The author
is a Professor in Urdu at the Center of Indian Languages, Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi. He has written 70 books and is an Urdu playwright and
literary critic. Literature
is often described as he conscience of a nation. It mirrors the finer
sensibility of a people and denotes their intimate responses to the everyday
challenges of national life. Hence the cultural ethos of a community is perhaps
most faithfully represented in literature, particularly poetry. Indian Muslims have always been such
an integral part of the nation, that it will be nearly impossible to identify
their distinct role without considering the whole gamut of the cultural
heritage. Practically in all modern Indian languages, their role has been quite
significant for one cannot discuss Bengali without Nazrul Islam, or Punjabi
without Waris Shah or Kashmiri without Habba Khatoon, or Awadhi without Jaisi
or Brij Bhasha without Rahiman or Tamil without Abdur Rahman or Malayalam
without K T Mohammad or, for that matter Indian literature without Ghalib ? the
list is endless. But let?s start from the beginning.
Islam came to India in the 8th century and the first Muslims who
arrived were the Arabs who landed in Kerala as traders and were warmly received
by the Zomorin. Undoubtedly Indo-Arab relations go much further back than the
advent of Islam. But the new religion brought by Prophet Mohammad emphasized
mono-theism with great vigor and, as a corollary advocated and to a great
extent, practiced equality among men of different race, colour and social
strata. This message of equality attracted a large number of converts and it
soon spread to other parts of the land. The second major contact developed in
Sind-not as traders but as conquerors for here Mohammad Bin Qasim, an Arab lad
of 14 years conquered a part of Sind in 712 AD as a reprisal to the looting of
a ship of Arab pilgrims by Raja Dahir of Sind. This contact, though political
had a cultural impact and it was to this that the Sindhi language and
literature owe their origin. To this day, Sindhi is written in a modified
Arabic script and bears a strong component of Arab and Islamic influence in the
tone and tenor of its poetry. And it was here that Abdul Latif
Bhitai composed his songs of mystic devotion and human love. A new era had
already began- the era of cosmopolitan mystic vision. Undoubtedly mysticism is no monopoly
of Islam but in the centuries that followed, several groups of Muslim mystics
so swarmed over parts of North India that mysticism began to acquire as a
Muslim face. Till today, Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti who came from Iraq in the 12th
century to settle down in Ajmer as a lonely immigrant is held in high esteem
both by Hindus and Muslims and the compositions of one of his disciples, Baba
Farid, form -part of the holy book
of the Sikhs ? the Guru Granth Sahib. Both of them emphasized the concept of
the equality of man and sang of man?s total submergence in the divine existence
of God Almighty. The idea caught on and spread with speed and alacrity to
practically all the dialects and languages of the land, and assumed different
shapes and forms. One of these was that of allegory and
symbolism. Human existence was symbolized as a woman in love who has been
unwittingly separated from her beloved and consequently sings the songs of
separation form her divine love and thirsts for re-union. Hence, the poet- or
human existence ? was portrayed as a woman in love while God was taken to be
the separated husband. This also took the form of Bara-masa,
(Twelve months) in which the damsel describes the charms of every season,
month by month, and implores her beloved to take pity on her and to join her in
enjoying the seasonal blessings.
