Colonial History of India

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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->A very interesting article in this week's TFT, about the Urdu poetry before, during, and after the events of 1857.  Posting in full, I have bolded the parts that indicate that the seeds of Pakistan were sown in the minds of the muslim elite in the aftermath of 1857.  Admins please edit if inappropriate:

<!--QuoteBegin--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Rising phoenix

Rakshanda Jalil
reviews the Urdu poetry of struggle
   
<i>After the fall of Delhi, several poets speak of the weeping, homeless men and women, carrying bundles of precious belongings on their heads, who flee Delhi only to be robbed or murdered on the way</i>
 
<i>The turbulence of 1857 was witnessed by some of the finest poets of the age – the ‘Bloomsbury Group of Delhi’ as it has been called. They saw and commented, yet few scholars and historians have seized upon their testimony. The history of 1857 is still being constructed largely from English language accounts</i> 

‘Politics and history are interwoven, but not commensurate,’ wrote Lord Acton. So also politics and poetry. In the Delhi of the nineteenth century, everybody – from the king down to the beggar – was smitten by poetry. Before 1857, poets dominated the city’s cultural and intellectual landscape; they were held in greater esteem than the Mughal emperors whose ‘rule’ did not extend beyond the shabby grandeur of the Quila-e-Moalla, or the Exalted Fort, as the Red Fort was then called. After 1857, especially in its immediate violent aftermath, the political climate became far too volatile for poets and writers to chart the course of the city’s fortunes. They could, at best, defend or decry – depending upon their lot – the causes and effects of the year that was to change their lives irrevocably. And this they did in prodigious amounts of poetry written in Urdu during and after 1857.

However, just as there is no generalized or undifferentiated response to the Revolt of 1857 among the Muslim intelligentsia of the late nineteenth century, there is no uniform, un-variegated, one-dimensional reflection in contemporary Urdu poetry of what would later be dubbed the First War of Independence. It reflects a bewildering and often contradictory array of opinions. Reactions vary from nostalgic lament for a lost age, to fixing blame and apportioning responsibility for the terrible misfortunes that had befallen all those who had actively participated in the rebellion. <b>The Muslims in particular felt they had been singled out.</b> In the poetry of this period, heroes become villains and vice versa: the mutineering soldiers referred to as mujahid (martyrs, or those who bear witness) by some, become balwai (rioters) for others. So also the Firangi and the Mughals, both of whom invite varying degrees of criticism and approbation. Two worlds – the decaying and the emergent – fuse and merge. Pathos, confusion and conflict reign supreme. It had to take several decades for the clouds of uncertainty to part and the debate on the Old Light versus the New to usher in the Lamp of New Learning. But for that to happen, Delhi – the focus of the ‘Dilli Chalo’ movement, the worst victim of its worst excesses and also the markaz or centre of the finest Urdu poetry of its time had to first rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes of its siege and slaughter.

Given the close relationship between social reality and literary texts, it is important to re-visit and re-examine the literature produced during times of great social upheaval. Often, it gives a far more nuanced understanding of historical events than official records and documents. In Urdu, there exists a body of poetry known as shehr ashob (‘misfortunes of the city’) to express political and social decline and turmoil. While much of it is melodramatic, self-pitying and exaggerated, with a great deal of rhetoric and play upon words in the best traditions of elegiac poetry such as nauha, marsiya and soz, shehr ashob also affords ample opportunities for the poet to paint graphic word pictures of what he sees and experiences at first hand. Using the conventional imagery of the Persian-Arabic tradition, shehr ashob allows the poet to speak of his personal sorrows and losses while, ostensibly, bemoaning a crumbling social order. When Sirajuddaullah was killed by the British in the Battle of Plassey (1757), his friend Raja Ram Narain Maozoon expresses his anguish thus:

Oh! where have the mad lovers who once roamed the desert gone
And where have those days of love vanished

Over the years, events conspired to give plenty of fodder to the Urdu elegist’s mill. There was the decline and dismantling of the Mughal empire, subsequent invasions of Ahmad Shah Abdali, the Marathas and Rohillas, establishment of British control over Delhi in 1803, and <b>the most cruel blow of all –the annexation of Awadh in 1856 – which turned even loyal Muslim supporters of the British into discontented suspicious malcontents, if not ardent jehadis</b>. With each fresh catastrophe, the Urdu poet evolved a vocabulary to express his angst, clothing his sorrow in a time-honoured repertoire of images and metaphors. Some favourite synonyms for the Beloved sitamgar, but, kafir, yaar – now began to be used mockingly for the British.

