10. From Persian to English

“Although the tree of Urdu grew in the soil of Sanskrit and [Braj] Bhasha, it flourished in the breezes of Persian” (49). Azad traces the earliest development of Urdu back to the first great Indo-Persian poet, Amīr Ḳhusrau, who receives—for his folk poetry—the supreme accolade: “Look at these words and ideas, how they are immersed in nature (nechar)!” (69). In his more sophisticated work Amīr Ḳhusrau used “the salt of Persian” to season his Urdu (67); in fact, he and other early poets used Persian and Bhasha “like salt and pepper, such that the language makes you smack your lips” (72). Sometimes the mingling was less successful: in the poetry of Valī and his generation, Persian was added to Urdu “as if someone had put sugar in milk, but it had not yet been well dissolved: one sip is particularly sweet, one absolutely flavorless; then in another, the teeth crunch a sugar crystal” (31). Persian brought into Urdu “the coloring of metaphors and similes.” If such a coloring “had come only like oil rubbed into the face, or like collyrium around the eyes, it would have been both attractive and beneficial for vision. But alas—its intensity caused severe harm to the eyes of our power of expression” (49). “The eyes of our power of expression”—what an image! Azad himself, with his uninhibited love for metaphors and similes, would have been quick to acknowledge his own share in this Persian heritage.

Persian gave to Urdu “many lofty thoughts” and also “exaggeration of maẓmūns,” so that it became alienated from the straightforward temperament of Braj Bhasha; Bhasha and Urdu became “as different as earth and sky” (49). Bhasha remained so simple and clear, of course, only because all the elaboration went into Sanskrit (56).^[1] Persian groomed Urdu and “adorned it with metaphors and similes, so that it advanced beyond Bhasha in the subtlety of its thoughts, the tautness of its constructions, the force of its speech, its swiftness and sharpness; and many new words and new constructions created breadth in the language as well” (57). Azad had provided a kind of epitaph for this relationship in The Wonder-World of Thought: Urdu “flew with the wings of Persian, it mounted to the sky through verbal and rhetorical power; then, when it fell, it was buried beneath a layer of metaphors and disappeared.”^[2]

Alas, Azad laments, that the price of the Persian heritage was so high. When Urdu poets gave up realistic poetry, they casually flung away a “natural flower” that had its own color and scent (57), in favor of the artifices of Persian. “They didn’t understand that this unreal coloring destroys our true temper.” And then Azad continues, most remarkably, without a moment’s pause, “This is the reason that today we are very deficient in writing in the style of English and in translating its maẓmūns quite fully” (58). How extraordinary that the cure for an overdose of Persian should be—not some sort of literary self-exploration, but an equally powerful dose of English!

Azad can certainly be accused—as in fact he often was—of uncritical Anglophilia. In general, he never has a bad word to say about the British. Even when he registers harsh judgments made by “civilized nations” about his own country, he has nothing to say against them. “Everyone knows,” he observes neutrally, that “India has long been notorious for cowardice and laziness” (6). In Water of Life, when poets encounter Englishmen, most of their experiences are unexceptionable. Mīr is courteously invited to call on the governor general—and haughtily declines: “My lineage [as a Sayyid] is of no interest to the Sahib, and he does not understand my work. Certainly he will give me some reward; but that kind of visit can produce nothing but humiliation” (211). By contrast, the uninhibited Inshā introduces himself to John Baillie, the resident at Lucknow, by secretly making faces in his direction from behind the nawab’s chair. The resident is amused, and he and Inshā are soon engaged in friendly banter (277-78).