The first available Bara-masa was written by Addiman, who is believed to
be a convert to Islam named Abdur Rahman. He belonged perhaps to the area
between the North West Frontier Province (NWFP)and Sind in the 12th
century, according to Hazari Prasad Dwivedi and Vishwanath Tripathi, the first
editor of the treatise, Sandesh Rasak and this happens to be the first
literary work traceable in Awhat, the language deemed the precursor of
the present Hindi and Urdu. This marks the great beginning in
practically all-modern Indian languages. The mystic era had begun. The famous
Indian historian Dr. Tara Chand has traced the origin and development of the
Bhakti movement in the south and its spreading in the north to the impact of
Islam ? and Muslim poets and saints played a very significant part therein. In Hindi, for instance even before
the advent of the four recognized categories of Bhakti poetry ? Gyana-Kshri,
Prem Margi Sufi, Ram Bhakti and Krishna Bhakti , the emergence of Amir Khusrau was noticeable . Though mainly a
Persian poet, born in Patiali (Uttar Pradesh) or, according to some scholars,
in Delhi Khusrau was a devout mystic and
disciple of the Sufi saint Hazrat Nizamuddin Auslia of Delhi, and his
bridal songs, riddles and stray couplets mark the beginning of poetry in a
mixed language with an amalgam of Khari Boli grammatical syntax and a
sprinkling of Turkish, Persian and Arabic words. He sings praises of his
motherland and mixes with the common man of his times so as to give unhampered
expression to his feelings with exuberance and spontaneity. Later on Kabir (whom several scholars
consider Muslim) and his followers wrote poetry of iconoclastic humanism and
robust commonsense in the Gyana-Kshri and Nirgun Bhakti which are similar in
not worshipping idols and believing in the non-material existence of God. Syed
Mohammad Jaisi?s Padmavat, on the other hand, was the allegorical and
anecdotal exposition of man?s quest for Divine Beauty, and of self-abnegation
in the process, as narrated
in the form of Alauddin Khiliji?s abortive attempt to conquer Padmini, who
burns herself to death and escapes surrender. And the followers of Jaisi?s
philosophy and diction were many, who adorn the ranks of Prem Margi Sufi poets,
including Mulla Daud, Qutban and Manjhan. Then came the Krishna Bhaktas and
these also include a number of Muslim poets. Sri Krishna has often been
symbolized as the romantic embodiment of divine existence and not only in Brij Bhasha
Hindi poetry of the 16th century but also in Urdu poetry of the 20th
century. Poets like Maulana Hasrat Mohani took pride in proclaiming himself a
Krishna Bhakt, Hence the continuing tradition from Ras Khan (the famous Brij
Bhasha poet) to Hasrat Mohani. Of course, Riti Kal of Brij
Bhasha Hindi poetry abounds in Muslim names and these includes some very
distinguished poets, like Akbar?s Minister Abdur Rahim Khan Khanan whose dohas
are exemplary. Another branch of the Khari Boli
developed as Urdu literature, which claims Amir Khusrau as the common ancestor
and extends its frontiers to Gujarat and Deccan (mainly parts of Andhra
Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra), in the form of Gujri and Deccani. In these
literary traditions, too, Indian Muslims played a significant, even
predominating, role. In Gujarat, saint poets like Mahmud Daryai, Miranji, Janam
and Khub Mohammad Chishti enriched the allegorical mystic tradition while in
far off Deccan, first under the Bahmani Kingdom and later on under the Bijapur,
Golconda and Ahmadnagar Kingdoms, a whole corpus of literary writings developed
with Muslim authorship. Even prose pieces in Deccani like sab
Ras of Wajhi (of Golconda) were written and acclaimed. Wajhi?s is a perfect
allegory with Beauty, Reason and Heart as symbolic characters and, according to
some, draws heavily from a Persian mystic?s work and, according to others from Prabhad
Chandra Uday, an Indian classic. Earlier, a Muslim saint-disciple of Nizamuddin Aulia of Delhi, living
in Gulbarga (Karnataka) had written copiously in prose and
poetry for propagating his humanistic teachings, bearing close resemblances
with Hindu mystic thought. In Bijapur and Golconda kings,
saints, courtiers and itinerant scholars and poets, all made their contribution
in making an indigenous language rich. These included the Muslim ruling monarch
Quli Qutub Shah, the first Urdu poet with a regular collection and poets like
Nizami, Nusrati, Ibn-Inishati, Ghannasi, Hashmi and a host of prose-stylists
like Burhanuddin Janam, Aminuddin Aala, Miran Yakub and others. That their
writings are enriched by their cultural environs is beyond doubt as they sought
to achieve a blend of cosmopolitan elements with the indigenous traditions. The development of Urdu language and
literature in the north began rather late but the imprint of Indian Muslims on
