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Alphabet Poems and other Urdu Religious Booklets

In: International Journal of Islam in Asia
Author:
Francesca Orsini Professor Emerita, SOAS, University of London London UK

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Abstract

Religious booklets formed a substantial part of the boom in commercial publishing and print culture in nineteenth and early-twentieth north India, cheaply available and widely reprinted by multiple publishers. This essay considers two popular texts that allow us to trace some of the range and of the linguistic and emotional contours of this production. Alif Be alphabet poems gesture towards the earlier history of Muslim oral traditions in north India. Short Wafātnāma verse narratives on the death of the Prophet Muhammad, conversely, were most likely produced by authors connected to Sunni reform movements and sought to focus their devotion on the Prophet alone.

Religious booklets of all kinds formed a substantial part of the commercial publishing boom in the nineteenth-century, in northern India as elsewhere in the subcontinent (Green, 2011). The religious booklets discussed in this essay testify to the ability of commercial publishers to produce and market “oral-literate” genres that could be recited or read aloud in communal settings or read silently, or almost silently, alone, and market them around Sufi shrines or at fairs: “Since around the close of the nineteenth century,” Kelly Pemberton notes, “the bazaars attached to Sufi shrines have been the repositories and disseminators of a type of demotic literature that was printed cheaply, marketed en masse, written in the vernacular languages” (2002: 55). In this, Islamic religious booklets were like the songbooks, songs of the twelve months (bārahmāsas), and short narratives or qiṣṣas that were the most widely printed genres in late nineteenth-century northern India (Orsini, 2009: especially 20–21).

Who were their authors? In most cases we do not know, because the texts were printed and reprinted without paratextual details about them. As a result, their names became titular attributes (“The alphabet poem of X, Y, or Z”) rather than markers of personal authority honed by the specific seat or tradition to which the author belonged. Only rarely do texts reveal more than bare names: one edition of the oft-reprinted alphabet poem by Wajhan calls him Miyan Wajhan Shah Sandelvi and calls his poem and the one by Miyan Karim Shah the work of “perfect mystics” (ʿārifān-i kāmil kī taṣnīf) (Wajhan, 1878: 8). This indicates that they were Sufis, Wajhan from the qaṣba of Sandila in current Uttar Pradesh. But like the booklets of Sant poetry published by the Belvedere Press (Orsini, 2015), booklets unmoored the words of teachers and saints from their specific milieus and from specific bonds of affiliation or personal connection and reached out to a wider and anonymous community of believers.

The booklets themselves, ranging between 8 and 36 pages, consist of either single titles or collections (majmūʿa) of texts in the same or in different genres. Printed on flimsy paper in the standard octavo (roughly, 6 × 9 inches or 16 × 23 centimeters) or the smaller 16mo (10 × 17 cm or 4 × 6.8 inches) formats, they could cost as little as 1 anna or 6 paise – less than 1/10 of a Rupee. The same commercial publishers published booklets of Shiʿi and Sunni devotion, including songs and narrative poems about the martyrdom of Imam Husayn at Karbala (nawḥa, mars̱iya, and jangnāma), miracle tales (muʿjiza), narratives about the birth, ascent to heaven, and death of the Prophet Muhammad (mawlid sharīf or mawlūdnāma, miʿrājnāma, and wafātnāma), mnemonic alphabet poems (alif be, from the first two letters of the alphabet), verse prayers (munājāt), and religious tales (qiṣṣas) like the Qiṣṣa shāh-e Yaman, about the Prophet’s miraculous conversion to Islam of the Shah of Yemen. According to the official records, the Quarterly Lists of Publications (1867–), some of these titles were among the ones most often reprinted by printers across the cities of northern India, suggesting a wider readership beyond the truly puny numbers of literates recorded for this period (see Orsini, 2009: 49 for literacy statistics).1 The British Library in London is fortunate to hold a substantial collection of these flimsy and highly perishable nineteenth-century print objects.

The genres of nineteenth-century commercial publishing can be divided between “genres introduced” through print, like theatre chapbooks and detective novels, and “genres reproduced” from earlier manuscript or oral traditions (Orsini, 2009: 229). Religious texts likely fall among the genres reproduced, and therefore already familiar. Some – like the alif be alphabet songs – can be traced back to the oral tradition and to a repertoire and language partly shared with the Sants, those saint-poets who sang their devotion and religious ideas and appealed to a broad spectrum of individuals and groups. Others, like the Nūrnāma booklets, offer simplified versions of texts already available in manuscript form in Persian and regional languages (d’Hubert, 2019).2 But compared to the substantial jangnāma and mars̱iya texts composed for Shiʿi gatherings, or to the elaborate Sufi romances composed in Avadhi, Bengali, and Punjabi since the fourteenth century, these are much simpler, shorter, and less literary texts.3

Other works, like the verse narratives or descriptions of the life, appearance, death, and miracles of the Prophet Muhammad, were likely produced by authors connected to the various Sunni reform movements that sought to pull ordinary Muslims away from the worship of Sufi saints and focus their devotion on the Prophet alone. These texts, Epsita Halder (2023) argues, re-channeled the intense devotion and fervor connected with the remembrance of the Karbala martyrs towards the Prophet.

Both alif be and wafātnāma booklets composed in simple language were available in the religious print market from the 1850s and highlight its heterogeneity. Alif be alphabet poems gesture towards the otherwise largely missing history of Muslim oral traditions in early modern North India. They also point to the limitations of looking for Urdu folklore and oral traditions within a narrowly defined linguistic code. Muhammad Husayn Khan’s Wafātnāma, whose earliest print version appears to have been printed in Delhi in 1852, exemplifies the new devotional verse narratives inspired by reformist movements (Pearson, 2008; Metcalf, 2014 [1982]). Together, the alif be and wafātnāma texts show a more colloquial linguistic and aesthetic register to the one associated with Urdu poetry and prose in this period and take us into complementary aesthetic and affective realms.

