An extraordinary life ; Mohammad Husain Azad

Appropriately it is the month for remembering and honouring Mohammad Husain Azad, the memorable chronicler of the classical age of Urdu poetry and at the same time an ardent advocate of ‘making it new’ in keeping with the spirit of the age.

In recent years Azad has received critical attention, though not as much as he deserves. Frances Pritchett, in association with Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, published an annotated English translation of Aab-i-Hayat and Abdus Salam prepared a new scholarly edition of this book, while Anjuman Tarraqi Urdu reprinted Dr Aslam Farrukhi’s two volumes on Azad’s life and works.

This month marks the centenary of his death and tributes are already being announced. The Government College University and the Oriental College in Lahore will be hosting seminars on his life and work, as will the Arts Council of Karachi. A hundred years after his death, Azad remains a marvelous writer and an interesting though enigmatic personality.

To Azad one can attribute many of the assumptions which dominate critical discourse as he helped determine and shape the modern sensibility in Urdu. More than any other writer, Azad was responsible for defining the ‘canon’ of Urdu poetry so much so that his omissions, mistakes and prejudices have become part of the popular perception.
It is through his descriptions that we recall Mir, Sauda, Mushafi and Ghalib almost as if they were a living presence exercising their wit and reciting their poetry in front of our eyes.

Later day opinions have questioned his opinions as well as his motives, indicating that he my have acted as a blindly vehicle for the large scale ‘colonisation’ of Urdu literature. Along with Hali, he engineered the paradigm shift from ghazal to nazm written around a specific theme.

He adapted the English essay and gave it an indigenous colour. He can be given credit for introducing modern linguistic analysis, the essay, the modern poem as well as literary drama in Urdu all at the same time!

A seminal figure in modern Urdu literature, Azad is a man of letters in the complete sense of the term. There are few genres of literature that he did not try his hand in and even fewer in which he did not leave an indelible mark.

While his scholarship is open to question, it as an innovator and stylist that he remains matchless, a towering figure but nevertheless with his nebulous zones which continue to pose a challenge.

Life began for Mohammad Husain in almost a conventional manner, like any other child born in the educated and cultivated class of the ashrafiya. If swift-moving events had not overtaken him, perhaps he too may have ended up as nothing else but one of the innumerable highly polished and otherwise unremarkable conventional poets of the kind he was to capture so perfectly in his Aab-i-Hayat years later.

He was a child of the late flowering of the Mughal Delhi under its last emperor, the much misunderstood Bahadur Shah, who used the poetic name Zafar, and was a great patron of poetry and the arts. Taking a different view, Bahadur Shah’s recent biographer William Dalrymple describes Delhi during this period as a great cultural
centre.

Like other young men Azad took up poetry and became the disciple of Zauq, who was also the emperor’s ustad and a friend of his father, Maulvi Mohammad Baqar. Azad’s father is by all accounts one of the earliest, if not the first, journalist in Urdu who established himself as a journalist writing under siege and the precursor of today’s war correspondents.

Dalrymple describes him as ‘the garrulous and outspoken editor of Dilli Urdu Akhbar as he became ‘one of most enthusiastic cheerleaders of the new regime in the besieged city of Delhi. He remains a complex and contradictory figure as some accuse him of being in the league with the British army, for which he was to pay with his life.

It was the father who cast a long shadow as the Mughal era ended with what was termed the ‘Mutiny of 1857’ followed by mass scale death and destruction in Delhi. It was the end of the world as Azad had been brought up in. Azad’s father was killed by a cannon shot, the noise of which was enough to take the life of Azad’s infant daughter. Azad turned back to give a last look at the house he was leaving behind and this look committed him for life.

He saw the manuscripts of Zauq’s poetry which he had wanted to edit as his divan. It would be irreplaceable if lost, he thought and stopped to pick up the manuscript on which he was to spend much time and energy, and, for some, forever lose his credibility and risk his sanity. This is surely one of the most memorable scenes in modern Urdu literature and of course, it comes from the pen of nobody else but Azad.

A period of wandering followed and finally took him to Lahore, the burgeoning city of educational endeavors being set up by the British and emerging as the literary capital of Urdu poetry and prose.

A new kind of mushaira was soon institutionalised under the auspices of the Anjuman-i-Punjab where ‘natural’ poems celebrating the natural seasons and moral virtues were read out instead of ghazals. Azad gave several talks and lectures and read out some of his best-known poems in such meetings. Altaf Husain Hali joined in his efforts and revolutionized the world of Urdu poetry. Azad started teaching at the Government College and this was the period that he produced his best-known books from Aab-i-Hayat to Darbar-i-Akbari, the magisterial study of life in Akbar’s court.

An extraordinary episode in Azad’s career, which calls for more investigation now, was his trip to Central Asia in 1865 as a member of a ‘political mission’ sent by the British government, a euphemism for espionage. Azad may have been coerced by his employers to join this mission and he my have been anxious to prove his loyalty to the crown, but it is bizarre that inadvertently became a pawn in the Great Game.

Later on he traveled to Iran and wrote about Persian language and literature, the subject of his life-long love.
Azad’s grandson has recorded a family legend that Azad met his hamzad during this journey and became convinced that he was to die soon. He did not loose his life but his sanity. Did this create an emotional conflict which may have quickened Azad’s descent into madness?

Using modern day criteria such as DSM 4, I am not sure if this was schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, but what is certain is in spite of his deteriorating condition, the ever-indefatigable author remained busy, producing a number of books in these twilight years, making him unique among writers.

Mixing languages and following a logic of their own, Azad’s last writings are a unique aspect of his wayward genius.

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