This final section contextualizes Habibur Rahman’s efforts to imagine a Persian Golden Age for Urdu in Bengal within debates over Urdu’s relationship to Persian in the Anjuman-i Taraqqī-yi Urdu’s central headquarters in Aurangabad in the early 1920s. Abdul Haq moved the Anjuman’s
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headquarters from Aligarh, in North India, to Aurangabad, when he took over the leadership of the Urdu promotional outfit in 1913. The Anjuman’s central headquarters remained in Aurangabad until 1938. (This era in Aurangabad will be discussed in more detail in Chapter Two.) The Anjuman in Aurangabad was located squarely within Marathwada, the Hyderabad State’s Marathi-speaking region. While urban Aurangabad had a sizable Urdu-speaking Muslim ashraf population, most of the people living in Aurangabad District spoke Marathi.
In many ways, Dhaka and Aurangabad were similar urban spaces for the Anjuman in the first few decades of the twentieth century as former princely centers with significant urban Urdu-speaking ashraf Muslim populations within predominantly non-Urdu Urdu-speaking areas. Just as Dhaka was a competing center to Bengal’s major political and cultural capital, Calcutta, Aurangabad was the former capital and second city to Hyderabad within the princely nizām’s Deccan dominions. The Anjuman’s main audience in Eastern Bengal were ashraf Muslims in the former Mughal capital of Dhaka. These Urdu-speaking ashraf Muslims were located in a largely non-Urdu speaking province. Similarly, the Anjuman’s members and wider audience in Aurangabad were Urdu-speaking ashraf Muslims in a predominantly non-Urdu speaking area. The Muslim ashraf in Dhaka claimed descent from Mughal governors and armies who came to Bengal in the early modern era. Likewise, in Aurangabad the ashraf were the descendants of mobile Muslim elites who had moved to Aurangabad when it was the capital of the Mughal Empire in the seventeenth-century and the nizām’s first capital in the early eighteenth century.
Although the Anjuman’s members in Aurangabad shared a similar cosmopolitan provincial heritage to Hakim Habibur Rahman in Dhaka, in contrast to Habibur Rahman’s celebration of Persian, there was significant pushback to the elevation of the Persian past from within the Anjuman network in Aurangabad. These institutional conflicts offer a fine-grained look at how the
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Anjuman’s members debated the relationship of Persian to Urdu and commemorated a contested Persian Golden Age. Soon after taking over the Anjuman in 1913, Maulvi Abdul Haq commissioned Maulana Ali Ahsan Marharvi to produce an edited collection of Wali Aurangabadi’s poetry. Maulana Marharvi was part of the Bilgrami syed family, a North Indian ashraf Muslim family whose scribes and gentlemen scholars were spread between Awadh, Calcutta, and Hyderabad in colonial and princely state service from the early nineteenth century onwards. In 1920, Marharvi produced a draft of Kulīyāt-i Wali (the poetry of the Wali Aurangabadi.) Wali Aurangabadi was a famous late seventeenth century Urdu poet from Aurangabad who is considered to be a transformative figure in bridging the Deccan’s Dakhini Urdu literary traditions with Urdu poetry in North India in the early modern era. Once Aurangabad became the Anjuman’s center in 1913, Wali became an important historical figure for the organization to reclaim in order to position Aurangabad as a new conjunction of North Indian and Deccani Urdu scholars in the early twentieth century.
Along with his selected anthology of Wali’s early Urdu poetry, Marharvi penned an expansive introduction which ran to almost two hundred pages. Although Marharvi submitted the hand-written rough draft in 1920, the Anjuman did not publish the text for seven years. Clearly dissatisfied with Marharvi’s edition of Wali’s poetry, Maulvi Abdul Haq soon replaced Marharvi’s tome in the Anjuman’s catalogue with a second edition in which he criticized Marharvi.
In reality, Marharvi’s introduction was less a gateway into Wali’s poetry and more of a long polemic against Persian. In particular, Marharvi blamed the stunted literary history of Urdu on widespread patronage for Persian by Indo-Muslim rulers in the early modern era. In the original hand-written draft, Marharvi poured scorn on early modern Muslim rulers in the Deccan for their
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preference for Persian which “was not the mother tongue of India.”166 Marharvi moved seamlessly from the era of the medieval Bahmani Sultanate across the early modern Deccan Sultanates and Mughal conquest to the early period of the nizāms of Hyderabad with little concern for drastically different political contexts, condemning them all for their preference for Persian. Marharvi insisted that “no language can become a literary language until a kingdom’s kind hand of patronage is placed upon it” since “after gaining a place in the royal administration (shāhī daftar), the expansion and universality that will be gained for a language cannot even be described.”167 Marharvi complained that not until “the sun of the [Mughal] sultanat began to set” could Urdu shine since
“Urdu advanced to the same extent that the significance of the Persian language declined.”168
In Marharvi’s telling, this crucial turn away from Persian and towards Urdu in the late nineteenth century was orchestrated by the Asif Jahi nizāms of Hyderabad. Marharvi claimed that
“for ages, the royal administration of the kingdom of the Deccan (mumalakat-i Deccan) was run through the Persian language, but instead, this blessed era is adorned with the jewel of Urdu and
… the honor of the sovereign [to Urdu] does not remain limited only to administrative offices, but the ruler himself with great kindness and interest has increased the literary wealth of this language”
since the nizām composed Urdu poetry.169 Marharvi insisted that the entire “population of Hindustan’s literati” were grateful for the nizām’s patronage for Urdu.170
Marharvi asserted that the patronage of the Hyderabad princely state for Urdu had created a
“new world” for the language in the early twentieth century. According to Marharvi, due to the
166 Maulana Ali Ahsan Marharvi, Dīvān-i Walī ma’ savāneh-i Walī Draft Copy (Delhi: Anjuman-i Taraqqī-yi Urdu Hind Manuscript Archive, 1920), 205.