1 Memorable Instruction

Alif aik būrangī sāiyan4
hara ghaṭa wā kī parchāiyān
jahān dekho tahāṉ rūpa nyāra
aisā hai būrangī pyārā
Alif one many-colored Lord,
reflected in each and every body.
Wherever you glance, there
is his wonderful form.
Such is the many-colored Lord.
Wajhan kahe to kyā kahe
kucha kahne kī nahīn bāta
samandara samāyo būnda men
acharaja baṛo dikhāta. [1] (Wajhan, 1849: 2)
What can Wajhan say?
There is nothing to be said.
A drop holds the whole sea –
what an astonishing wonder.

Alphabet songs – called alif be when following the Arabic-Urdu alphabet, and kakhahara the Nagari one – provide a simple structure for the repetition and memorization of knowledge. In this they resemble the grinding songs analyzed by Richard Eaton (1974 and 2010). Each line or verse begins with a letter of the alphabet and a corresponding word, often the key term elaborated in the verse. As the two most oft-printed examples – by Wajhan and Miyan Karim – show, such song-poems could develop a core set of ideas or else jump around and provide diverse notions in pill-like form. Though printed in Urdu and following the Arabic-Urdu alphabet, alif be songs employ a mixed Khari Boli – Brajbhasha koine and a colloquial register full of tadbhava words, that is, words that evolved organically from older Indo-Aryan strata, so much so that an early printer thought it necessary to insert glosses explaining them in Persianate terms.5 So, while the letters specific to the Arabo-Persian alphabet (ث،خ،ع،غ، ق،، ظ, etc.) require the words to be, well, Arabic and Persian (s̱ābit, żarūr, ʿālam, gharūr, fāẕil, qināyat), in the rest of the text the vocabulary is largely devoid of Perso-Arabic vocabulary and includes technical vocabulary like japnā, dhyāna, guru rūpa, hari (Hari, for God), joga (yoga), biraha, and so on, a vocabulary dialogically shared with the Sants.

Comparing Wajhan’s Alif be by with Karim’s – which often came first in printed collections – reveals interesting differences. Wajhan’s poem is all about Sufi meditation and guided absorption into the path of love. The esoteric knowledge it imparts, about the mystery of love and the unity of existence, is expressed in metaphors familiar from the long Chishti tradition: just as the sea exists in each droplet, the shadow of God exists in each and every body. Miyan Karim’s Alif be, by contrast, combines more generic verses about Sufi practice with verses about proper comportment and ethical behavior, and includes basic quotes from the Qurʾan. Like Karim’s “prescription” (nuskha) appended in some collections, his Alif be reads like a general guide for a novice. As Karim himself says at the end: “A lot or a little, do whatever worship you can” (thoṛī bahuta sī bandagī kara jo kuchha bana pāʾe) (Karim, 1915: 8).

Both poems begin, appropriately, with alif for ایک, aik, God as one. In Wajhan’s Alif be, God is one and present in everything, according to the theology of the unity of existence (waḥdat al-wujūd). The poem continues with be to say that without a guide (binā guru) no one ever cracked the mystery (bheda na pāyā), and one first needs to find and love a guide before donning (lit. “dyeing,” basan rangāʾe) the robe of a dervish and setting foot on the “path of love” (pahale pīta guru se kare, prema ḍagara meṅ paga taba dhare). One’s practice (joga) can only be successful when (tab, for the third letter, t/ت) the “devious dilemma” (bairan dubadhā), that is, the dualism of me and you (main main and tain tain), disappears from one’s mind (Wajhan, 1849: 2). ث/ is for “s̱ābit dhyana,” steadfast meditation, thanks to which error vanishes on its own and one’s breath does not go wasted (birthā sāns na jāʾe): the term used is ajapājāpa, a technical term for the silent repetition of the name of God, paired here with the typical Sufi metaphor of polishing the mirror of one’s heart until all impurities disappear and one can see God reflected in it (ajapājāpa tū japa re bhāʾī chūṭa jāʾī darpana kī kāʾī) (1849: 3). Other verses insist on the practice of sitting patiently (the letterص/ is for ṣabr, patience), and on repeating the name of the Prophet day and night (nisa dina nāʾūn nabī kā lījiye) as the only practice needed (ض/ż is for żarūrat, 1849: 5). The disciple errs by thinking only within the limits (ح/ is for ḥad: ḥe ḥad bhara yaha bhūla hai terī) (1849: 3) of the intellect (budhi). Or he may lose his way in search of wealth (ز/z is for zar, gold: ze zara dekha tū bhūlā rahiye) (1849: 4), which is “false illusion” (jhūṭhī māyā). As in the earlier Hindavi Sufi romances, the spiritual path is called the path of love (pema, prema). And in terms strikingly similar to Kabir’s, love is an arrow piercing the heart and setting the body on fire:

ذ/ẕāl ẕawq jaba laga nahīṅ āvai
kitnon cahe koʾū mana bhaṭakāvai
hiradai lage na prema kī gāsī
kaise milen kaho abināsī
Ẕāl, many may lead you astray,
but until you taste the pleasure,
till you feel love’s arrow,
how can you meet the imperishable?
jaba laga tana nāhīṅ jarata
aura mana nāhīṅ mara jāta
taba lagā mūratī syāma kī
wajhan kahān dikhāta. (Wajhan 1849: 7)
Till the body burns, Wajhan says,
and the mind expires,
how will the image
of the dark lord appear?

This is Kabir:

The Satguru is the true Hero, who loosed up a single Arrow;
The moment it struck, I fell to the ground and a wound opened in my breast.
Within the heart, a forest-fire is burning yet no smoke is visible:
He whom it consumes knows that flame and He who kindled it. (Vaudeville, 1993: 168, 170)

Notice that the term Wajhan used for God here is one commonly used for Krishna, the “dark lord”, in his embodied form, mūratī. Wajhan is here re-accenting the vocabulary of bhakti devotionalism, knowing that his listeners and disciples will understand.

Love is also juice (rasa) and intoxicating wine (madhu) leading to a higher state of correct understanding.

Prema bhaṭṭī kā madhu piyu cokhā
miṭa jaʾihe saba mana kā dhokhā (Wajhan, 1849: 7)
If you taste the beloved’s wine in the distillery of love
all mind’s deceit will disappear.