And then the Revolt happened. It divided the Urdu poets into two camps; those for it and those against. Some were for Zafar but against the ghaddar (the traitors in the British army); others gave vent to their ire against the emperor too. Interestingly, these poets not only contradict each other, often they contradict themselves too; against the British before and during the siege of Delhi, they turn into fervent admirers of British rule in Hindustan shortly after the fall of Delhi. A great many, however, refuse to take sides, preferring instead to chronicle the end of an age and a way of life.

A staunch ‘royalist’ Dagh writes:

Calamity has seized the populace, misfortune befallen the city
The coming of the Purabiyas has spelt God’s doom for the city

Muhammad Sadruddun Khan Azurdah, a poet, scholar and magistrate, however, directly attacks the people of the Fort and holds them responsible for the calamity:

Misfortune befell the city because of the fort
Due to their evil deeds retribution came upon Delhi
Calamity arrived with the black men from Meerut

Azurdah goes on to catalogue the woes of Delhi after the kale are defeated by the gore: the massacre of innocents, men pulled out of their homes on the flimsiest of pretexts (often their being Muslim being reason enough), but his real concern is with people like himself, the aristocracy of Delhi. He mourns the loss of his friends, in particular Sehbai, the teacher, poet and scholar, the leading light of the Dilli College, who was shot dead by the British troops. Azurdah writes:

Why shouldn’t Azurdah go crazy and run to the wilderness
When Sahbai is killed so brutally, though he was guiltless

The notion of ‘guilt’ itself is interpreted differently by different Urdu poets of this period. On the one hand you have poets accusing the Indians of being guilty, others such as Fazle Haq Khairabadi and Munir Shikohabadi <b>hold the British guilty of unleashing terror upon hapless Muslims</b>. Writing in his island prison, an unrepentant Fazle Haq says:

I did not commit any crime except this
I did not like them (the British), nor was I friendly with them
* * *

On 20 September 1857, Delhi fell. <b>British soldiers entered the Jama Masjid, desecrated it and set about unleashing the most terrible atrocities.</b> In one week, 25,000 people were killed, the rebels and their sympathizers summarily executed, 160,000 inhabitants driven out of the city limits and forced to camp in the open countryside. Qazi Fazal Husain Afsurdah holds the soldiers and spies guilty for the madness that spirals out of control and catches both the ‘guilty’ and the ‘innocent’:

Calamity came with the coming of the soldiers
The spies added fire to the fury
Both the guilty and the innocent were arrested

<b>Several felt that Muslims were singled out for reprisals. Shah Ayatollah Johri rues the desecration of mosques and holy places, claiming that the Brahmins prosper while the Muslims suffer and the masjids remain desolate while in the temples the conches can now be heard:

The House of God lies in darkness whereas the lamps are lit in the temples
The traditions of the infidels thrive whereas the light of faith flickers</b>
The mystically inclined Syed Ali Tashnah, a much-loved poet of Delhi, blames the outsiders who robbed and pillaged:

The Tilangas came and looted the entire city
As the saying goes, the naked came to rob the hungry

Several poets, such as Zaheer Dehlvi, Hakim Agha Jaan Aish, Nawab Mirza Dagh, Qurban Ali Beg Saalik, Mohsin and Kaukab speak of the weeping, homeless men and women, carrying bundles of precious belongings on their heads, who flee Delhi only to be robbed or murdered on the way. Some speak of unemployment and acute poverty. <b>Dagh writes ‘the only job left for Muslim men is to fill up the prisons’</b>, and Sehr says ‘it has been an age since one has seen the face of a rupaiya’. Ruing the slaughter of an age, Zaheer Dehlvi writes:

