SHAMS-UR-RAHMAN FAROOQI had it right when he pointed out the fact that Urdu literature created in the South India, especially Deccan and Gujarat, was intentionally ignored and stifled by the critics from the North India.
Despite the fact that Urdu’s earliest literary pieces were written in Deccan (which literally means ‘south’ and which historically included Gujarat) the 18th- and 19th-century critics and literary historians of Urdu, most of whom were from the North, tried to downplay south’s pioneering role. In fact, some writers from the North India ridiculed the early Urdu poetry created in Deccan and, says Farooqi, Mir Taqi Mir in his Nikaat-ush-Shuara ignored the entire Urdu literature created in Deccan during a span of about 350 years by saying in a derisive way that “not even a single poet from the South has been able to compose a couplet wherein both the lines were interconnected”.
Muhammad Hussain Azad in his Aab-i-Hayaat quotes an Urdu couplet by a poet from Deccan’s early era and sarcastically says “if this is poetry, then Punjab, too, has produced dozens of poets”, adds Farooqi, so even Punjab was marginalised by the critics and historians of Urdu belonging to the North. Even Jameel Jalibi tried to prove that Vali Deccani died much later than commonly believed, just to prove that Deccani’s poetry was much more influenced by Delhi’s literary environment and parlance rather than Deccan’s, laments Farooqi.
We often forget the fact that Urdu literature’s earliest pieces were created in South India in the 15th century, though the Urdu language had originated from the local dialects spoken in and around Northern city of Delhi in the 12th and 13th centuries. Masnavi Kadam Rao Padam Rao, the earliest known piece of Urdu poetry, was created by Fakhr Deen Nizami, a poet from Deccan, between 1430 and 1435, as wrote Jameel Jalibi.
Muhammad Hussain Azad surmised that Vali Deccani was the ‘Adam’ or the progenitor of Urdu poetry. But Moulvi Abdul Haq pushed the history further back by publishing a paper in 1922 on a manuscript of Quli Qutb Shah’s divan, composed entirely in Urdu, consisting of some 50,000 couplets. So Abdul Haq proved that Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, and not Vali Deccani, was Urdu’s first poet to have composed an entire divan in Urdu on the lines of Persian divans that were arranged alphabetically according to ‘radeef’ (or the word/s repeated after the rhyming word).
Sultan Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah was the fifth ruler of Golconda (also spelt Golkonda), the Qutb Shahi dynasty in Deccan, South India. He was fond of arts and literature and is admired for his architectural penchant that had resulted in the foundation of a new city named Hyderabad and construction of many monuments, including the famous ‘Char Minar’. He was a poet of Urdu, Persian and Telugu, as Telugu was his native tongue. Quli Qutb Shah was born in Golconda in 1565 and was enthroned in 1580. He died in 1611.
The manuscript of Quli Qutb Shah’s divan that Moulvi Abdul Haq worked on was housed at Asifia Kutub Khana, Hyderabad (Deccan). Later on, it went missing and its editing and publishing could not take place. But Salar Jang Museum at Hyderabad (Deccan) held two more manuscripts and Dr Mohiuddin Qadri Zor worked on them. He edited and published Kulliyaat or complete works of Quli Qutb Shah’s. Dr Sayyada Jafer, too, compiled and published Kulliyaat-i-Quli Qutb Shah.
But it is not easy to understand Quli Qutb Shah’s poetry, considering the vocabulary he uses, which at times sounds archaic or obsolete. Author dictionaries or glossaries are sometimes an answer to such problems. But preparing author dictionary of a Deccani poet may be a challenging one because of a number of factors. The challenge that Quli Qutb Shah’s Urdu poetry –and poetry of many other Urdu poets from Deccan and Gujarat — poses is that much of their vocabulary is laden with the words borrowed from local languages such as Telegu, Gujarati and Marathi. Also, some of the Urdu or Persian or Arabic words used have a localised pronunciation, written with a peculiar local orthography, much different from the way written elsewhere, which makes them much more difficult to recognise and read correctly. Many couplets may sound rendered out of metre if not read out carefully. This has misled even some scholars, let alone common readers.
So the task taken up by Nisar Ahmed, a researcher from Hyderabad (Sindh), was not easy: preparing an author dictionary of Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah’s Urdu poetry. But he met the challenge and was awarded a PhD for it by Sindh University, Jamshoro. Now the dictionary, titled Farhang-i-Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah, enlisting and explaining words and phrases used by Quli Qutb Shah in his Urdu poetry, has been published by Idara-i-Yadgar-i-Ghalib, Karachi. The work quotes couplets with the words as citation and would be very helpful for the students and scholars of Urdu’s Deccani literature.
Dr Nisar Ahmed teaches Urdu at Government Degree College, Hyderabad, (Sindh).
Published in Dawn, October 12th, 2020
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