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Literary Review
Towards a critical modernity
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More than a history told in brief but telling strokes, Musaddas is a cultural critique conducted in the medium of verse, says RANJIT HOSKOTE.
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EVEN two decades after the events of 1857, the shock wave set off by the Great Uprising and its brutal suppression by the British colonial regime continued to rattle the doors and shatter the windowpanes of northern India's feudal homes. The region's Muslim courtly and scribal elites never quite recovered from the liquidation of the Mughal Empire; for them, the 1870s were a time of agitation in which to recollect a lost tranquillity and mourn a present that excluded them. The failure of the Great Uprising had meant the passing of their life-world; just as menacingly, it had meant the transformation of the colonial regime, from a primarily commercial and military enterprise, into a system of governance that would place its magisterial impress upon Indian society and culture.
The Musaddas-e Hali, composed by the distinguished Urdu poet and scholar, Maulana Altaf Husain, better known by his nom de plume of "Hali", vividly expresses the sorrows and anxieties of a tradition that had seen its certitudes of eternity end in the ransacked palaces and devastated havelis of Delhi in the unforgiving summer of 1858. The Musaddas (the title refers to the form in which this 294-stanza poem is composed, a six-line verse consisting of three rhymed couplets) is an elegy for Indian Islam. As an intellectual who kept abreast of world events, Hali could not but have been affected, also, by his knowledge of the steady rate at which imperial Britain and France were extending their domination throughout the House of Islam. In the 1830s, France had occupied Algeria and Britain had annexed Aden. In 1860-61, France demanded gubernatorial powers over the Ottoman province of Lebanon, supposedly to safeguard its Arab Christian population. During these decades, also, the Ottoman Empire and Egypt contracted their first foreign loans, to finance Western-style development projects, thus becoming debtors to the European powers.
Published in 1879, the Musaddas assumes the entire Muslim world for its canvas, seeking to account for the general reverse suffered by the Islamic vision. The recurrent image of the poet as disregarded physician of a failed society, central to this celebrated lament, manifests itself from the opening verses onward. Citing a parable circulated among the Faylasufs, the lineage of Islamic philosophers who engaged with the ancient wisdom of Greece, Persia and India, Hali cites Buqraat (Hippocrates) to the effect that no affliction is more fatal than that which the patient refuses to acknowledge as such. To Hali, this meant the refusal of Indian Muslims to admit to the decadence and apathy that had reduced them, as a qaum or community, to marginalisation. Hali castigates Indian Muslim society for having slipped into the sins of bigotry, torpor, hidebound convention and withdrawal from a challenging modern polity and new public sphere, with new institutions of trade, academia, art and bureaucracy, and new social relationships and opportunities for the communicative gesture. Not surprisingly, another of his recurrent metaphors for Islam in its state of devastation is that of the ruined garden (bagh-e veeran).
The poignant echoes of the Musaddas carry into the present. As we read Hali, who has been recovered for us in a recent translation by his descendant, the academic and writer Syeda Saiyidain Hameed (New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2003), it is difficult to avoid comparing the situation that he describes, with the one that currently prevails. The recent explosions in Riyadh should serve to remind us of the extraordinary degree of grievance and resentment that prevails in the House of Islam, at the manner in which the great powers of the West, now represented by the U.S. and its allies, continue to manipulate the destinies of millions of Muslims. The wars of neo-colonial occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq have been followed up with threats of belligerence towards Iran and Syria. Such violence has had the effect of retarding the emergent local modernities struggling to articulate themselves in the Islamic countries, while strengthening the hands of regressive forces within them. An image of Fortress Islam, so developed, mirrors that of Fortress America: as the Iranian thinker Abolkarim Soroush observes, it is precisely the aggression of the West, in pursuit of its strategic interests, that has provoked and sustained an "Islam of war", which is promptly demonised as the "Other", its organic linkage with its progenitor forgotten. Against a background of missed opportunities for understanding, mutual suspicion prevails across the lines of cultural, political, religious and philosophical difference, turning the West and the House of Islam into implacable antagonists.