Love is a stuffed betel leaf that marks the beginning of a challenging quest: “ع/ʿain, the betel leaf of love is one of its kind. There, no place for two” (ʿain ʿishq kā bīṛā hai nyārā, vahān dūje kā nahīṅ guẕārā) (1849: 6).6 Finally, love is the mystery, a deep river where distinctions between the lover and beloved, and between the manifest and the hidden, disappear in non-duality (prema kī nadī gaharī, jo kou ūtarai pāra, ʿāshiq aur māʿshūq meṅ rahavai kauna bichāra) (1849: 6).

Wajhan’s poem about the Sufi path brings in colloquial idioms (pride “has spoiled the whole game” gharūra ne saba khela bigāṛā), and multiplies metaphors to make the mystery of the Sufi path and experience visible and tangible (1849: 6). Disciples must learn further (ط/ is for ṭālib) to find “God’s village” inside their own body (ghaṭa ke andara hari kā gānv). The choice of a register marked by tadbhava words, colloquial expressions, and terms shared with the Sants is not at all unusual among Sufis, who listened to bhakti devotional as well as other songs but accented and interpreted them in their own terms. But if finding God in one’s own body is a shared metaphor, here it is paired with the “pīr’s town” (pīra nagara) and the “Prophet’s city” (nabī nagara) (1849: 6; see Stewart, 2001; Orsini, 2014).

If Wajhan’s Alif Be is all about the Sufi path and practice, Miyan Karim’s intersperses basic Sufi ideas with general instruction. If in Wajhan’s poem the repetitive structure aids the deepening of meditation, in Karim’s it seems to help novices internalize simple religious and ethical precepts.

‫(ا) ایک ایسا رب پیارا‬
جن پھیلایا جگ سنسارا
کاف نون سے کیا ظہور
ایسا ہے صاحب بھرپور
Alif One such lord beloved,
who spread out the whole world,
made it manifest through kāf nūn [kun = be].
He is the lord of abundance. (Karim, 1915: 2)

The letters خ/k (for khāliq) and د/d (for dīn) reiterate the basic covenant between God and the believers (“Am I not your God?” “Yes, I am”). ث/ is for s̱ābit, steadfast living with pure intention (nīyat pāk) according to the sharīʿa (s̱ābit sharīʿat par rahnā) (Karim, 1915: 2). ح/ is for ḥalāl in food and speech: “Only one who eats ḥalāl and speaks the truth meets the Lord” (1915: 3).

Several verses instruct on ethical living and warn against deceit, covetousness, or pride (“Pride is bad, just see ʿAzāzīl’s destruction”) (1915: 5). ج/j instructs the reader or listener to live in the world without deceit and to worship God with a true heart (jīm jagat meṅ kapaṭ na kījiye, sachche dil se rabb bhaj lījiye), for acting deceitfully takes you away from God (1915: 3). گ/g is for gumān, warning against thinking bad thoughts (gumān bad) and acting basely (ochhī karnī), and it is followed byل/l for liyāqat (propriety, merit), which accrues only once one kills “the enemy nafs”: “nafs the snake is a bad, black cobra, who has survived its bite?” (1915: 6).

Miyan Karim mentions internalized practice, but his emphasis is less on love and esoteric knowledge and more on proper guidance, and on the sharīʿa and the sunna as the measure and limit.

‫(ت) تسبیح تم من مین جپنا‬
سچ پوچھو یہ مال ہے پنا
یہ دنیا دھوکھے کی سپنا
لاکہون مر گے کرکر اپنا
T Turn the tasbīḥ in your mind,
truth be told, this is your wealth.
This world is a deceitful dream,
thousands died thinking it theirs.
کریم کہے تو کیا کہے
کچھ بھی کہا نہ جاؑے
نیکی اپنا مال ہے
جو حق سے لے بخشاے(1915: 2)
What can Karim say?
Nothing can be said.
Goodness is my wealth,
God gifted it to me.

س/s is for sirr, mystery, but it is a plain one:

S, let me tell you another secret (sirr),
through which people may find God.
Close your eyes, ears, and mouth,
sit in a corner – this is the message.
What can Karim say?
Nothing can be said.
It is a famous prescription,
try it if you will. (1915: 4)

Karim’s poem includes fewer metaphors from Sufi discourse. Even Mansur al-Hallaj appears less as a heroic example and more as a warning.

F the faqīrī you do is one.
where no step is set outside the sharīʿa.
Mansur spoke one word,
the sharʿ disclosed its command.
What can Karim say?
Nothing can be said.
Within the sharīʿa is good
which your guide tells you. (Karim 1915: 6)

As already mentioned, at the end Miyan Karim hints familiarly at both readers and listeners for his poem (jo koʾī paṛhe sune ise yār) (1915: 8). Elsewhere, he tells “educated people [to] act and understand, illiterates [to] ask a learned person” (paṛhe huʾe kar ʿamal aur būjh, anpaṛh ho ʿālim se pūch) (1915: 5). This Alif be, this line suggests, is literally a primer directed at novices, including illiterate people, to introduce them to the basic terms and principles of a sharīʿa-aligned Sufi path and to warn them about venturing on the path without proper guidance. Theology, religious duty, and moral norms are ground together into pills of wisdom for devotees to eat, in other words to memorize and make part of their body. And while the two poems were also printed separately, when printed together Karim’s Alif be preceded Wajhan’s, perhaps as a recognition that it works at a more basic level – though without paratexts this is only speculative.

