14

A Long History of Urdu Literary

Culture, Part 1
Naming and Placing a Literary Culture
Shamsur Rahman Faruqi

MODERN ORIGIN MYTHS OF HINDI AND URDU

Using the term “early Urdu” is not without its risks. “Urdu” as a language
name is of comparatively recent origin, and the question of what was or is
early Urdu has long since passed from the realm of history, first into the colo-
nialist constructions of the history of Urdu/Hindi, and then into the politi-
cal and emotional space of Indian (Hindu) identity in modern India. For
the average Hindi user today, it is a matter of faith to believe that the lan-
guage he knows as “Hindi” is of ancient origin and that its literature origi-
nates with Amir xhusrau (1253–1325), if not even earlier. Many such people
also believe that the pristine Hindi or “Hindvi” became Urdu sometime in
the eighteenth century, when the Muslims “decided” to veer away from Hindi
as it existed at that time and adopted a heavy, Persianized style of language,
which soon became a distinguishing characteristic of the Muslims of India.1
Even scholars often suggest or state that the language today known as Hindi
is the rightful claimant to the space in Indian literary history occupied, at
least up to the end of the seventeenth century, by the language today called
Urdu. The positing of Hindi against Urdu has had far-reaching effects on
the literary culture of Urdu, yet few of these have been documented—much

All translations from Urdu, Hindi, and Persian are mine. The transliteration scheme is that of
Pritchett 1994. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Sheldon Pollock for suggesting lines of
inquiry, to Frances Pritchett for asking the right questions and helping with editing, and to
Sunil Sharma for general assistance.
1. In recent times, this case has been most elaborately presented by Amrit Rai (see Amrit
Rai 1984). Rai’s thesis, though full of inconsistencies and tendentious speculation rather than
hard facts—and of fanciful interpretation of actual facts—was never refuted by Urdu scholars
as it should have been.

805
806 shamsur rahman faruqi

less discussed and explained in proper perspective. However, no discussion

can now afford to ignore the fact that there are two claimants to a single lin-
guistic and literary tradition, and that the whole issue is more political than
academic. I begin, therefore, with a brief historical account of the origin
myths and realities of the terms “Hindi” and “Urdu.”
Early names for the language now called Urdu were (more or less in chrono-
logical order) “Hindvi,” “Hindi,” “Dihlavi,” “Gujri,” “Dakani,” and “Rekhtah.”
In the north, both “Rekhtah” and “Hindi” were popular as names for the
same language from sometime before the eighteenth century, and the name
“Hindi” was used, in preference to “Rekhtah,” from about the mid-nineteenth
century. In fact, the spoken language was almost always referred to as
“Hindi.” Even in the early twentieth century, the name “Hindi” could be
used—as it was by Iqbal, for example —to refer to Urdu. “Hindvi” was in use
until about the end of the eighteenth century. Mu3hafi (1750–1824) says
in his first divan (poetry volume), compiled around 1785:
Oh Mu3hafi, put away Persian now,
Hindvi verse is the mode of the day.

“Urdu” as a name for the language seems to have occurred for the first
time around 1780. All, or almost all, of the earliest examples are from
Mu3hafi again. He says in his first divan:
Mu3hafi has, most surely,
a claim of superiority in Rekhtah—
That is to say, he has expert knowledge
of the language of (the) urdu.2

“Urdu” here may mean the city (of Shahjahanabad, that is, Delhi) rather
than the language. In the following instance, from the fourth divan, com-
piled around 1796, the reference seems clearly to the language name:
They put gosh and chashm everywhere in place of nak and kan,
And believe that their language is the language called “Urdu.” 3

The name “Urdu” seems to have begun its life as zaban-e urdu-e mu aª lla-e
shahjahanabad (the language of the exalted city/court of Shahjahanabad)
and originally seems to have signified Persian, not Urdu. It soon became
shortened to zaban-e urdu-e mu aª lla, then to zaban-e urdu, and then to urdu.
The authors of Hobson-Jobson cite a reference from 1560 in support of “urdu
bazaar” (camp-market). They also claim that the word urdu came to India

2. Mu3hafi [1785] 1967: 91, 38.

3. Mu3hafi [1796] 1969: 578. Gosh and chashm are the Persian, and nak and kan are the
Indic, words for “nose” and “ear.”
 urdu literary culture, part 1 807

with Babur (1526), that his camp was called urdu-e mu aª lla (the exalted camp,
or court), and that the language that grew up around the court/camp was
called zaban-e urdu-e mu aª lla.4 While the citation is obviously correct, the com-
mentary of the authors is wrong for many reasons: there were plenty of Turks
in India before Babur; Babur never had an extended stay in Delhi; Hindi/
Hindvi/Dihlavi was already in use in and around Delhi before Babur. No
new language grew up in northern India as a result of the advent of the
Mughals there.
By the eighteenth century, if not sooner, the word urdu meant the city of
Delhi. It retained this sense until at least the early nineteenth century. In-
sha and Qatil say in Darya-e la/afat (The river of lightness and subtlety, 1807)
that “the residents of Murshidabad and ªA}imabad [Patna], in their own es-
timation, are competent Urdu speakers and regard their own city as the urdu”;
Insha means that they are really provincial and are not true citizens of Shah-
jahanabad. Further evidence is provided in the Persian literature of the time.
Around 1747–1752, Siraj ud-Din ªAli xhan-e Arzu (1687/88–1756), the ma-
jor linguist and Persian lexicographer of his time, composed Navadir ul-alfa}
(Rare and valuable among words), in which he constantly uses both urdu and
urdu-e mu aª lla to mean Delhi. Commenting on the word chhinel (woman of
easy virtue, harlot) for instance, he says, “ We who are from Hind and live in
the urdu-e mu aª lla do not know this word.” In another work he declares: “Thus
it is established that the most excellent and normative speech is that of the
urdu, and the Persian of this place is reliable . . . and poets of [various] places,
like xhaqani of Sharvan, and Ni}ami of Ganjah, and Sanaºi of Ghaznin, and
xhusrau of Delhi, spoke in the same established language, and that language
is the language of the urdu.”5 It is thus obvious that in the 1750s, the terms
urdu, urdu-e mu aª lla, and zaban-e urdu-e mu aª lla did not, at least among the elite,
mean the language that is known as Urdu today. The name zaban-e urdu-e
mu aª lla probably began to refer to Hindi around 1790–1795—at any rate,
no earlier than January 1772.
Although many of the Mughal royals, including Babur himself, knew Hindi
in some measure (later Mughals knew at least one Indian language quite well),
Urdu became the language used around the court only in January 1772,
when Shah ªAlam II (r. 1759–1806) moved to Delhi. The court’s official lan-
guage remained Persian, but Shah ªAlam II, because of his long sojourn in
Allahabad and his personal predilection, spoke Hindi on informal occasions.
This informal use, along with Shah ªAlam’s knowledge of languages (in-
cluding Sanskrit), patronage and love for Hindi, and practice of Hindi lit-
erature, gave the language respectability. In fact, in his prose narrative Das-

