Fort William College and Mir Amman: The Perfection of Ganga-Jamuni Balance in Urdu Prose

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, while Urdu poetry was at its zenith in the cultural hubs of Delhi and Lucknow, a new and quiet movement in Urdu prose was taking root in Calcutta. This was the era when British imperialism was establishing its foothold in India, and the need to teach the local language to British officers was being felt. With this objective, John Gilchrist focused on Urdu then called Hindustani at Fort William College and gathered a group of native scholars munshis.   Although the establishment of Fort William College was driven by political and imperial necessities, it brought about a revolution in the history of Urdu prose. Prior to this, Urdu prose was lost in the labyrinth of difficult, rhyming, and highly ornamented sentences found in books like Ata Hussain Tahseen's 'Nau Tarz-e-Murassa'. The greatest contribution of Fort William College is that it liberated prose from this artificiality and brought it closer to the natural, spoken language.   Many writers associated with this college, such as Haider Bakhsh Haidari, Sher Ali Afsos, and Nihal Chand Lahori, produced valuable work, but the immortality achieved by Mir Amman Dehlvi's 'Bagh-o-Bahar' was unmatched by any other. According to Gopi Chand Narang, if Urdu is the name of a linguistic balance between Prakrit Hindi and Arabic-Persian elements, then Mir Amman, through his tremendous linguistic genius, had discovered the secret to the beauty of this balance.   The greatest virtue of Mir Amman's prose is that it is not merely washed in 'Kausar and Tasneem' the purity of Arabic and Persian, but it also clearly reflects the 'Ganga and Jamuna' the earthy fragrance of the Indian soil. His language possesses a fluency, simplicity, and sweetness that goes straight to the heart. This excerpt from 'Bagh-o-Bahar' perfectly illustrates this:   "Now I could not even afford a penny's worth of parched grain to chew on and drink water. I endured two or three days of severe starvation. Unable to bear the pangs of hunger, I helplessly threw the veil of shamelessness over my face and decided to go to my sister... That sister of mine, seeing my condition, took my misfortunes upon herself, embraced me, and wept bitterly. She offered oil, black lentils, and black coins as alms to ward off evil from me. One day, she said, 'O brother! You are the apple of my eye and the last memento of our deceased parents. Your arrival has brought peace to my heart.'"   Reading this prose, one can easily gauge that the Urdu language had now crossed the boundaries of its adolescence and stepped onto the threshold of youth. It had developed all the qualities of expression that are characteristic of an advanced language. Mir Amman showed Urdu prose the path upon which Ghalib and Sir Syed later walked to construct the magnificent edifices of modern Urdu prose.