it is so unmistakable that it has been wrongly identified with them though a
galaxy of non-Muslim Urdu writers adorn the pages of literary history. Urdu literature in the north flourished
mainly in the 18th and 19th centuries in Delhi , Uttar
Pradesh and Bihar where masnavi writers like Afzal, Mir, Mir Asar and Mir Hasan continued to enrich
and extend the tradition of allegorical and non-allegorical romantic poetic
tales and started writing ghazals in Urdu, thus combining earthly
romance with deeper metaphysical thought pattern. Of course, Muslim poets played an important part in giving
shape to this new idiom, which heralded a new cultural climate ? the climate of
secularism, cosmopolitanism and urban sophistication. The stalwarts included Mir Taqi Mir
and Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib in Delhi whose Catholicism and free-thinking
earned for them an eternal place in the hearts of millions; Agha Hasan Amanat?s
Inder sabha in 1846 attempted an amalgam of Hindu mythology with Awadh
culture and ushered in a new era in Indian drama; Mir Anis? religious epics on
the battle of Karbala gave its Arab characters local habitation and an Indian
look the inimitable Nazeer Akbarabadi of Agra identified himself with the
common man and wrote poems on everyday subjects like bread, water melons and
the rainy season. Urdu literature by itself stands
witness to the involvement and identification of Indian Muslims with the Indian
ethos. Urdu literature particularly the ghazal, gave tyrical expression
to the agony and ecstasy of the national scene throughout the ages. Of course,
non-Muslim writers participated equally in the process but any literature can
be justly proud of poets like Mir, Ghalib, Iqbala and Josh Malihabadi; fiction
writers and movelists like Nazeer Ahmed, Mirza Mohammad Hadi Ruswa, Abdul
Haleem Sharar, Sajjad Yaldram, and in our own times, Qurratulain Hyder, Ismat
Chughtai, Jilani Bano, Hayatullah Ansari and Khwaja Ahmed Abbas; prose writers
like Abul Kalam Azad, Qazi Abdul Ghaffar and Rashid Ahmed Siddiqi; and
dramatists like Agha Hasan Amanat, Agha Hashr, Imtiaz Ali Taj and Mohammad
Mujib. The whole galaxy of progressive writers who lit the fire for the
independence struggle and stormed the citadel of conservatism and obscurantism
comprises of names like Faiz, Majaz, Makhdoom Mohiuddin , Parvez Shahidi, Ali
Sardar Jafri, Jan Nisar Akhtar, Sahir Ludhianvi, Kaifi Azmi and Majrooh
Sultuanpuri. No history of Indian literature can be complete without mentioning
the literary and artistic sensibility brought about by Urdu poets and
literatures. Every one of them deserves a whole chapter for his or her
achievements. K.A. Abbas, for instance, left an indelible mark not only as a
storywriter or a novelist but also as a distinguished filmmaker and outstanding
journalists. Iqbal by his philosophy of Self
aroused the Asian nations from their long slumber and gave them the message of
self-reliance and dignity. His clarion call for the emancipation of the subject
nations of the Orient added a new dimension to contemporary literature.
Similarly Josh Malihabadi?s revolutionary poetry and Abul Kalam Azad?s fiery
writings made the struggle for national independence an article of faith and
extended the frontiers of literary consciousness. In Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the
cradles of Urdu and Hindi Khari Boli literatures the galaxy of great names in
both poety and prose include Rasikh, Shad, Hasrat Mohani, Jigar, Josh and
innumerable others. Yet the Indian Muslims contribution to folk literature of
the area should not be overlooked. In local dialects as well as in Khari Boli
folk idiom. Muslim writers and composers have made their mark in Kajri,
Laoni and other popular folk forms. Recently, Azhar Husain Faruqi?s Uttar
Pradesh ke lok geet gives a long list of Muslim ?composers? and these
represent only a portion of such contribution. But the contribution of Indian
Muslims was by no means restricted only to Urdu literature. In Punjab
literature, for instance, mystics and saints left their own indelible marks.
Waris Shah and Bulhe Shah composed classics in the 18th century,
which are yet to be surpassed in excellence and acceptability. Even when the
subcontinent was divided into two hostile countries, India and Pakistan and the
border state of Punjab, the land of five rivers, was itself partitioned, the
gathering of Punjab soldiers on both sides of the frontier could be seen
listening to or reciting Waris Shah?s epic Heer Ranjha jointly in the
dead of night. Further North, Kashmiri literature also boasts
of its Indian Muslim authors, the greatest of them being, perhaps, Habba
Khatoon, a plain peasant girl wedded to a ruling monarch and sharing his
destiny in glory and Suffering.