4. Yule and Burnell [1886] 1986: 646.

5. Insha and Qatil [1807] 1850: 116; xhan-e Arzu [1747–1751] 1992: 214, 32.
808 shamsur rahman faruqi

tanªaja ºib ul-qi3a3 (The strangest of stories), begun around 1792–1793, Shah
ªAlam identified the language of the tale as Hindi.6
For their part, the English seem to have found, from the first, a set of
names of their own liking or invention. Edward Terry, companion to Thomas
Roe at Jahangir’s court, described the language in his A Voyage to East India
(London, 1655) as “Indostan,” saying that it was a powerful language that
could say much in a few words; it had a high content of Arabic and Persian,
but was written differently from Arabic and Persian.7 In late-eighteenth-
century colonial encounters, the name that the British most favored for
Hindvi/Hindi was “Hindustani.” This was perhaps because it seemed orderly
and logical for the main language of “Hindustan” to be called “Hindustani,”
just as the language of England was English, and so on. “Hindustani” as a
language name was not entirely unknown. Sayyid Sulaiman Nadvi cites oc-
currences of it in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Persian texts; he him-
self in fact favors it over “Urdu” as a language name because of the negative
associations of the latter.8 Yet “Hindustani” never became popular: as a lan-
guage name it does not occur in any major Persian dictionary, and most na-
tive speakers preferred “Hindi” or “Rekhtah.”
The British identified what they called “Hindustani” as largely a Muslim
language, though they also granted that it was spoken, or at least understood,
all over India. Hobson-Jobson describes “Hindostanee” as
the language that the Mahommedans of Upper India, and eventually the Ma-
hommedans of the Deccan, developed out of the Hindi dialect of the Doab
chiefly, and the territory around Agra and Delhi, with a mixture of Persian vo-
cables and phrases, and a readiness to adopt other foreign words. It is also called
Oordoo, i.e., the language of the Urdu (‘Horde’) or Camp. This language was
for a long time a kind of Mahommedan lingua franca over all India, and still
possesses that character over a large part of the country, and among certain
classes.9

The Oxford English Dictionary (1993) is even more explicit than Yule and
Burnell were in 1886, defining “Hindustani” as “the language of the Mus-
lim conquerors of Hindustan, being a form of Hindi, with a large admix-
ture of Arabic, Persian, and other foreign elements; also called Urdu, i.e. za-
ban-e Urdu, language of the camp, sc. of the Mughal conquerors.” 10 Thus both
Hobson-Jobson and the Oxford English Dictionary define “Hindustani” in con-

6. Shah ªAlam II [1792–1793] 1965: 26.

7. Cohn [1985] 1994: 300. On the use of Perso-Arabic script in the fifteenth century, see
McGregor, chapter 16, this volume.
8. Sulaiman Nadvi 1939: 103–7.
9. Yule and Burnell [1886] 1986: 417–18.
10. Oxford English Dictionary 1993: 769.
 urdu literary culture, part 1 809

formity with British perceptions or policy: namely, there are two languages—
Hindustani for the Muslims, Hindi for the Hindus.
In 1796, well before Yule and Burnell, John Gilchrist published a gram-
mar of the “Hindoostanee Language,” which included examples from “the
best poets who have composed their several works in that mixed Dialect, also
called Oordoo, or the polished language of the Court, and which even at
this day pervades with more or less purity, the vast provinces of a once pow-
erful empire.” 11 Writing somewhat grandly of the British adoption of the term
“Hindustani,” Gilchrist observed that “Hindoostan is a compound word,
equivalent to Hindoo-land or Negro- land. . . . It is chiefly inhabited by Hin-
doos and Moosalmans; whom we may safely comprise, as well as their lan-
guage, under the general, conciliating, comprehensive term Hindoostanee.”
He gives the following reasons for his terminology:
This name of the country being modern, as well as the vernacular tongue in
question, no other appeared so appropriate as it did to me, when I first en-
gaged in the study and cultivation of the language. That the natives and oth-
ers call it also Hindee, Indian, from Hind, the ancient appellation of India, can-
not be denied; but as this is apt to be confounded with Hinduwee, Hindoo,ee,
Hindvee, the derivative from Hindoo, I adhere to my original opinion, that we
should invariably discard all other denominations of the popular speech of this
country, including the unmeaning word Moors, and substitute for them Hin-
doostanee, whether the people here constantly do so or not: as they can hardly
discriminate sufficiently, to observe the use and propriety of such restrictions,
even when pointed out to them.
Hinduwee, I have treated as the exclusive property of the Hindus alone; and
have therefore constantly applied it to the old language of India, which pre-
vailed before the Moosulman invasion; and in fact, now constitutes among
them, the basis or ground-work of the Hindoostanee, a comparatively recent su-
perstructure, composed of Arabic and Persian, in which the two last may be
considered in the same relation, that Latin and French bear to English.12

In addition to cheerfully and confidently assuming the right to make de-

cisions for the natives—since they themselves apparently have no discrimi-
nation and do not know what’s good for them—Gilchrist also perpetrates a
canard on Persian and Persian speakers (among whom, at that time, there
were many Indians as well) by saying that in Persian hindu means “Negro.” 13
Though he recognizes Hindvi as the “basis or ground-work of the Hindoo-