Still, one long anecdote surely gives us a look into Azad’s heart. It is not even identified as the usual “anecdote” (naql) or “jest” (lat̤īfah), but as a “chance encounter” (ittifāq), a label Azad almost never uses. This incident is narrated in the first person—by the uniquely authoritative Żauq. It is reported as a word-for-word conversation, and by Azad’s normal narrative standards it is uncharacteristically exact and detailed. Azad recounts Żauq’s precise words:

One day the king gave me a draft of a ghazal and commanded, “Fix this one up too and give it to me.” It was the rainy season. Clouds were forming. The river was at its height. I went into the Hall of Private Audience and sat down to one side, looking out on that view. And I began to work on the ghazal. After a little while, I heard footsteps. When I looked, I saw a learned European Sahib standing behind me. He said to me, “What is you writing?”^[3] I said, “It’s a ghazal.” He asked, “Who is you?” I said, “I praise His Majesty in verse.” He said, “In which language?” I said, “In Urdu.” He asked, “What languages does you know?” I said, “I know Persian and Arabic also.” He said, “Does you compose poetry in those languages too?” I said, “If it’s some special occasion, I have to compose in them too; otherwise I compose only in Urdu, since it’s my own language. What a man can do in his own language, he cannot do in someone else’s language.” He asked, “Does you know English?” I said, “No.” He said, “Why hasn’t you studi-yed it?” I said, “My mouth and voice are not suited to it, it just doesn’t come to me.” The Sahib said, “Well (vil), what is this! Look, I speaks your language.” I said, “In old age, a foreign language cannot be learned, it’s a very difficult thing.” He then said, “Well, I has learned your three language after coming to India. You cannot learn our one language. What is this?” And he went on and on about it. I said, “Sahib, I consider learning a language to mean that one should write and speak on every matter the way educated native speakers (ahl-e zabān) themselves do.”—He says, “I ’as learned your three language”! Why, what kind of language is that, and what kind of learning! I don’t call it learning and speaking a language—I call it ruining a language! (475-76)

Apparently the Englishman went off secure in his smugness, since it seems unlikely that he was crushed by Żauq’s parting shot. Żauq was left fuming—muttering offensive bits of the conversation to himself, venting the anger he had suppressed. That is, if the “chance encounter” ever took place at all, which seems on the face of it unlikely.

But what a set of colliding values the “chance encounter” depicts! The old Mughal patronage relationships (Żauq respectfully obeys the king’s command) are challenged by the new English ones (the Englishman saunters insolently around the palace). The old sensibility (Żauq enjoys the beautiful sights of the rainy season) is challenged by the new pragmatism (the Englishman ignores the scene entirely). The old courtesy (Żauq is impeccably polite and self-deprecating throughout) is challenged by the new arrogance (the Englishman is unabashedly rude and domineering). The pursuit of quality (Żauq polishes sophisticated poetry) is challenged by the pursuit of quantity (the Englishman boasts of his three languages). The lifelong immersion in one’s own, uniquely known, supremely valued language is challenged by the casual annexation—and consequent devaluation—of the languages of others. Here we have a small, perfectly constructed jewel of implicit social commentary; and it does sound like a cri de coeur from Azad’s own deeper self. If Persian overcomplicated Urdu, the English were all too capable of ruthlessly oversimplifying it.

Yet this very plainness and directness, this disdain for literary niceties, this concern with the real world, is part of what Azad wants from English. To him, English is valuable because it provides a correct and liberating poetics—one that enables literature to break the confining bonds of tradition, to cut through all artifice and self-reflexivity, to reach the eternal nonverbal bedrock of Nature itself. We have seen that the lucky, uncorrupted poets of the first two daurs simply write down whatever is in their hearts, and this makes their poetry wonderfully moving and effective. “English writing” values this effectiveness, and Azad holds its poetics up for emulation. “The common principle of English writing is that whatever thing or inner thought you write about, you should present it in such a way that you arouse the same state—of happiness, or grief, or anger, or pity, or fear, or fervor—in the heart as is aroused by experiencing or witnessing the thing itself” (58). This is almost word-for-word the same creed Azad had advocated at that memorable meeting of the Anjuman-e Panjāb in 1874, but now he makes it even clearer that for him this view is at the heart of “English writing.” English shows us how to use language instrumentally, how to short-circuit the play of words, how to get from feelings in the poet’s heart to feelings in the reader’s heart with a minimum of fuss in between. Mere words may be suspect, the autonomous “game of words” may have been discredited—but feelings are reassuringly real and irreproachably “natural.”

