The following excerpt is taken from the chapter, “Urdu as the Language of Love”

THE ghazal, not necessarily the explicitly erotic version associated with Lucknow, but the whole genre in general, contributed most to the image of Urdu as an amorous and erotic language.

Themes such as romantic love, separation, fidelity on the part of the lover, indifference, and fickleness on the part of thebeloved were reiterated throughout the 300 years tradition, dating at least from Vali Dakkani (1667-1707) (even if the earlier one is not part of the common people’s consciousness) of the Urdu ghazal.

The ghazal had a special place in the lives of educated people — both Hindus and Muslims — in North India. Even in other parts of India — Hyderabad, Murshidabad, Mysore, Lahore, etcetera — the elite enjoyed the ghazal as a distinctive cultural artifact.It was customary for educated, urban men to learn several hundred couplets of the masters of the Urdu ghazal.

These would be recited to make the conversation interesting. By the 1920s, when Modern Hindi had overtaken Urdu as the language of printing in North India, Urdu poetry would appear in journals of Hindi. Moreover, “collections of popular ghazals were printed more often in Devanagari than in the Perso-Arabic script, thus transmitting the taste for Urdu poetry to the wider public of new Hindi literates” (Orsini 2002: 49-50).

Urdu couplets featured in popular theatre and evoked a well-known and experienced response of tenderness, romance and the appreciation of the aesthetic in literature and life (Orsini 2002: 50). Mushairas, called kavi sammelans in Hindi, were common and are held even now in the South Asia diaspora settled in the United States and Europe, where Urdu poets are welcomed and people come to listen to them and enjoy the ghazal as well as the more recent genres of poetry.

People played baet bazi in which one person recited a couplet and the other player had to recite a couplet in response, beginning with the last sound (denoted by the letter of the Urdu alphabet) of the last line. This went on till one of the parties ran out of couplets.

This has changed into antakshari in Hindi where film songs, instead of the classical works of the Urdu poets, are used.However, although even if the official language of the songs in India is said to be Hindi, it is closer to the Urdu end of the linguistic spectrum than Sanskritised Hindi. In any case, the Hindi movie is strongly influenced by the amorous orientation of Nawabi Lucknow and, therefore, reminiscent of the link between Urdu and the life of love (Kesavan 1994: 255-256) — a point which will be taken up in more detail later.

Very often, couplet after couplet, by the great masters, was recited only for the pleasure of it. Such an evening and thespecial romantic atmosphere it created is described by E.M. Forster in his novel A Passage to India (1924) as follows:

“They listened, delighted for they took the public view of poetry, not the private which obtains in England. It never bored them to hear words, words; they breathed them with the cool night air never stopping to analyse; the name of the poet, Hafiz, Hali, Iqbal, was sufficient guarantee.” (Forster 1924: 38)

This kind of enthusiasm for poetry was common. Every student of Aligarh Muslim University who has written memoirs hasattested to it. And books of madrassa students, and even sermons, are studded with the couplets of the ghazal which are obviously amorous and sometimes erotic (Nadvi 2007). The highest number of publications of printed books, pamphlets, monographs, etcetera, during British India used to be either on literary or religious themes (Annexure A of Chapter 12).

Sometimes the one theme, and sometimes the other, predominated. In short, printing flooded the market with the Urdu ghazal and reinforced the impression that Urdu was the language of love. Since the ghazal mentioned love and beauty repeatedly, Urdu itself came to be associated with romance and eroticism in the public mind.

This image proved to be harmful for Urdu during the Urdu-Hindi controversy when some critics (such as Bharatendureferred to earlier) said that they did not want their children to learn Urdu as, being taught through its literature, it would spoil them. This criticism is still repeated by the partisans of the indigenous languages of Pakistan who claim that Urdu, beingnurtured in the decadent and effete culture of the nawabs of India, is a decadent language.

However, whatever critics might say, Urdu couplets and inscriptions, written on the pattern of the ghazal by unknown and often unaccomplished poets, are used widely to decorate trucks in Pakistan. They are chosen by the driver, the painter and sometimes by the owner of the truck, generally out of scrapbooks kept for this purpose by painters.

Out of all types of inscriptions on different themes — religion, fatalism, love for the mother, life of the driver, the truck itself, blessings and good wishes — romantic inscriptions are found on 56 per cent trucks from the Punjab; 50 per cent from the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa; 37 per cent from Sindh; 59 per cent from Balochistan and 51 per cent from Gilgit-Baltistan and the Azad Jammu Kashmir area. At 95 per cent confidence level, there is no significant difference between these different regions of Pakistan in the occurrence of romantic inscriptions on the backs of trucks (Rahman 2010: 290).