11. Gilchrist 1796: 261.

12. Gilchrist [1798] 1802: i.
13. This canard has found echoes in the modern Indian English-language press, where ab-
surd meanings have been foisted on the Persian word hindu. The latest is by Wagish Shukla, a
normally careful and humane scholar. Reviewing Vasudha Dalmia’s book on Bharatendu Har-
ishchandra, Shukla claims that in Persian, Hindu means “nigger” (Shukla 1997).
810 shamsur rahman faruqi

stanee,” he omits to mention—or doesn’t know—that Hindvi was not a sep-

arate language but was merely an early name for the same language for which
he was now prescribing the name “Hindoostanee.”
Gilchrist lifted most of his theory from Nathaniel Brassey Halhed (1751–
1830), who was one of the first to have written a grammar of the Bangla lan-
guage (1778).14 Halhed identified a language called “Hindustanic” that “had
two varieties, one which was spoken over most of Hindustan proper and was
‘indubitably derived from Sanskrit.’” The other was “developed by the Mus-
lim invaders of India, who could not learn the language spoken by the Hin-
dus, who, in order to maintain the purity of their own tongue, introduced
more and more abstruse terms from Sanskrit.” Thus the Muslims introduced
“exotic” words “which they superimposed on the ‘grammatical principles of
the original Hindustanic.’” 15 Here we can see the source not only for
Gilchrist’s grand prescriptions but also for the definitions of the words “Urdu”
and “Hindustani” that we find from Fallon (1866) through Platts (1884) and
the Hobson-Jobson (1886) to the Oxford English Dictionary (1993). Fallon de-
clared “Urdu” to mean:
an army, a camp; a market. urdu,i m’alla, the royal camp or army (generally
means the city of Dihli or Shahjahanabad; and urdu,i mu’alla ki zaban, the court
language). This term is very commonly applied to the Hindustani language as
spoken by the Musalman population of India proper.

In strikingly similar language, Platts defined it as:

Army; camp; market of a camp; s.f. (urdu zaban), the Hindustani language as
spoken by the Muhammadans of India, and by Hindus who have intercourse
with them or who hold appointments in the Government courts &c. (It is com-
posed of Hindi, Arabic, and Persian, Hindi constituting the back-bone, so to
speak):—urdu-i-mu’alla, The royal camp or army (generally means the city of
Dehli or Shahjahanabad; the court language (urdu-i-mu’alla ki zaban); the Hin-
dustani language as spoken in Delhi.16

The Oxford English Dictionary identifies “Urdu” with “Hindustani,” and goes
on to distinguish “Hindustani, the lingua franca,” from the tongue that is
the official language of Pakistan!
In his Dictionary, English and Hindoostanee (Calcutta, 1790) Gilchrist de-
clares that Sanskrit was derived from “Hinduwee,” which was spoken over
much of India before the Muslim invasion. He further suggests that repeated
invasions of Muslims resulted in the creation of “Hindustani”: “Muslims re-
ferred to this language as ‘Oorduwer’ in its military form, ‘Rekhtu’ in its po-

14. Rocher 1983.

15. Cohn [1985] 1994: 298.
16. Fallon [1866] 1986: 28; Platts [1884] 1974: 40.
 urdu literary culture, part 1 811

etical form, and ‘Hindee’ as the everyday language of the Hindoos.” 17 Worth
noting here first is the mutilation of the term urdu-e mu aª lla: Gilchrist does
not know that it is a compound, and its first part standing alone is mean-
ingless, so that no one ever wrote, or spoke, “urdu-e.” Next we might note
the entirely imaginary classification of the language: military, literary, and
Hindu. Finally, we can see here the source for Gilchrist’s confident predic-
tion that “the Hindoos will naturally lean to the Hinduwee, while the Moosul-
mans will of course be more partial to Arabic and Persian; whence two styles
arise.” 18 That the prediction found many ways of coming very nearly true
should not permit us to ignore the fact that it was based on historically false
and morally questionable premises.
Since the name “Hindustani” did not work in spite of Gilchrist’s confi-
dence, the British were obliged, eventually, to give it up. They found a better
alternative: “Urdu” was a name that did not have the faintest reverberations
of a Hindu link. On the contrary, since it was a Turkish word, its Muslim con-
nections were obvious. As we have seen, Shahjahanabad gradually came to
be called urdu-e mu aª lla, and the language spoken there became “the language
of the urdu-e mu aª lla.” And xhan-e Arzu had, of course, described Persian in
exactly the same terms. Now with the patronage and practice of Shah ªAlam
II, Hindi, rather than Persian, began to be called “the language of the urdu-e
muªalla.” Though the shortened name “Urdu” didn’t instantly become univer-
sally popular, the etymology of the word urdu, and the fact that in Rekhtah/
Hindi the word urdu did mean, among other things, “camp,” or “camp-mar-
ket,” made it easy for the British to propose that Hindi/Rekhtah was born
in Muslim army camp-markets, and that that is why it was called zaban-e urdu-e
muªalla.
The earliest printed source for this fiction from an Indian author seems
to be Mir Amman Dihlavi’s Bagh o bahar (Garden and spring), a prose romance
produced in 1803 at the College of Fort William, under Gilchrist’s direc-
tion, as a text for teaching Urdu/Hindustani to British civil servants. Mir
Amman says that he wrote the story in the “language of urdu-e mu aª lla.” He
adds that he was asked by Gilchrist to “translate” the story into “pure Indian
speech, as spoken among themselves by the people of the urdu, Hindu or
Muslim, women, men, children and young people.” In the pages following,
he proceeds to apprise the reader of the “true facts about the language of
the urdu.” He says:
Finally, Amir Taimur (with whose House the rule still remains, though only in
name), conquered India. Due to his advent, and extended sojourn here, the
bazaar of the army entered the city. And that’s why the market-place of the city

17. Cohn [1985] 1994: 304.

18. Gilchrist [1798] 1802: 2.
812 shamsur rahman faruqi

came to be called urdu. . . . When King Akbar ascended the throne, people of
all communities, hearing of the appreciation and free flow of generosity as prac-
ticed by that peerless House, came from all four sides of the land and gath-
ered in his Presence. But each had his distinctive talk and speech. By virtue of
their coming together for give and take, trade and commerce, question and
answer, a [new] language of the camp-market came to be established.19