Despite his official rejection of the “game of words,” however, Azad himself is a very clever and slippery writer. Prose really does turn to poetry in his hands. To make his ideas persuasive he uses not simple, straightforward exposition or step-by-step reasoning, but his own inimitable literary skills. As a master of wordplay he has no peer in Urdu, and his style has always been held—with good reason—to be untranslatable. Azad so often tends to “send the breezes of invention flying through the air,” and to build sustained metaphorical “towers of fireworks,” that he in fact resembles his own vision of the fifth daur—of which he was, chronologically, a member in good standing. Between one lively, engaging sentence and the next there may lie a tremendous chasm; but the reader is often seduced into leaping easily over it, allured by the sentence on the far side. Azad can be at his most delightful when he is being persnickety and prejudiced. Although he sometimes sets forth opposing points of view with a show of judiciousness, his real interest is always in placing a dexterous thumb on his preferred side of the scales.^[4] His “unofficial” ideas about poetry, which underlie many of his shrewd remarks and observations, are always suggestive, and often full of insight.

But when Azad expounds his official, Westernized poetic ideology, he rarely achieves his finest effects. His views are merely set forth, loudly if not clearly, as self-evident; they obviously arouse strong emotion in him, but the emotion is not in itself persuasive. Rather than analyzing or defending his views, he reiterates them, and drapes them in fresh imagery, and heaps passionate scorn on the old poetry. He has to persuade himself as well as us: as we have seen, he feels himself ultimately a stranger in the world of the “New Light” people (328), his heart sadly unmoved by the “new civilization” (297). He flogs himself into flogging his views; remembering how he was situated, who can blame him?

Of course, it is absurdly easy to question the assumptions of Azad’s official poetics. He assumes that expressing one’s own immediate and “natural” feelings is the most effective way to arouse the same feelings ina reader or hearer. He assumes that arousing such “natural” feelings inthe reader is the single great goal of all literature. He assumes that all of “English writing” has a common poetics—and that it is the one he describes. He assumes that to be, like Amīr Ḳhusrau and other early poets, “immersed in nature,” is not only a self-evidently desirable condition, but a self-explanatory one that requires no further definition or discussion. If these crucial assumptions are challenged—as of course they must be—his work is incapable of responding to the challenge. Azad is simply not a coherent or systematic thinker. His officially declared poetic ideas are so sweeping, imprecise, and metaphorical that it is almost impossible even to pin them down, much less to defend them.

The same vagueness makes it difficult to decide where Azad got these ideas. The principle of Occam’s razor would suggest that he got them from the people who had thrust them vigorously into his face: perhaps he merely combined Colonel Holroyd’s forceful contempt for poetic “decadence” with Sir Sayyid’s emphatic ideal of bringing poetry as “close to nature” as possible. Certainly he didn’t get his ideas from Johnson and Addison,^[5] the two English writers with whom we can be sure he was at least somewhat familiar (since he had transcreated—without acknowledgment—a number of their essays in The Wonder-World of Thought). In Water of Life Azad does not mention the name of a single English theorist;^[6] he hardly does so elsewhere in his writing either. Views are attributed to “English writing” or “Europeans” or “civilized nations,” even in the rare case of individual mention: “A wise European (firang) says that the poet brings his poetry with him when he is born” (83). He uses relatively few English words.^[7] Azad perceives not merely the English but Europeans in general as a collective group with a single, powerful point of view.

Their authoritative language, English, is equally powerful. The young language Urdu, with its “limited scope,” far from equaling English, is not even capable of expressing the full range of English ideas in translation. But at least the work of translation is well under way, and “now we can hope that perhaps one day Urdu too will attain some standing in the ranks of learned languages.” After Azad has duly expressed his official, optimistic point of view, however, his mood changes with characteristic speed. Such a happy day will not come soon, for even “Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Bhasha, and so on, which are Urdu’s elders,” do not have in their treasuries the right words to translate everything from English. It should not surprise us if “poor Urdu” cannot yet succeed where its elders have failed. Especially, Azad concludes somberly, since Urdu is not the only one at fault—“especially since Hindus and Muslims both have let their inheritances from their ancestors slip through their hands” (25).