Alphabet songs connect to other mnemonic genres like mnemonic dictionaries or multiplication tables (pahāṛā) that were a basic part of the educational experience in South Asia for centuries (Hakala, 2010). The fixed structure of the alphabet accommodated variation in content, and alphabet songs became a “dialogic genre” par excellence: in other words, even the same lexical signifiers could carry different meanings and accents at the hands of Sufi and Sant authors. For example, Yari Sahab (c.1670s–1710s?), a guru in the lineage of the Bavri community which moved from Delhi to near Ghazipur, east of Banaras, sometime in the early eighteenth century, wrote two alphabet songs (Yari Sahab, 2005: 2, 9–12). And so did Bhikha Sahab, three generations down the same line (Bhikha Sahab, 2013: 62–3; see also Lal, 1933: 89–91). Yari chooses several of the same words that we found in Wajhan and Karim (ا/alif is ek; ث/s̱e is s̱ābit; ج/jīm is jagata, like jaga, world; ح/baṛī ḥe is ḥad; خ/khe is khāvind; ط/ṭoe is ṭamāʾ; ض/żvād is żarūr; and so on).7 But if the initial definition of the singular, ultimate, and all-pervading divine entity is similar in Sufi and Sant vocabulary, and Sufi alphabet poems also used jāpa to refer to the practice of repeating God’s name and sacred formulas (ẕikr), Yari’s poem focuses on bodily practices using yogic and Sant vocabulary:

अलिफ एक अबिनासी देव
अविगत अपरम्पार अभेव ।
ताहि धरो धरि ध्यान हजूर
सो सब ठौर रहा भर पूर।।
Alif, one God imperishable,
immortal, infinite, undivided.
Keep that presence in your mind,
which pervades fully everywhere.
बे बिन जिभ्या सुमिरन करै
उनमनि सों मन की धुनी धरै ।
पूरन ब्रह्म जहाँ तहँ आप
ताहि जाप को कीजै जाप ।।
Be, do remembrance without (bina) moving the tongue.
Keep your axis on the supra-conscious state (unmani).
Wherever the full brahma is,
repeat and repeat his name.

For Yari, ẕawq is not the taste for things spiritual that sets the novice on the Sufi path: it is the taste of the five senses which the adept must crush to avoid the dispersal of energy and attention.

ज़ाल ज़ौक़ पाँचों का भानु
बाहर जाते भीतर आनु।
मेलि दसो दिसि इक मन करै
सो साधू कहु कैसे मरै।। (Yari Sahab, 2005: 9; see also Lal, 1933: 6)
Zāl crush the taste of the five [senses].
Bring them in as they turn outward.
Collect the ten directions into one mind.
How can that sadhu, tell me, die?

Yari’s other, shorter, Alif be veers towards more basic instruction:

अलिफ़ एक हरि नाम विचार
बे भजु बिश्नु तारन संसार
ते त्रिभुवन सब घट में राजा
से साबित में चिन्है साजा। (Yari Sahab, 2005: 9)
Alif alone is the name of Hari
Be worship Bishnu the savior of the world
Te He’s the king of three worlds and of every body
S̱e strong and stable is his creation.

Yari and Bhikha scrupulously follow the Arabic-Persian alphabet, including the hamza (and Yari the negative lām alif). But whereas Yari knows which words correspond to all the Arabic-Persian letters, Bhikha sometimes chooses words that sound like them according to North Indian phonology (gyāna for ghainغ; khana, moment, for khe/ خ, spelled ) (Lal, 1933: 90). His, it seems, is an oral knowledge of the Arabic-Persian alphabet. To use Purushottam Agrawal’s (2009) term, he is bahushrut, “well-listened”, rather than well-read.

Sufis using a Hindavi-Brajbhasha koine, yogic vocabulary and the names of Hindu gods like Krishna, and Sants using the Arabic-Persian alphabet and some of its recurring terms: this suggests a religious language that was partly shared, though the communities, practices, and specific philosophies and practices differed. “The words of a language belong to nobody, but still we hear those words only in particular individual utterances”, Mikhail Bakhtin argued (Bakhtin, 1986: 88). In the spirit of Bakhtin’s philosophy of language and his emphasis on the social (and productive) nature of the utterance – shared, accented, and re-accented by each speaker in constant dialogue with real or imagined listeners and other speakers – I suggest that we read these alphabet poems as instances of “re-accenting” terms, phrases, and characters, or even “multi-accenting” them if they sought to address different audiences at once or be particularly clever (see Orsini, 2018 for one example).

This point has historiographical and archival implications as well. Whereas the alphabet song-poems of Sufi and other Muslim authors have yet to surface in manuscript archives, the fact that the same genre is found in the Sant archive suggests that such poems must have indeed been common before Wajhan’s and Miyan Karim’s appeared in print. In this case, it is refracted in the Sant archive that we can find early evidence of the vernacular oral forms used for basic Islamic religious instruction in northern India.

Other evidence comes from the colonial ethnographic archive. A mnemonic song counts one to three to remind Muslims of who is most important (God, the Prophet, and Fatima). The festive scene of the founding of Mecca, saluted by the whole of creation and graced by the Prophet and by the apsaras of Indra’s heaven, segues into the umma’s request for instruction.

Pahilé nám lé Alláh Míyán ká
Dújé Nabi Rasúl.
Tíjé nám lé Fátimá ká,
Jeké mukh par barsai núr.
Míthá nám Alláh Míyán ká
Dújé Nabi Rasúl.
Tíjé míthá Sáwan Bhádon
Jo barsai so núr.
Jehi din newá parí Makké men
Jánat muluk Jahán,
Jitné ummat rahé Muhammad ké
Sab jhuk, jhuk karat salám.
Bágh bajáwai bánsurí,
Bhálu bajáwae túr,
Náchat áwain Indar ké pariyán,
Dekhat awain pák Rasúl. […]
Jitné ummat rahé Muhammad ké
Sab kharé bhaé kar jor.
Háth jorké ummat bolen –
“Nabi jí bachan sun áo.
Tumrá kahá Míyán karbai,
Nabijí jo kucha hukm lagáo.” […]
“Khudá ká nám japá ka bándhé,
“Subah, sabere, sám,
“Yah japná teré kám áwengé
“Jehi din hoihai Qayám.”
Dahiné takht par baithé Alláh Miyán,
Baiyén baithé Rasúl.
Nekí badí ká lekhá chukáwen,
Míyán rahe taráju jhúl. […]
Kalimá parho to kal parai,
Bé kalimá kal náhín.
Jáke mukh men kalimá basat hai,
Wáké dojakh ko dar náhín.
First repeat the name of God,
Second that of the Prophet.
Third take Fatima’s,
on her face rains heavenly light.
Sweet is the name of God,
Second, sweet is that of the Prophet.
Third, Sáwan and Bhádhon are sweet,
they rain heavenly light.
On the day Mecca’s foundation was laid,
the world knows,
believers in Muhammad
bent their head in obeisance.
Tigers played the flutes,
bears played the trumpets.
Indra’s fairies came to dance,
the Holy Prophet came to watch. […]
All of Muhammad’s umma
stood with folded hands.
With hands folded they said –
“Listen Nabi ji, the Lord
will listen to what you say,
Give us your command.” […]
“Repeat the name of God,
at dawn, morning, and night.
This will come in useful,
on the final day of Qayam.”
On the throne Allah Miyan sits
on the right, on left the Prophet.
They check accounts of good
and bad, Miyan swings the scales. […]
Say the kalima and feel at peace,
no kalima, no peace.
One in whose mouth the kalima
dwells, has no fear of death.
“A Religious Song of the Dhobis” (Tiwari, 1891: 145–6)