Mir Amman did not tell the reader that there was a gap of a century and a
half, as well as a dynastic change, between the coming of Taimur (1398) and
the advent of Akbar (r. 1556–1605). Moreover, Akbar never lived in Delhi,
and the only time he would have had an army camping near Delhi would
have been in 1556, when he fought Hemu at Panipat, eighty kilometers away.
Most important, Mir Amman omitted to mention that the language in ques-
tion was called Hindvi/Hindi from early times, and “Hindi” was its com-
monest name in his day. But the immense success of Bagh o bahar as a school
text ultimately caused Mir Amman’s narrative to prevail, in every sense of
the word.
The story didn’t come to prevail quickly, though. A long time was required
for “Hindi” and “Urdu” to take root as the names of two different languages.
The native speaker’s resistance to the term “Urdu” may have had something
to do with the fact that the name suggested false images about the origins
and nature of the language. As late as December 1858, Ghalib was uncom-
fortable with “Urdu” as a language name, and he used it as a masculine word
in a letter to Shiv Naraºin Aram; language names are invariably feminine in
Urdu, but urdu in the sense of “camp, camp-market” is masculine. Sayyid Su-
laiman Nadvi, as we have seen, preferred “Hindustani” for just those reasons;
“Hindi,” of course, was unavailable to him by then.20
Ahad ªAli xhan Yakta, a poet and physician of Lucknow, wrote Dastur ul-
fa3ahat (The exemplar of proper speech), a small tract on Urdu syntax—he
uses both “Hindi” and “Urdu” for the language —in or before 1798.21 He
wrote the book in Lucknow and was uninfluenced by British political con-
siderations. The Dastur contains the earliest printed observations made by
a knowledgeable native Urdu speaker on the origins of Urdu:
And the reason for the appearance of this exquisite language is . . . that the
wise and the learned of the time and the age, and the masters of all arts and
sciences, persons of excellence and erudition, poets and people from good
families, wherever they were, came from all sides and all shores of the world,
traveled to this large and desire-fulfilling territory, and attained their heart-
felt wishes and purposes. And most of them adopted this paradise-adorned

19. Mir Amman [1804] 1992: 2, 6, 7–8.

20. Ghalib 1984–1993, 3: 1067; Sulaiman Nadvi 1939: 101–2.
21. Yakta [1798] 1943: 27, preface.
 urdu literary culture, part 1 813

land as their own native place. Thus, due to their coming and going to the court,
and having to deal with the local people, it became necessary for them to con-
verse in this language.
Inevitably, during intercourse between them and these, and these and them,
in the course of conversations, they mixed in each other’s vocabulary as much
as needed, and got their business done. When this had continued over a long
span of time, a state was reached when, by virtue of absorption of words and
connections of phrases from each other, it could be described as a new lan-
guage; for neither the Arabic remained Arabic, nor Persian, Persian; nor, on
the same analogy, did the dialects and vernaculars included under the rubric
“Indian” [which had contributed to the new language] retain their original
form. But even at this time, a single mode, such as should exist, had not sta-
bilized. . . . And every community and group used to privilege its own idiom
over the others.

Yakta goes on to say that, ultimately, persons of “knowledge and wisdom, hav-
ing no choice” laid down a standard register: among its requirements was
speech that was
very clear, familiar to the temperament, and easily comprehensible to the ple-
beian and the elite. . . . But speech conforming to the above conditions is not
to be found except among those inhabitants of Shahjahanabad who reside
within the city’s ramparts, or in the language of the offspring of these honor-
able persons, who have migrated to other cities and taken up residence there.
Thus the language of those inhabitants of Lucknow who are not its ancient
residents, and were not there in the past, is nowadays closer to the standard
speech.22

These remarks are quite in accord with the privilege that the Delhi idiom
arrogated to itself soon after Hindi/Rekhtah became the main medium of
literature there. The literary culture of Delhi became, for all intents and pur-
poses, Urdu’s literary culture (as is discussed in a later section of this essay).
The British apparently had no problems with this. But stories about the ori-
gin of Urdu were another matter.

Yakta’s observations about the origin of Urdu must have been based on the
common perception of educated native speakers of those times. These per-
ceptions were hardly suitable material for stories about Urdu as the language
of “Muslim invaders” and “conquerors,” a language that only those Hindus
who were in the employ of a Muslim ruler had adopted—practically under
duress. Yakta was no linguist—historical or comparative —and did not know
that the dialect now called Khari Boli, the developed form of which is Urdu,
had existed prior to the arrival of the Muslims. Muslims functioned as cata-

22. Yakta [1798] 1943: 4–5, 5–6.

814 shamsur rahman faruqi

lysts in refashioning the dialect into a full-fledged language. The broad story
of Urdu’s birth and growth as given by Yakta is accurate enough, and it dif-
fers from Mir Amman’s British-approved story in every important respect.
There is evidence to suggest that the Hindus, for whose “benefit” a whole
new linguistic tradition was being constructed in the nineteenth century, were
initially not too happy either. Christopher King argues that a class of “edu-
cated Hindi speakers, committed to a style of the khari boli continuum which
differentiated them from the Urdu speakers,” had not yet arisen in the north
by the 1850s. In King’s words: “To find statements by Hindus educated in
the Sanskrit tradition, denying the existence of this new style of khari boli,
then, should come as no surprise.” He narrates an incident that shows that
young students at Benares Sanskrit College were unaware of what Europeans
meant by “Hindi”; for them, hundreds of dialects deserved the name. Nev-
ertheless, the British succeeded in a project that was motivated by colonial
arrogance and that engendered strong emotions and a special kind of faith
in “Hindi/Hindu” identity.23
At the time that modern Hindi was being groomed to occupy center stage
on the Indian linguistic and literary scene, Urdu was being denigrated on
moral and religious grounds. Bharatendu Harishchandra (1850–1885), for
instance, who is widely regarded as the father of modern standard Hindi,
was at that time not only switching from Urdu to Hindi but also writing sav-
age, if vulgar, satires mocking “the death of Urdu Begam”—among whose
mourners were Arabic, Persian, Pushto, and Panjabi, for they shared a com-
mon, “foreign,” script. Addressing the Education Commission of 1882,
Bharatendu testified (in English):
By the introduction of the Nagari character they [the Muslims] would lose en-
tirely the opportunity of plundering the world by reading one word for an-
other and misconstruing the real sense of the contents. . . . The use of Persian
letters in office is not only an injustice to Hindus, but it is a cause of annoy-
ance and inconvenience to the majority of the loyal subjects of Her Imperial
Majesty.24

23. King 1994: 90–91. Vasudha Dalmia has recently quoted Grierson (1889) as saying that
the “wonderful” hybrid language known to Europeans as “Hindi” was “invented” by the Euro-
peans themselves. She goes on to say that by the 1860s, “the nationalist supporters of Hindi”
who were involved deeply in “the creation of myths and geneologies [sic ] concerning the ori-
gin of Hindi” would have treated as “preposterous” any suggestion that “their language was an
artificial creation.” Their belief was that “Hindi was spoken in homes across the breadth of North
India and this had been the case before the Muslim invasion.” Both imperialists and national-
ists believed “the Hindus possessed a language of their own, which set them off not only from
contemporary Muslims, but also from Muslims in the past.” While the English “stressed their
own agency in the creation of their language,” the Hindus “claimed continuity through the
ages.” Dalmia 1997: 149–50.
24. Sengupta 1994: 137.
 urdu literary culture, part 1 815