Azad never ceased to grapple with the question of Persian, the heritage he loved so much yet denounced so fiercely. The importance of Persian in Water of Life was made clear in Azad’s three-part preface: first came “The History of the Urdu Language” (6-25); then “When Persian Entered into Braj Bhasha, What Effects It Created, and What Hope There Is for the Future” (25-63); and finally “The History of Urdu Poetry” (64-80). The middle section—the one about Persian—was longer than both the others put together. The discussion was chiefly historical and linguistic, however; if Azad knew anything of the many sophisticated Persian literary theorists, he did not make his knowledge evident. When Hali reviewed Water of Life, he praised the preface as “extremely useful and full of insight,” as one that “mirrors the reality of the language”; he noted approvingly that in it Azad had “with much effort” used English sources. His only real complaint was that Azad had neglected to mention Sir Sayyid’s reformist journal, Tahżīb ul-Aḳhlāq.^[8]

But when Hali came to write his own Introduction, he did not mention Persian in a single one of his eighty-three chapter headings.^[9] For him, with his interest in Islamic history, Arabic poetry and Arabic theorists (including Ibn Ḳhaldūn) were a more useful case in point. But the people with whom Hali was most obviously concerned were neither Arabs nor Persians, but Europeans. While Azad saw Western poets and theorists as a single harmonious chorus, Hali was very much aware of their individual identities. Not for nothing had he spent those four years in Lahore, editing the translations of English works into Urdu. Hali’s Introduction mentions by name: Plato (14, 29); Byron (16, 19); Solon (17-18); Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” (19); the “Marseillaise” (21); Shakespeare (21, 69, 72); Goldsmith (41-42); Macaulay (46, 70, 113); Homer (46, 68, 72); Dante (46); Sir Walter Scott (56-57); Scott’s Rokeby (57); Virgil (60); Ariosto (60); and Milton (61, 68-70, 113).^[10] These references generally occur in the first third of his book; once Hali is well launched in his own arguments, he no longer needs such Western examples and authorities.

Moreover, Hali clearly knew a certain amount of English and was not averse to displaying it. Or rather—to do him justice—he was inclined to retain English words that he felt were impossible to translate. English words crop up, carefully transliterated, in all his mature critical writing. The English words that appear in the Introduction include: actor, Asiatic, blank verse, civilization, copyright, despotic government, dictionary, grammar, imagination, immoral, introduce, judge, literature, magic lantern, material, moral, moralist, natural, nature, novelist, organ, poetry, point, political, public, publisher, science, second nature, self-help, simple, social, society, supernatural, unnatural, and verse. It is a list that says a lot already about his concerns.

At times, however, Hali shows a surprising coyness (or even ignorance?) about his English borrowings. The very first image he offers for poetry is that of a “magic lantern” (maijik lenṭarn) that glows more brightly as the room—or the age—grows darker (14). Later, continuing to develop his argument that poetry declines as civilization advances, he presents the magic-lantern image more elaborately, in the form of a quotation:

A great supporter of this opinion says:

Poetry puts the same sort of curtain over the heart as a magic lantern puts over the eyes. Just as a magic-lantern show reaches its full effect in an entirely dark room, in the same way poetry shows its full fascination only in a dark age. And just as the moment light comes, all the displays of the magic lantern vanish, in the same way when the limits of the physical world gradually become visible and the curtains of possibilities are raised, to that extent the magical manifestations of poetry disappear, because two incompatible things—that is, reality and illusion—cannot be combined. (26)

Who is this “great supporter” whose words are so carefully set apart from Hali’s own, but whose name we are not told? Hali leaves us to wonder.

