And so, in the late 1700s while the English romantics were off picnicking in Delhi’s ruins,
the Urdu poets like
Mir Taqi Mir,
Mirza Muhammad Rafi Sauda,
Shakir Naji,
Shah Hatim Dihlavi
-Muslim poets-
They looked out across these same views and wrote a type of poetry called the shahr ashob.
shahr = city
ashob = disturber
This was the poetry of disturbed cities, written in Urdu, the tongue of Delhi.
This was a poetry about disruption and decay,
of a decadent Muslim community convinced that it was being punished by a ‘cruel sky,’
about the world becoming a nasty carnival,
a spectacle, as it turns completely upside down.
All that was once glorious is now fading and the poet's pen is possessed:
Enough now, my pen! Control your tongue [nib]
Who will be regaled with this tale of woe?
~ Mir
As the glorious Mughal Empire was starting to fail, the Delhi poets wrote with a mixture of nostalgia and pessimism and the standard metrics of poetry gave way to satire and exaggeration:
Whose evil-eye has 'eaten' this garden? There's no knowing.
Where there were cypress and pine, the zuqum [hell-tree] grows.
…
Tens of millions of times through my temperament has passed this wave: If the revolving of the age would give me even a bit of peace of heart,
Then I would sit down somewhere and weep so much that the people of the city,
Would keep on baling the water out of their houses.
~ Sauda - Mukhammas on the Desolation of Shahjahanbad
The poetic form known as shahr ashob was originally from Persia.
But in Persia, the shahr ashubs or 'city disturbers' referred to actual living characters:
They were the charming young boys who tended shops around town and who ‘disturbed’ the poets when they coyly sang about making a sawda, or a ‘deal’ with them.
But by the time this poetic form flourished in a traumatized Delhi in the late 1700s, it had dropped its homo-erotic roots and was busy responding directly to things happening in the streets, as if the poets were roaming the city aimlessly by foot…
…making observations as they went.
Things were falling apart.
Social pecking orders were being flipped.
Patronage for art was failing.
The poets called out this misery
with a language that seemed to slip past the censors.
As a poetry about disturbed cities, the shahr ashob became a poetry of watan - the community of place – THIS place:
Perhaps this city was once the heart of a lover,
It was wiped out as though it were a wrong letter.
~ Sauda
As the Mughal empire, centered in Delhi, was in decline, a new, foreign, white-skinned power was arriving holding picnic baskets and sketchbooks. This is when the poetry of the shahr ashob appears in Delhi.
Shahr ashobs were written about Agra and Lucknow as well, but Delhi remained the focus, especially after the 1857 Uprising or, as the British called it, the Mutiny.
At that time, the Uprising was the most significant act of armed resistance against Western imperialism that had ever been attempted.
In response, the British gave the order to 'shoot every soul.'
Delhi, once again, was decimated.
Poets like Saqib,
Hakim Muhammad Ahsan,
and Mufti Sadr-uddin Azurda
responded with visceral shahr ashobs:
Tyrannous Sky! Are there any more disasters left?
Why do you spy upon Delhi through the Sun’s eye?
In sorrow for Delhi's ruin, rather than pure wine, Delhi's wine drinkers now drink their own heart's blood.
~ Hakim Muhammad Ahsan, Fughan I Dihli
Thus demented and dismayed,
I'm forced to seek the wilds
With a stone to break my head,
to beat my breast and die.
~ Mufti Sadr-uddin Azurda, Dirge for Delhi