In Water of Life, Azad began with a long historical and linguistic introduction, and then proceeded to divide Urdu poetry into five daurs. The literal meaning of daur is “going around” or “circle,” and he imagined the poets of each daur as constituting a kind of mushairah: the table of contents introduced, for example, “the first daur of Water of Life, in which Valī and his excellent contemporaries are seated in assembly” (5). In his preface to the first daur, Azad continued the imagery—“Look, the mushairah is resplendent with the aristocratic and the elite”—and went on to describe the appearance and demeanor of those present (81). Each later daur had its own mushairah as well, introduced in an equally visual style. But the word daur also means “period,” and Azad used the chronological sequence of daurs to organize his great tazkirah-cum -history.

For the daurs are soon revealed as stages in a clearly marked sequence of development. The poets of the first daur write simply and naturally: “Whatever they see before their eyes, and whatever thoughts then pass through their minds—this is what comes to their lips.” They use no “convoluted ideas, far-fetched similes, subtle metaphors.” Such spontaneity is characteristic of every language and its poetry “as long as it is in a state of childhood.” Although their maẓmūns are often “light and commonplace,” these early poets have a “simplicity and informality” that give their work an “inborn beauty” and “natural excellence” (82).

The second daur is “the springtime of the natural beauty of the language,” the time when “the flowers of maẓmūns in the garden of eloquence are in their natural youthful prime” and show an “inborn grace” that shuns all artificial adornment (106). “In what clear language, and with what simple expressions, these poets conveyed their thoughts!” Moreover, “the mood they expressed in their poetry pervaded their heart and soul.” This is why every verse you look at is “overflowing with ‘movingness’ (tāṡīr).” Such genuineness and sincerity are “just what the Europeans(ahl-e firang) are seeking today” when they say that poetry “should show the real condition of each thing” (122).

Trouble begins in the third daur. When its poets “entered the garden of speech” and strolled about in it, they saw the earlier daurs’ “flower of eloquence, which was showing its inborn, natural, youthful prime in a natural springtime.” But now “they too had to make their names,” so they “wanted to go beyond their elders.” Although they “ran around a great deal in the surrounding fields, all the flowers had already been used.” Thus, “when they found nothing before them, having no choice, they raised their buildings high.” Azad promises his readers a wonderful show: “Just look—they won’t [merely] use maẓmūns of height, they’ll bring down the stars from the sky. They won’t merely get praise from connoisseurs—they’ll get worship!” In the process, these poets used a certain amount of “elaborateness”—but only, Azad says in their defense, “like the dew on roses, or a mirror held up to a picture,” so that it added pleasure, and did not obscure what lay behind. Still, the damage was done: their “high-flying temperaments” caused them to turn their faces “upwards.” Alas, “if only they had gone forward, so that they would have emerged from the limited field of beauty and love, and galloped their horses into fields that knew no bounds, and that were free of wonders and refinements!” (123-24).

The fourth daur carries the process a step further. The poets of this period are frivolous; they are wits and jesters who will “make you laugh until your jaw grows tired.” But they “will neither take a single step to move forward, nor raise earlier buildings higher.” Instead, they will “wander among them, leaping and bounding” and “use one house to decorate another.” They will keep changing the color of everything they show. “Taking the same flowers and dipping them in perfume, they will sometimes weave a garland, sometimes adorn curls of hair, sometimes make flower-balls and fling them around to create a Holī festival” (221).

By the time of the fifth daur, exhaustion is setting in. The poets in this daur are of two types. Some use “old branches and yellow leaves” to make “new colors and new types of bouquets.” Others are of such “lofty imagination” that they employ “vapors of thought to send the breezes of invention flying through the air—and use them, like towers made of fireworks, to reach a high level.” Rather than exploring the limits of the terrain around them, they fly so high that some reach an altitude at which “the sun becomes a star,” and some “fly up and just keep on flying.” They call their practice ḳhiyāl bandī and nāzuk ḳhiyālī, but in fact “poetry is their magic, and they are the master magicians of their time.” Their artistry cannot be doubted, but it is only of a certain kind: when they notice a “flower of maẓmūn” swaying in the breeze in the garden of eloquence, “they will take its buds, and use the point of a pen to make drawings on them that can’t be seen without glasses” (325). They face a fundamental problem: “Earlier poets had already made use of every single leaf in the gardens around them—now where could they get new flowers?” They are trapped: they find “no road onward, and no equipment for making a road.” The problem is not theirs alone, but appears in Persian and Arabic also, and in other languages as well. Even English is not exempt: “Although I don’t know English I do know this much—that its later generations too complain of the same difficulty” (326).

