a Sat-saī in the style of Bihāri-Lāl called Sapta-satika and several
other works. He and Jawān worked together at the Singhāsan
Battīsī (1801), a redaction in mixed Urdū and Hindī (Dēvanāgarī
character) of a famous collection of legends relating the prowess of
King Vikramāditya; and he also aided the latter author in the
production of the Sakuntalā Nāṭak. Maz̤har ʽAli Wilā was his collaborator
in the Baitāl Pachīsī, a collection of stories similar in many
respects to the Singhāsan Battīsī, and also in mixed Urdū-Hindī;
and he aided Wilā in the preparation in Urdū of the Story of Mādhōnal,
a romance originally composed in Braj-bhāshā by Mōtī Rām.
The works of these authors, though compiled and published under the superintendence of Dr Gilchrist, Captain Abraham Lockett, Professor J. W. Taylor, Dr W. Hunter and other European officers of the college of Fort William, and originally intended for the instruction of the Company’s officers in the vernacular, are essentially Indian in taste and style, and, until superseded by the more recent developments of literature noticed below, enjoyed a very wide reputation and popularity. They may, indeed, be said to have set the standard of prose composition in Urdū and Hindī, and for the first half of the 19th century their influence in this respect continued almost unchallenged. Side by side with them, among the Musalmān population of northern India, another almost contemporaneous impulse did much for the expansion of the Urdū language, and, like the work of the Vaishnava reformers in moulding literary Hindī, gave an impetus to composition which might otherwise have been lacking. This was the reform in Islam led by Sayyid Ahmad[1] and his followers. In all Eastern countries religion is the first and chief subject of literary production; and the controversies which the new preaching aroused in India at once afforded abundant material for authorship in Urdū, and interested deeply the people to whom the works were addressed.
Sayyid Aḥmad was born in 1782, and received his early education at Delhi; his instructors were two learned Muslims, Shāh ʽAbdul-ʽAzīz, author of a celebrated commentary on the Qurʽān (the Tafsīr-i ʽAzīziyyah), and his brother ʽAbdu-l-Qādir, the writer of the first translation of the holy volume into Urdū. Under their guidance Sayyid Aḥmad embraced the doctrines of the Wahhābīs, a sect whose preaching appears at this time to have first reached India. He gathered round him a large number of fervent disciples, among others Ismāʽīl Ḥājī, nephew of ʽAbdu-lʽAzīz and ʽAbdu-l-Qādir, the chief author of the sect. After a course of preaching and apostleship at Delhi, Sayyid Aḥmad set out in 1820 for Calcutta, attended by numerous adherents. Thence in 1822 he started on a pilgrimage to Mecca, whence he went to Constantinople, and was there received with distinction and gained many disciples. He travelled for nearly six years in Turkey and Arabia, and then returned to Delhi. The religious degradation and coldness which he found in his native country strongly impressed him after his sojourn in lands where the life of Islām is stronger, and he and his disciples established a propaganda throughout northern India, reprobating the superstitions which had crept into the faith from contact with Hindus, and preaching a jihād or holy war against the Sikhs. In 1828 he started for Peshāwar, attended by, it is said, upwards of 100,000 Indians, and accompanied by his chief followers, Ḥājī Ismāʽīl and ʽAbdu-l-Ḥayy. He was furnished with means by a general subscription in northern India, and by several Muhammadan princes who had embraced his doctrines. At the beginning of 1829 he declared war against the Sikhs, and in the course of time made himself master of Peshāwar. The Afghāns, however, with whom he had allied himself in the contest, were soon disgusted by the rigour of his creed, and deserted him and his cause. He fled across the Indus and took refuge in the mountains of Pakhlī and Dhamtōr, where in 1831 he encountered a detachment of Sikhs under the command of Shēr Singh, and in the combat he and Ḥājī Ismaʽīl were slain. His sect is, however, by no means extinct; the Wahhābī doctrines have continued to gain ground in India, and to give rise to much controversial writing, down to our own day.
The translation of the Quran by ʽAbdu-l-Qādir was finished in 1803, and first published by Sayyid ʽAbdullāh, a fervent disciple of Sayyid Aḥmad, at Hūghlī in 1829. The Tambīhu-l-ghāfilīn, or “Awakener of the Heedless,” a work in Persian by Sayyid Aḥmad, was rendered into Urdū by ʽAbdullāh, and published at the same press in 1830. Hājī Ismāʽīl was the author of a treatise in Urdū entitled Taqwiyatu-l-Īmān (“Confirmation of the Faith”), which had great vogue among the following of the Sayyid. Other works by the disciples of the Tarīqah-e Muḥammadiyyah (as the new preaching was called) are the Targhīb-i Jihād (“Incitation to Holy War”), Hidāyatu-l-Mūminīn (“Guide of the Believers”), Mūẓiḥu-l-Kabāir wa-l-Bidʽah (“Exposition of Mortal Sins and Heresy”), Naṣlhatu-l-Muslimīn (“Admonition to Muslims”), and the Mi’at Masāil, or “Hundred Questions.”
