Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/889

Rh LITERATURE.] HINDUSTANI 849 Delili (died 1862), wrote under the name of Zafar, and was a pupil in poetry of Shaikh Ibrahim Zauq, a distinguished writer ; he has left a voluminous dlivdn, which has been printed at Dehli. Mashafi (Ghulam-i Hamdam), who died about 1814, was one of the most distinguished of the revived poetic school of Delili, and was himself one of its founders. Originally of Lakhnau, he left that city for Dehli in 1777, and held conferences of poets, at which several authors who afterwards acquired repute formed their style ; he has left five dlwdns, a Tazkirah or biography of Urdu poets, and a Shdh-ndmah or account of the kings of Dehli down to Shah Alain. Qaim (Qiyamuddm All) was one of his society, and died in 1792 ; he has left several works of merit. Ghfilib, otherwise Mirzii Asadulliih Khan Nausliah, laureate of the last Mughal, who died in 1869, is undoubtedly the most eminent of the modern Dehli poets. He wrote chiefly in Persian, of which language, especially in the form cultivated by Firdausi, free from intermixture of Arabic words, he was a master ; but his Urdu dlwdn, though short, is excellent in its way, and his reputation was spread far and wide. To this school, though he lived and died at Agra, may be attached Mir Wall Muhammad Nazir (recently dead in 1832) ; his masnavls entitled Jogi-ndmah, Kaurl-ndmah, Banjdre-ndmah, and Burhape- ndmah, as well as his dlwdn, have been frequently reprinted, and are extremely popular. His language is less artificial than that of the generality of Urdu poets, and some of his poems have been printed in Nagari, and are as well known and as much esteemed by Hindus as by Muhammadans. 4. While such, in outline, is the history of the poetic schools of the Dakkhan, Dehli, and Lakhnau, a fourth, that of the Fort William College at Calcutta, was being formed, and was destined to give no less an impulse to the cultiva tion of Urdu prose than had a hundred years before been given to that of poetry by Wall. At the commencement of the present century Dr John Gilchrist was the head of this institution, and his efforts were directed towards getting together a body of literature suitable as text-books for the study of the Urdu language by the European officers of the administration. To his exertions we owe the elaboration of the vernacular as an official speech, and the possibility of substituting it for the previously current Persian as the language of the courts and the government. He gathered together at Calcutta the most eminent vernacular scholars of the time, and their works, due to his initiative, are still unsurpassed as specimens of elegant and serviceable prose composition, not only in Urdu, but also in Hindi. The chief authors of this school are Haidarl (Sayyid Muhammad Haitlar-bakhsh), Husaini (Mir Bahadur All), Mir Amman Lutf, Haflzuddin. Ahmad, Slier All Afsos, Nihal Chand of Lahore, Kazim All Jawfin, Lallu Lai Kavi, Mazhar All Wila, and Ikram All. Haidarl died in 1828. He composed the Totd-Kahdni (1801), a prose redaction of the Tut.l-ndmah which has been already men tioned ; a romance named Ardish-i MaJifil (&quot;Ornament of the Assembly&quot;), detailing the adventures of the famous Arab chief Hatim-i Tai ; the Gul-i Maghfirat or Dah Majlis, an account of the holy persons of the Muhammadan faith ; the Gulzdr-i Danish, a translation of the Bahdr-i Danish, a Persian work containing stories descriptive of the craft and faithlessness of women ; and the Tdrlkh-i Nddirl, a translation of a Persian history of Nadir Shah. Husaini is the author of an imitation in prose of Mir Hasan s Kihni-l-baydn, under the name of Nasr-i Benazir (&quot;the Incom parable Prose,&quot; or &quot;the Prose of Benazir,&quot; the latter being the name of the hero), and of a work named. Akhldq-i Hindi, or &quot;Indian Morals,&quot; both composed in 1802. The Akhldq-i Hindi is an adaptation of a Persian work called the Mvfarrihu-l-qulul) (&quot;the Dflighter of Hearts&quot;), itself a version of the ffiiopadeia. Mir Amman was a native of Dehli, which he left in the time of Ahmad Shah Durrani for Patna, and in 1801 repaired to Calcutta. To him we owe the Bdgh o Bahdr (1801-2), an adaptation of Amir Khus- rau s famous Persian romance entitled the Chahdr Darwesh, or &quot;Story of the Four Dervishes.&quot; Amman s work is not itself directly modelled on the Persian, but is a rehandling of an almost contemporary rendering by Tahsin of Etawa, called the Nau-tarz-i Mur asset. The style of this composition is much admired by natives of India, and editions of it are very numerous. Amman also composed an imitation of Husain Wa iz Kashifi s Akhldq-i Muhsinl under the name of the Ganj-iKhubl ( Treasure of Virtue&quot;), produced in 1802. Haflzuddin Ahmad was a professor at the Fort William College ; in 1803 he completed a translation of Abu-1- Faz s Iydr-i Danish, under the name of the Khirad-afroz (&quot;En- lightener of the Understanding&quot;). The /ydr-i Danish (&quot;Touch stone of AVisdom&quot;) is one of the numerous imitations of the originally Sanskrit collection of apologues known in Persian as the Fables of Bldpdl, or Kalllah and Damnah. Afsos was one of the most illustrious of the Fort William school ; originally of Dehli, he left that city at the age of