There were other anti-Urdu voices at that time, especially in Benares, but
Bharatendu Harishchandra’s diatribes stand out, coming from a creative
writer who began his career in Urdu and who still occupies a place in the
history of modern Urdu literature. As late as 1871, he wrote that his lan-
guage, and that of the women of his community, was Urdu. In fact, belong-
ing as he did to the pachhahiñ (western) branch of the Agraval clan, he may
not even have known the Benares-area folk language of his time. He cer-
tainly looked down upon the purabiya (eastern) branch of the clan.25 No other
Hindu writer seems to have switched from Urdu to Hindi in the 1880s, but
after that time the name “Hindi” began to be used less and less for Urdu. As
we have seen, the British also more or less gave up on “Hindustani” once the
name “Urdu” became almost universally popular. Writing in 1874, Platts had
compromised, titling his work A Grammar of Hindustani or Urdu. As late as
1879, Fallon had still named his work A New Hindustani English Dictionary.
But by the time Platts published his famous dictionary (1884), the new nomen-
clature was firmly in place: its title was A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi,
and English.
New Urdu writers continued to rise from among the Hindus, but the Mus-
lims, perhaps unconsciously responding to the pressure of official British
opinion, tended to exclude Hindu writers from the Urdu canon (and the
Persian canon too, but that is another story). In his enormously popular his-
tory of Urdu poetry called Ab-e hayat (Water of life, 1880), Muhammad Hu-
sain Azad (1831–1910) ignores numerous Hindu poets of the eighteenth
century, including such major figures as Sarb Sukh Divana (1727/28–1788),
Jasvant Singh Parvanah (1756/57–1813), Budh Singh Qalandar (fl. 1770s),
and Tika Ram Tasalli (fl. 1790s). Among poets nearer his own time, Azad
makes only marginal mention of Ghanshyam Lal ªA3i, a leading poet of Delhi
and a pupil of Shah Na3ir (1760?–1838). Azad found only one Hindu poet
worth more than passing mention: Daya Shankar Nasim (1811–1844), whom
he discusses anachronistically and confusingly along with Mir Hasan (1727–
1786).26
In 1893, Al/af Husain Hali (1837–1914) published his Muqaddamah-e shi ªr
o sha ªiri (Introduction to poetry and poetics), an extensive theoretical state-
ment on the nature of poetry and an indictment of Urdu poetry following
official British ideas about what was wrong with it. Next to Water of Life, the
Muqaddamah remains the outstanding work of Urdu criticism of the nine-
teenth century, commanding nearly absolute authority even now. The
Muqaddamah is dotted with references to and quotations from Urdu poets
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With the exception of four ref-

25. Dalmia 1997: 118–19.

26. Azad [1880] 1967: 566, 308–9. See also Faruqi 1997b and Pritchett, chapter 15, this
volume.
816 shamsur rahman faruqi

erences to Daya Shankar Nasim—two of them quite perfunctory and all of

them disapproving—there is no Hindu among them.27 By the end of the cen-
tury a number of potential Urdu-readers were switching over to Hindi in
northern India, and many institutions and movements had sprung up there
to aggressively sell the Nagari script and modern Hindi. Yet the Hindu com-
munity continued to produce Urdu writers, and the end-of-century scene
included a number of dominating, or potentially dominating, Hindu liter-
ary figures in Urdu.28
In 1939, the Delhi station of All India Radio broadcast a series of six talks
entitled Hindustani kya hai (What is Hindustani?). The time and the subject
were both fraught with emotion. Urdu’s case was most forcefully presented
by Brij Mohan Dattatreyah Kaifi and ªAbd ul-Haq. But among them all, Tara
Chand came out with the most historically succinct presentation. He said:
For the Hindus, Lalluji Lal, Badal Mishra, Beni Naraºin, and others were or-
dered [by the authorities at the College of Fort William] to prepare books com-
prising prose texts. Their task was even more difficult. Braj did exist then as
the language of literature, but it had prose scarcely even in name. So what could
they do? They found a way out by adopting the language of Mir Amman, [Sher
ªAli] Afsos, and others, but they excised Arabic/Persian words from it, replac-
ing them with those of Sanskrit and Hindi [Braj, etc.]. Thus, within the space
of less than ten years, two new languages . . . were decked out and presented
[before the public] at the behest of the foreigner. . . . Both were look-alikes in
form and structure, but their faces were turned away from each other . . . and
from that day to this, we are wandering directionless, on two paths.29

Tara Chand thus clearly suggested the British political motivation; five years
later, writing his monograph The Problem of Hindustani, he blamed the mis-
guided “zeal” of some “college professors” at Fort William. His conclusion
was, however, the same: the zeal of the professors led to the creation of “a
new type of Urdu from which Persian and Arabic words were removed and
replaced by Sanskrit words.” Although this was done “ostensibly to provide
the Hindus with a language of their own,” the step had “far-reaching con-

27. Hali [1893] 1953.

28. The harm, however, had been done. True, there were historians like R. W. Frazer, who
said, “ When [Urdu was] used for literary purposes by the Mussalmans, the vocabulary employed
was mainly Persian or Arabic. When used as a lingua franca, for the people speaking the various
dialects of Hindustan, the vocabulary is mainly composed of the common words of the market-
place. . . . High Hindi is purely a book language evolved under the influence of the English who
induced native writers to compose works for general use in a form of Hindustani in which all
the words of Arabic and Persian were omitted, Sanskrit words being employed in their place.”
(If he had said “by Mussalmans and Hindus” instead of merely “by the Mussalmans,” he would
have had it exactly right.) But such voices were few and far between. See Frazer [1898] 1915:
265.
29. Maktabah Jamiªa [1939?]: 11–12.
 urdu literary culture, part 1 817

sequences,” so that “India is still suffering from this artificial bifurcation of