People have been pulled out of their homes
Corpses line the road, layers upon layers
Neither grave, nor shroud, nor mourners are left

Many of these poets belonged to the privileged classes who were the worst hit. So there is an element of personal sorrow and loss mingled with the general lament and mourning. Occasionally there is also an attempt to shift the ‘blame’ for the terrors and afflictions on those who opposed the British. Ghalib, the pre-eminent Urdu poet, who stayed in Delhi all through the siege and fall of Delhi, writes:

Now every English soldier that bears arms
Is sovereign, and free to work his will
Men dare not venture out into the street
And terror chills their heart within them still
Their homes enclose them as in prison walls
And in the Chauk the victors hang and kill
The city is athirst for Muslim blood
And every grain of dust must drink its fill…

A self-confessed namak-khwar-e-sarkar-e-angrez (an eater of the salt of the British government on account of his pension, incidentally stopped after 1857), Ghalib tries to be diplomatic in his Persian Diary, called Dastambu meaning a ‘Posy of Flowers’ – an incongruous name for a document so grim. He calls the rebellious soldiers from Meerut ‘faithless to the salt’ and ‘black-hearted killers’. He terms the revolt ‘unwarranted’ and expresses joy when Delhi is ‘divested of its madmen and conquered by the brave and wise.’ But this joy is short-lived, as his letters prove: ‘We live in anxious thought for bread and water, and die in anxious thought for shroud and grave.’ As Delhi becomes a city without a ruler, a garden without a gardener, he writes, ‘<b>By God, you may search for a Muslim in this city and not find one – rich, poor, and artisans alike are gone.’ He records how Hindus were allowed to return by January 1858 ‘but on the walls of the homeless Muslim homes the grass grows green, and its tongues whisper every moment that the places of the Muslims are desolate.’</b> Several verses too bear testimony, albeit obliquely:

If Ghalib sings in a bitter strain, forgive him;
Today pain stabs more keenly at his heart
And
We kept writing the blood-drenched narratives of that madness
Although our hands were chopped off in the process.

Ghalib’s hands were not chopped off. He lived another twelve years after the Revolt and witnessed the confusion and disarray that followed the loss of power and patronage. With time, two groups of Muslims emerged who soon established themselves as two opposing camps. One camp made no effort to camouflage their hostility to the British, choosing to do one of two things: either, <b>establish cloistered citadels of traditional learning based on religion; or, live in the hope that one day their lost glory would be miraculously restored</b>. The other group – and here it must be said that this lot had suffered a mere clipping of wings and not the devastation that one section of Muslims had indeed experienced – took the diametrically opposite view. They figured that the old Muslim elite could never recapture their lost ground; the best they could do, under these irrevocably changed circumstances, was to build bridges between the Muslims and the British and hitch their star to the wagon of western learning which would, in turn, open the doors to employment in the government.

The champions of this second camp – Sir Syed, Hali, Azad, Nazir Ahmad and Maulvi Zakaullah – felt the need to brush the ashes of 1857 from their feet and move on. At a mushaira in Lahore in 1874, Hali read the Nauha-e-Dehli:

Dear friends, I beseech you, speak not of the Delhi that is no more
Even the traces of what reminded us of the city’s destruction are gone
Dear Heaven, can there be greater oblivion than that?

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, a new voice arose, the satirical doubting voice of Akbar Illahabadi who could fully support neither the new nor the old, but did feel the need to admonish those who had forgotten the lessons of the Revolt:

The minstrel and the music – both have changed
Our sleep has changed, the tale we told has changed.

To conclude, the turbulence of 1857 was witnessed by some of the finest poets of the age – the ‘Bloomsbury Group of Delhi’ as it has been called. They saw and commented, yet few scholars and historians have seized upon their testimony. The history of 1857 is still being constructed largely from English-language accounts. Elsewhere in the world, literature is increasingly being used to supplement archival material. It is therefore in the fitness of things that in both India and Pakistan the various regional literatures be used to write national narratives.

Rakhshanda Jalil is Director, Media & Culture, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

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