It turns out to be Macaulay, in his essay on Milton; Hali uses a somewhat simplified but quite recognizable translation of his words.^[11] Elsewhere in the same essay Macaulay had made his point even more clearly, declaring that Milton himself from his height of civilization “looked back with something like regret to the ruder age of simple words and vivid impressions.” To Macaulay, this was no cause for surprise. “We think that, as civilisation advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.…We cannot understand why those who believe in that most orthodox article of literary faith, that the earliest poets are generally the best, should wonder at the rule as if it were the exception.”^[12]

Here, in a nutshell (where perhaps it properly belongs), is the seed of the naturalistic poetics Azad and Hali both advocated: “that most orthodox article of literary faith, that the earliest poets are generally the best.” Scholars who play find-the-sources for Azad and Hali soon discover that most of their ideas floated in the Victorian air. A cyclical view of time, for example, was common among a number of Victorian thinkers, including Mill and Carlyle; they often saw their own age as part of a period of doubt and dissolution preceding the next rebirth at a higher level of progress.^[13] Hali may thus have encountered some of his favorite ideas in more than one writer; and, conversely, even when he quotes directly from a writer, he may have known his work only partially or inadequately, through brief or poorly translated excerpts. The game of find-the-sources thus becomes even more complex.

About Hali’s sources Vaḥīd Quraishī concludes: that Hali knew Macaulay only through two essays (“Milton” and “Moore’s Life of Lord Byron”); that he drew much material from Johnson’s Lives of the Poets; that he was “probably quite unacquainted with Mill and Carlyle,” although they were widely known in his circles; that he borrowed a single half-phrase from Biographia Literaria but did not know more of Coleridge, or else “perhaps his view of poetry would have been different from its present form”; that he did not know Matthew Arnold at all, or else he would surely have made use of his essay “Literature and Science”; and, most intriguingly, that he knew Wordsworth’s poetry but not his famous “Preface,” because “if this essay had fallen into his hands, he would at once have translated the whole essay and included it in his book,” since it could have provided him with “a wonderful foundation for his notion of ‘simplicity.’ ”^[14] By contrast, IḤtishām Ḥusain maintains not only that Hali did know Wordsworth’s “Preface,” but that its influence was probably what caused him to write a similar Introduction to his own poems in the first place.^[15] Similarly, Mumtāz Ḥusain concludes that Wordsworth’s “Preface” seems to be the source for the whole of “whatever Hali has written in the Introduction about the iṣlāḤ of poetic language.”^[16] Other scholars have lined up on one side or the other, especially with regard to Wordsworth.^[17]

This kind of argument from personal judgment may or may not help us identify Hali’s exact sources, but it serves to bring home the extent to which Hali was operating within a larger Victorian literary milieu, in which possible sources were legion and influences and parallels even more so. Cultural transmission from England to India was actively promoted (for different reasons) by various parties in both countries; while it did not always keep up with the latest fashions, it became a powerful intellectual force. Certain elite groups in the larger Indian cities in fact came to have access to a highly sophisticated English literary education. As early as 1852 the Calcutta Review sarcastically noted the frequency with which “young Babus undertake to reveal to the admiring world beauties in Milton which Macaulay never perceived, and archaisms in Shakespeare which Halliwell never detected.”^[18]

At the time of the Lahore mushairah series in 1874, a “Muslim from Amritsar” seems to have actually imported Macaulay into Indian traditional lore when he wrote to a newspaper: “ ‘To the extent that education progresses, poetry declines,’ one says proverbially in India; and indeed, things turn out thus.”^[19] By the last two decades of the nineteenth century, literate Urdu speakers indeed had many opportunities to become familiar with English theorists of the early and middle decades of the century. Wordsworth’s “Preface” is an obvious, plausible, well-known source that Hali could have, should have, or even—many critics feel—must have, used. But how do we account for the fact that Hali, who mentions so many other names, never once mentions Wordsworth’s?

With all this possible or probable borrowing, Hali remains perforce an original thinker; for just as Azad had feared, the linguistic and cultural barriers through which English ideas had to pass proved only semipermeable. The supreme example, one discussed by dozens of Urdu critics, is Hali’s explicit borrowing from Milton of his three criteria for poetry. In the “Tractate of Education,” Milton had spoken of teaching schoolchildren “a gracefull and ornate Rhetorick” based on classical texts: “To which Poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being less suttle and fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate.”^[20] Coleridge extracted these latter three adjectives from their casual, comparative, descriptive context, made them absolute and normative, and then defined them according to his own lights. Other writers discussed them as well. What Milton actually meant by these three adjectives remains ultimately uncertain. What concerns us here is what Hali thought—or chose to think—Milton meant.