tongues.” 30
The sane and dispassionate accounts of historians like Tara Chand were
not enough to uproot the plant of doubt and suspicion, especially when it
was fed and nurtured by waters from chauvinistic streams. Francis Robinson’s
conclusion that “an increasingly important development in the 1880’s and
1890’s [was] the tendency of the Hindi movement to become a communal
crusade against the Urdu language” is borne out by the report of the Edu-
cation Commission set up by the British in 1882. In his evidence before the
commission Shiv Prasad, a senior official in the Department of Education
(then called “Public Instruction”) in U.P., who had switched his support from
Urdu to Hindi, said: “For Hindus, Hindi was a language purged of all the
Arabic and Persian accretions which served to remind them of the Muslims’
supremacy while the Nagri script had a religious significance. . . . For Mus-
lims on the other hand Hindi was dirty and they thought most degrading to
learn it.” Thus, he argued, in the “second half of the nineteenth century,
Urdu and the Persian script in which it was written became a symbol of Mus-
lim power and influence.” Shiv Prasad was also unhappy over the popular-
ity of Urdu—which, he somewhat inconsistently added, was becoming a
mother tongue for the Hindus.31
One of the cultural consequences of the Hindi-Nagari movement of the
late nineteenth century was the inculcation among Urdu speakers of feel-
ings of guilt and inferiority about Urdu script and orthography. Not only
Harishchandra, as we have seen, but also other supporters of Nagari, like
Rajendralal Mitra, an influential Sanskrit scholar of early-modern Bengal,
claimed that Urdu’s script was intrinsically inferior.32 The seed for these
ideas, too, had been sown by Gilchrist, who published the Oriental Fabulist
(1803) to prove that “Hindoostanee, Persian, Arabic, Brij Bhasha, Bongla
and Sanskrit” could all be written in the roman script “with ease and correct-
ness.” The great success of the colonial discourse in India can be judged
from the fact that a modern, liberal historian like Siddiqi actually admires
Gilchrist for his proposal to romanize the script of these languages: he looks
upon it as a step toward the “unification” of the country. In fact, the roman
script cannot (without diacritics) configure many important Urdu sounds,
but the British introduced it for the army’s use anyway; apart from army
and missionary texts, however, roman script never caught on.33 Neverthe-
less, calls for “improvements” in Urdu orthography, or even script, are still
made, and not in “anti-Urdu” circles alone. The Urdu linguistic and liter-

30. Tara Chand 1944: 57–58; quoted in Farman Fa/hpuri 1977a: 53.
31. Robinson 1974: 75, 36.
32. Dalmia 1997: 132–33, 418–19.
33. Siddiqi 1963: 39–40; Willatt 1941.
818 shamsur rahman faruqi

ary community is perhaps the only one in the world that feels uncomfort-
able, and even guilty, about almost every aspect of its script and orthogra-
phy. To this must be added a surreptitious feeling of guilt generated by the
Urdu literary community’s almost universal belief that Urdu was a “mili-
tary language” after all.
The fault for this, I think, lies with Urdu historians from 1880 on, who
did not stop to examine the implications of the fact that if the name “Urdu”
first came into use during the last few years of the eighteenth century, as we
have seen, it could not possibly have any military implications. The only lit-
erary historian who did realize the anomaly here was Grahame Bailey. He
even offered a tentative explanation for the late appearance of the name
“Urdu.” Unfortunately, he also made a number of fanciful observations about
the origin of Urdu, and as a result his writings on this matter seem not to
have been taken seriously. Bailey argued that “Urdu was born in 1027; its
birthplace was Lahore, its parent Old Panjabi; Old Khari was its step-parent;
it had no direct relationship with Braj. The name Urdu first appears 750 years
later.” And he noted some queries:
1. Why was there a delay of centuries in giving the name Urdu?
2. If a new name had to be given in the eighteenth century, why was this
name chosen for the language when it had many, many years previously
been given up for the army?
3. If the army was not called urdu till Babur’s time, 1526, the language that
had then existed for nearly five hundred years must already have had a
name. Why was that name given up? 34
Bailey noted that the problem was easier to state than solve. Yet to him
must go the credit for at least realizing that there was a problem. Bailey in
fact did suggest an answer, but with extreme diffidence: “Jules Bloch made
a striking suggestion, which he admits is only an intuitive feeling required
to be substantiated by proof, that the name Urdu is due to Europeans.” 35
Bailey didn’t investigate Bloch’s idea further, for he felt that since Gilchrist
always called the language “Hindustani,” and in 1796 reported—as we saw
earlier—that the language was also called “Oordoo,” it could not have been
the British who introduced the name. This is quite true. But it was the British
who popularized the name, for apparently political reasons. Even Bailey fell
into the “military error” by believing that urdu means “army” and nothing
more, when in fact there is no recorded instance of this word ever being used
in the Urdu-Hindi-Rekhtah-Dakani-Gujri language to denote “army.” As borne

34. Bailey 1938: 1, 6. I am grateful to Frances Pritchett for bringing to my attention Gra-
hame Bailey’s writings on this subject.
35. Bailey 1938: 3.
 urdu literary culture, part 1 819

out even by the definitions of the word urdu from Fallon and Platts that I
cite earlier, its most popular meaning was “the city of Shahjahanabad.”
The blame for not effectively refuting the theories about the antiquity of
modern Hindi, and even its anteriority over Urdu, must also lie with the his-
torians of Urdu—all of whom failed to address this issue scientifically and log-
ically, if they dealt with it at all. Premchand, though not a historian by any
means, had clearer ideas than they on this subject. He advocated the use of
“Hindustani”—which he defined as a simplified Urdu/Hindi—but recognized
that Hindi was not a separate language as such. In an address delivered at
Bombay in 1934, he declared, “In my view, Hindi and Urdu are one and the
same language. When they have common verbs and subjects, there can be no
doubt of their being one.” Speaking in Madras before the Dakshin Bharat
Hindi Prachar Sabha, also in 1934, he said, “The name ‘Hindi’ was given by
the Muslims, and until just fifty years ago, the language now being described
as ‘Urdu’ was called ‘Hindi’ even by the Muslims.” 36 But remarks like these
were not decisive and had no force of theory, and so fictions about Urdu’s
“Muslim military character” persisted, and are generally current even now.

BEGINNINGS
Urdu literature may have begun with Masªud Saªd Salman Lahori (1046–
1121). Nothing survives of the “Hindi” divan that he is reported to have put
together. We know about it from Muhammad ªAufi’s Lubab al-albab (The
essence of wisdom). Composed in Sindh around 1220–1227, the Lubab says
of Salman: “The quantity of his verse is greater than that of all the poets,
and he has three divans: one Arabic, the other Persian, and the third Hindvi,
and whatever from his poetry has been heard or come across [by me] is mas-
terly and most pleasing.” 37 Since the term “Hindi” was used occasionally in
the Indian medieval period to denote any Indian language, a question has
been raised by modern scholars about the Indian language in which Salman
actually wrote. xhusrau, writing a few decades after ªAufi, helps to clarify the
question.
In his Masnavi Nuh sipihr (Nine heavens, 1317–1318), xhusrau devotes
an entire long section to India. Placing the “Indian speech” above Persian and
Turkish because of its “pleasing vocabulary,” he goes on to say:
In short, it’s quite without purpose
To try and gain the heart’s pleasure
From Persian, Turkish, or Arabic.