Among the various metaphors Azad uses to describe the daurs, the ubiquitous one is that of flowers as maẓmūns and poetry as a “garden of eloquence.” The primal action of the poet seems to consist of picking flowers, in a state of springlike, flourishing innocence and youthful vigor. This state seems, ideally, to be shared by the language, the poetry, and the poets alike; it is a “natural” state and is “just what the Europeans are seeking today.” And it is a state that, by definition, cannot endure; later poets cannot recapture it, and whatever else they do is less satisfactory. The problems of loss of direction, of being trapped in exhausted fields of dead leaves, are seen as universal. The very achievements of earlier generations create painful difficulties for their successors.

Of course, the real flow of Azad’s narrative constantly violates this deterministic scheme of daur-based growth and decay. Early in his history, after all, Azad tells us the emblematic story of how thoroughly Mīr preferred his inner garden—the crumpled drafts of ghazals lying on the floor—to the real, outer garden all around him. No flower picking for him! As this anecdote shows, Mīr’s ghazals were not “natural” and spontaneous outpourings of emotion, immediately reflecting the poet’s feelings, but were the product of struggle, of many reworkings, of old versions crumpled and tossed on the floor. Azad’s anecdotes about ustads, shagirds, iṣlāḤ, mushairahs, and so on, don’t by any means reveal a steady decline in poetic satisfaction, achievement, or “naturalness” as the daurs progress—much less a sense that all the available poetic material has been “used up” by earlier poets. Moreover, the revered Żauq is a member of the fifth daur—yet he emerges as a universal genius, the culmination of the tradition, and none of the supposedly inevitable difficulties of his exhausted daur seem to trouble him for a moment.

Creating so many daurs within such a narrow span of time posed chronological problems as well. For Azad chose to begin the classical poetic tradition proper with Valī (1667-1720/25), largely ignoring the several centuries of fruitful literary development in the Deccan from which Valī’s poetry had emerged.^[2] Within the brief one-and-a-half-century period between Valī and Ġhālib, there was, of course, much overlapping of generations and of individual poets’ lives. In several cases Azad actually put shagirds in the first daur, and poets whom he declared to be their ustads in the second and even third daurs.^[3] Shāh Ḥātim (1699-1783), whom Azad put in the second daur, outlived four of the seven poets in the third daur. The life spans of two important poets of the fourth daur, Jur’at (1748-1810) and Mīr “Ḥasan” (1727-1786), were completely contained within the life span of Mīr (1722-1810)—whom Azad put in the third daur. Mīr, who lived to be eighty-eight, wrote poetry all his life and produced six separate volumes; his work spanned more than half of the whole historical period about which Azad was writing. How could Mīr be so firmly assigned to a single daur in the first place? Such difficulties arise from the vexed question of how, and on what basis, Azad drew his dividing lines between daurs.

While the daurs were roughly chronological, they were not—and could not be—perfectly so; and in any case Azad made no effort to assign them beginning and ending dates. Each daur appears in fact to be defined, as well as constituted, by the particular group of poets assigned to it. Thus to make the daur system intelligible, we have to believe that these groups of poets differed from one another in coherent, consistent, adequately describable ways. But is the third-daur poetry of Mīr, for example, really one level more “natural” than the fourth-daur poetry of Mīr Ḥasan, and two levels more “natural” than the fifth-daur poetry of Żauq? (And what, of course, does it mean to be “natural”?)

The overgrown fifth daur poses particular problems, for it contains no fewer than eight poets—Nāsiḳh, “Ḳhalīq,” ātash, Shāh Naṣīr, Momin, Żauq, Ġhālib, and “Anīs”—of whom almost all are strong, important ustads who loom large in Urdu literature and have their own distinct and recognizable styles. It is impossible to think of any rubric—much less one of generalized “exhaustion” or “high-flying” tendencies—that would adequately draw them all together as a daur over against other daurs. For since the poets from adjacent daurs were often virtual contemporaries, and knew each other’s work intimately, and were trained in the same way by the same ustads, and sought to please the same audiences, it is hard to believe that daur-based differences among them could actually be well marked and consistent. Certainly the burden of proof rests heavily on Azad to convince us that this is the case.

But Azad not only fails to convince us—he hardly even tries. Beyond the minor linguistic changes over time that he occasionally adduces as evidence, he never sets forth the (presumably special) literary characteristics of each daur with any cogency. His few metaphorical images at the beginning and end of his account of each daur do not serve even to differentiate the daurs in theory, much less to persuade us that the poets in each daur really share those special qualities. Visions of a whole daur picking flowers together or leaping from building to building or flying up to the sky do not suffice. In fact his vision of each daur as a single mushairah only serves to remind us how many different mushairahs poets attended in their lives, and how contentious and controversial even a single mushairah could be. Why, for that matter, should there be exactly five daurs, rather than four or six or some other number? Azad never provides any rationale for the system as a whole. He lays down the law for each daur with a firm, though mostly metaphorical, introduction; then, once he is safely launched into the daur itself, he seems to heave a sigh of relief and forget his own framework almost entirely.

