Everything on Urdu Literature

Literature & Language

10 items

• The Language That Went North: Dakhni Before It Was Called Urdu — essay · Deccani Urdu · 22 sources
  The oldest surviving manuscript in the language now called Urdu was written at Bidar in the 1420s, and it is a Sufi poem about a king who wants to learn yoga. For three centuries the Deccan wrote in this language while the north wrote in Persian — and in 1700 a poet from Aurangabad carried it to Delhi and changed what northern poets thought their own vernacular could do. The name "Urdu" was coined eighty years after that.

• Dakhni — Language · from the 14th c. · Deccani Urdu
  The Deccan’s own literary vernacular — writing serious poetry two centuries before Urdu was taken seriously in Delhi.
• Khwāja Ḥaidar ʿAlī Ātish — Person · 1764 (per Wikipedia infobox) – 1846; his own principal Anglophone source, Saksena 1927, prints 1846 in its margin gloss on p.111 and then 1823 in its body text on p.112 — see erasure · Lucknow School
  Khwāja Ḥaidar ʿAlī, who took the pen name Ātish ("Fire"), was a Lucknow ghazal poet whom Ram Babu Saksena's 1927 history ranks "foremost amongst Urdu writers of ghazals after Mir and Ghalib."
• Insha Allah Khan Insha — Person · d. 1233 AH / 1817 CE · Lucknow School
  Insha Allah Khan Insha, a Delhi Syed born at the Bengal Nawab's Murshidabad, became a poet at Shah Alam II's Delhi and then at the Lucknow court of Nawab Saadat Ali Khan, where he co-wrote the Darya-i-Latafat — "the first grammar of the Urdu language written by a native of the country" (Saksena, p. 87) — before a quarrel with his patron left him, in the same book's words, to "end his days in ignominy, regret and starvation" (p. 84).
• Mirza Salamat Ali Dabeer — Person · 1803 – 1875 (1218–1292 AH) · Lucknow School
  A marsiya poet born in Delhi in 1803 who moved to Lucknow at seven, trained as a pupil of Zamir, rose to recite before the Nawabs of Awadh, and was ranked by contemporaries beside his rival Mir Anis as a master of the Karbala elegy until his death in Lucknow in 1875.
• Mirza Muhammad Rafi 'Sauda' — Person · d. 1195 A.H. / 1781 A.D., Lucknow — no birth date is recorded by any contemporary or early biographer · Delhi Urdu
  Sauda, a Delhi merchant's son left the collapsing Mughal capital in old age and died at Lucknow as Nawab Asaf-ud-Daulah's poet laureate.
• Mir Muhammad Taqi "Mir" — Person · b. February 1723, Agra – d. 1225 AH / 1810 AD, Lucknow (Saksena: "there is a conflict of statements as regards the age of Mir") · Rekhta Poetry
  A Delhi poet who reached Lucknow in 1782, answered a mushaira's laughter at his old-fashioned Delhi dress with an improvised ghazal that won the room over, and whose one autobiography — seen once in the Nawabs' library in 1848–50 — was already gone by the time Saksena wrote of him in 1927.
• Imam Bakhsh Nasikh — Person · d. 1254 A.H. (1838 A.D.), Lucknow — birth year and parentage not recorded · Lucknow School
  Sheikh Imam Baksh, who took the pen-name Nasikh ("abrogator"), is credited by Ram Babu Saksena with giving Lucknow's Urdu "the final touches to the languages" and fixing rules of diction and grammar that a school of pupils then enforced as law.
• Mir Babbar Ali Anis — Person · 1802–1874 (1217–1291 AH) · Lucknow School
  Mir Babbar Ali Anis was a marsia poet of Lucknow whose recitations before the Nawabs of Awadh and, after 1859, in Patna, Benares, Allahabad and Hyderabad, filled halls that Saksena describes as "packed to overflowing."

• Is Dakhni a distinct language, or a dialect of Urdu? — claim · Contested · Deccani Urdu
  Every published classification opened for this page files Dakhni as a variety of Hindostani/Urdu — but none of them measures the distance. No intelligibility test, feature-distance metric or lexicostatistical count for Dakhni against Standard Urdu was found in any source opened here, so "structurally one language" is an inference from inherited taxonomy rather than a finding. Against that inheritance stands a documented case of contact-induced convergence reaching the genitive, the pronoun system and the finite verb — which the classification literature opened here has never weighed. The chronology in the claim is right and is not seriously disputed: the Deccan corpus and the name Dakanī precede the name "Urdu" by roughly three centuries, and Dakhni was an elaborated literary standard that was later de-standardised by administrative replacement. The taxonomic question is open, and the strongest scholarly statements of the separate-language position were not read for this page.