36. Premchand 1983: 108, 124. I am grateful to Professor Jaªfar Ra{a of the University of
Allahabad for drawing my attention to these texts of Premchand.
37. Muhammad ªAufi [1220–1227] 1954: 423.
820 shamsur rahman faruqi

Since I am Indian, it’s better

To draw breath
From one’s own station. In this land
In every territory, there is
A language specific, and not so
By chance either. There are
Sindhi, Lahori [Panjabi], Kashmiri, Kibar [?],
Dhaur Samandari [Kannada], Telangi [Telugu], Gujar [Gujarati],
Maºbari [Tamil], Gauri [West Bengali dialect], and the languages
Of Bengal, Avadh, Delhi
And its environs, all within
Their own frontiers.

All these are Hindvi, and

Are in common use
For all purposes since antiquity.38

Some of the glosses I provide here are tentative; nevertheless, one can see
that xhusrau distinguishes Lahori (Panjabi) from other languages like
Avadhi, or the mu3/alah (specific speech) of Delhi and its surrounds.
Earlier, in the magnificent Dibachah (Preface) to Ghurrat al-kamal (The
new moon of perfection, 1294), his third divan, xhusrau said:
I am a Turk from India,
My response is Hindvi.
Egyptian candy I don’t have
For doing converse in Arabic.

I have presented to friends a few quires of [my] Hindvi verse too. Here I con-
sider it sufficient to just mention this and not give examples, for no delecta-
tion is to be had from inserting Hindvi words into sophisticated Persian, ex-
cept when needed [for explaining something.]
Since I am the Parrot of India
If you ask for the truth
Ask in Hindvi
So that I reply in dulcet tones.

He then offers “An Account of the Compilation of Three Divans” that

emphasizes his own uniqueness: “Although Masªud Saªd Salman does have
three divans, he has them in Arabic, Persian, and Hindvi.” How one wishes
xhusrau had given some examples of his own work, for almost nothing of
his “Hindvi” survives today. But his account does make two things clear:
Masªud Saªd Salman wrote in Hindvi, and so did xhusrau. The reason xhus-
rau’s Hindvi works did not survive seems to be that he didn’t write much in
Hindvi, and didn’t consider what he wrote worth saving. In Nuh sipihr, writ-

38. xhusrau [1317–1318] 1948: 179–80.

 urdu literary culture, part 1 821

ten nearly twenty-five years later, xhusrau claimed some knowledge of San-
skrit but said nothing about being a poet in Hindvi.39
Clearly, xhusrau did not consider his Hindvi efforts worth preserving be-
cause Hindvi still had not become a respectable literary language by his time,
and he considered it suitable only for light-hearted, for-the-nonce compo-
sition. The reason Masªud Saªd Salman’s Hindvi did not survive is presum-
ably the same. We do not know the size of his divan either; it may have been
quite small, and may even have been regarded as an embarrassing oddity by
his Persianate admirers. The Ghaznavid sage and poet Sanaºi (1087/91–
1145/46), who made a collection of Salman’s poems and presented it to the
great man, apparently says nothing about his Hindvi poetry.40 The odds are
that Salman wrote in Hindvi chiefly to demonstrate his virtuosity—not an
uncommon practice in medieval literary culture in the Middle Eastern and
the Indo-Muslim milieus. He wrote in Arabic for the same reason.
The first person whose Hindvi writings survive in substantial quantity, and
with whom Urdu literature can seriously be said to begin, is Shaiwh Baha
ud-Din Bajan (1388–1506). His grandfather came from Delhi and settled
in Ahmadabad. Shaiwh Bajan was born in Ahmadabad, worked in Gujarat,
and described his language on different occasions as “Hindi,” “Dihlavi,” and
“Hindvi.” 41 Northerners—mainly army men and civil servants—first came
to Gujarat in large numbers in 1297, when ªAla ud-Din xhalji (r. 1296–1316)
annexed Gujarat after assuming the sultanate of Delhi. A larger movement
toward Gujarat from the north is reported to have taken place around 1398,
when Taimur sacked and occupied Delhi. By Shaiwh Bajan’s time there was
a considerable population of Dihlavi-speakers in Gujarat. Shaiwh Bajan was
a major Sufi of that part of the country. He collected some of his Persian
and Hindi prose and verse in an anthology that he called xhazaºin-e rahmat-
ullah (Treasures of divine mercy and compassion), in honor of his mentor,
Shaiwh Rahmatullah. In it, he included Hindi/Hindvi poems in a verse genre
called jikri (after the Perso-Arabic zikr, “remembering”). It was a genre ap-
parently much used in fourteenth-century Delhi, too.42 Shaiwh Bajan wrote:
Poems that have been composed by this faqir are called jikri in the Hindvi
tongue, and the singers of Hind [northern India] play and sing them upon
instruments, observing the discipline of the ragas. Some of these are in the
praise of Pir-e Dastgir, and of his mausoleum, or in praise of my own native
land, that is, Gujarat; some are disquisitions on my own purposes, and some
in the cause of pupils and seekers; some are on the theme of love.43

39. xhusrau [1317–1318] 1948: 63–64; 181.

40. Lewis 1995: 130–37.
41. Sherani 1966, 1: 166–68; Zaidi 1993: 47; Madani 1981: 50, 65–68.
42. Sherani 1966, 1: 176.
43. Jalibi 1977: 107.
822 shamsur rahman faruqi

The Shaiwh here establishes the parameters of Urdu language and liter-
ature for a long time to come: the language is Hindvi, the meters used are
both Indic and Persian, the themes of poetry are both sacred and secular.
The poetry has a strong popular base and appeal; there is an air of spiritual
devotion and Sufi purity about its transactions. Love of one’s native land is
also a notable theme.
The quality of Shaiwh Bajan’s poetry is uneven; the tone is occasionally
one of ecstasy, though the general mood is didactic. The following poem oc-
cupies a middle space between these two. It celebrates the inaccessibility of
God, yet there is a hint of desperation. Success is not certain, failure is a strong
probability. Still, there is a certain pride, a sense of distinction, in having such
a distant and forbidding Beloved:

None can walk Your path

And whoever does
Exhausts himself, walking, walking. . . .
The Brahman reads the holy texts
And loses wit and wisdom
Yogis give up deep meditation
The anchorites practice
Self-denial, and do
No good to anyone.

