Hali Panipati :: Articles on Maulana Hali

Articles on Maulana Hali

Hali's Musaddas by Dr Syeda Hameed, Member, Planning Commission, Govt of India

Maulana Hali was my paternal grandmother Mushtaq Fatima's grandfather. Let me elaborate. Altaf Husain had two sons, Khwaja Akhlaq Husain and Khwaja Sajjad Husain, and one daughter, Inayat Fatima. My grandmother was Khwaja Akhlaq Husain's daughter. Hali's ancestry can be traced all the way to Hazrat Abu Ayub Ansari of Medina. It is said that when the Prophet of Islam performed Hijrat (the Prophet's exodus from Mecca to Medina in year AD 622 from which date the Islamic calendar starts), each Medina dweller was anxious that he should be his guest and grace his house. 'Wherever my camel sits down, that is the house in which I will stay,' the Prophet is reported to have said. The camel sat before the house of Abu Ayub Ansari

It was amidst these tumultuous happenings that Hali graduated from moon-gazing poets of the feudal era to nation-building activities. His sensitive mind saw the decaying socio-economic structure and started expressing his deep anguish through his powerful pen. He was the first poet of the era to raise his voice against social injustices and evils. He was the originator of an age in Urdu literature in which writers and poets cast aside their romantic yearnings and began waking up the society

Hali transformed poetry into a potent weapon for social reform and cultural transformation. This was the beginning of purposeful, progressive poetry and socially-conscious literature in India. And that, in time to come, itself became a part of national consciousness. No wonder, in his Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru lists Hali among the founders of the Indian cultural and social renaissance, and calls him "one of the outstanding figures of urdu literature"

Hali's first contacts with Sir Syed were through the former's contribution to the Aligarh institute Gazette, but later they met personally in Delhi and became good friends. Their friendship proved a tremendous asset to the Aligarh Movement. In a classic passage, Hali thus described his first meeting with Sir Syed "All of a sudden I saw a man of God, a hero among men, going ahead on a hazardous path

Hali was revolutionary in the sense that he overturned the supremacy of feudal elements, vain conventionalism and introduced in its place new canons of realism, simplicity and sincerity. Taking up the attitude of a reformer, Hali condemned, in emphatic and unmistakable terms, the abuse of the noble art at the hands of lesser geniuses...Poetry as "Criticism of life" did not exist. It administered to the sensuous passions of its readers without fulfilling any of its high offices. But Hali boldly declared that the first essential element of poetry lay in its capacity to move the heart which can be done only if it is true to nature, unartificial, and simple in thought and language. As in thought so in diction. He revolted like Wordsworth, against the artificialities and conventionalities of the time

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HALI—AN APPRAISAL by Dr. Mohd. Hasan

The famous Urdu poet, Raghupati Sahai Firaq, has aptly described him as the "Prophet of sensitive rationalism". He was the first Urdu critic to stress the need of basing literary criticism on objective criteria of "realism, simplicity and passion" and it was on these standards that he undertook a survey of Urdu poetry and urged his contemporaries to open their closed minds to the new Western winds. His Muquadama Sher-o-Shairi, though, in fact, a lengthy preface of his Divan, opened new vistas in Urdu criticism and remains the most outstanding critical work in Urdu.

Hali was a unique litterateur in that he was equally great as a prose writer and as a poet. Ghalib was a master of Urdu prose as well as poetry but his gift to prose consists of nothing but personal letters. Shibli was not as remarkable a poet as prose writer. Hali was a prodigy whose modern poems were trend-setting and prose creations were epoch-making. Hali was a versatile writer.... Hali's prose style is simple, direct but very sincere. It will be incorrect to regard it as bereft of any literary embellishment. At places Hali writes a very idiomatic and literary prose. At other places his style is what may be termed the basic style of Urdu prose, Though shorn of verbiage, it nevertheless displays an intense depth of human feelin.

He appeared on the scene at a time when the impact of Western learning was being felt by most of the modern Indian languages. He and Maulana Mohd. Husain 'Azad' made conscious effort to give literature a sense of history and of direction. His 'Muqaddama-e-Shero Shaeri* blazed a new trail in Urdu criticism. He advocated that good poetry must have social content, a freshness of approach and progressiveness. He was against ornamentation, embellishment and literary acrobatics. His preference was for simple and direct expression, with delicacy and clarity of thought

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