About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the Urdu text and a new English translation of all sixteen essays and addresses by Maulvi Abdul Haq (1870–1961) that are found on Urdu Wikisource. The first eight are "What Is Hindustani?", "A Mixed Language", "The Hindi–Urdu Quarrel", "The Champions of Urdu", "The Causes of Urdu's Popularity", "The Present and Future of Urdu", "The Good Book" and his presidential address written for the first meeting of the All-India Progressive Writers' Association. Chapters 10–17, added in October 2026, give the other eight: his address at the Aligarh Muslim University (1938), the preface to his selection from Mir, and his presidential addresses at the Sindh Provincial Urdu Conference (Karachi, 1937), the Urdu Section of the Hindustani Academy (Allahabad, 1936), the Urdu Conference at Aligarh (1937), the Bihar Urdu Conference (1936), the Urdu Conference at Nagpur (1938) and the Urdu Section of the All-India Oriental Conference (Baroda, 1934). The title, *Abdul Haq ke Mazameen* ("Essays of Abdul Haq"), has been given to this collection by the present edition; it is not one of the author's own printed volumes.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the pages listed under the author, downloaded in October 2026 and marked {{PD-Pakistan}}. All sixteen pieces listed there in October 2026 are given. Abdul Haq's printed collections (*Khutbat-e-Abdul Haq*, *Muqaddamat-e-Abdul Haq* and others) contain more than this.

What is left out and what was changed: nothing has been left out of the pieces that are given. The dated notes that head some pieces (the radio talk, the Allahabad paper, the Lahore address, and the compiler's note before the Progressive Writers' address) are kept, as is the credit to All India Radio. Abdul Haq wrote in very long paragraphs; for ease of reading facing the translation, the longest have been divided at the ends of sentences, without any change to the words. Verses that the source runs into the prose are translated inside the prose, with a note where they are Persian. A few doubtful readings of the source are explained in notes.

Copyright: Maulvi Abdul Haq died in 1961, so his writings are in the public domain in Pakistan and India. The pieces given here date mostly from 1934 to 1941 (the Mir preface is earlier), so their status in the United States should be checked. The English translation is new. Translator's notes are marked [TN: …]. Urdu, Hindi and Persian words that he discusses are given in transliteration in italics with their meaning in brackets.

Names are spelled in one way throughout: Mir (Mir Taqi Mir), Zauq, Hali, Firdausi, Sa'di, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Nazir Ahmad, Shibli, Azad, Zakaullah, Mahatma Gandhi, Premchand, Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru; Delhi, Lucknow, Lahore, Allahabad, Azimabad (Patna), the U.P. (United Provinces), the C.P. (Central Provinces), the Frontier Province.

Introduction

Maulvi Abdul Haq was born in 1870 at Hapur, near Meerut, and studied at the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, where he came under the influence of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan. He spent most of his working life in Hyderabad, in the education service of the Nizam's state and later at the new Osmania University. In 1912 he became Secretary of the Anjuman Taraqqi-e-Urdu (Society for the Advancement of Urdu), and he gave the rest of his life to it: he collected and printed old Urdu texts and *tazkiras*, edited the journal *Urdu*, planned a great English–Urdu dictionary, and toured India surveying the state of the language. His admirers called him *Baba-e-Urdu*, "the Father of Urdu". After 1947 he moved to Karachi, where he re-established the Anjuman and worked for an Urdu university. He died in Karachi in 1961.

The essays in this book belong to the years when the language question had become bitter. In 1935 the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, meeting under Gandhi's presidency at Indore, declared Hindi the national language; the Congress had earlier spoken of "Hindustani" in either script. Abdul Haq, who had worked with Hindu and Muslim scholars all his life, saw in the new, heavily Sanskritised Hindi a threat to the shared language of north India. "What Is Hindustani?" is a radio talk of 1939 that asks what the word means if it is not simply Urdu. "A Mixed Language" (1941) answers the charge that Urdu is a hybrid: every great language is mixed, and Urdu was made by Hindus and Muslims together. "The Hindi–Urdu Quarrel" replies to the editor of *Vishal Bharat* and lays much of the blame on Gandhi.

"The Champions of Urdu" is a short call to work: Urdu grew by itself out of need and taste, and those who love it must now read it, teach it and give money for it, with less talk and more work. "The Causes of Urdu's Popularity" finds them in its roots in common speech, its spread over all India, and the delicate language of the women's quarters. "The Present and Future of Urdu" is the presidential address to the Urdu section of the Anjuman Himayat-e-Islam at Lahore in April 1936, with an account of the Anjuman's survey and dictionaries, a plea to writers to take up the struggle of life, and a sharp criticism of Gandhi's "Hindi or Hindustani". "The Good Book" is a short piece on purposeless reading. The last is the address he wrote for the first meeting of the Progressive Writers in Lucknow in April 1936, which he could not attend: he welcomes the young writers, but warns them not to cut their roots in the past, to master their language, and never to lean on reactionaries for support.

Abdul Haq's prose is plain, direct and full of homely proverbs, and he enjoys an anecdote: the old man who stumbles and laments his youth, the jinn set to climb a tamarind tree, the angel who forgot to sow languages in a mountain valley. The translation keeps these turns as they are, and keeps the paragraph structure of the source, except where the longest paragraphs have been divided.

The eight pieces added in chapters 10–17 fill out the picture. The long preface to his selection from Mir is one of the classic essays of Urdu criticism: a life of Mir drawn from his own *Zikr-e-Mir*, a defence of his "easy yet inimitable" style against the artifice of Lucknow, and a portrait of his pride and poverty. The six presidential addresses, given between 1934 and 1938 at Baroda, Allahabad, Patna, Karachi, Aligarh and Nagpur, tell the history of Urdu from Fort William College and Delhi College to the Osmania University, describe the Anjuman's survey and dictionaries, and grow sharper year by year against the Sanskritised Hindi of Gandhi's followers and the Vidya Mandir scheme of the Central Provinces; the Aligarh University speech of 1938 sums up the case for the student audience of Sir Syed's college. In these too he keeps his anecdotes: Shibli and the barber who had become "political", the angel Kalmail who forgot to sow languages in the Grisons, and the student who asked to be lent a match and was told that it was now called *dhumrashalaka*.