This article is an excellent read for Punjabis out there and for anyone interested in the linguistic side of the Punjab.
REVIEW: Posthumously speaking
http://www.dawn.com/weekly/books/books16.htm
Reviewed by Shafquat Tanvir Mirza
It were the British who first took note of Punjabi’s rich language and literature before their conquest of Punjab (west of the Sutlej). Even the Sikh state never asserted its Punjabi cultural identity and the language was not given any status in the court where Persian was supreme. Contrary to that, the would-be-rulers of the Punjab, the British were training their European manpower in Punjabi language and its dialects.
The language first found favour with the scholars at Fort William College and the Christian Mission of Serampur had the New Testament translated into Punjabi in the Persian script. The British intention was to penetrate into Punjab and these happened to be the first Punjabi books ever printed in a modern press.
After they had humbled the Lahore Darbar, the British thought it better to make Urdu as the medium of instruction in the Punjab (the Frontier was then part of the Punjab). The Maharaja of Kashmir followed suit. This was contrary to the policy of the colonialists who had introduced the local languages as the medium of instruction in all occupied areas, including Sindh. Punjabi was not entertained as an optional subject in the educational system except for those who were ready to accept the Gurmukhi script. That would explain why no Muslim or Hindu scholar paid any attention to writing the history of the language.
It so happened that all the major poets of Punjab - from Baba Farid of Pakpattan to Mian Muhammad of Mirpur - belonged to west Punjab. It was the need of the Sikhs to adopt Punjabi as the language of their religion while the British as the rulers of Punjab had to pay attention to the language, literature and folklore of this area. While preparing their settlement reports, they would commission a study of the language and literature of the area under their rule. Thus the first English-Punjabi dictionary was prepared and published by the British. Books such as The legends of the Punjab also got to be produced by them. The author of this significant book placed poets like Peelu (first narrator of the story of Mirza-Sahiban) in Doaba while the man belonged to Chakwal district in the Rawalpindi region.
With the installation of printing presses in the Punjab, volume after volume of Punjabi poetry was published much to the delight of the rural population of the province. This popularity of the language and its poetry coaxed Sikh scholars to collect, research and write the history of Punjabi poets and perhaps the first attempt was made by Bawa Budh Singh, an engineer by profession, who first wrote tazkaras and published them in the Gurmukhi script in three volumes. He also wrote a tazkara on the pattern of Maulana Muhammad Husain Azad’s Aab-i-Hayat. It was named Prem kahani and was in the Persian script.
Dr Mohan Singh Diwana first wrote the history of Punjabi language and literature in the early thirties. It was in English and was a thesis for his Ph.D for the Punjab University. This is the first ever history of Punjabi literature written in any language of the area. Though reproduced in Pakistan, it has not yet been translated into Punjabi or Urdu. The same decade saw the PhD thesis of Dr Lajwanti Ramakrishna on Punjabi sufi poets. It did not have a historians approach and was translated from English into Punjabi and published by Majlis Shah Husain, Lahore.
Just before Partition, Dr Diwana published a short history in the Persian script and before that Ustad Maula Bukhsh Kushta of Amritsar wrote a voluminous Tazkara also named Tazkara Punjabi Sho’ara which became the guidebook of all the so-called histories and tazkaras written by the later scholars including the book under review which was originally written for the Tarraqi-i-Urdu Board of Lahore in 1963.
The project was to publish histories of all the Pakistani languages and their literatures in Urdu. In the meantime, the nomenclature of the Board was changed and it was named as Tarraqi-i-Science Board. This well-written tazkara-cum-history by Dr Faqir was no more on the publication list of the Board and perhaps Dr Faqir himself was so frustrated that he predicted the fate of this manuscript in an Urdu verse:
Khak mein mil jaey ga jab meri hastika nishan
Ho gi taza yadgar-i-zeest iss tasveer sey
Many years after his death, his son, Khwaja Muhammad Ashraf decided to get all the unpublished work of Dr Faqir published. For this he approached the Board chief, Amjad Islam Amjad, with the request that if the Board was not willing to publish the manuscript, he himself was ready to return the amount of royalty received by his late father. All he asked was to be allowed to publish the manuscript which was now at the mercy of moths. His proposal was not accepted.
Somehow, Arshad managed to obtain a copy of the manuscript which was lying among the papers of the late scholar. Credit goes to the publishers who have produced this neat little book 40 years after it was written. Thus Dr Faqir’s Yadgar-i-Zeest has seen the light of day.
The first part of the book is spread over 60 pages and is about the origin and history of the language, forms of folk literature and the various genres of Punjabi poetry. In his view, Masud Saad Salman (eleventh century), Ghaznavid governor of Lahore, was the first poet in Punjabi (then called Hindvi) who in one of his Persian verses claimed that he had written a diwan in Hindvi also, which was no more traceable. Therefore, Baba Farid Ganjshakar (twelfth century) was considered as the founding father of Punjabi literature followed by Guru Nanak (fifteenth century) and Shah Hussain of Lahore and Damodar Das of Jhang (sixteenth century).
The book is written in tazkara-style the pattern established by Maula Bukhsh Kushta, Abdul Ghafoor Qureshi and Kaifi Jampuri. The only difference is that this book includes an exhaustive chapter spread over 100 pages on the prose writers who are missing in the previous books. The scheme followed is simple but educative. Every chapter begins with an introductory passage on the life of a poet/writer followed by a representative sample of his verse/prose in original Punjabi with its Urdu translation.
Though the writer does not basically approve of the Sanskritized Punjabi being produced in the Gurmukhi script, he has also included 52 non-Muslim poets in this volume.
Punjabi zuban-o-adab ki tareekh
By Dr Faqir Muhammad Faqir
Sang-e-Meel Publications, 20 Shahrah-i-Pakistan, Lahore
Tel: 042-7220100.
Email: [email protected]
ISBN 969-35-1345-2
526pp. Rs600