Then comes Mahjur, who sang songs of liberty and social justice and enthused
Kashmiris to wrest their rights with courage and determination. Of course,
these two names are only representative of dozens of other such writers and
poets. Further east, the development of
Bengali literature, according to some literary historians, owes much to the
patronage of Muslim kings of Bengal. Since its very inception, Muslim poets and
writers have been in the vanguard of Bengali literature but the stature of Qazi
Nazrul Islam remains unsurpassed. His poetic talent came to a sudden flowering
when lying in a trench in a 21-day ambush during the Second World War and he
broke into revolutionary song. Nazrul stands next to Tagore in his appeal and
artistic excellence and his poetry inspired millions of Bengali-speaking people
of India and Bangladesh in their struggle for independence. In fact, Nazrul
inspired poets of all the modern Indian languages and provided a model for Josh
Mahilabadi in Urdu, Subhramaniam Bharati in Tamil, Vallathal in Malayalam and
Dinkar in Hindi. Bengali literature can boast of
other Muslim writers and ?composers?, among them the outstanding literary
critic, Kazi Abdul Wudood, Communist writer and intellectual Muzaffar Ahmad and
of course, the innumerable Muslim singers and minstrel poets who roam the
countryside and compose and sing Baul poetry. Further down, we come across Oriya in
which Mughal tamasha, a distinct form of folk drama, owes its origin
mainly to Muslim writers. In Tamil, Abdur Rahman is still considered a major
poet. In the sister languages of Kannada and Telugu, the present writer has
limited information but the first Urdu poet with a regular poetic collection,
the Golconda king, Quli Qutub Shah was also credited to be a Telugu poet. In
Marathi, and Gujarati too, Muslim writers made their mark while in Malayalam,
the stories and novels of K T Mohammad gained distinction. This is only a cursory outline of the
Muslim contribution to the various and modern Indian languages and literatures.
But merely listing names of Muslim poets and writers, does not do justice to
their role nor does it evaluate the true nature, extend and depth of their
impact. This impact was not restricted only to Muslim writers but percolated to
all levels and all kinds of writers irrespective of their religious fidelities. What does this impact really mean in
terms of the literary structure of these languages? Firstly, it must be appreciated that
the word Muslim denotes a much wider cultural domain than Islam. Islam was a
set of beliefs but Muslims of different countries, though adhering to these
common beliefs, developed their own cultural identities in conjunction with
their indigenous environments. Islam for instance, forbids, or at least
discourages all arts, frowns on the practice of music, dance and sculpture and
deprecates painting, yet in all these fields Indian Muslims, and devout Muslims
at that, earned distinction. It has often been the case that the artistic
talent of Muslims in the forbidden arts found expression either in permitted
media (for example, the expression of painting talent in calligraphy or of
sculpture in the carving of Quranic verses on the Qutub Minar) or in the
innovative transfer of these talents to other media. Hence the Muslim
contribution to literature and poetry should be taken in this context, which in
some measure, explains the popularity enjoyed by poetry among Muslims in
general so that couplets form part of ordinary everyday conversation. The second important factor that
should be noted is that this contribution was basically secular and
cosmopolitan in character. Secular ? because Muslim poets and men of letters
could not identify themselves with Hindu religious or devotional poetry
(barring instances where it had been raised to mystical or allegorical heights)
and hence their writings, both in poetry and prose, opened the gates of secular
and materialist subjects. What sustained this new poetic idiom was its
cosmopolitanism. To bracket this cosmopolitanism with
alien influences would be erroneous. The fact remains that the Turco-Iranian
cultural tradition was, in the Dark Ages, the predominant world tradition.
