On May 9, 1874, Azad delivered to the Anjuman his famous lecture on the reform of Urdu poetry. The audience included a number of Englishmen of high official rank (director of public instruction, high court judge, secretary of the Punjab government, colonel, commissioner, deputy commissioner). The text of Azad’s speech was printed the next day in a local newspaper, and there is no doubt about the boldness of his message: he called for a new Urdu poetry and a new poetics, both based on English models. The traditional adornments of poetry have now fallen into desuetude, he argued. “New kinds of jewelry and robes of honor, suited to the conditions of the present day, are shut up in the storage-trunks of English—which are lying right here beside us, but we don’t realize it.”^[15]

In the course of his speech he accused classical Urdu poetry of ignoring the Indic side of its heritage, the colloquial language of Braj Bhasha with its simplicity and expressive vigor, in favor of the charms of Persian: Urdu poets had “reproduced in Urdu a photograph (foṭogrāf) of all the meters, and interesting and colorful ideas, and types of literary composition, found in Persian.” This had indeed given Urdu not only sophistication and polish but also “the power of expressing, through metaphors and similes, extremely subtle and refined thoughts.” However, it had also led to the growth of dark, obscure tangles of poetic verbiage, in which meaning had been reduced to a kind of firefly: “now it lights up, now it vanishes.”^[16] Moreover, the verses in this rich language were devoted to an extremely narrow, limited circle of traditional maẓmūns (themes), mostly those of love: “some to the joy of union, many to longings, even more to bewailing separation; to wine, to the cupbearer, the spring, the autumn, complaints against the heavens, and flattery of the powerful”—all “absolutely imaginary” topics. Urdu poetry languished in captivity within this “limited circle” of related themes, and must be helped to break free.^[17]

At the heart of Azad’s talk was an emotional plea for a radically new vision of the nature and goals of poetry:

Oh gardeners of the Garden of Eloquence! Eloquence is not something that flies along on the wings of exaggeration and high-flying fancy, or races off on the wings of rhyme, or climbs to the heavens by the force of verbal ingenuity, or sinks beneath a dense layer of metaphors. The meaning of eloquence is that happiness or sorrow, attraction or repulsion, fear or anger toward something—in short, whatever feeling is in our heart—should as we express it arouse in the listeners’ hearts the same effect, the same emotion, the same fervor, as would be created by seeing the thing itself.^[18]

The touchstone of poetry was thus to be its power to express and communicate natural feelings—feelings, reactions to the world, which are first present in the poet’s heart, and are then passed on to the listeners as well. Verbal adornments in poetry were to be treated like salt in food: they should be used in small, judiciously planned quantities.

Azad made it clear that he did not underestimate the difficulty of this task, or the seductive power of the old poetry. But he warned that if the effort was not made, the old poetry would decay into hopeless obsolescence, and Urdu would end up with no poetry at all. He then explained candidly, “Although some of my countrymen and myself have long been aware of these matters, the reason I speak about them now is that I see that lately our government, and its officers whose hearts have taken responsibility for our education, have turned their attention in this direction.”^[19]

Azad’s speech was followed by the remarks of Colonel W. R. M. Holroyd, the director of public instruction. Speaking in English, Colonel Holroyd began, “This meeting has been called to discover means for the development of Urdu poetry which is in a state of decadence today.” Quoting the lieutenant governor, Colonel Holroyd emphasized the usefulness of poetry as a teaching tool and deplored the dearth of poetry suitable for the classroom. To fill this need, he suggested that verses from Mīr, Żauq, Ġhālib, and others should be compiled, “aiming at moral instruction, and presenting a natural picture of our feelings and thoughts.”^[20]

At the end of his speech Colonel Holroyd proposed that the Anjuman should start a new mushairah series, but that instead of setting the traditional formal pattern line (miṣra‘-e t̤araḥ) to which all the poetry should conform, the Anjuman should “propose a certain subject on which the poets should write.” He had high ambitions for this scheme: “Should this proposal succeed, the year 1874 would be a landmark in the history of India, and people would remember the poets through whose efforts poetry rose out of decadence and reached the height of perfection.” He concluded, “I propose that we should hold monthly meetings, and that for the next month the poets should write in praise of the rainy season.”^[21] This meeting turned out to be the most memorable and controversial in the Anjuman’s whole history.

