Literary history: Periods, authors, works and movements
What this section asks
Chronology, genre and author-to-work mapping across the three phases the syllabus follows: the Deccan beginnings, the Delhi–Lucknow classical age, and the twentieth-century moderns.
Anchors to hold
- Origin: Urdu grew from the Khariboli spoken around Delhi, enriched by Persian, Arabic and Turkish, and was earlier called Hindi, Hindustani, Dehlavi and Rekhta.
- Deccan phase: Wali Deccani (1667–1707) gave the ghazal literary standing; the courts of Golconda and Bijapur patronised it.
- Classical north: Mir Taqi Mir (1723–1810) for pathos, Mirza Sauda for satire, Mirza Ghalib (1797–1869) for philosophical density and for the letter-writing that reshaped Urdu prose, Bahadur Shah Zafar as the last Mughal patron-poet.
- Reform and prose: Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (1817–1898) and the Aligarh movement; Maulana Muhammad Husain Azad's Aab-e-Hayat; Hali's Muqaddama-e-Sher-o-Shaeri; Shibli Nomani; Abul Kalam Azad's Ghubar-e-Khatir.
- Fiction: Premchand (1880–1936), author of Godan and Gaban; then Manto, Krishan Chander, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Ismat Chughtai, Qurratulain Hyder.
- Movements: Tarraqqi Pasand Tehreek, launched through the Anjuman-e-Tarraqqi Pasand Musannifeen at Lucknow in 1936, with Faiz, Josh and Sardar Jafri; Halqa-e-Arbab-e-Zauq, Lahore, 1939, formed in reaction to it.
Worked example
Task: match the work to its author - Aab-e-Hayat, Ghubar-e-Khatir, Muqaddama-e-Sher-o-Shaeri.
Reasoning: classify by genre first. Aab-e-Hayat is a biographical history of Urdu poetry (Muhammad Husain Azad); Ghubar-e-Khatir is a collection of letters (Abul Kalam Azad); the Muqaddama is literary criticism (Hali). Genre narrows the field before memory is tested.
Traps
Swapping Azad and Hali; placing Iqbal (1877–1938) in the Deccan phase; dating the Tarraqqi Pasand movement to Partition; naming Premchand as a ghazal poet; giving a bare date with no work to justify it.