|
| |
Urdu literature has a long and colorful history that
is inextricably tied to the development of that very language, Urdu, in
which it is written. While it tends to be heavily dominated by poetry, the range
of expression achieved in the voluminous library of a few major verse forms,
especially the ghazal and nazm, has led to its continued development and
expansion into other styles of writing, including that of the short story, or
afsana. It is today most popular in the countries of India and Pakistan and is
finding interest in foreign countries primarily through South Asians.
Urdu literature
may be said to find its provenance some time around the 14th century in Mughal
India amongst the sophisticated gentry of Persian courts. The presence of the
Muslim gentry in a largely Hindu India, while clearly acknowledged, did not so
nearly dominate the consciousness of the Urdu poet as much as did the continuing
traditions of Islam and Persia. The very color of the Urdu language, with a
vocabulary almost evenly split between Sanskrit-derived Prakrit and Arabo-Persian
words, was a reflection of the newness of cultural amalgamation and yet the
insistence on retaining what was best and most beautiful about the lands of
Afghanistan and Persia.
A man who exercised great influence on the initial growth of not only
Urdu literature, but the language itself (which only truly took shape as
distinguished from both Persian and proto-Hindi around the 14th century) was the
famous Amir Khusro. Credited, indeed, with the very systematization of northern
Indian classical music, known as Hindustani, he wrote works in both Persian and
Hindvi, frequently engaging in ingenious mixes of the two. While the couplets
that come down from him in are representative of a latter-Prakrit Hindi bereft
of Arabo-Persian vocabulary, his influence on court viziers and writers must
have been mighty, for but a century after his passing Quli Qutub Shah was seen
to take to a language that may be safely said to be Urdu.
| |
|
