Literary History (Adabi Tareekh): Names, Dates, Movements
What Adabi Tareekh tests
Literary-history questions are date-and-name questions with one line of explanation: pioneers, schools, movements and individual contributions. Answers are short, and accuracy outranks length.
Core sequence
- Beginnings: Urdu grows out of the Dehlvi or Rekhta speech of the Delhi region; Amir Khusrau is the earliest name usually cited.
- Deccan phase: Muhammad Quli Qutub Shah and Nusrati precede Wali Dakkani, whose diwan is treated as the first substantial Urdu diwan and as the bridge carrying Rekhta to Delhi.
- Delhi school: Mir Taqi Mir, Sauda and Dard, then Zauq, Momin, Aatish and Ghalib.
- Lucknow school: Insha Allah Khan Insha, Jurrat, Rangin, Ameer Minai; the marsiya peaks with Mir Anis and Mirza Dabeer.
- 1800, Fort William College, Calcutta: Gilchrist commissions prose; Mir Amman writes Bagh-o-Bahar and simple Urdu prose begins.
- Aligarh movement: Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, the journal Tahzib-ul-Akhlaq, the college founded in 1875, and a reformed argumentative prose.
- 1933, Angare, a story collection by Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmed Ali, Rashid Jahan and Mahmood-uz-Zafar, is banned; 1936 brings the Progressive Writers' Movement; 1939 brings Halqa-e-Arbab-e-Zauq in Lahore with N.M. Rashed and Miraji. Maulvi Abdul Haq is called Baba-e-Urdu for his lexicographic and institutional work.
Worked example
Question: what was Angare and why is it remembered?
Reasoning: give the genre (short-story collection), the year (1933), all four authors, and the consequence (prosecuted and banned, yet it opened the way for the Progressive Writers' Movement). Naming only Sajjad Zaheer halves the mark.
Traps
- Shifting dates by a decade; 1857, 1875, 1933 and 1936 recur.
- Merging the Delhi and Lucknow schools.
- Crediting Bagh-o-Bahar to Sir Syed instead of Mir Amman.