The language is the same Hindavi-Braj koine of Yari, Bhikha, and Wajhan’s alphabet poems. But the term japa here seems to refer not to the practice of repeating a holy name or phrase but to the five obligatory prayers. Even more succinctly, the kalima is enough to pass the test on the day of the final judgment.

This song “was recited to me by an old dhobi at Chunár, and is a curious illustration of the adoption of Muhammadan ideas by low-caste Hindus”, wrote the Persian and Hindi educated clerk Bhanu Pratap Tiwari, a regular contributor to North Indian Notes & Queries, the ethnographic journal edited by the colonial administrator William Crooke. Apart from Tiwari’s ethno-religious assumption (dhobis must be all Hindus), what is striking is that the song was recorded at all. Muslim songs, customs, and performances were implicitly excluded from the first Hindi collections of folklore since folk literature (loksāhitya) pertained to the Volk – which Hindi intellectuals coded as Hindu. As for Urdu, its self-definition at the time was too tied to language register, so that Muslim orature in this koine and not in “chaste Urdu” was not taken into consideration. Excluded on the one side on religious-cultural grounds and on the other on linguistic grounds, Muslim orature became completely invisible.

The Dhobis’ religious song shows the Prophet addressed familiarly as he descends on earth to enjoy the dance and festivities for the foundation of Mecca. A similar “vertical levity” (Raj and Dempsey, 2010), establishing intimacy between human beings, the Prophet, God, and his angels can be found in another popular text, a narrative mas̱navī of 563 verses in written a conversational Urdu full of colloquial expressions, that elaborates on the last death days and death of the Prophet Muhammad (Husayn Khan, 1852).

2 Shedding Tears for the Prophet

The topic of the Prophet Muhammad’s death had been dealt rather briefly in the traditional biographies, like the sīra of Ibn Ishaq (1955). As Tarif Khalidi (2009: 2) notes, early biographers seem to have decided to include “the names of every single man or woman whose life in some way or another touched upon or intersected the core narrative”, and the events of the Prophet’s illness and last words of instruction, his death, and burial are told in the voice of many characters. What stand out are the light banter between the Prophet and ʿAʾisha about whose headache was worse and who would die first, his last wish – for a toothpick! – and the discussions about how to wash the Prophet’s body and where to bury it (Ishaq, 1955: 682, 688–689). Biographies in the “Sunni mood” emphasized the unity of the community as the most important ethical and social value. Those in a “Shiʿa mood” emphasized the personal integrity of the ruler and made the case that a member of the family of Muhammad was best suited to guide the community after his death; they also included a voice telling ʿAli that he and the members of the Prophet’s family would face severe trials (Khalidi, 2009: 62, 129–130).

Muhammad Husayn Khan’s Wafātnāma (1852) focuses on a smaller cast of characters and includes spirited dialogues between ʿAʾisha, Fatima and the angels Jibril and Azraʾil who come to summon the Prophet. Allah, Jibril, and Azraʾil, the Prophet, ʿAli, and all the chief members of the Prophet’s entourage all appear in the same familiar way. For example, When the Prophet’s temperature soars, God sends Jibril to enquire after his health and say:

agar is marż se wo nākām ho
shifā dūn maiṅ usko ki ārām ho
wagarna hūn mushtāq-i dīdār kā
ki dīdār ho yār ko yār kā. (Khan, 1852, vv. 61–2).
If this medicine does not work
I’ll give him a cure that will set him at rest.
Though I long to meet with him
As a friend longs to see a friend.

In fact, the predominance of dialogue and colloquial expressions and the informal way in which the angels and the revered figures of the Prophet’s entourage of the early days of Islam are presented produce proximity and emotional identification in the listeners/readers, who feel part of the scenes played out before them.

Muhammad Husayn Khan’s text evokes the context of oral recitation and devotional effusion and purification that accompany the commemoration of the death of the Prophet in the first twelve days of the month of Rabiʿ al-Awwal. During this period, the French orientalist Garcin de Tassy observed in 1831–1832 drawing on contemporary sources, “the Qurʾan is recited every morning and evening in mosques or in private houses and alms are distributed after the fatiha is recited and incense is burnt in the name of the Prophet. The story of the death of Muhammad (wafātnāma) is also recited in Hindustani” (Garcin de Tassy, 1995: 155). Indeed, like a good sermon, the text touches different chords, from Jibril’s courteous visits to the scolding Azraʾil, the malak al-mawt, gets from Fatima, and from Allah’s solicitous offer of a cure to Muhammad’s affectionate parting from his wives and daughter that seeks to lighten the atmosphere.8 Muhammad Husayn Khan explicitly mentions of the purifying and salvific effect of tears shed listening to the story.

