THE latest issue of Urdu Adab, a literary magazine published by Delhi’s Anjuman Taraqqi-i-Urdu Hind (ATUH), carries an intriguing article by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi.
As the arrival of Indian books and magazines has come to the proverbial grinding halt ever since the relations between India and Pakistan further deteriorated last year, now we have to rely almost entirely on websites for access to Indian books and periodicals. Luckily, some websites (such as https://rekhta.org), have proved to be a great treasure for the students, scholars and common readers. The Urdu website named ‘rekhta’ exclusively caters to those looking for material on Urdu literature and language.
Similarly, the ATUH runs its website (www.atuh.org) and new issues of Anjuman’s magazines too are uploaded regularly. The ATUH publishes Urdu Adab, a quarterly Urdu magazine devoted for the promotion of Urdu language and literature.
A prestigious journal, Urdu Adab carries informative and research-based articles. Its new issue (Jan-March, 2020) too offers some thought-provoking articles. Available online as well, the issue also carries an article by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, one of the most respected literary figures of our times. Faruqi has earned this respect through sheer hard work, profound study and deep sense of attachment. For him, literature is not a pastime or entertainment. It is a question of life and death. The article is in fact an Urdu translation of his English article. Translated into Urdu by Ather Farouqi, ATUH’s secretary and editor of Urdu Adab, it raises many questions about the histories of Urdu literature written so far and is bound to raise many heckles, too. The article asks that a “proper” history of Urdu literature may please be written.
The original English version, presented as a keynote address at University of Virginia in 2008, was titled ‘A Modest Plea: Please, Could We Have a Proper History of Urdu Literature?’ On the onset, Faruqi reminds us of Ralph Russell’s stricture on some histories of Urdu literature when he elaborated on ‘How Not to Write a History of Urdu Literature’. Faruqi says Russell’s condemnation could very well apply to nearly all histories of Urdu literature. Faruqi is not any less annoyed with the literary histories of Urdu than Russell was.
Aab-i-Hayat (1880) by Azad is treated as history despite its anecdotal style and inaccuracies, says Faruqi, but even a hundred years after Azad, it has not become clear what exactly a history of Urdu literature should do. Mentioning Gian Chand Jain’s mammoth work Urdu Ki Adabi Tareekhen (2000), Faruqi seems least impressed and says that Jain was never clear about a literary-critical point of view from which literary histories are written. Jain “is not at all concerned with the theoretical or ideological underpinnings of the histories that he examines” and tends to praise or criticise the authors of histories, looking for the explanations to the “errors” that the historians made, adds Faruqi. While he says Jameel Jalibi’s history of Urdu literature, named Tareekh-i-Adab-i-Urdu, is a “monumental work worthy of respect”. He thinks that Jalibi’s “main fault” is “his failure to jettison the colonialist-orientalist baggage inherited by him from the nineteen century modernizers”.
Then Faruqi goes on to state what should be the parameters for developing theoretical model of a history of Urdu literature, intentionally ignoring the obvious such as inaccurate dates or the missing dates of “publication of even important works by the most prominent authors”. What causes Faruqi most displeasure is the acceptance of some stories without any examination or inventing a story to serve “some chauvinistic motive”, as put by Faruqi. One such story is about the origin of Urdu, connecting it to army just because the word ‘Urdu’ means ‘an army camp’.
Counting pitfalls of literary historiography, Faruqi says that even Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and Garcin de Tassy thought that Urdu was an urban language while Hindi was rural or “uncouth”. Being “oriented towards Delhi” and ignoring Dakkani and Gujari is another blind spot. Many historians, including Jalibi, have tried to deny Vali Dakkani’s pioneering role while the fact is Vali kick-started the writing of serious Urdu poetry in Delhi. Mir Taqi Mir rejected Deccan’s poets and Azad thought if what poets of Deccan wrote was poetry, even Punjab had many poets, which means, according to Faruqi, even Punjab was marginalised.
Faruqi thinks many of the false stories or half-truths have “been a staple of our literary history texts for scores of years”. Pedagogical texts created under “colonial-imperial agenda” such as material produced by Fort William College were not literary texts but our literary historians not only treat them as literature, but also insist that those works marked the beginning of modern Urdu prose. Similarly, the concept of Lucknow School and Delhi School too is misconstrued and it all began with Abdus Salam Nadvi’s Shearul Hind (1925).
There are other misconceptions that Faruqi has tried to remove and reading only the full text can make one see what he means by appealing for a “proper history of Urdu literature”.
Published in Dawn, February 3rd, 2020
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