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After the Muslim conquest, the regional Apabhramsha of northwest India gave rise to Urdu. Amir Khosrow, who composed couplets, folk ballads, and riddles in the newly established language, then known as Hindvi, was its first prominent poet.
Various names for this hybrid language, commonly referred to as "the language of the camp," include Hindvi, Zaban-e-Hind, Rekhta, and simply "Urdu." Urdu was previously known as Hindi or Hindustani for a long time.
While the historical roots of Urdu are disputed, it is likely that it evolved in the Middle Ages from a fusion of Persian used by the Muslim conquerors, whose troops quickly disseminated the new national language throughout the subcontinent, and the regional Indian languages of the Delhi region.
Urdu did not start to be ingrained in northern India as a literary language for courtly poetry, until the fall of unitary Muslim political rule.
The preclassical Urdu poetry composed in the southern Muslim Deccan kingdoms served as a linguistic model for the northern Indian royal poetry's transition from Persian to Urdu.
The Navvab-Vazirs of Avadh court in Lucknow and the later Mughal court in Delhi, both of which were maintained by the British, are strongly aligned with the period of time when Urdu flourished as the significant language of poetry.
Firaq Gorakhpuri is one of the most well-known names of Urdu Literature. Like the Romantic poets, Wordsworth and Thomas Hardy, who influenced him, he discovered a healing power and a liberalizing impact in the natural world by invoking the profound sense of beauty in even the most minute details of his surroundings.
Firaq's spontaneous poetry synthesizes languages—Hindi/Sanskrit words combine with Persianized Urdu—while maintaining his authentic voice. Firaq, a modernist himself in his own way, wrote experimental and historically-grounded poetry, such as ghazals and rubais (quatrains).
The ghazal is by far the most prominent genre. Its formal rhetoric has been carefully developed to enable its expressions of private sentiment to easily reach a large audience through oral and musical presentation as well as written publication.
The widely recognised two greatest classical artists of the Urdu ghazal are Ghalib, whose collection (divan) of ghazals is a legendary masterpiece combining refined sensibility with the sardonic intellectualism of the "Indian style," and the extremely prolific Mir Taqi Mir.
The identity and gender of the lover are left unspecified in the majority of Ghalib's lines, following traditional ghazal conventions. Since the last quarter of the seventeenth century, "poems about love" rather than "love poems" in the traditional sense have made up the majority of Urdu's love poetry.
Ghalib was an independent thinker and nonconformist who detested and ridiculed established religious and cultural institutions. His poetry is filled with phrases like "why," "what," "when," "where," and "how," which reflect his inquisitive nature.
Based on English genres and forms, modern Urdu narrative prose is less complex. Sayyid Abu l-Ala Maududi, the founder of the Jamaat e Islami, was undoubtedly the most significant Urdu prose writer of the later twentieth century in terms of Islamic ideology, while Faiz Ahmad Faiz quickly emerged as the greatest poet of Urdu in the post-Iqbalian period.
Faiz Ahmad Faiz has assured his ability to continue influencing younger generations of poetic disciples in the ghazal and the nazm by fusing idealistic socialism with the style of English romantic poetry with beautiful references of Ghalib.
FAQ
Q1. What is known to be the first literary publication in the Urdu language?
Fakhr Deen Nizami’s Masnavi Kadam Rao Padam Rao, was a Urdu poetry first published literary work in the Urdu Language.
Q2. Who is well-known as the Father of Modern Urdu Literature?
Indo-persian scholar, poet and musician, Amir Khusrao is known as the Father of Modern Urdu Literature.
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