Europe was still to emerge as the new arbiter of human destiny and Arabs were
dispensing the knowledge acquired from Greek sources, through translations. The
Turco-Iranian tradition had absorbed this corpus of knowledge and had become
its champion in Asia and the Middle East. Hence, the adoption, or acceptance of
these Turco-Iranian influences meant imbibing the impact of the then pervading
world culture. Thirdly, it should also be borne in
mind that Muslim contact was not primarily through administrators or rulers but
mainly through traders (who purchased handicrafts and other manufactured goods
and materials from the Indian towns or trade centres and sold them in Central
Asian and West Asian courts and markets), Sufi saints, scholars and mercenary
soldiers. Consequently, the adoption of these influences was the acceptance of
world cultural norms and values of that period. The literary exchanges between
Turco-Iranian traditions and modern Indian languages were therefore a part of
this transaction, which can be compared to the impact of the English language
and literature on various Indian languages today. The Indian Muslim writer?s
contribution to various modern Indian languages and literatures, therefore, is
two-fold: first in creating a secular and cosmopolitan literary idiom, and
second in forging a new syntactical conciseness and close-knit poetic and
literary expression mainly brought about as part of this Turco-Iranian impact. Though very close to Sanskrit, old
Persian had taken a different syntactical line of development. To discuss in
detail the nature of the syntactical influences of the Turco-Persian traditions
on the modern Indian languages is beyond the scope of this essay but the use of
izafat (conjunctional lower apostrophe) alone gave much greater
compactness and conciseness to expression. The same holds good in the case of
symbols- and non-religious and non-mythical symbols at that. The Indian Muslim
writers in many cases revolutionized the literary idiom by introducing new
symbols or by communicating a different conceptual system through old and
familiar images and symbols. Even Nazrul Islam, who is greatly influenced by
Hindu mythological symbols, introduced several new dimensions to them and
introduced a series of symbols from the Turco-Iranian tradition. The system of symbolism was used in a
peculiar way by the ghazal, a poetic genre born in Arabic as an introductory
digressive part of Qasida (eulogy) poetry which came to flowering in Persia as
a separate form with scattered self-contained couplets bound together by common
rhyme and ending with a subjective tone and symbolic expression of its own.
Even though the ghazal symbols were not altogether indigenous, its popularity
in practically all the modern Indian languages is due to its compact
subjectivity and generalised symbolism, which covers at once different fields
of human activity. For instance, a
ghazal couplet, though apparently addressed to one?s beloved can ? thanks to
the prevailing generality of ghazal symbols ? be recited as a political
statement. Hence, the ghazal as poetic form remains popular in Hindi, Marathi,
Gujarati, Punjabi, Bengali and several other languages. Not exclusively a
contribution of Muslims alone, it has however a Muslim connexion. This clearly shows that the Muslim
contribution to Indian languages and literatures has been a source of
strengthening its cosmopolitan links and giving it a modern, secular and
worldly look. In fact, this literary contribution was a part of the composite
culture, which brought the diverse religious and regional identities together
and tried to develop it into a national culture. Unfortunately, the process was
rudely interrupted by a long spell of British rule which erected various
barriers between the various components and constituents of this composite
cultural ethos and the final act of the country?s partition undermined the very
basis of this emerging synthesis. In the post-Independence period, Urdu
has suffered the greatest setback with total exile from most of the north
Indian states and this exile covers schools, libraries, government offices and
courts. Yet mushairas are held in almost every important town and attract large
crowds. ghazal concerts are a craze and immediate commercial success. Of late,
however, Urdu has been accorded the status of the second official language in
Bihar and UP and about ten Urdu Academies and a Bureau for Promotion of Urdu
have been set up in several states and at the centre. While Muslim writers are among the
prominent literary authors of various Indian languages, in many cases, a sense
of alienation separates them from their fellow writers. Recurrent communal
Hindu-Muslim riots breed extremists on both ends and create distrust and
insecurity. Hence the psyche of the Indian Muslim writer, whether writing in
Urdu or Malayalam or Marathi, experiences an ordeal different from his
compatriots. Add to this, the rise of fundamentalism,
the eleven year rule of Pakistani military dictators and the reign of orthodox
papacy of Imam Khomeini of Iran, which have been posing serious threats to
liberalism and rationalism to Muslims everywhere in the world ? and we get a
complete, or a near complete, picture of the context an average Indian Muslim
writer finds himself in. Yet there is a silver lining to this
dismal panorama. A number of Indian Muslim writers view their own preservation
as well as that of the composite culture evolved through centuries of communion
as a part of the defence of democratic values in our land. This crusade cannot
be waged and won in isolation but with wider, much wider, cooperation and
support of the people. And it is for this that writers, and among them Muslim
writers too, though it fit to break the conventional framework of communication
media and reach the common man through street theatre. Habib Tanvir attempted
to mobilize the actual man in the street and, without any commercialized
make-up, express through him the woes and sufferings of a suffocated society.
Safdar Hashmi took street theatre to the masses even more vigorously and
addressed them on burning topics directly connected with their own lives. For
the temerity of criticizing the Establishment he paid the price with his own
life, and symbolized the participation and involvement of Indian Muslims in the
struggle of making India a safer and a better place to live and in preserving
the highest values of a composite culture evolved during centuries of our
history. |