Glimpses of Mughal Society and Culture: A Study Based on Urdu Literature in the 2nd Half of the Eighteenth Century

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

The book emphasizes the need for a reassessment of the social, cultural and intellectual trends of the later Mughal period. A general decadence of the eighteenth century society need not be assumed in terms of the political status of the Mughal empire as its decline did not prove to be detrimental to the development of art, architecture, music and poetry which continued to receive patronage in the new provincial and local centres of power. Mughal culture survived the ruin of Delhi in the years 1739-1760, a period marked by an exodus of the nobles, the literati and the professionals to the neighbouring state of Awadh where Mughal cultural traditions not only received a new lease of life but also acquired a new set of cultural norms and life style which claimed superiority over Delhi's language and culture.

The study chiefly aims at analysing the contemporary attitudes and relationships, the value system and the socio-religious outlook which find natural expression in literature rather than a detailed account of the material conditions under such conventional heads as food, clothes, means of recreation and festivals etc. The Urdu poetry of the age, which includes the works of the great masters like Mir Taqi Mir, Mirza Rafi Sauda and Mir Dard, reveals contemporary socio-political attitudes. The praise showered by the poets on the decadent monarchy and nobility was to their social and political institutional forms and not to the individuals representing the system at that time. This also reflected the inability of the upper classes of the time to postulate a system other than the existing one. The author has carefully examined the contemporary attitudes towards the nobility and the fact that while on the one hand the nobles were censored for disloyalty, a disloyal noble who had carved a separate state was praised for maintaining law and order. Obviously the major consideration of the people was establishment of peace and order and they were prepared to give their allegiance to any one who was in a position to ensure it.

The book highlights the contradictions which are inherent in the social values of the times as reflected in the poetry of the age. While there was a great deal of sectarian animosity as exemplified by Sauda's sarcastic remarks against the Sunnis, there was a broad sentiment of tolerance at the court. Sauda himself alongwith other poets condemns fanaticism, corrupt practices and meaningless strife in the name of religion. The Urdu poetry of the period lent voice to such concepts as mysticism, eclecticism, religious toleration and humanism which provided a distinctive character to the culture of the eighteenth century.

SANTOSH THOMAS born on 16th May 1966 in Madras. He is chairman of the Department of Religion and associate professor of physics at IBD College, Shimla. He earned the Ph.D. in physics from the University of Calcutta, and the B.D. in theology from Yale. Currently he is on leave from IBD to teach at Chicago Theological Seminary. He is the author of Christianity and the Scientist and has written many articles for various scientific, philosophical, and theological journals.

In the present study an attempt has been made to examine the historical content in the Urdu poetry of the second half of the eighteenth century. The high quality of literature produced in India during this period, including Urdu poetry made a significant contribution to the intellectual and cultural developments of the period. It would therefore be futile to brand the great literary output of the age as a part of a 'decadent age, rather it was symbolic of the cultural and artistic achievements of the eighteenth century (Chapter 1). A word of caution however needs to be added. In any evaluation of the poetry a distinction must be made between the objective reflection of social reality in their poetry and the poets' own understanding of this reality. Also, due consideration has to be given to the great exaggeration and hyperbole which was the poet's right in the eighteenth century.

With the exception of Nazir Akbarabadi, all the poets under study. namely, Mir Taqi Mir, Mirza Rafi Sauda, Shah Hatim and Mir Dard spent the greater part of their lives in Delhi (Chapter 2) and were a witness to the last days of Mughal splendour in the reign of Muhammad Shah when the capital was a model of luxury and culture for the rest of India. They also saw this society suffer a severe set back in the years 1739-1760 which left a deep imprint on their writings. The passing away of the old order in Delhi, therefore, forms a constant theme of lament in their poetry. Although aware of the rise of the British power and its success in Bengal, the world of Mir and Sauda remained steeped in Mughal times. Such an attitude of the poets could be due to the fact that the great centres of Urdu poetry, especially Delhi and Agra still lay outside the influence of the British. Not surprisingly, therefore, the socio-political theme of their poetry centred around Delhi and its environs. The present work ends with the British occupation of Delhi in 1803 when the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II came under the protection of the East India Company.