According to Hali, Milton said, “The excellence of poetry is that it should be simple (sādah), filled with fervor (josh se bharā hu’ā), and founded on truth (aṣliyat par mabnī)” (68). Since Hali probably read the original passage at second hand, in a discussion by someone else—or rather at third hand, through a translation of a discussion—the changes are not surprising. Indeed, he immediately presents just such a discussion of Milton’s words, attributed to an unnamed “European scholar” (68-70). This passage has been identified as a very free transcreation and expansion of the words of Coleridge—another writer whose name Hali never once mentions.^[21]

Here is what Coleridge, taking his own liberties with Milton, originally wrote. It is very intricate, and the whole thing turns out to be a single long sentence:

For the first condition—simplicity,—while, on the one hand it distinguishes poetry from the arduous processes of science, laboring towards an end not yet arrived at, and supposes a smooth and finished road, on which the reader is to walk onward easily, with streams murmuring by his side, and trees and flowers and human dwellings to make his journey as delightful as the object of it is desirable, instead of having to toil with the pioneers, and painfully make the road on which others are to travel,—precludes, on the other hand, every affectation and morbid peculiarity;—the second condition, sensuousness, insures that framework of objectivity, that definiteness and articulation of imagery, and that modification of the images themselves, without which poetry becomes flattened into mere didactics of practice, or evaporated into a hazy unthoughtful day-dreaming; and the third condition, passion, provides that neither thought nor imagery shall be simply objective, but that the passio vera of humanity shall warm and animate both.^[22]

The prospect of turning such a sentence into Urdu would undoubtedly give a translator pause. No reader could possibly expect—nor could any translator produce—a perfectly literal rendering.

Still, no one would expect what Hali has produced, either. He has really taken inexcusable liberties—or perhaps excusable ones, since he never identifies his source. Hali’s version brings in nature, Homer, Shakespeare, and magnetism; it is much plainer in diction, and something like three times as long.

Simplicity does not mean merely simplicity of words, but rather that thought, too, ought not to be so refined and subtle that ordinary minds would not have the capacity to understand it. To walk along the highway of the emotions, not to turn aside from the simple, straightforward road of informality, to keep the intelligence away from a show of quickness—this is what is called simplicity. The road of knowledge cannot be so clear for its seekers as the road of poetry ought to be for its hearers. Seekers of knowledge have to traverse depths and heights, caves and peaks, pebbles and stones, waves and whirlpools, in order to arrive at their goal. But the readers or hearers of verse ought to find such a level and clear road that they will walk on it easily. Rivers and water channels ought to flow on both sides, and fruit and flowers, trees and houses, should be present all along to lighten their journey. Those poets who have become famous in the world have produced works that have always been seen or heard in just this way. Every mind finds such a work congenial, and every heart has room for it. Homer, in his poetry, has everywhere captured such a picture of nature that old and young, and nations who live at opposite poles from each other, can equally understand it and take the same pleasure in it. His poetry has moved over every inch of the world of emotions, and its light has spread out like the sun. It impartially illumines inhabited areas and wastelands, and has the same effect on the learned and the ignorant. Shakespeare, too, has the same quality as Homer. They both, unlike most poets, do not claim any exceptional status, but always choose the common share. They don’t want to make people infatuated with their special capabilities by displaying extraordinary sights and unique events.

The second thing that Milton said is that a poem must be founded on truth. This means that thought should rest on something that really exists, rather than the whole maẓmūn being like a spectacle in a dream: one moment it’s everything, and when you open your eyes—it was nothing. Just as this ought to be true of the maẓmūn, so it ought to be true of the words also. For example, the kind of similes and metaphors that seem to be based on abstractions ought not to be used.

