Charles James Lyall

“ The high level of excellence which is found in its selections, both as to form and matter, is remarkable, and caused it to be said that Abū Tammām displayed higher qualities as a poet in his choice of extracts from the ancients than in his own compositions. What strikes us chiefly in the class of poetry of which the Ḥamāsa is a specimen, is its exceeding truth and reality, its freedom from artificiality and hearsay, the evident first-hand experience which the singers possessed of all of which they sang. For historical purposes the value of the collection is not small ”

“ The cult of Rāma is founded on family life, and the relation of the worshipper to the Deity is that of a child to a father. The morality it inculcates springs from the sacred sources of human piety which in all religions have wrought most in favour of pureness of life, of fraternal helpfulness and of humble devotion to a loving and tender Parent, who desires the good of mankind, His children, and hates violence and wrong. ”

“ All evil in the world is ascribed to Māyā, illusion or falsehood, and truth in thought, word and deed is enjoined as the chief duty of man: “No act of devotion can equal truth; no crime is so heinous as falsehood; in the heart where truth abides there is My abode.” [3] The distinctions of creeds are declared to be of no importance in the presence of God: “The city of Hara [4] is to the east, that of ʽAlī [5] is to the west; but explore your own heart, for there are both Rāma and Karīm;” ”

“ That of Krishna, on the other hand, had for its basis the legendary career of a less estimable human hero, whose exploits are marked by a kind of elvish and fantastic wantonness; it has more and more spent its energy in developing that side of devotion which is perilously near to sensual thought, and has allowed the imagination and ingenuity of poets to dwell on things unmeet for verse or even for speech. ”

“ The language is the form of Hindi called Braj-bhāshā, spoken in the country about Mathura, where the poet lived. The couplets are inspired by the Krishna side of Vishnu-worship, and the majority of them take the shape of amorous utterances of Rādhā, the chief of the Gōpīs or cowherd maidens of Braj, and her divine lover, the son of Vasudēva. Each couplet is independent and complete in itself, and is a triumph of skill in compression of language, felicity of description, and rhetorical artifice. ”

“ Every man and woman that has ever been born is of the same nature as yourself. He, whose is the world, and whose are the children of ʽAlī and Rāma, He is my Guru, He is my Pīr.” He proclaims the universal brotherhood of man, and the duty of kindness to all living creatures. Life is the gift of God, and must not be violated; the shedding of blood, whether of man or animals, is a heinous crime. The followers of Kabīr do not observe celibacy, and live quiet unostentatious lives ”

“ Entirely in verse, it adopted and elaborated the Prākrit metrical forms, and carried them to a pitch of perfection too often overlooked by those who concern themselves rather with the substance than the form of the works they read. It covers a wide range of style, and expresses, in the works of its greatest masters, a rich variety of human feeling. Little studied by Europeans in the past, it deserves much more attention than it has received. ”

“ The Lord is to be approached by faith (bhakti) —disinterested devotion and surrender of self in perfect love, and all actions are to be purified of self-interest in contemplation of Him. “Show love to all creatures, and thou wilt be happy; for when thou lovest all things, thou lovest the Lord, for He is all in all.” ”

“ Such, in the briefest outline, is the character of Hind literature during the period when it grew and flourished through its own original forces. Founded by a popular and religious impulse in many respects comparable to that which, nearly 1600 years before, had produced the doctrine and literature, in the vernacular tongue, of Jainism and Buddhism, and cultivated largely (though by no means exclusively) by authors not belonging to the Brahmanical order, it was the legitimate descendant in spirit, as Hindī is the legitimate descendant in speech, of the Prākrit literature which preceded it. ”

“ BIHĀRĪ-LĀL, a name famous in Hindustani literature as the author of the Sat-saī, a collection of approximately seven hundred distichs, which is perhaps the most celebrated Hindi work of poetic art, as distinguished from narrative and simpler styles. ”

“ It has already been seen that during the early centuries of Muslim rule in India adherents of that faith used the language and metrical forms of the country for their compositions. Persian words early made their way into the popular speech; they are common in Chand, and in Kabīr’s verses (which are nevertheless unquestionable Hindī) they are in many places used as freely as in the modern dialect. Much of the confusion which besets the subject is due to the want of a clear understanding of what Urdū, as opposed to Hindī, really is. ”