Azad was immediately attacked by a number of his contemporaries for his proposed new poetics. He was accused of writing a language that was “outwardly Urdu and inwardly English, such as the present rulers want to create.” His rejection of the traditional repertoire of poetic adornments and figures of speech was “as if some beautiful woman were stripped of her jewelry and clothing, and made to stand absolutely naked.” After all, “without metaphors and similes, there’s no pleasure in poetry!” And far from being restricted to themes of love, “Urdu poetry has incorporated every kind and every sort of maẓmūn, so excellently and subtly that if a hundred societies are formed, and make such futile efforts for a hundred years, and give out a hundred thousand rupees as a reward, they still won’t be able to improve on it!” In short, Azad was exhorted to honor Żauq and Ġhālib and to stop trying to “ruin Urdu poetry by remaking it in the English style.”^[22] He also, however, received a certain amount of support.^[23]

As for Hali, he seems to have welcomed the new mushairah series.^[24] A quarter of a century later, he diplomatically divided the credit for the initiative: “Under the auspices of Colonel Holroyd, director of public instruction, Punjab, Maulvī Muḥammad Ḥusain Azad fulfilled his longstanding desire—that is to say, in 1874 the foundation was laid for a mushairah absolutely new of its kind in India.” Hali noted that he himself had shared in the mushairah series by writing four maṡnavīs (narrative or reflective poems)—on “The Rainy Season,” “Hope,” “Patriotism,” and “Justice.”^[25] He spelled out the goal of the project: “that Asian poetry, which has become entirely the domain of love and exaggeration, might be broadened as much as possible, and that its foundation might be laid on realities and events.”^[26] And he specifically urged the organization of more such “new-style mushairahs.”^[27]

The Anjuman’s new mushairahs proceeded exactly along the lines laid down by Colonel Holroyd. After the first one praised “The Rainy Season,” the second addressed itself to “Winter.” This second mushairah went so well that the official journal of the Anjuman predicted full success in “removing from Urdu poetry licentious subjects and obscene images, and replacing them by scenes descriptive of things in this world.” After the third mushairah, on “Hope,” a sarcastic newspaper article sneered that “the poets of the Punjab and of Delhi have well understood the intention of the director of public instruction”—which was that they should “abandon the mention of wine and song” in order to “describe the phenomena of nature.”^[28]

Then followed “Patriotism,” “Peace,” “Justice,” “Compassion,” “Contentment,” and “Civilization.” By this time, a great many poets were attending, some from far away; still others who were unable to attend sent their poems to be read. But many of the poems were full of the “worn-out maẓmūns” that Azad wished to drive out of circulation. At the fourth mushairah, people were said to have listened “all ears” to Hali’s poem on “Patriotism,” while when Azad’s turn came his delivery was praised but his poem found to be in need of iṣlāḤ, “correction.” At the fifth mushairah a modernist newspaper correspondent complained that Hali was still using the old maẓmūns: he “again mentioned wine and drunkenness, the nightingale and the rose, and destroyed the hopes one had conceived for his talent.” By the sixth mushairah it was reported that “Hali’s poem was, as usual, the high point,” and he was praised as “the only glory of these gatherings.” Strict generic standards were maintained: some poets who had inappropriately brought odes or satires (Ḥajv) were forbidden to recite them. Colonel Holroyd was very pleased with the mushairahs.^[29] And he was not the only one: at some point Hali wrote a brief but extravagant Persian poem, “Verse-sequence in Praise of the Kindness and Generosity of the Honorable Colonel Holroyd.”^[30]

But the mushairahs became the center of much controversy. It was announced that poets who distinguished themselves would be awarded not merely prizes but monthly stipends as well, and this raised the stakes considerably. A newspaper called Panjābī Aḳhbār began a kind of vendetta against Azad, making a series of charges: that he was an incompetent poet and no real shagird of Żauq’s, but only a kind of young “nephew”; that he was arrogant and put on superior airs; that he presided over the mushairahs in a biased way; that he quarreled with senior poets, who he feared would eclipse him; that he used his influence unfairly, to manipulate the prize giving in favor of junior poets; that he made the mushairahs “theresort of youngsters, green-grocers, and confectioners,” among whomhe could easily shine.^[31] Azad’s own poems were repeatedly subjected to the most exacting kind of iṣlāḤ and were invariably found by hostile critics to be wanting. One criticism was especially ironic: Azad, who reproached Urdu poetry for excessive borrowing of imagery from Persian, was accused of depicting, in his own long maṡnavī on “Winter,” entirely foreign and fantastic scenes. “Has there ever been such cold in our country, that the rivers froze into ice, and people began crossing them without boats?” Azad’s reindeer, sleighs, and perpetual snows came in for marked disapproval.^[32]