ʿAzīzo suno tum yih az gūsh-i jān
wafāt-i nabī kā karūṉ maiṅ bayān
Muḥammad ke gham meṅ jo ānsū chalen
Wo ānkheṅ na dozakh meṅ hargiz jalen
Listen my dear ones with ears of the heart,
let me tell you the story of the Prophet’s passing.
Eyes shedding tears mourning for Muhammad
will never burn in the fire of hell. (Husayn Khan, 1852: 2)9

In his Wafātnāma, the women of the Prophet’s family play a substantially larger role than in the Arabic sīra literature, suggesting that they were perhaps part of the intended audience. At the same time, themes hotly debated among reformist groups at the time – such as awareness of namāz and the description of its stages; the moral codes for men and women; the Prophet Muhammad’s affective connections, particularly with the future caliphs, his family, and the umma, and their affective bonding with him; the importance of Jibril in the Prophet’s life; the notion of the hereafter, the Prophet’s position in heaven, and the description of heaven and hell and of the Day of Judgment – all find place in the narrative. Together, these features suggest that Muhammad Husayn was part of the reformist debates of his time and wrote his text partly to reach out to women.

The narrative starts without any preamble.

the aik roz baiṭhe wo shāh-i ʿarab
jamaʾ the mahājir aur ʿanṣār sab
ki Jibrīl ne ā sunāyā payām
ki bhejā hai Haqq ne wurūd o salām.
One day that king of Arabia was sitting
with all the friends and attendants who had come from Medina
when Jibril came and related this message:
“God sends his best greetings.” (Husayn Khan 1852, vv. 9–10)

Jibril then recites the whole Qurʾan to the Prophet. The Prophet is immediately delighted while Abu Bakr is pained at heart:

ushī se huʾā uskā dil bāgh bāgh
Abū Bakr kā dil huʾā dāgh dāgh (v. 13)

People wonder – why is the Prophet happy but Abu Bakr is crying? It must be a secret (rāz), ʿUmar thinks. The contentious question of succession to the caliphate underpins this scene but is left unspoken: Abu Bakr’s tears attest to his eligibility as the first caliph, and Muhammad is happy to see Abu Bakr loyally grieving. At the same time, strolling in a garden on a Saturday – the word used is the colloquial sanīchar – Muhammad reveals to his cousin and son-in-law, ʿAli, that Jibril has been coming to him every year to recite the whole Qurʾan. This year, though, Jibril has come a second time – this is how Muhammad has realized that he is going to die (v. 40).10

As in the Arabic sīra, when he falls ill the Prophet jokes with ʿAʾisha that for her to die before her husband would indeed be a good thing, but in fact he will die before her. In this wafātnāma, ʿAʾisha’s first thought is about proper performance of ritual: who will read the namāz for the Prophet at his death, who will wash him and cover him with a shroud? Don’t worry, Muhammad tells her, God will recite the first namāz, followed by Jibril, and then by the “family members,” the ahl al-bayt. This sequence places the ahl al-bayt right up front, even before the close bond between ʿAʾisha and Muhammad.11 ʿAʾisha holds an important position in Sunni piety as Muhammad’s caregiver on his deathbed but remains absent from the scene of grieving after Muhammad’s death.12 To his daughter Fatima, who is also upset, the Prophet reveals that she will not live long after him (v. 74). That Fatima will die soon afterwards – a detail Muhammad does not share with ʿAʾisha – shows the intensity of Fatima’s pain over her separation from her father, a pain that will kill her soon after Muhammad’s death.

Fatima in fact plays an active role in Muhammad Husayn Khan’s text. When Azraʾil, the Angel of Death, calls out loudly as he stands waiting at the door, ʿAʾisha tells Fatima to go and look – their togetherness is a feature of the new Sunni reformist piety, which appropriates Fatima and pulls her from her Shiʿa intercessory role. Fatima scolds Azraʾil in no uncertain terms:

tujhe kyā muḥammad se darkār hai
měrā bāp is waqt bīmār hai (v. 348)
What business you have with Muhammad?
My dad is ill right now

And when Azraʾil calls out again, and the Prophet from his bed opens his eyes and asks what the noise (shor-o ghul) is, Fatima replies:

kahā fāṭimā ne koʾī hai ʿarab
khaṛā shor kartā hai yah bī-adab (v. 351)
“It’s some Arab”, said Fatima
“He’s standing, the uncouth, making a racket!”

Fatima’s imperious scolding would have likely made women listeners snicker. When Azraʾil finally comes before Muhammad, he stands courteously (adā se aṛā) and asks him if he’s ready to follow him.

Meanwhile, Jibril comes, too, with the happy news that everything is ready in heaven and that even hell is comparatively cool that day.

kahā āj dozakh kī hai āg sard
nahīn dozakhī par hai kuchh ranj o dard
bihishton men kyā ūb bichhā hai farsh
murattab huʾā āj kursī o ʿarsh
kiyā āj ḥūron ne kyā kyā singār
khaṛe hainge ghilmān bāgh o bahār (1852: vv. 370–72)
He said, “Hell’s fire is cool today,
it does not bother people there.
A beautiful carpet is spread out in the heavens!
A chair and throne are well arranged
Houris have come out in their best
and boys are happily standing at the ready.”

In Sunni reformist Islam, the depiction of the hereafter became an all-engrossing topic. The Qurʾanic paradigm introduced by Sunni reformers was based on the affirmation of an awe-inspiring Allah, whose wrath will befall individual Muslims who do not follow the path of duty, that is, performing the farż. If individuals adhere to the farāʾiż, they will be allotted the pleasures of heaven on the Day of Judgement; if they stray, they will be tortured in hell. Within this framework of reward and punishment, Muhammad is hailed as the savior of the umma because he offered his sunna, his sayings and practices for Muslims to follow. In Bengali wafātnāmas (ofatnāmas), which by describing Muhammad’s actions acted also as manuals of comportment, the theme of Muhammad being offered heaven was essential.13 Muhammad Husayn Khan’s Wafātnāma dwells on Muhammad’s lingering before his final breath to bargain for the best possible deal for his umma.