Printing was first used for vernacular works by the College Press at Fort William, at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, and all the compositions prepared for Dr Gilchrist and his successors which have been mentioned were thus given to the public. But the expense of this method of reproduction long precluded its extensive use in India, and movable types, though well suited for alphabets derived from the Sanskrit, were not equally applicable to the flowing and graceful characters of Persian. Lithography was introduced about 1837, when the first press was set up at Delhi, and immediately gave a powerful stimulus to the multiplication of literature, both original and editions of older works. In 1832 the vernaculars were substituted for Persian as the official language of the courts and the acts of the legislature, and this at once led to the transfer to the former of a mass of technical and forensic terms which had previously been only to a limited extent in popular use. Thirdly, the spread of education in subjects of Western learning, for which text-books (many of them translations from English) were required, not only greatly enlarged the vocabulary of the common speech, but led by degrees to the use of a simpler and more direct style, and the abandonment wholesale of the florid and artificial ornament which was the legacy of the Persian literature upon which Urdū prose had at first modelled itself. Lastly, the establishment of a vernacular newspaper press, which lithography had rendered possible, placed within the reach of a continually widening public the means of becoming acquainted with new ideas in every department of culture, and practised the writers who contributed to it in the art of wielding their mother-tongue with effect in its application to European themes.
All these revolutionary agencies were at work, though in a tentative and limited fashion, when the great change, following on the Mutiny of 1857, of the transfer of the government of India from the Company to the Crown inaugurated a new era. Since 1860 their operation has become extremely rapid and far-reaching. The use of lithography both for Urdū and Hindī annually gives birth to hundreds of works. The extension of education through both public and private agency has created an immense mass of school-books, and the spread of instruction in English and the activity of translators have filled the vernaculars with a multitude of new words drawn from that language. The newspaper press, in Urdū and Hindī, now counts over two hundred journals, the majority issued in the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh and in the Punjab, but a few at Madras, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Bombay and Calcutta. Of this great body of literary production it is possible to speak only in general terms. Style and vocabulary are still in a somewhat fluid and unsettled condition, and the subjects treated are almost as various as they are in European literatures. Much, indeed, of the work produced has scarcely any claim to literary excellence, and in the crowd of writers we may content ourselves with mentioning only a few whose influence and authority make it probable that they will hereafter be known as leaders in the new culture.
One of the first effects of the new literary inspiration seemed to be the extinction of poetical composition as previously practised. With the deaths of Ẕauq (1854) and Ghālib (1869) of the Delhi school, and those of Anīs (1875) and Dabīr (1876) of Lucknow, the end of Urdū poetry appeared to have come. The new age was intensely practical and eager to engage in the race for material and political advancement, and had no time for sentiment, or taste for mystical conceits. Moreover, poetical composition in India, as in other Eastern countries, has always owed much to the patronage of courts and princes. The thrones of Delhi and Lucknow had passed away, and the new rulers showed little interest in this form of achievement. Only at Hyderabad in the Deccan, under the patronage of the Nizam, were laureates still honoured; the last of these, Mirzā Khān Dāgh (1831–1905), enjoyed a wide reputation as a graceful and eloquent master of the poetic art.
But prose and material prosperity did not succeed in monopolizing the genius of the people. The great movement of reform and liberalism in Islām led by Sir Sayyid Aḥmad Khān (1817–1898) found its bard in Sayyid Alṭāf Ḥusain of Pānipāṭ, poetically styled Ḥālī—an ambiguous nom-de-plume now generally taken in the sense of “modern,” or “up-to-date.” Ḥālī in his youth was a pupil of the famous Ghālib, whose life he has written and of whose writings he has published an able criticism. At the age of forty he came under the influence of Sir Sayyid Aḥmad Khān, and from that time devoted his great poetic gifts to the service of his co-religionists. He has published much verse, of which an interesting specimen will be found in the edition of his Rubāʽīs or quatrains (101 in number), with an English translation, by Mr G. E. Ward (Oxford, 1904); in this is included a famous poem addressed to his muse, setting forth his ideals in poetry—simplicity, avoidance of exaggeration and unreality, direct and emotional appeal to the heart, and above all sincerity. There can be no doubt that he has succeeded in becoming the leader of a new poetic school, which shows much vigour and promise.
Perhaps the most memorable of all Ḥālī’s compositions is his long poem in six-line stanzas (called musaddas) on “the flow and ebb of Islam” (1879), which has had an extraordinary influence in stimulating enthusiasm in the cause of progress among the Musalmāns of the north of India. In it he draws, in simple and direct but searching and eloquent language, a rapid sketch of the glories of Islam in the past, its principles and precepts, and the sources of its strength; and then turns to contrast with this picture the degradation and decay into which it had, when he wrote, fallen in Hindōstān. Never have the vices and shortcomings of a people been lashed by one of themselves with more vigorous denunciation, or with more earnestness of moral purpose. In his preface he
- ↑ To be carefully distinguished from the reformer of the same name who flourished half a century later.
