sense, a forum in which to publish scholarly articles, translations and views.” Full credit for that goes to Mr Memon, who manages to bring it out yearly under the auspices of the Wisconsin University’s Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia. The present issue of 2003, divided into two volumes, is spread over 659 pages.

Mr Memon is associated with the University of Wisconsin, Madison, as a professor of Urdu, Persian and Islamiat. He is known to us as a scholar, and as a critic and translator of Urdu fiction. As a scholar, he has to his credit a research work on Imam Ibn-ai-Taimya. In addition, he has translated in English a large number of Urdu short stories and has made critical studies of the works of different fiction writers of Urdu in English. He seems to have planned to expose Urdu literature, particularly fiction, to the English reader in the West. The Annual of Urdu Studies appears to be in line with this plan. So the contents of the journal include a number of translations from fiction and poetry of Urdu.

The articles are all of a scholarly nature. C.M. Naim’s article attracted me most. It runs under the title, Ghalib’s Delhi: A Shamelessly Revisionist Look at Two Popular Metaphors. The one more popular is the candle metaphor, which, according to Naim, was first invoked by Munshi Zakaullah when he wrote: “When the lamp of the Timurid rule was about to go out, it gave out so much light and was so revived that it is difficult to find another incident like it.”

The metaphor was soon picked up by other writers. In their writings, the lamp of the Timurid rule turned into the last and final candle of Delhi, which came to stay as a popular view. Naim objects to it as it, according to him, implies “that life in the Delhi of the first half of the 19th century was not radically different from the days of the great Mughals, that it was illumined not by anything new but only by the last remaining candle of the multitude that had burnt bright in the preceding three centuries, and that a radical and wide-ranging change took place only after the Revolt of 1857.”

C.M. Naim differs with this popular view. He says: “The candle was neither of Mughal make, nor did it die out with the Mutiny.” He seems to be saying that it was of an English make. “Something new, a product of Indo-British collaboration, and though it sputtered greatly in 1857, it continued to burn and give light.”

To be more precise, the candle, as he suggests, was the Delhi College, a product of Indo-British collaboration in concrete terms. A cradle of new learnings, where western sciences were taught through the medium of Urdu. Its offshoot, the Delhi Vernacular Translation Society, managed to get translated and publish a large number of books on physics, chemistry, geography, history, astronomy, geometry, and algebra. C.M. Naim has taken pains to show that all luminaries of the city, including Ghalib, were, in one way or the other, involved with the college or its society. Ghalib, he tells us, participated in a meeting of the society on August 11, 1865. “He sat through two papers, one on the Mahajani system in India by the society’s vice-president, Lala Sahib Singh, and the second on the benefits of studying history by Munshi Jivan Lal. He then himself read a short note — seated in his chair for he could not stand for long — on the destruction of the city and the hard times that followed.”

Then he cites the example of Munshi Zakaullah when he was still a boy studying in the Delhi College. “We will be,” he says, “missing out on something precious, not only in him but in ourselves, if we fail to understand the boy Zakaullah, who could have come running home all excited, his head buzzing with new ideas.”

One more example cited by him is of Master Ram Chandra, who studied and then became a teacher in the college. The man, according to him, was the first modern mathematician in India, and that he “contributed immensely to the development of a new intellectual discourse among the people of Delhi.”

C.M. Naim concluded from examples of this sort that the new candle continued to burn and give light even after 1857.