While it is
always fun going through literary
classics, the effort by a Lahore-based
publisher to actually reprint in its
totality an old edition of the famed
Baagh-o-Bahar by Mir Aman has added
a new dimension to the experience,
making it a collector's item. Even the
text has not been re-composed for its
latest edition; instead, it has been
regenerated through photo-printing,
which makes it fascinating for the
reader to have a firsthand experience of
the Urdu script of some two hundred
years ago.
Baagh-o-Bahar represents a
watershed in the development of the Urdu
language and literature, as it bridged
the gap between everyday usage and
literary prose. Ironically, the credit
for such trend-setting experimentation
should perhaps go to an Englishmen, Dr
John Gilchrist, who headed the Urdu
department at the famed Fort Williams
College in Calcutta, and invited Mir
Aman to come up with something that
could be taught easily to those coming
from abroad to join the English
administrative machinery in India.
At the time, the celebrated Persian
text, "Qissa Chahar Dervesh", had
already been translated into Urdu by one
Ata Hussain Khan and was titled "Nau
Tarz-i-Murass'a". Gilchrist naturally
wanted to avoid the linguistic gimmickry
that was the hallmark of Ata's work, and
Mir Aman obliged him with Baagh-o-Bahar,
which was almost an original work, and
not a mere translation. It turned out to
be such a success that it has survived
more than a couple of centuries even
though not much detail is available
about the author himself.
In the preface to the latest edition, Dr
Saleem Akhtar has discussed in detail
almost all aspects related to the work,
dealing in depth with the common myth
which suggests that the original Qissa
in Persian was penned by Amir Khusrau
during a phase when his mentor
Nizamuddin Aulia was down with some
illness. The current effort is a photo
reproduction of the 1851 edition of
Baagh-o-Bahar, which was brought out
by Duncan Forbes, who was a professor of
oriental languages at King's College in
London, and has to his credit an
impressive list of oriental
reproductions. The edition includes a
120-page Urdu-English dictionary of all
the difficult words in the book. It must
have been a great help to the English
students, but, frankly, it would be of
much greater help to a modern day reader
of Urdu classics!
Though a low-scale edition of
Baagh-o-Bahar by the same publisher
is also available in the open market
(150 pages, Rs120), those really
interested in classics would be
fascinated by the photo-print
reproduction, which is as great as Mir
Aman 's text.
While Urdu prose owes its origin to Brij
Bhasha, Urdu poetry has drunk heavily
from Persian. Interestingly, Persian
poetry itself has remained dependent on
its Arabic counterpart for much of its
initial phase, and the Arabic influence
on Urdu is there for all to see. It is
only natural then that Urdu poets,
especially beginners, often go jittery
while using a whole lot of words, as
they are not sure about the origin of
such words and their correct usage.
With more than six thousand words within
its fold, Moeen-ul-Shu'raa was
compiled by Munshi Ghulam Hussain Khan
back in 1932 with the purpose of
providing an authentic guide to Urdu
poets about words of foreign origin. It
not only has words from Arabic and
Persian, but also from English, Sanskrit
and Turkish to cover the whole range.
The thing that puts this effort apart
from the rest of its kind is the element
of authenticity, as the compiler has
quoted verses from famous poets to
confirm the meaning and gender of each
and every word. It may be difficult to
realize the importance of the gender of
a word today, but in those days of
intense Delhi-Lucknow controversies,
gender happened to be a key element in
the usage of words, and the book, even
if indirectly, is a reminder of those
interesting times
|