Before Muhammad agrees to die (he, too, is keen to meet his lord), he hesitates, worried about his dear community. He wants to make sure that God will pardon sinners even if they repent at the very last minute. In another funny sequence – which, however, presses the idea of being committed to performing the farāʾiż, here in the form of repentance for any moral deviation – Jibril rushes to and fro again and again between God and the Prophet, who keeps bargaining down the time needed for repentance to a single breath. When the Prophet finally dies, Jibril brings the bier (tābūt) down from God himself, while Azraʿil slowly draws out the life spirit (jān) of the umma from his chest. Color disappears from Muhammad’s face and perfume spreads in the air while he cries “yā ummatī”, affectionately apprehensive about the community even after his death (magar donoṅ honṭh uske ḥarkat meṅ hain, sunā kān dharkar yahī kahtī hain. ṣadā uskī dil se uṭhtī thī yahī, ki yā ummatī ummatī ummatī) (1852: vv. 522–3).

Already Ibn Ishaq’s sīra contained some discussion regarding the proper performance of the Prophet’s funeral rites – should he be washed naked or with his clothes on? “As they disputed, God cast a deep sleep upon them so that every man’s chin was sunk on his chest. Then a voice came from the direction of the house, none knowing who it was: ‘Wash the apostle with his clothes on’” (Ishaq, 1955: 688). In reformist tracts and narratives, Muhammad’s choice of ʿAli to perform his last rites over the other three future caliphs was a recurrent theme: it secured ʿAli’s position in the affective world view of Sunni Muslims, both as member of the ahl al-bayt and as an early caliph. At the same time, such appropriation of ʿAli overwrote Shiʿa devotion towards ʿAli and his family and their antagonism towards the Sunni caliphs by confirming, through ʿAli’s dual position in the ahl al-bayt and the caliphal succession, the integral bonding between the ahl al-bayt and the caliphate (see for example the Dobhashi narratives discussed in Halder, 2023). In Muhammad Husayn Khan’s Wafātnāma, it is the women themselves, instructed by ʿAli, who wash the body before covering it with a shroud; ʿAli drinks the leftover water and gets special knowledge. Some drama attends the proceedings here, too. Does the Prophet need to be washed, he who was so pure? While the women hesitate, a voice is heard:

ki mat ghusal do kuchh nahīn aḥtiyāj
yih hai pāk ṭāhir muṭahhar mizāj. (1852: v. 487)
Don’t bathe him, there is no need.
He’s pure, clean, cleansed by nature.

Immediately, another voice – Khizr’s – denounces the first one as that of Iblis (1852: vv. 506–7).

Though excessive wailing is restrained, the prolonged and recurrent outbursts of weeping in the story – for example, when Bilal the muezzin returns to Medina and calls out the Prophet’s name in the first azan, and everyone is once again moved to tears (1852: vv. 558–61) – create a Sunni counterpart to the collective mourning during Muharram. The story ends on a note of mourning before the concluding prayers (munājāt):

nahīn kahne kī ṭāqat ab jī ko hai
ke yih gham wo hai āh sab jī ko hai
pas ab hai yahī ūb kam kar kalām
aur us shāh par paṛh wurūd ū salām. (1852: vv. 562–63)
I have no strength left to tell,
the pain is a sigh that fills my heart.
Better to now lay down my pen
and recite my salute to that king.

Whatever Muhammad Husayn Khan’s affiliation may have been, his simple and attractive narrative could circulate in cheap booklet form as an oral-literate genre in gatherings at home and in mosques. Amy Bard (2015) has described contemporary settings in which miracle stories or muʿjizas like the ones found in the British Library booklets and still printed in India and Pakistan are told in family and devotional gatherings. We may imagine the Wafātnāma being read out straight or used as a basis for more elaborate sermons that would intersperse, amplify, and delay the narrative with repetitions, tears, comments, direct appeals, descriptions, Arabic citations, and exhortations, with the speaker modulating their voice between surprised, pathetic, intimate, harsh, etc. (see Cummins and Stille, 2021).

3 Conclusion

I have long been intrigued by the gap where Muslim popular ritual and devotional genres in North Indian languages should be in the history of tellings and texts (Orsini and Butler Schofield, 2015). Urdu critics and scholars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were interested in popular Urdu or in popular Muslim devotion only for the sake of criticising them. For one thing, was the language of popular Muslim devotion even Urdu? As scholars like Catherine Servan-Schreiber (1999) or Shahid Amin (2015) have shown, North Indian Muslim performers like Madaris or Dafalis did not use “proper Urdu” but rather Bhojpuri and other local languages, and women sang songs to the Prophet or to Husayn and other members of the ahl al-bayt in Avadhi (Khan Mahmudabad, 2013) or Sindhi (Asani, 1995; tellingly, the Urdu poems he includes are written texts in a literary style). Meanwhile, when the first Indian collectors of Hindi folklore (like Tripathi, 1929) went around collecting songs, they did not include anything “Muslim.” As a result, until quite recently it was as if “Muslim folklore” or popular culture (lok adab) did not exist – though we know that Sufis and ordinary Muslims sang, listened to, and composed seasonal and other songs, like bārahmāsas. The first book on Urdu popular culture dates from 1990 (Rais, 1990), the first academic conference on the topic from 2017 (“Exploring the Popular Culture of Urdu Language,” Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 8–10 September). It is in the context of this gap that the booklets of alif be poems or of verse narratives of wafātnāmas, mawlūdnāmas, or the qiṣṣa of the Shah of Yemen appear so precious, whether they were texts “reproduced” or “introduced”. When the pre-print archive is still largely missing, we must look elsewhere into other archives and for traces that make visible a practice or a tradition.

While scholars and historians of religion have tended to focus on religious debates, reform and polemics and their abundant textual production, the advantage of a book history approach is that it begins from the evidence of the market: which texts and genres were reprinted most often, and were therefore most popular among readers? Whether they represent specific religious positions is less interesting than their linguistic, aesthetic, and religious range and variety. Although what this essay offered was just a preliminary exploration, it seems clear that the religious print market was animated by a great number of different actors and impulses: older Sufi centers; “traditionalist” reformers translating the Qurʾan and other key texts in Urdu (Farooqi, 2010); poets and possibly religious performers bringing out their devotional poems; reformist authors composing verse narratives in a simple diction and fast pace that closely approximates that of non-religious qiṣṣas; and printer-publishers who maximized their offerings by reprinting all of these texts and genres. As with other popular Urdu print genres of the nineteenth century – songbooks, qiṣṣas, theatre chapbooks, and so forth – the language of these religious-devotional genres represents a flexible koine stretching from colloquial Urdu to Brajbhasha. Muhammad Husayn Khan’s Wafātnāma appears closer to non-religious qiṣṣas, while Wajhan’s and Miyan Karim’s alif be poems to Sant orature. The former helps us extend the range of “popular Urdu” to oral-literate religious narratives. The latter provide evidence to the dialogue conducted through shared utterances, language, and genres between Sufis and Sants.

