Urdu — a seven-century making

Amir Khusrau of Delhi (1253–1325) was the court poet of seven sultans and the disciple of the Chishti master Nizamuddin Auliya. He wrote five Persian masnavis and dozens of ghazal sequences for the durbar — but on his own time he composed riddles, songs, qawwali verses and short ghazals in the Hindavi of his own Delhi childhood. "Ze hal-i miskin makun taghaful, durae naina banaye batiyan," his most famous bilingual couplet, alternates a Persian first line with a Hindavi second. It is the founding verse of the long Urdu lyric tradition.

Khusrau also stands at the start of the qawwali genre and, by tradition, of the sitar and the tabla — though both attributions are folk memory rather than firm history. What is certain is that he treated the bazaar-tongue as fit for art at a time when no other court poet had thought to do so. He died in 1325 at the foot of his master's grave in Delhi. His tomb is still tended; pilgrims still recite his Hindavi verses there in their unaltered fourteenth-century form.

When Muhammad bin Tughluq, in 1327, moved the capital from Delhi to Daulatabad in the Deccan — marching tens of thousands of Delhi soldiers, scholars and merchants south on the road that would become the trunk-road of Indian history — he carried this Hindavi with him. It is the first chapter of the language's long association with the Deccan.

The Bahmani sultanate broke into five successor kingdoms after 1490. Three of them — the Qutb Shahis of Golconda, the Adil Shahis of Bijapur, and to a lesser extent the Nizam Shahis of Ahmadnagar — became the great patrons of literary Dakhni. Persian remained the language of the diwan and the firman; Dakhni became the language of the king's heart.

Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah (r. 1580–1611), the founder of Hyderabad, left a divan of more than 50,000 verses in Dakhni — the first sustained sovereign-poet's diwan in any South Asian vernacular. His ghazals are personal, urban, often startlingly direct; he praises his city, his beloved Bhagmati, the rains, the lamps of his durbar. Ibrahim Adil Shah II of Bijapur (r. 1580–1627) wrote in Dakhni-flavoured Hindavi the Kitab-i-Nauras — fifty-nine songs and seventeen couplets on music and aesthetics, addressed not only to Allah but to the goddess Saraswati and the Sufi master Gisu Daraz. Mulla Wajhi of Golconda, c. 1635, wrote the Sab Ras, an allegorical romance that is the first novel-like prose work in any north-Indian vernacular.

By 1650 the Deccan had a fully literate vernacular tradition — diwans, masnavis, prose romances, devotional songs, the entire technical vocabulary of love-poetry — at a moment when the Mughal North was still writing all its serious literature in Persian. The centre of gravity of Hindustani letters, against all expectation, lay in the south.

The eighteenth century is the great century of the Urdu ghazal. Delhi, sacked by Nadir Shah in 1739 and by Ahmad Shah Abdali six times after that, was a city in slow ruin — but its poetic life was at its height. Mir Taqi Mir (1723–1810) wrote six full divans of an almost unbearable melancholy; Mirza Sauda (1713–1781) wrote satires sharp enough to draw blood; Mir Dard (1721–1785) wrote Sufi quatrains of stark serenity.

As Delhi declined, the centre of patronage shifted east to Lucknow, where the Nawabs of Awadh built a parallel court. The Lucknow school — Mir Anis (1803–1874), Mirza Dabeer (1803–1875) — refined the marsiya, the long elegiac poem on the martyrs of Karbala, into one of the great formal achievements of Urdu literature. Their long marsiyas, recited in Muharram, are still recited today.

And above them all stands Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797–1869), born at Agra, settled at Delhi, who carried the ghazal as far as the form would go — into philosophy, doubt, and a self-aware modernity that startles still. Ghalib lived through the Revolt of 1857 and the destruction of the Mughal court he had served. His letters from a ravaged Delhi are the first true Urdu prose of the modern kind. He died, exhausted, in 1869. With him the classical line ends.

The 1947 partition of British India divided Urdu into two political streams. In Pakistan it became the national language; in India it became one of twenty-two scheduled languages, with its largest concentrations of speakers in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and — crucially — the old territories of Hyderabad State: Telangana, the Marathwada districts of Maharashtra, and the Hyderabad-Karnataka region. The aggressive Sanskritisation of Hindi after 1950 and the equally aggressive Persianisation of Urdu in Pakistan widened a literary gap that did not exist for the readers of Premchand or Ghalib.

The post-1947 Urdu of Hyderabad and the Deccan kept a different temper. The Asaf Jahi state, until 1948, had supported Urdu as its administrative language, its medium of higher education at Osmania University, and its newspaper culture (the Daily Siyasat, founded 1949, remains the largest Urdu daily in India). After integration, even as the language lost its administrative weight, it retained its everyday life — at the cinema, in the bazaar, in qawwali, in the affectionate Dakhni-Urdu mixture still heard in the old city.

The literary line, meanwhile, continued: Faiz Ahmad Faiz in Pakistan, Sahir Ludhianvi and Kaifi Azmi in India, Ahmad Faraz, Gulzar, Javed Akhtar, Munir Niazi, Parveen Shakir. The film song of Bombay carried Urdu poetry into every house in the subcontinent — including, in many cases, houses where the script was no longer read. Urdu in the twenty-first century is at once a national language of one country, a constitutional language of another, and the still-loved private speech of perhaps fifty million people who use it daily without reading it. It is, in that sense, exactly what it was in 1325: a spoken civilisation that occasionally writes itself down.