Azad’s real vision of the poetry is in fact so much more complex than his “official” vision that again and again he undercuts his own daur-based approach. From the introduction to Water of Life, for example, we learn that the poets of even the first daur, rather than being simple and natural, made a practice of using elaborate wordplay:

At the beginning of [the account of] Urdu poetry, it is worth mentioning that in Sanskrit one word has quite a number of meanings. For this reason, in it, and in its offshoot Braj Bhasha, wordplay with double meanings and punning (īhām) was the foundation of verses. In Persian, this figure exists, but less commonly. In Urdu, at the very first, the foundation of poetry was laid on it. And among the poets of the first daur, this edict remained constantly in force. (75-76)^[4]

Later he laments this fondness for wordplay: “God knows how the elders of his [Valī’s] time became so enthusiastic for this! Perhaps the style of duhrās [= dohās], which were the wild native foliage of the language of Hindustan, lent its color” (81). So much for the alleged simplicity of the first daur! (And of Braj Bhasha, a point on which Azad is equally contradictory.)

It has been argued that Azad’s daurs are so arbitrarily defined and poorly explicated that he perhaps borrowed the scheme blindly from English sources.^[5] In specifically literary terms, the outlines of the idea were available no further afield than Wordsworth’s “Appendix on Poetic Diction,” which he added to the Lyrical Ballads in 1802: “The earliest poets of all nations generally wrote from passion excited by real events; they wrote naturally, and as men.” But then, Wordsworth notes with regret, things changed: “In succeeding times, Poets, and men ambitious of the fame of Poets, perceiving the influence of such language…set themselves to a mechanical adoption of these figures of speech, and…frequently applied them to feelings and thoughts with which they had no natural connection whatsoever.”^[6] The emphasis on “natural” as a term of praise, and on an inevitable temporal progression downward from emotion toward artifice, is just what lies at the heart of Azad’s scheme of daurs.

However, Azad had no need to look even as far as Wordsworth. The Islamic side of his own culture offered a powerful paradigm in Ibn Ḳhaldūn, with his vision of hardy warriors coming in from the desert, taking over the city, and gradually, irresistibly, being softened and transformed by urban luxury over several generations—until they fall prey to some new band of hardy warriors from the desert.^[7] And the Indic side of his heritage of course offered the traditional system of yugs, in which the virtue, health, and natural order of the universe decline over time during four long ages, culminating in dissolution—followed by eventual renewal (though only after an inconvenient number of eons have passed). But we need not rely too much on such speculation, for in fact many particulars of Azad’s daurs seem to have been borrowed without acknowledgment from two earlier Urdu writers who had devised similar—and equally problematical—temporal divisions.^[8]

The daurs were, literarily speaking, new bottles into which Azad poured the old wine of traditional anecdote. But their rigid temporal determinism made them very awkward containers. They were shaped not by the poetry itself, but by Azad’s paradoxical double vision. Azad the progressive needed to show that the old poetry was moribund anyway—through no one’s fault, but by the laws of its own internal history, by the decree of Time itself, so that leaving it behind and moving on to fresher fields was both absolutely necessary and entirely desirable. And Azad the lover of the past needed to exalt earlier times, to mourn for the lost world, to give scope to his lifelong nostalgia; even the fifth daur, the terminal one, could contain the magnificent Żauq. Consigning the old poetry irrevocably to the past, proving that its life span was over, allowed Azad to depict it as a lost Paradise—while also condemning it, and endorsing a very different sort of poetry for the present and future.

Azad places his faith in the tremendous power of poetry. Urdu in particular owes all its expressive capability, all its creativity, all its beauty and vividness, in fact everything it has, to its poets (27). The necessary breakthrough into a new poetry can and must be made. No doubt the process of adjustment will be painful, but Urdu is fortunate to have English as a source of stimulation and technical help, continually “giving iṣlāḤ to our literature.”^[9] It is time to look ahead, time now to begin creating poetry for today and tomorrow. Dividing the old poetry so carefully and rigorously into temporal daurs, measuring out its life with coffee spoons, is a way of putting it into storage forever.

Whatever their psychological value, for critical purposes the daurs are worse than useless. Instead of highlighting the real qualities of real poems, they impose a framework that is arbitrary, misleading, and hostile. They impose a framework designed first to kill the poetry—and then to prove that it died of old age. The remarkable thing is not that Azad invented a badly flawed system, but that almost everyone since has faithfully carried it on. Azad’s scheme of division into daurs has become the foundation of Urdu literary history: it has been “extremely widely accepted” for the whole past century. “From Hali to the Ḥāl (present), the effects of this division can be seen everywhere.”^[10]