I
Revive Urdu. Else, our future generations willnever know the eloquence of love, and poetry.
Ab urdu kya hai ek kothey ki tawaif hai
Mazaa har ek leta hai mohabbat kaun karta hai
(What is Urdu now but a whore in a whorehouse/Everyone has fun with her, but who really loves her)
I find this couplet very apt, for it both describes the current neglect of the language and the reasons why we need books like this. I have often met people who want to enjoy the meaning of an Urdu couplet but are unable to. Others come out with the conventional ‘wah, wah!’ when a sher is recited, but have not, I am pretty sure, understood its meaning. There are understandable reasons for this inadequacy. For at least two generations now, Urdu has not been studied by most of our educated, simply because it is not part of the school curriculum. People don’t know the script, and, increasingly, very little of the vocabulary. The result is the neglect of the good Urdu poets, and the proliferation of the mediocre, whose compositions—if they can be called that—are little more than tukbandi, lacking depth or insight, but comprehensible to the lowest common factor.
Translation of poetry from one language to another is not an easy task. As Shabana Azmi once told me, the process is like transferring perfume from one bottle to another: however careful one is, some of the fragrance is lost. However, if there is one person who can translate Urdu poetry to English with optimum competence, it is Khushwant Singh. He has spent a lifetime studying and translating the works of Urdu poets. Also, he comes from that generation that learnt the Urdu script in school. His translation of Mohammad Iqbal’s Shikwa and Jawab-i-Shikwa is a classic. As he confesses himself, he has a passion for Urdu poetry.
Urdu poetry is a passion for Kamna Prasad too, and she has a couplet on her lips for any occasion. Every year she expends a great deal of time and effort in organising a Jashn-e-Bahaar Mushaira of leading Indian and Pakistani poets in the capital. Not surprisingly, the acknowledged greats of Urdu poetry are included in the selection. There is Sauda from the 18th century, Mir Taqi Mir who led the way to the 19th, and the clutch of legends who held sway in the decades that followed: Zafar, Zauq, Ghalib, Momin, Daag and Akbar Allahabadi. Among more recent poets, there is a selection from Mohammad Iqbal, Firaq Gorakhpuri and Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Obviously, any process of selection can be accused of subjectivity. However, by and large, Kamna has played it safe, choosing the most well-known nazms of the masters. It could perhaps be said that the structure is a trifle lopsided. Ghalib—and I can hardly complain about this—gets 35 pages, and Iqbal almost 40, while most of the others are allocated much less. There are also, to my mind, some glaring omissions. Kaifi Azmi, Ali Sardar Jafri, Javed Akhtar, Nida Fazli and Gulzar should be a part, I would have thought, of any selection that celebrates the best of Urdu poetry.
The book’s format has been wisely done. There is a brief historical introduction to each poet. The poetry can be read in both the Devanagri and the Roman script, with Khushwant’s translation on the facing page. Penguin India must be complimented too for the get-up of the volume. It is a handsome book, well designed, that could find pride of place on any discriminating book shelf.
The decline of Urdu in modern India is a verifiable fact. Certainly some policy measures at the governmental level can help in rectifying this situation. But short of that, and beyond lament and breast-beating, the next best thing we can do is to have translations from the best of Urdu poetry, so that those who do not know the language get a glimpse of the richness of its legacy. There is a whole world waiting to be discovered, replete with the magic of a language which mesmerises you with the delicacy of its expression, the brevity of its construct and the depth of its meaning. This book is a commendable step in that direction and I would unhesitatingly recommend it to those who are familiar with Urdu poetry, and, even more importantly, to those who are not but would like to be.