In this introduction
Urdu literature is one of the great poetic traditions of the world. Urdu grew out of the mingling of the Hindavi speech of north India with the Persian of its Muslim rulers and the Turkic and Arabic of their armies — its very name comes from the Turkic word for a camp (ordu). Written in a modified Persian-Arabic script, it became from the eighteenth century the language of poetry, courtly culture and, later, Muslim identity across north India and the Deccan, and is today the national language of Pakistan and one of India’s scheduled languages, spoken and loved by over two hundred million people.
How this room is organised
The shelves below hold the poets and writers in order of birth, their books, and the forms and movements of Urdu literature. Start with the Ghazal: almost everything in classical Urdu poetry is built around it.
The classical age
The first great Urdu poets wrote in the Deccan, in the sultanates of Golconda and Bijapur; when the poet Walī Dakkanī came to Delhi in 1700, he showed the Persian-writing poets of the Mughal capital that their own spoken tongue — then called Rekhta, “scattered” or “mixed” — could carry the refinements of Persian poetry. Eighteenth-century Delhi, its empire collapsing under invasion and civil war, produced the first great master, Mir Taqi Mir, the poet of grief. The nineteenth century, the last age of the Mughal court before the catastrophe of 1857, produced Mirza Ghalib, whose ghazals and letters are the summit of Urdu literature.
Reform and nation
After 1857 Urdu writers turned to reform — Altāf Husain Hālī’s Musaddas lamented the decline of Islam; Sir Syed Ahmad Khan founded Aligarh — and to new forms: the nazm (a poem on a single theme), the novel, the essay. Muhammad Iqbal made Urdu and Persian poetry a call to the awakening of the self and of the Muslim world, and became the spiritual father of Pakistan.
The modern age
In 1936 the Progressive Writers' Movement brought Urdu writers into the struggle against colonialism, feudalism and religious obscurantism. Its poet was Faiz Ahmad Faiz, who fused the classical ghazal’s lover and beloved with the revolutionary and his cause. Its storytellers were the fearless Saadat Hasan Manto, chronicler of Partition’s madness, and Ismat Chughtai, who wrote of women’s desire and the zenana with a frankness that brought both to trial for obscenity. After Partition, Urdu literature divided between India and Pakistan, and Qurratulain Hyder‘s Āg kā Daryā traced the whole history of the subcontinent in one great novel.
Urdu and Hindi
Urdu and Hindi are two literary registers of one spoken language. Poets like Amīr Khusrau and Premchand belong to both. See Hindi Literature.
Map of Influence
who answered whom, inside this roomWriters
10
Amīr Khusrau
The 13th–14th century poet, musician and Sufi of Delhi — disciple of Nizāmuddīn Auliyā, master of Persian verse, pioneer of Hindavi (early Hindi-Urdu), and by tradition the inventor of qawwālī, the khayāl and the sitar.
Mir Taqi Mir
The first great master of Urdu poetry (1723–1810) — “Khudā-e-Sukhan”, the God of poetry — whose six dīvāns of ghazals, written amid the sack and ruin of eighteenth-century Delhi, made grief, love and loss sing in a language of heartbreaking simplicity.
Mirza Ghalib
The greatest poet of Urdu (1797–1869) — master of the ghazal, of wit, paradox, grief and doubt — who lived through the fall of the Mughal world in 1857 and wrote its elegy in letters and verse.
Muhammad Iqbal
The Urdu and Persian poet-philosopher of Lahore who preached “khudī” — the self’s dynamic development — as the heart of a reconstructed Islam, wrote “Sāre jahāṅ se acchā” for India, and later envisioned a Muslim homeland that became Pakistan.
Premchand
The greatest writer of modern Hindi and Urdu fiction — novelist of the Indian village, of peasants crushed by debt, caste and colonial rule — whose Godān and stories like “The Shroud” founded social realism in Indian literature.
Faiz Ahmad Faiz
The greatest Urdu poet of the twentieth century — a Marxist and lover whose ghazals and nazms fused the classical language of love with revolution, prison and protest; jailed in Pakistan, exiled in Beirut, sung across the subcontinent: >- “Mujh se pahlī sī mohabbat”, “Bol”, “Ham dekhẽge”.
Saadat Hasan Manto
The fearless master of the Urdu short story — chronicler of Partition’s madness in “Toba Tek Singh”, “Khol Do” and “Ṭhanḍā Gosht”, of prostitutes, pimps and the city’s outcasts in Bombay — tried six times for obscenity, dead of drink at forty-two, now hailed as the greatest story-writer of South Asia.
Ismat Chughtai
The boldest woman of Urdu fiction — author of “Liḥāf” (The Quilt), tried for obscenity in 1944, of the novel Ṭeṛhī Lakīr and of stories of women’s desire, the zenana and middle-class Muslim households, told in a racy, colloquial voice that changed Urdu prose.
Sahir Ludhianvi
The Urdu poet of protest and heartbreak who became the greatest lyricist of Hindi cinema — author of Talkhiyā̃ (“Bitterness”) and of film songs like “Ye mahlõ ye takhtõ”, “Kabhī kabhī mere dil mẽ” and “Allah tero nām” — who brought progressive poetry to hundreds of millions.
Qurratulain Hyder
“Ainee Apa”, the grande dame of Urdu fiction — novelist of time, history and the Indo-Muslim civilisation, whose Āg kā Daryā (River of Fire, 1959) follows four souls across 2,500 years of Indian history, from the age of the Buddha to Partition.