eleven, and entered the service of Qasim Ali Khan, Nawab of Bengal ; he afterwards repaired to Haidarabad in the Dakhhan, and thence to Lakhnau, where he was the pupil of Mir Hasan, Mir Soz, and Mir Haidar Ali Hairan. He joined the Fort William College in 1800, and died in 1809. He is the author of a much esteemed dlu-dn ; but his chief reputation is founded on two prose works of great excellence, the Ardish-i Mahfil (1805), an account of India adapted from the introduction of the Persian Khuldsatu-t-tawdrlkh of Sujan Kae, and the Bdgh-i Urdu (1808), a translation of Sa di s Gulistdn. Nihal Chand trans lated into Urdu a masnavl, entitled the Gul-i Bakdicall, under the name of Ma~hab-i Ishq (&quot; Religion of Love&quot;) ; this work is in prose intermingled with verse, was composed in 1804, and has been frequently reproduced. Jawiin, like most of his collaborators, vas originally of Dehli and afterwards of Lakhnau ; he joined the College in 1800. He is the author of a version in Urdu of the well- known story of Sakuntala, under the name of Sakuntald Ndtak; the Urdu was rendered from a previous Braj-bhakha version by Nawaz Kabishwar made in 1716, and was printed in 1802. He also composed a Bdrah-mdsd, or poetical description of the twelve months (a very popular and often-handled form of composition), with accounts of the various Hindu and Muhammadan festivals, entitled the Dastur-i Hind (&quot;Usages of India&quot;), piinted in 1812. Ikram Ali translated, under the name of the Iklnmnu-s-safd, or &quot;Brothers of Purity&quot; (1810), a chapter of a famous Arabian collection of treatises on science and philosophy entitled Rasdilu Ikhiudni-s-safd, and composed in the 10th century. The complete collection, due to different writers who dwelt at Basrah, has recently been made known to European readers by the translation of Dr F. Dieterici (1858-1879) ; the chapter selected by Ikram Ali is the third, which records an allegorical strife for the mastery between men and animals before the king of the Jinn. The trans lation is written in excellent Urdu, and is one of the best of the Fort William productions. Sri Lallu Lai was a Brahman, whose family, originally of Guja rat, had long been settled in Northern India. What was done by the other Fort William authors for Urdu prose was done by Lallu Lai almost alone for Hindi. His Prcm Sdgar and Rdjnlti, the former a version in pure Hindi of the 10th chapter of the Bhdgavata Purdna, detailing the history of Krishna, and founded on a pre vious Braj-bhakha version by Chaturbhuj Misr, and the latter an adaptation in Braj-bhakha prose of the Hitopadcsa and part of the Pancha-tantra, are unquestionably the most important works in Hindi prose. The Prcm Sugar was begun in 1804 and ended in 1810; it enjoys immense popularity in Northern India, lias been frequently icproduced in a lithographed form, and has several times been printed. The E&jnlti was composed in 1809; it is much admired for its sententious brevity and the purity of its language. Besides these two works, Lallu Lai was the author of a collection of a hundred anecdotes in Hindi and Urdu entitled Latdif-i Hindi, an anthology of Hindi verse called the Sabha-bilds, a Sat-sal in the style of Biiiari-Lal called Sapta-Satika, and several other works. He and Jawiin worked together at the Singhdsan Battisl (1801), a redaction in mixed Urdu and Hindi (Devanagari character) of a famous collection of legends relating the prowess of King Yikra- maditya ; and he also aided the latter author in the production of the Sakuntald Ndtak. Mazhar Ali Wila was his collaborator in the Baitdl Pachlsl, a collection of stories similar in many respects to the Singhdsan Battisl, and also in mixed Urdu-Hindi ; and he ! aided Wila in the preparation in Urdu of the Story of Mddhunal, a romance originally composed in Braj-bhakha by Moti Earn. The works of these authors, though compiled and published under the superintendence of Dr Gilchrist, Captain Abraham Lockett, Professor J. W. Taylor, Dr W. Hunter, and other Euro pean officers of the College, are essentially Indian in taste and style, and owe to this character a popularity and wide reputation which have been gained by no other work (and there have been many) undertaken under British initiative. If not absolutely the first works in Urdu and Hindi prose, they were at any rate the first literary standards in those languages ; and almost the whole of recent prose authorship is due either to their influence or to one of two other impulses, the first of which was almost synchronous with the Fort William productions, and the other not many years pos terior to them. These were the reform in Islam led by Sayyid Ahmad, and the introduction of lithography and a newspaper press. Sayyid Ahmad was born in 1782, and received his early educa tion at Dehli ; his instructors were two learned Muslims, Shah Abdu-l- Aziz, author of a celebrated commentary on the Qur an (the Tafslr-i* Azlziyyah), and his brother Abdu-1-Qadir, the writer of the first and best translation of the Holy Volume into Urdu. Under their guidance Sayyid Ahmad embraced the doctrines of the Wahhabis, a sect whose preaching appears at this time to have first reached India. He gathered round him a large number of fervent disciples, among others Ismail Hiiji nephew of Abdu-1- Aziz and XL 107