167 Marharvi, Dīvān-i Walī ma’ savāneh-i Walī Draft Copy, 205.
168 Marharvi, Dīvān-i Walī ma’ savāneh-i Walī Draft Copy, 206-207 and 216.
169 Marharvi, Dīvān-i Walī ma’ savāneh-i Walī Draft Copy, 217.
170 Marharvi, Dīvān-i Walī ma’ savāneh-i Walī Draft Copy, 218-219.
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nizām’s lavish patronage, thousands of Urdu poets travelled to Hyderabad, Urdu literati held the court of Hyderabad in greater esteem than their own teachers, and “it was visible to the entire world that there was no greater patron of the Urdu language than him.”171 Marharvi concluded with the hope that in the future, “God willing, with this patronage, there will now be even greater advancement and security gained [for Urdu].”172 While Marharvi drew on older Indo-Persian literary tropes of praising royal patrons, what is noticeable here was the optimistic assumption that even better days were awaiting Urdu in the princely Deccan in the early twentieth century. In reality, Marharvi imagined a populist prince for a population which largely did not speak the Urdu language. In fact, the education policies favoring the small Urdu-speaking elite of the Hyderabad State were increasingly controversial from the 1920s and contributed to the 1946 Telangana peasant rebellion against the princely state’s Muslim and Hindu feudal elite.
After receiving Marharvi’s rough draft in 1920, Abdul Haq edited the manuscript over a seven-year period before publishing it. This hand-written and edited rough draft was forgotten and mistakenly housed with older hand-written manuscripts in the Anjuman’s contemporary archive in New Delhi. Abdul Haq’s editorial pen made extensive interventions in the hand-written rough draft which Marharvi submitted to the organization in 1920 for publication. In the final 1927 published version, while Abdul Haq kept the celebration of the nizām as a princely patron for Urdu, he excised the entire preceding section rebuking early modern Muslim sovereigns for patronizing Persian instead of Urdu. Across the pages of Marharvi’s hand-written rough draft, Abdul Haq carefully crossed out all the sections criticizing historical patronage for Persian in the Deccan.
171 Marharvi, Dīvān-i Walī ma’ savāneh-i Walī Draft Copy, 216- 217.
172 Marharvi, Dīvān-i Walī ma’ savāneh-i Walī Draft Copy, 218- 219.
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Thus, the ‘Persian Golden Age’ which was carefully constructed by Habibur Rahman and Abdul Haq came under harsh criticism from some of their fellow Anjuman scholars.
A careful analysis of discussions of the Persian textual past in the Anjuman’s offices in the first decades of the twentieth century reveals both the potency of Persian as a historical imaginary for Urdu promoters and its significant limitations. While Hakim Habibur Rahman in Dhaka proposed a ‘Persian Golden Age for the Muslims of Bengal,’ Maulana Marharvi in Aurangabad viewed Persian as a historical impediment for Urdu’s progress. What for Hakim Habibur Rahman in Dhaka constituted the historical mirror for Urdu’s scientific future, remained an antiquated impediment for other ashraf scholars in the Anjuman.
VI. Conclusion
This chapter demonstrates how the cultural authority of science was not limited to English-educated professionals in early twentieth century South Asia, but was instead potently mobilized by Urdu-speaking Muslim elites in provincial cities on the margins of North India to make scientific claims through the Persian past. These debates over Persian’s relationship to Urdu reveal the enduring importance of Persian to Muslim scholars in smaller cities and commercial hubs across South Asia into the early twentieth century. For some Urdu language promoters in cities such as Dhaka, which boasted historical ties to princely courts, but were overshadowed by neighboring capital cities or commercial centers in the early twentieth century, the historical mantle of a Persian ‘Golden Age’ assumed even greater importance. For Hakim Habibur Rahman in Dhaka, the Persian past was a way for Dhaka to compete with other Indo-Muslim cities, including both its local rival, Calcutta, and the distant imperial capital of Delhi. In turn, Persian offered a rich repertoire of healing tools, Islamic magic, and romantic advice that was crucial for the local popularity of Urdu-mediated medicine.
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Urdu scientific writing in Dhaka also reveals how the Anjuman drew on Urdu scholars with prestigious textual lineages to advance Urdu as a medium of scientific knowledge. The Anjuman’s members and audience were largely elite (ashraf) Muslims with family histories of Persian scribal service or religious expertise. Not only was the Anjuman a mobile organization, but it connected with local elites who themselves possessed family lineages of prestigious textual service and early modern migration for princely patrons. From Dhaka (now the capital of Bangladesh) to Aurangabad and Hyderabad (in southern India) in the 1920s and 1930s, and finally on to Karachi (now in Pakistan) in the early post-colonial era, provincial Muslim elites with family lineages of scribal expertise often aligned their regional literary projects with the Anjuman to remake Urdu as a medium of accessible, yet prestigious, scientific knowledge.
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