The decline of the Mughal empire notwithstanding the idea of imperial authority, also voiced by poets like Mir and Sauda, remained embodied in the Mughal dynastic rule while every aspirant for political power including the British continued to seek legitimacy in the name of the Mughal emperor through out the eighteenth century. The poets who saw the decline of the nobles with the initial sense of shock and dismay reconciled to the political realities by pinning their faith and hope in the establishment or law and order by a section of the nobles at provincial or local levels (Chapter 4). The period thus witnessed a realignment of political power leading to the emergence of regional and local centres of political and economic activity as well as patronage of art and literature.

It is not possible to examine all the aspects of society on the basis of the writings of the poets. The chief purpose of the study is to analyse the attitudes and relationships, the value system and the socio-religious outlook which finds natural expression in literature (Chapter 6) rather than a detailed account of material conditions under such conventional heads as food, drink, clothes, means of recreation etc. The writings of the poets, especially in case of sufi poets like Mir Dard reveal at least at some levels of society a broader outlook in socio-religious matters and a steady growth of the forces of liberalism and eclecticism (Chapter 5) which find free expression in the Urdu ghazal of the age.

A word on the references and foot notes seems necessary here. Instead of following the common pattern of putting the surname of the author later, I have written, in case of the poets, the surname first, because the poets under study were known mostly by their surnames e.g. Mirza Mohammad Rafi Sauda as Sauda and Mir Taqi Mir as Mir etc.

I wish to express my sincere thanks to Professor Satish Chandra without whose supervision and guidance the work could not have been undertaken. I am especially grateful to Professor Nural Hasan for his valuable suggestions and encouragement. I am grateful to Professor Gopi Chand Narang, Professor S.R. Kidwai, Prof. H.C. Verma, and Dr. Muzaffar Alam for their comments and help in the translation and interpretation of many verses. My special thanks are due to my colleagues, Ms. Shashikala Mutatkar and Ms. Vidyabati Das Arora, who gave many fruitful suggestions in improving this work. Finally I am deeply indebted to my father Mirza Iqbal Shah, whose constant help has been a continuous source of encouragement in the writing of this work.

Dr. Ishrat Haque has blazed a trail by treading a treacherous path which others fear to enter. Instead of commonality of ground between history and literature as both deal with the ebb and flow of 'social formation' in all its variegated hues, one is based on facts and the other thrives on imagination. The polarisation is perennial and looked from this angle, even the poetry at best is 'fiction' a non-fact. Whatever, reality literature may claim to 'reflect' or 'portray', in fact as the nature of literature goes, it is the 'reconstruction' of reality, or the 'illusion of reality, whose main objective is the 'aesthetic effect' as compared to the 'knowledge effect' which is the goal of history (both terms as developed and used by the neo-marxist French Philosopher Louis Althusser in For Marx, Harmonds Worth, Allen Lane, 1969). We may however, qualify the 'knowledge effect' by adding 'of perfective, of what has happened, or what has passed'.

Nonetheless, be it the reflection, or the illusion or a mere form, the poetical image springs from the hard 'social formation', which if studied and analysed with proper care and sensibility, may yield such information which cannot be culled from any other source. It is this rare treatment which Dr. Ishrat Haque has successfully applied to the late eighteenth century Urdu poetry. She has not restricted her study to the descriptive genres of Shahr-ashob and the Qasida, which given' to hyperbole, bubble with surface information, but she has delved deep into the oblique and highly dense genre of the Ghazal which reverberates with the tragic undertones of the crumbling Mughal Empire tinged with the glow of its golden twilight. It is here that her study attains its high illuminative not only for the historian, but also for the literati who views literature as a socio-political by-product. There is thus a lot of interest for the intrepid traveller who wants to look beyond the barrier of disciplines.

**Contents and Sample Pages**