The third thing was that a poem should be filled with fervor. This does not mean merely that the poet should have written the poem in a state of fervor, or that the style of the poem should express his fervor, but rather that it must also arouse fervor in the hearts of the people to whom it is addressed. And for this purpose their hearts must be wrung, and to attract their hearts the poem must have a magnetic pull in its expression. (68-70)

This passage is so different from its putative source that it might even be a translation from some other source entirely—from some imitator or popularizer of Coleridge who has not yet, even after a century of zealous Urdu scholarship, been identified.

But to a person who has read a lot of Hali, what it really sounds like is pure Hali. It is adjusted suspiciously well to the kind of Urdu structures Hali used, and straightforwardly advocates exactly the ideas that Hali was in the process of presenting. Thus we might take the passage to be not so much a translation as Hali’s own meditation on Coleridge meditating on Milton.^[23] For after all, attribution to an unnamed “English scholar” was a fine convenience; it offered the necessary prestige, without the risk of having anyone challenge the translation. But on the other hand, perhaps Hali himself in this case had some kind of imperfect access to some actual text. For he then continues: “The ‘magnetic pull’ that this European scholarhas mentioned in his commentary on Milton’s words is one that LordMacaulay says is found in Milton’s words alone,” and he offers a quotation in which Macaulay attributes to Milton “magical” powers of speech (70-71). And now suddenly the Urdu translation of Macaulay’s words is so accurate, so perfectly faithful to the original, that it could hardly beimproved upon.^[24]

We cannot say how well Hali controlled his English sources, and how much he was at the mercy of translators. But certainly he knew what he wanted to say, and went looking for English writers who would help him say it. For consider the actual outcome: Hali first invokes Milton, whose three adjectives are thoroughly ambiguous; he next quotes an anonymous “English scholar” who turns out to write, most cooperatively, almost exactly the way Hali writes himself; and finally he cites a passage from Macaulay that eulogizes Milton in such particular terms that it expressly denies to itself any wider critical relevance. Then, with his English credentials duly established, Hali proceeds to turn Milton’s adjectives into nouns, and do as he pleases with them. His next three chapters are called “What Is Meant by Simplicity (sādagī)?” (71), “What Is Meant by Truth (aṣliyat)?” (73), and “What Is Meant by Fervor (josh)?” (76). In them he uses the “English scholar” passage as a starting point, explicates the three concepts at greater length, and provides Persian and Urdu examples. By now, however, the concepts are unabashedly Hali’s own and are made to undergo various convolutions as his arguments develop.

Hali is not only his own man but also manifestly, as his pen name (“Contemporary”) proclaims, a man of his own time. In the Introduction almost all his real English sources are from the nineteenth century. Shakespeare, like Homer, Dante, and others, is no more than a name. Although Hali speaks with great respect of Milton, he obviously sees him through the eyes of Macaulay and (to some extent) Coleridge. Even when he claims to find in Goldsmith (?1730-1774) an exemplary eighteenth-century poet, he cannot really make use of him. Hali seeks to identify Goldsmith’s literary aims with his own reformist efforts. He gives Goldsmith a tiny little chapter all to himself, called “Goldsmith’s Poetry,” and says of him, “When Goldsmith, in the very beginning, abandoned the practice of the early poets of his country—a practice that was based on falsehood and exaggeration, and on maẓmūns of love and desire—and adopted true natural poetry, these same difficulties [of innovation] confronted him. Thus he described this situation in a poem; addressing the poetry of his new path, he says,”—and there follows a careful prose rendering, including even explanatory annotation for place names, of the conclusion to “The Deserted Village” (41-42).

But if Goldsmith is so favorably contrasted with earlier English poets and their apparently false or overly romantic poetry, what of Shakespeare and Milton, whom Hali also officially admires? Moreover, in the course of “The Deserted Village” Goldsmith has earlier described the meretricious effects of “luxury” on an original simplicity of character: “Thus fares the land, by luxury betrayed,/In nature’s simplest charms at first arrayed;/But verging to decline, its splendours rise,/ Its vistas strike, its palaces surprise.” Ignoring this and other obviously congenial passages, Hali cites only the poem’s conclusion—which is not nearly so much to the point.^[25] Then, without a word of discussion, he immediately begins a fresh chapter, never to mention Goldsmith’s name again. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Hali knew little more of Goldsmith than the end of “The Deserted Village,” which he perhaps found excerpted in a textbook.