“ Pleasing hyperbole, ingenious comparison, antithesis, alliteration, carefully arranged gradation of noun and epithet, are the means employed to obtain variety; and few of the most eloquent passages of later Persian verse admit of translation into any other language without losing that which in the original makes their whole charm. What is true of Persian is likewise true of Urdū poetry. Until quite modern times, there is scarcely anything in it which can be called original. [17] Differences of school, which are made much of by native critics, are to us hardly perceptible ”

“ It is very difficult now to form a just estimate of the poem as literature. The language, essentially transitional in character, consists largely of words which have long since died out of the vernacular speech. Even the most learned Hindus of the present day are unable to interpret it with confidence; and the meaning of the verses must be sought by investigating the processes by which Sanskrit and Prākrit forms have been transfigured in their progress into Hindī. Chand appears, on the whole, to exhibit the merits and defects of ballad chroniclers in general. ”

“ But there is this difference between them, that, whereas Hindī has been raised to the dignity of a literary speech chiefly by impulses of revolt against the monopoly of the Brahmans, Urdū has been cultivated with goodwill by authors who have themselves highly valued and dexterously used the polished Persian. Both Sanskrit and Persian continue to be employed occasionally for composition by Indian writers, though much fallen from their former estate; but for popular purposes it may be said that their vernacular rivals are now almost in sole possession of the field. ”

“ Much, indeed, of the work produced has scarcely any claim to literary excellence, and in the crowd of writers we may content ourselves with mentioning only a few whose influence and authority make it probable that they will hereafter be known as leaders in the new culture.
One of the first effects of the new literary inspiration seemed to be the extinction of poetical composition as previously practised. With the deaths of Ẕauq (1854) and Ghālib (1869) of the Delhi school, and those of Anīs (1875) and Dabīr (1876) of Lucknow, the end of Urdū poetry appeared to have come. ”

“ The Persians, having for centuries treated the same themes with a fecundity which most Europeans find extremely wearisome, had elaborated a system of rhetoric and a stock of poetic images which, in the exhaustion of original matter, made the success of the poet depend chiefly upon dexterity of artifice and cleverness of conceit. ”

“ It is not a little remarkable that, as happened with the Vaishnava reformation initiated by Rāmānuja and Rāmānand, and with the Vallabhāchārya cult of Krishna established at Mathurā, the first impulse to literary composition in Urdū should have been given, not at the headquarters of the empire in the north, but at the Muhammadan courts of Gōlkondā and Bījāpur in the south, the former situated amid an indigenous population speaking Telugu, and the latter among one whose speech was Kanarese, both Dravidian languages having nothing in common with the Aryan tongues of the north. ”

“ Tulsī Dās followed her, and endeavoured to induce her to return to him, but in vain; she reproached him (in verses which have been preserved) with want of faith in Rāma, and so moved him that he renounced the world, and entered upon an ascetic life, much of which was spent in wandering as a preacher of the necessity of a loving faith in Rāma. He first made Ajōdhyā (the capital of Rāma and near the modern Fyzābād) his headquarters, frequently visiting distant places of pilgrimage in different parts of India. ”

“ The worship of Krishna, especially in his infant and youthful form (which appeals chiefly to women) , is widely popular in the neighbourhood of Mathurā, the capital of that land of Braj where as a boy he lived. Its literature is mainly composed in the dialect of this region, called Brajbhāshā. That of Rāma, though general throughout Hindōstān, has since the time of Tulsī Dās adopted for poetic use the language of Oudh, called Awadhī or Baiswārī, a form of Eastern Hindī easily understood throughout the whole of the Gangetic valley. ”

“ Tulsī’s great poem, popularly called Tulsi-krit Rāmāyan, but named by its author Rām-charit-mānas, “the Lake of Rāma’s deeds,” is perhaps better known among Hindus in upper India than the Bible among the rustic population in England. Its verses are everywhere, in this region, popular proverbs; an apt quotation from them by a stranger has an immediate effect in producing interest and confidence in the hearers. ”