The 2nd Annual Shamsur Rahman Faruqi Memorial Lecture was recently delivered by the eminent literary scholar Francesca Orsini at the India Habitat Centre in Delhi. The lecture commemorates the towering scholarship of critic, novelist, editor, poet, literary historian and lexicographer Shamsur Rahman Faruqi whose influence on contemporary Urdu literature is vast and multi-dimensional.
Faruqi edited and published Shabkhoon, an avant garde literary magazine, for over 50 years. He was one of the leading harbingers and theorists of the rise of Modernism in Urdu literature. He published a four-volume study of the classical poet Mir Taqi Mir which established Mir as the greatest Urdu poet and also reacquainted us with our classical poetic heritage and mores which had been lost to us because of colonial disruptions and hegemony.
He published a five-volume study about Dastans and traditional Urdu dastangoi which helped revive the now universally popular contemporary form of storytelling and performance called Dastangoi. He presented to us the most brilliant interpretations of Ghalib and of other classical poets including Iqbal. His collections of short stories and his novel, written late in life, were both translated into English by him as The Sun That Rose From the Earth, and The Mirror of Beauty. The latter especially is today recognised as one of the most important works of fiction produced from India this century.
Professor Orsini’s lecture was preceded by the launch of a reprint of a gem of a book about Persian poetry, especially its Indian practitioners, who were particularly dear to Faruqi. His writings on the Indo-Persian style and tradition of poetry, known as ‘Sabk e Hindi’, were groundbreaking and are today part of the syllabi around the world.
A Renaissance man
As a high ranking civil servant, Faruqi was never formally associated with Urdu academia, but was awarded several honorary doctorates and lectured at many major Universities in India and abroad. Faruqi’s interests in matters academic, literary, historical, social, artistic were vast, but he was also passionate about thrillers, dogs, flowers, birds, tea, and tobacco and the lecture honours this Renaissance man of modern Indian letters. The inaugural lecture was delivered by renowned poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra who spoke on the poet Rahim Das.
Professor Orsini, Professor Emerita of Hindi and South Asian Literature at SOAS, University of London, chose to speak on the ‘Purab: A Multilingual Literary History,’ a subject that she has spent over two decades researching. A scholar of medieval and modern Urdu and Hindi, of Braj bhasha and Awadhi, as well as of Persian, her interest in the lecture was two-fold.
She alerted us to the importance of the region, an understudied area in the pre-colonial Indian past. In contrast to the arbitrarily driven boundaries of the British imperialists, and subsequently of the modern Indian state, the pre-colonial Indian regions of Awadh, Braj, Purab, Malwa, Dakan, were more than just administrative zones. They were defined by their linguistic, literary and ecological boundaries.
A town called Bilgram
In this case the Purab, or the area east of Lucknow, produced many renowned multilingual poets who wrote in Persian as well as Braj bhasha. They hailed from small towns and qasbas and could choose to express themselves in many literary forms and languages. Among them were Jayasi and Mulla Daud, who wrote romances which combined a very deep knowledge of Hindu scriptures and mythology, and deployed that towards spiritual pursuits.
She especially dwelled on the small town called Bilgram which produced generations of poets who knew Persian and also learnt Sanskrit or Braj, which was heavily influenced by the former and saw a major revival under the Mughals. Many of them such as Abdul Wahid Bilgrami, Barkatullah Shah Premi, Syed Nizamuddin wrote poetry in Hindavi, often suffused with Krishna Bhakti for which the Sufis had their own interpretation. Some of them wrote pathbreaking treatises on music.
Delhi’s adoption of Urdu/Rekhta
The question that professor Orsini posed towards the end of the lecture related to the rise of Urdu and its mysterious absence in north India before the 18th-century. How is it that while there were many forms and shades of Hindavi, and several poetic registers, there was virtually no poetry in Khari Boli, which forms the grammatical basis of modern Urdu and Hindi?
As answer to this literary conundrum which has long bamboozled literary historians, professor Orsini suggested a novel approach. Conventionally historians seek to explain this in terms of substitution, of Persian for Urdu, or of Braj for Hindi. However, in a multilingual literary culture, practices are often re-arranged rather than simply abandoned. She showed how the Qasba poets who were writing in Braj, Awadhi or other forms of Bhakha or Hindavi, adopted Urdu or Rekhta poetry once it became popular in Delhi in the 18th century.
Ironically as political power of the Mughals declined, their capital Delhi seems to have gained immense cultural prestige from the 18th century onwards. Since Urdu had become popular there it emanated across the country and poets around north India, long familiar with various non-Persian forms of poetic expression, quickly latched on to it while continuing their engagement with other dialects.
Braj was not abandoned but became more identified with music, and Awadhi and Bhojpuri became more markedly associated with performance forms at the Awadh court. Wajid Ali Shah’s interests in Thumri, Dadra, in the performance form called Inder Sabha and in tableaus such as Rahas continued the engagement with several literary cultures and streams. The current popularity of Qawwalis such as ‘Chhap Tilak’, ‘Aaj Rang Hai’ or ‘KanhaiyyaYaad Hai Kuchh Bhi Hamari’ is a vestige of that same multi lingual and multi cultural literary heritage which we are all heir of.
Faruqi’s most important legacy was to show the great expanse, variety and formative influence of the Indo-Muslim cultural landscape across history. He was the first to point out the deep influence of Sanskrit poetic practice on Urdu and on contemporary Persian culture in the 18th-century. Professor Orsini’s brilliant lecture threw further light on the great kaleidoscope that makes the Indian past.
Mahmood Farooqui is known for reviving Dastangoi as a performance form