‘BASTARD MONGREL ARMY ON THE MOVE, URDU’

Abstract

The Enchantress of Florence essays a modernist and postmodern account of Mughal roots of Urdu that steers clear of uncritical nostalgia for the Mughal empire on the one hand, and avoids the satiric mode of anti-Urdu polemic on the other. Abjuring these novelistic and essayistic conventions, Salman Rushdie's novel constructs a global map of the Renaissance within which Florentine humanism, sensuality, political thought and love poetry has its eastern counterpart in the humanist, syncretic and proto-modern elements in Akbar's court in Sikri. The compound word at the heart of Rushdie's cartographic fiction is an older term for the Urdu language – zubān- e-urdu –e- mŭallā – that literally means the neighbourhood or royal court where Urdu is spoken. Disconnected facts of Urdu's early linguistic history are strung together in the novel into a haunting love story between a European stranger, an exquisite fortress city to which he travelled and wished to live, and a visionary emperor who had the imagination to conceive of the cosmopolite city and adopt the cosmopolite vernacular but who betrayed his own best self and violated the principle of fraternal affection. The stranger who is first welcomed in Sikri and Florence and then repudiated by city dwellers embodies the spirit of Urdu and its potential resources for creating the enchantress city where foreigner turns into beloved, the wholly Other into the dearly familiar. Through its linguistic openness Urdu functions for Rushdie as rallying point for other Third World vernaculars. How can the English novel mediate and make visible the secular and modern sympathies of Urdu and heal the Hindi–Urdu divide? These are the lines of enquiry that Rushdie's novel makes possible.

Keywords:

• Etymology
• Hindustani
• Mughal
• novelization
• Renaissance
• Sikri

Notes

¹For a cogent historical account of the nineteenth-century Hindi–Urdu divide, see Dalmia (1999) and King (1994).

²Hindustani as a way to heal the Hindi–Urdu divide has been advocated from both sides of the divide, by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan as well as by Gandhi in the nationalist period, and more recently by Rai (2000).

³Literary forms favoured by nineteenth-century polemicists from either side of the Hindi–Urdu divide were the essayistic form, satires, drama, speeches, literary histories and the production of dictionaries and annotated editions. See, for instance, the anti-Urdu plays described by King (1994: 128–53).

⁴Everyday speech is the locus for arguments concerning the common ground between Hindi and Urdu. For instance, Aamir Mufti states: ‘at the spoken level at least, “Hindi” and “Urdu” designate the same linguistic stock or, at most, extremely slight dialectal variants of the same language stock, for which there is no encompassing name’ (2007: 140–51).

⁵The project of speech as lost memory contains links with the fantasy world of Khattam Shud the cultmaster who ‘opposes speech’ and creates the idol of Bezaban (silence) in Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Rushdie 1990: 27).

⁶Evidence for Rushdie's modernist anxieties about Urdu can be found in his interview with Michael Reder (2000) where he publicly agonized about how to execute Joycean modernism in Urdu.

⁷It is likely that Rushdie drew on Faruqi's (2001: 26) refutation. Faruqi states: ‘the commentary of the authors [of Hobson-Jobson] is wrong for many reasons: there were plenty of Turks in India before Babar’ and ‘Hindī/ Hindvī/ Dihlavī was already a language in and around Delhi before Babar’.

⁸‘Like everyone else who grew up in India, I got force-fed the Mughals as a kid’ (Eugenides 2008).

⁹In making Akbari Urdu the language of discontent and change Rushdie seeks to affiliate himself with the sceptical strain in the Urdu literary imagination, in particular the Urdu of Iqbal and Ghalib. For an insightful reading of Rushdie's links ‘with a highly wrought tradition’ in Mir, Ghalib, Iqbal and Faiz, see Suleri (1994: 224).

¹⁰Hindu nationalist exhortations to Muslims to stop harping on their Mughal past can be glimpsed in the Ballia speech in 1884 by Bhartendu Harischandra. He stated: ‘Even today many [among Musalmans of India] possess the knowledge that the monarchies of Delhi and Lucknow are intact. Friends! Those days are gone’ (Sharma 1989: 1013).

¹¹See Vijay Mishra's ‘Rushdie and Bollywood Cinema’ in Gurnah (2007). Mishra argues that Bollywood ‘tends to serve postmodernist ends for Salman Rushdie’ (26).

¹²The use of ellipsis here creates an intertextual pathway to Satanic Verses. The Bollywood actor Gibreel falls down from the sky into London while singing the refrain mera dil he Hindustani from the song in Raj Kapoor's film Sree 420, ‘My heart is Indian for all that’ (Rushdie 1988: 5).

¹³For a detailed view of Akbar's Sikri see the plans of the city reproduced in Lal (2005). See also Lal's chapter ‘Settled, Sacred and All Powerful: The New Regime under Akbar’ in the same book (140–75).

¹⁴In the introduction to the English edition of Ab-e-Hayāt Frances Pritchett provides ample proof that Azad's book formed the Urdu imaginary (Azad 2001: 15).

¹⁵Rushdie's birthing narrative about Urdu as the brainchild of Akbar and Mughal camp does not take cognizance of the contestatory birth narrative. Dakani Urdu and the pioneering work in the early eighteenth century by the poet Vali of Gujarat is considered the prior birthing of Urdu. See Faruqi's book chapter ‘Vali’ (Faruqi 2001: 129–42).

¹⁶In Ghalib's literary culture the compound word still meant Persian although he also wrote in what he called Rekhtah (known to us as modern Urdu).

¹⁷For a thoughtful argument on the English novel on Urdu as reterritorialized counterpoint to the deterritorialized impulse in Rushdie's novels, see Sadana (2009). Anita Desai's uncritical reproduction of humiliating stereotypes of decrepit Urdu poet, illiterate first wife, and second wife as former prostitute in her novel In Custody are discussed by Yaquin (2006).

¹⁸According to Faruqi (2008), ‘Urdu presents the most complete instance of syncretism.’

¹⁹The intertextual significance of the birthing of Urdu passage in EF can be gauged from the interweaving of birth of the nation and midnight's child (Midnight's Children); birth of Pakistan as miscegenation (Shame); global Islam and the birth of a new religion in the Prophet's vision (Satanic Verses); birth of global cosmopolitan Mumbai intertwined with the family saga of Moraes Zogoby (The Moor's Last Sigh).

²⁰In 1984 Rushdie enthusiastically reviewed Anita Desai's novelistic satire on Urdu entitled In Custody. EF, however, obliquely distances itself from the satiric mode favoured by Desai's novel.