Philosophers
Forget philosophizing
They bare their head, trying
To keep the feet covered.

Jains, in Your service,

Suffer pain and do
The most arduous penance.

Look there —
A dervish, in a new guise
A shaven fakir; another yet,
Master of the Age, pious
In worship; and here’s another,
Become a wanderer
Shouting ha, hu, ha, hu.
There’s a frenzied one,
Openly so; another wanders
The desert, mad, unknown.

One, drunk with love,

Raves and yells,
And another falls
Unconscious.
 urdu literary culture, part 1 823

A wanderer, with long and

Matted hair, and black
And dark as night;
Another madman gets the
Shivers, shaves his head
And says only Your name.

Secretly yet another

Pronounces words of power
And domination; and
Here’s someone else
Breathing out secret Names
Mad to capture the whole world.
Another, there, fasts and keeps
Awake, all night, every night.

And that one, there, becomes

A beggar, asking for
You alone, in alms.

Thus all groups and all bands,

All weeping and wasting away—
Pieces of chewed sugarcane.

That’s what they see

That’s what they find!
So say, O Bajan,
What can you count for?44

The preceding is a translation of a complete poem, comprising fifteen

verses (or thirty lines) of a rather short meter in the original. The meter is
Indic and reasonably regular. Bajan favors Indic meters but on occasion uses
Persian ones too. The poetry is pleasing in its simplicity, but an occasional
stunning metaphor (seekers after God end up like chewed sugarcane —with
no juice or sweetness of life left in them, and fit only for burning) enlivens
the utterance and raises its level substantively. While the poems mostly use
words sparingly, they pack in a lot of meaning. The language itself seems to
possess this characteristic, recalling Edward Terry’s observation (quoted ear-
lier) that “Indostan” “speaks much in few words.” In fact, in Shaiwh Bajan’s
time the language had not yet acquired anything from the vast, rich store of
images and metaphorical words and phrases that made Persian poetry (both
Indian and Iranian) very nearly unique in the world, in that it possesses a
huge ready-to-use vocabulary that sets up resonances of signification the mo-
ment anything from that vocabulary is used in a poem.

44. Madani 1981: 66–67; Sherani 1966, 1: 169.

824 shamsur rahman faruqi

Like nearly all poetry in the Indian Sufi tradition, Shaiwh Bajan’s embodies
the Islamic worldview as refracted through the prism of Indian eyes. Hindu
imagery and conventions abound in the works of early Sufi poets, and some-
times even affect their names. Shaiwh Mahmud Daryaºi (1419–1534), an-
other Sufi poet of Gujarat writing in Hindi/Hindvi, occasionally calls him-
self “Mahmud Das.” It is possible that Kabir (d. 1518) and Shaiwh ªAbd
ul-Quddus Gangohi (1455–1538) called themselves “Kabir Das” and “Alakh
Das,” respectively, for the same reason.45
By the early fifteenth century Hindvi had become so popular in Gujarat
that its vocabulary began to appear in Persian as well. In 1433–1434 a Per-
sian dictionary, Bahr al-fa}a ºil (Ocean of graces), was compiled in Gujarat by
Fa{l ud-Din Muhammad bin Qavam bin Rustam Balwhi. In addition to the
numerous Hindvi glosses of Persian words provided in it passim, it includes
a whole chapter “comprising Hindvi words used in poetry.” By the time of
Qa{i Mahmud Daryaºi (1415–1534) and Shaiwh ªAli Muhammad Jiv Gam-
dhani (d. 1565), the names “Hindvi” and “Dilhavi” seem to have generally
been given up in favor of “Gujri.” 46
Yet even much later, “Hindi” as a language name had not disappeared
from Gujarat. A maùnavi called Tariwh-e gharibi (A rare history), composed
in Gujarat between 1751 and 1757, contains the following verses:
Shoot no barbs at Hindi,
Everybody knows and explains
The Hindi meanings well.
. . . . . . . . .
And look, this Qurºan, the Book of God,
Is always explained in Hindi;
Whenever it is intended to expound
Its meanings openly, to the people,
One says and explains them
In Hindi.47

It must have been in the fifteenth century, if not earlier, that literary ac-
tivity in Hindi/Hindvi became popular in what is now called the Deccan.
The first name that we are aware of at present is that of Fawhr-e Din Ni}ami,
whose maùnavi has been tentatively called Kadam raºo padam raºo (c. 1421–
1434) after its two chief characters, since the single extant manuscript of the
poem does not have a name. It is a poem of great length; the manuscript
comprises 1032 verses (2064 lines)—and is incomplete.
The language of Kadam ra ºo padam raºo is dense and difficult, perhaps be-

45. Jalibi 1977: 113.

46. Sherani 1966, 1: 181.
47. Sherani 1966, 2: 249.
 urdu literary culture, part 1 825

cause of the poet’s heavy preference for Telugu and tatsama -Sanskrit vo-
cabulary. Yet unlike Bajan, who rarely used Persian meters, Ni}ami composed
his poem in a standard Persian meter, and used it quite carefully. Ni}ami is
not a better poet than Shaiwh Bajan, but he tells his story reasonably well:
Kadam Raºo said, Honored Lady,
Come, and listen carefully;
I’d heard it said that women
Do deceive a lot, and I today
Saw something of your tricks;
And ever since I saw those tricks
In real life, I have been
In perplexity. What I knew
By hearsay alone, I saw with
My own eyes. And since then
My eyes have had no peace.
Two serpents I saw, one
A female, high-born, the other
A lowly male, and they together
Were playing lover-like games
Of sex, and lust. As God
Did make me King, so how
Could I see such inequity
Of pairing? I sprang at them
With my rapier drawn
To finish it off then and there.
The female fast slipped away
With her life, leaving her tail behind.48

Some of my translation here is, inevitably, tentative. But the poem has an
easy flow of rhythm, once one develops a knack for reading it aloud.

THE BIRTH OF LITERARY THEORY

The most prominent feature of Kadam raºo padam raºo is its secularity: though
it has a moral of sorts, it is basically a poem about kingcraft, miscegenation,
worldly learning, magic, and mystery. It is also consciously literary. The poet
regards the use of iham (double entendre, or punning), as the essence of
versifying:
A poem that doesn’t have
Dual-meaning words,
Such a poem does not
Attract anyone at all—

48. Ni}ami [1421–1434] 1979: 91–93.