It would, at the outset, appear an audacious undertaking. How does one make a 19th century Urdu journal,
Avadh Punch, accessible to the contemporary English-reading public? And why its resurrection now? Mushirul Hasan has embarked on a brave journey. To present, in English, the essence of
Avadh Punch, the high point of Urdu humour, is a remarkable achievement.
The publication was launched barely two decades after 1857.
| | | | An inspired imitation
of the original, Avadh Punch offered a genteel, witty way to sustain an
adversarial equation with imperial authority. | | | | |
|
Avadh was recovering from its ravages. Its most popular king, Wajid Ali Shah, had been deposed in 1856 and transported to Matia Burj near Calcutta. With one executive order, 20,000 government employees had been rendered unemployed. More were reduced to abject penury. There was great anger among the people. How did the elite and ordinary citizens respond—by strapping themselves with explosives? They responded with a sophistication and elegance rare in history.
Avadh Punch, first published in 1877, was part of this cultured response.
Distil from the best of your opponent's satirical writing, incorporate it into your armoury, and dazzle him with a barrage of barbs and wit in the finest prose, and you've raised the quarrel to the level of Joseph Addison and Ratan Nath Sarshar.
In unabashed imitation of London's satirical Punch where writers like William M. Thackeray were among its earliest contributors, the Avadh Punch generated satirical and humorous writing in a language most equipped for it—Urdu. It also provided relief from the emotional and intellectual suffocation since 1857. And contrived the only way an adversarial equation could be sustained with the imperial authority. Thus, Avadh Punch became a channel of communication with authority. Style, elegance and wit, hallmarks of Avadh Punch, exposed the British to a sort of eastern urbanity they were otherwise ignorant of.
Hasan first sets the context of Avadh Punch in his inimitable style, often making forays well outside his theme, but even his digressions are interesting.
'Composite culture', 'ganga-jamuni tehzeeb', 'Nehruvian secularism' are all terms that have begun to pall by sheer repetition. Avadh Punch, in English, provides evidence of their early origins. They did not originate in the minds of latter-day romantics, but were an organic part of the social texture.
In the brilliant cartoons and etchings reproduced in the publication, India occasionally appears as Mother India. Did I hear someone mutter "Vande Mataram"?
There is chronological relevance in the fact that the publication was put to sleep in 1936, just when communal discourse began to acquire a clientele.