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Hali (1837-1914) was born in Panipat to a family of scholars and religiosi that traced its ancestry to Arabia, via Afghanistan; he was educated at a traditional madrassah in Delhi. In the 1850s, when he began to read his poetry to other poets, scholars and connoisseurs of the literary arts in Delhi, he adopted the takhallus or nom de plume of "Khasta", meaning exhausted or distressed. In 1863, Hali took up the position of tutor to the children of Nawab Mustafa Khan "Shefta": his developing friendship with this aristocratic poet brought him into contact with Shefta's friend and teacher, the legendary Ghalib. In 1871, Hali joined the Government Book Depot in Lahore, his mandate being to correct the Urdu translation of English books; this was his first systematic contact with the universe of English literature. It is surely of some significance that he should have chosen, during this period, to change his takhallus from "Khasta" to "Hali" — meaning contemporary, of the moment. By then, he had come under the spell of the reformist Muslim leader, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, who had realised that Indian Muslims would be left behind in the "race of progress" unless they adapted themselves to the instruments of Western-style education and training in the humanities and sciences, which the pedagogical apparatus of the colonial enterprise offered (this realisation formed the basis for the Aligarh Muslim University). It was at Sir Syed's suggestion that Hali composed the Musaddas, which, upon publication, had a widespread and electrifying effect on its readership, passing beyond the printed word into the influential circulation of readings and performances, to stimulate a profound collective soul-searching.
The poem begins with an evocation of the late 6th and early 7th Centuries AD in Hejaz, in western Arabia, just before the revelation of the Message to the Prophet. During this period — referred to as Jahiliya, the Time of Ignorance, in Islamic history — the Arabs were a people without a sacred book to guide them (unlike the Jews and the Christians, who each had their Revelation). The Prophet's people, the Quraish of the caravan-crossroads city of Mecca, were the guardians of the Ka'aba, a shrine believed to have been built by the prophet Abraham and his son Ishmael, and venerated even by the Jews and the Sabeans. But they were steeped in idolatry. Hali then sings of the birth and life of Mohammed, and the revelation that came to him, making him the Prophet of the One God. Hali's purpose is to indicate the moral, intellectual and artistic achievements of Islamic civilisation. He achieves this by setting off the high points of Islamic history — the teachings and practice of the Prophet, the culture of Abbasid Baghdad, the splendour of al-Andalus — against the Time of Ignorance, and its seeming recurrence as a temptation into backsliding, whether in the form of the Ummayad tyranny, the declining moral standards of late Mughal India, or the hedonism or lassitude prevalent among Muslims in British India.
This meditation on decline is punctuated by such recurrent symbols as that of the ship, caught in a whirlpool or adrift and menaced by an impending storm, while its crew and passengers slumber on, regardless (Hali calls them the ahl-e kashti, the people of the ship, an ironic take on ahl-e kitab, the people of the Book). The Musaddas is, therefore, more than a nostalgic and elegiac recital of the faded glories of Islam. More than a history told in brief but telling strokes, it is a cultural and political critique conducted in the medium of verse. Present-day readers, unused to the employment of verse for polemical or investigative purposes, may be puzzled or irritated; but the estrangement is only a function of the difference between our literary culture and Hali's.
In his perceptive reading of the reasons for Islam's decline and marginalisation, the poet-commentator accurately identifies secular modernity, especially in its avatar as Western conquistador rationality, as an engine of irreversible change. Hali's diagnostic inquiry encompasses many tones and emotions: melancholia, anger, bitterness — but it is propelled by the hope of the doctor who believes his patient will recover, if suitably rebuked and sufficiently inspired. The Musaddas anticipates that contemporary movement towards a critical, globally conscious but locally staged modernity that various Islamic societies have attempted to develop in the aftermath of colonialism and the onset of globalisation, despite opposition from entrenched reactionaries within and exploitative powers without.
Hali's Musaddas: A Story in Verse of the Ebb and Tide of Islam, translated from the Urdu by Syeda Saiyidain Hameed, HarperCollins India, 2003, p. 242, Rs. 500.
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