Azad felt the attacks keenly, especially since it happened that no shagird or admirer came forward at the time to respond on his behalf. However, he behaved with dignity in this difficult situation. He has been accused by ‘Abd ul-Ḥaq of being jealous of Hali’s greater popularity as a poet. Whether or not this was the case, he apparently did think that the venomous newspaper articles, although they appeared anonymously, were composed by a shagird of Hali’s. Azad seems to have felt that if Hali didn’t encourage the newspaper attacks, neither did he do anything to discourage them. For a time there was a coolness between the two. But, as Farruḳhī points out, it could not have been of major importance, for ten years later they were still exchanging warm and friendly letters.^[33]

One person who did encourage and support Azad was Sir Sayyid Aḥmad Ḳhān. He advised Azad to ignore the critics and recommended a strong and simple literary creed: “Bring your work even closer to nature (nechar). The extent to which a work comes close to nature is the extent to which it gives pleasure.” Sir Sayyid took the same line in an article in his own journal Tahżīb ul-Aḳhlāq (The cultivation of morality) in 1875: he praised Hali, invoked Milton and Shakespeare, and called for a “natural poetry” (necharal po’iṭrī).^[34] Another journal under his influence lamented the dearth in Urdu of poetry “with a feeling for nature” and maintained that the date of the first “mushairah for natural poetry” marked “the beginning of the improvement of Urdu.” It urged Urdu poets to “turn at last toward natural subjects and seek inspiration from the ideas of Milton and Shakespeare”—to write not just about “love and imagination,” but about “real events” and “visible objects.”^[35]

It seems that there were nine mushairahs altogether, ending in March 1875. Why did they end? Certainly the mushairah series generated a damaging competition for money and prestige; personal conflicts and rivalries were responsible for many of the attacks on Azad’s leadership. Sadiq argues that the mushairah series ended because it could not please its audience: “The academic verse it produced failed to touch the heart of the generation to which it was addressed.”^[36] According to Dr. Leitner, the “collapse” came because the series aggravated its participants: the “poets did not want to be told by any one that they had, hitherto, debased their genius by celebrating love”; they refused to accept “dictation in poetic inspiration.”^[37] Taking a longer view, Farruḳhī maintains that the mushairah series ended not because it failed, but because it succeeded. The officers of the Department of Public Instruction “came to feel that it had fulfilled its purpose”: the new literary movement had now been well launched and was gradually spreading by itself.^[38] The Anjuman’s own journal indeed proclaimed success: the mushairahs “will leave permanent traces” on the young; thus “the moral purpose which the founders of the mushairah had in view above all else will be attained.”^[39]

And what of the real, inner relationship of Azad and Hali to all this? Sadiq takes a cynical view: far from being “a spontaneous growth” based on real cultural needs, the new poetry was “an exotic tended and watered by official patronage.” Government patronage was the crucial factor, and government employees could not afford to disregard it. “The fact is that both Azad and Hali wrote to order at this stage.”^[40] Farruḳhī takes a more generous view: though all the government really wanted was some new textbooks for use in the schools, Azad himself saw his chance and “took advantage of this movement” for his own purposes, seeking to “turn the face of Urdu poetry in a new direction,” widen its range, and free it from its narrow circle of concerns. Azad had in fact expressed some such wish as early as 1867.^[41] As we have seen, Ṣāliḥah ‘ābid Ḥusain makes similar claims for Hali.

The psychological truth of the situation is surely impossible to disentangle. People tend to adjust their behavior to suit the strong concerns of powerful patrons: it would not be surprising, under the circumstances, if Azad or Hali had indeed in some fashion “written to order.” But people also tend to identify with the institutions that shape their lives: Azad and Hali would have been unusual if they had been entirely unaffected by the milieu of the Department of Public Instruction, especially when Colonel Holroyd’s views were couched in a rhetoric of solicitous concern for Urdu and its “decadent” condition.

In fact, both Azad and Hali were deeply ambivalent about the loss of the old poetry and its projected replacement with the new. Hali, even as he participated in the new mushairah series, also recited at another Lahore mushairah during the same year an elegy that mourned the irretrievable loss of the old world of Delhi: “Oh friend, don’t speak of Delhi as it used to be,/I cannot possibly bear to hear this story.” Hali identified the loss of the poets of the pre-1857 generation in Delhi with the loss of poetry itself: “Poetry is already dead, now it will never live again, friends,/Don’t torment your heart by remembering and remembering it.”^[42] Azad’s own inner turmoil was even more poignant. As Farruḳhī puts it all too accurately, “He struggled his whole life long to adopt a Western way of thinking; he advocated the development of new concepts and new principles; but mentally he lived in the past.”^[43]