Much like the footpath stalls outside stations and shrines, the large collections of flimsy printed booklets from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries now in the British Library reveal the important presence of popular registers of Urdu discourse, which too often get obscured by the preference for sophisticated poetry and high forms of textuality, a preference that is reflected in the biases and gaps of the manuscript archive. Let us abide to the injunction and listen to these texts, imagining ourselves to be in a group assembled to mourn the death of the Prophet or to celebrate his birth, or as having bought a booklet outside a Sufi shrine and trying to memorize its teachings letter by letter.

References

Printed Editions of wafātnāmas in the British Library

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  • Khan, Muhammad Husayn. (1876). Kanpur, pp. 24. 14119.e.20 (6).

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  • Khan, Muhammad Husayn. (1915). Wafātnāma. In Majmūʿa [Selection], with Fażāʾil nāma, Nūr nāma, Shamāʾil nāma, Afrīn nāma, Miʿrāj nāma. Lucknow, pp. 26. VT 1060.

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Printed Editions of Alif Be

  • Karim. (1875). Alif Be Miyān Karīm. With Wajhan’s Alif Be, Bareilly, pp. 16. VT 721.

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  • Wajhan. (1849). Alif Be, Kanpur, pp. 8. VT 104.

  • Wajhan. (1875). Alif Be, Lucknow, pp. 8. VT 617.

  • Wajhan. (1877). Alif Be, Lucknow, pp. 8. VT 725.

  • Wajhan. (1877). Alif Be. In Muhammad Zardar Khan, Rahbar-e rāh-e ḥaqq, Lucknow, 8vo, pp. 109110. 14119.e.28.

  • Wajhan. (1877). Alif Be. In Majmūʿa-i tawḥīd, Lucknow, pp. 13. 14114.e.28.

  • Wajhan Shah Sandelvi. (1878). Alif Be. In Majmūʿa alif be. Delhi, pp. 28. VT 807.

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1

The Quarterly Lists of Publications were published regularly after 1867 by colonial officers in the different provinces and record the details of all the publications submitted for official registration. They are not a complete record, since registration was voluntary, but they are by far our best source of information for book history in colonial India. Print editions rarely surpassed 1000 copies, so multiple editions are our best indicators that a title was popular, particularly if it was reprinted (copyright rules notwithstanding) by several publishers in the same and in different cities over the years.

2

The British Library has as many as 15 editions of the Urdu Nūrnāma, published between 1868 and 1879 in Delhi, Etah, Kanpur, Lahore, and Lucknow (Blumhardt, 1901: 131).

3

For example, Muhammad Fazil’s Jangnāma-e Karbalā, printed over 172 pages and published at least three times between 1873 and 1878 (Bumhardt, 1901: 126). See also Bard (2002) and Knapczyk (2014: 283–285) for printed editions of Mir Anis’ Urdu mars̱iyas.

4

būrangī”, glossed as “har rang” (“of every colour”) is likely a calque on bū-qalamūn, “of every colour”, the term for chameleon (Platts 1997 [1884]: 173). Since the poems’ language is closer to Brajbhasha, my transliteration follows McGregor (1993). Final nasalized vowels are spelt here and elsewhere (nahīn, men, kahān) with a full nūn instead of the nūn ghunna, and my transliteration reflects this.

5

E.g. “acharaja baṛo dikhāta” employs a Brajbhasha verb (dikhāta) and adjectival ending (baṛo), and the tadbhava term acharaja (< Skt āścarya). Glosses in the 1849 edition of Alif be Wajhan include zamīn for dharatī (earth), āsmān for ākāsa (sky), qadam for paga (step), ustād for guru (Wajhan, 1849: 2).

6

A bīṛā is a folded and stuffed betel leaf, which a warrior picks up when accepting a challenge.

7

I transliterate the letters of the Arabic alphabet as they are vocalized in the text in the Devanagari script.

8

In Bengali narratives, by contrast, the presence of the Four Companions and future caliphs (Abu Bakr, ʿUmar, Uthman and ʿAli) and of the ahl al-bayt (the Prophet’s daughter Fatima, her husband ʿAli, and their sons Hasan and Husayn) overshadows that of his wives (ʿAʾisha, but also Hafsa); I thank Epsita Halder for the comment.

9

The text in Husayn (1915: 2) differs slightly, suggesting some instability in the transmission from either oral recitation to printed text, or from one printed edition to another: “Azīzo zarā khol kar gūsh-i jān/ wafāt-i nabī kā suno tum bayān” (“Open the ear of the heart, dear ones/Listen to the narrative of the Prophet’s passing”).

10

Jibril, the bearer of revelation to the prophets, acts as an intermediary between Allah and Muhammad and appears at various crucial moments in Muhammad’s life, bringing him information about the untimely deaths of Hasan and Husayn and then carrying the premonition of Muhammad’s own death. In early modern Bangla texts on Karbala, Jibril also descends after Husayn’s death in Karbala to cry with Muhammad, while in the later dobhāṣī Karbala narratives he reappears with the other archangels on the Day of Judgment. Epsita Halder, email communication, 18 May 2022.

11

As Epsita Halder notes, in reformist narratives ʿAʾisha is not generally referred to as shedding tears after Muhammad’s death, and in dobhāṣī Karbala narratives in Bengal this became the prerogative of the members of the future four Caliphs and of the ahl al-bayt; email communication, 18 May 2022.

12

I am again grateful to Epsita Halder for this comment; email, 18 May 2022.

13

Epsita Halder, email communication, 18 May 2022.

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