The only other Westerner to be honored with a chapter of his own is Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832). Yet here too Hali’s discussion is perfunctory—and even here it is drawn not from a real analysis of Scott’s work but from unidentified contemporary secondary sources. The chapter begins: “Sir Walter Scott is a famous poet of England, and it has been writ-ten about him that ...” According to Hali, everyone agrees that Scott’s best poems are based on reality and on seeking new ways to expressgenuine meanings. Then Hali offers an unattributed anecdote (“They say that…”) about how Scott once carefully noted down the appearance of some tiny wildflowers, telling an inquirer, “In the whole universe there are no two things that are exactly the same.” Hali concludes by emphasizing the importance of paying close attention to reality, rather than relying on one’s own mind, “which is an extremely limited supply of some commonplace similes or illustrations” (56-57). (Although it would seem to follow that if each tiny wildflower is unique, each mind should be much more so.) Beyond a few secondhand comments and a single anecdote, it is not clear that Hali knew anything at all about Scott and his work.

Hali’s relation to his English sources in the Introduction is thus a kind of swamp, with some patches of clear ground, some muddy places, and some areas in which the English original (if any) is completely submerged. And above the swamp, it should be remembered, certain ideas float freely in the air of the time. If we leave aside all the speculative find-the-sources games, however, one plain fact emerges: it is above all Macaulay on whom Hali chooses to rely. From Macaulay he borrows an (unattributed) account of the idolatry accorded to Lord Byron (16-17),^[26] the (unattributed) magic-lantern passage (26), the description of Milton’s poetic “magic” (70-71), and the argument that people can truly learn and create only in their mother tongue (113). This is far more borrowing than can be established in the Introduction for any other single Westerner.

Macaulay was certainly a safe and respectable choice. When the viceroy wished to honor Sir Sayyid Aḥmad KḤān for his educational work, he presented him with a gold medal—and a copy of Macaulay’s works inscribed “in his Excellency’s own handwriting.”^[27] It is intriguing to wonder how well Hali really knew Macaulay. Did he know of the famous “Minute on Education” (1835)? In it Macaulay reasoned from a single sweeping postulate: “All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are, moreover, so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them.” Even the natives’ classical languages fared no better: Macaulay maintained that “a single shelf of a good European library” was “worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”^[28]

On the strength of these arguments, Macaulay concluded that it was necessary to create a class of people capable of being “interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern”; these people were to be “Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”^[29] Did Hali know this aspect of Macaulay’s thought—and would he have objected, if he had known? Perhaps he would not have objected very strongly. Hali’s hero Sir Sayyid Aḥmad KḤān, who initially found fault with Macaulay’s views, later came to accept them, at least as far as they pertained to English-language educational policy. Sir Sayyid in fact deliberately echoed Macaulay’s words: the aim of the Muhammedan Anglo-Oriental College he founded at Aligarh in 1875 was “to form a class of persons, Muhammedan in religion, Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, and in intellect.”^[30]

Macaulay was an early advocate of what became known as the “filtration theory”: an English education was to be given to a small Indian elite, and these chosen few were then to “act as teachers and translators of useful books, through which they would communicate to the native literature and to the native community ‘that improved spirit’ they had imbibed from the influence of European ideas and sentiments.”^[31] Even without having received an English education, Azad and Hali performed exactly the task that Macaulay envisioned. While Sir Sayyid sought to reform and Westernize many aspects of Indo-Muslim life, Azad and Hali were among the first to devote themselves chiefly to reshaping literature—and they were incomparably the most influential.^[32] They did their work well. Today, after more than a century, the influence of “that improved spirit” is still clearly to be seen in Urdu literature and criticism.

Notes