In India, romantic poetry in a fading language draws stadium crowds

NEW DELHI – The four designated stages inside the crowded stadium complex in the heart of the busy capital weren’t enough. So poetry lovers also took to the footpaths and the spaces in between, turning them into impromptu open-mic platforms for India’s embattled language of love.

In one corner of the festival grounds, which had been draped in vibrant colours and calligraphy, a group of university students alternated between singing popular romantic songs, backed by a young man on guitar, and jostling to recite verses of their own.

“In your love,” one young poet began, leaning into the huddle with confidence, before forgetting the rest of his verse. “In your love… ” he repeated, unable to recall.

“Don’t worry,” someone from the crowd encouraged him as the others chuckled. “In love, we all forget.”

In another corner, Mr Pradeep Sahil, a poet and lyricist, handed his phone to a friend to record him as he placed a red chair at a busy spot and took a seat, crossing his legs and reading poem after poem. A crowd soon gathered, cheering after every verse. With no room on the main stage, Mr Sahil had found a stage of his own, climbing atop his chair and reciting what felt like his entire book.

“The times have changed, and so has the poet. I am half a businessman now, half a poet.”

That more than 300,000 people came to celebrate Urdu poetry during the three-day festival this month in New Delhi was testament to the peculiar reality of the language in India.

For centuries, Urdu was a prominent language of culture and poetry in India, at times promoted by Mughal rulers. Its literature and journalism – often advanced by writers who rebelled against religious dogma – played important roles in the country’s independence struggle against British colonial rule and in the spread of socialist fervour across the subcontinent later in the 20th century.

In more recent decades, the language has faced dual threats from communal politics and the quest for economic prosperity. Urdu is now stigmatised as foreign, the language of India’s archrival, Pakistan. Families increasingly prefer to enrol children in schools that teach English and other Indian languages better suited for the job market.

Yet Urdu has remained the key language of romantic expression in the songs and cinema that saturate Indian life. Generations in India as well as across the wider subcontinent and in the diaspora have grown up humming songs from Bollywood musicals that draw heavily on Urdu poetry. Knowingly or unknowingly, Urdu has been their language of angst, heartbreak and celebration.

Urdu is a composite language. Its grammar and syntax are indigenous to India, but it draws its script – and a heavy share of its vocabulary – from Persian and Arabic influences that came on the back of Muslim invasions.

After Pakistan adopted Urdu as its national language with the bloody partition of India in 1947, the tongue increasingly took on an Islamic identity in India – a marginalisation that has only intensified with the recent rise of the Hindu right.

The poetry festival, known as Jashn-e-Rekhta, which was in its seventh edition, is part of a decade-old effort to bridge the gap between the language’s wide emotional connection and its receding accessibility.

It all began in 2013 with a website, Rekhta.org, started by Mr Sanjiv Saraf, an engineer and businessman who was a lifelong lover of music set to Urdu poetry and had just begun learning the script at age 53.

He wanted to make a small number of good Urdu poems accessible by presenting each in three different scripts: in the original Urdu; in Devanagari, the script of Hindi; and in English transliteration. Readers could click on any word to get a pop-up of its meaning.

Mr Saraf’s organisation, the Rekhta Foundation, has since expanded its mission to reviving the Urdu language. Dozens of its employees travel around India to scan and archive works from old libraries and private collections, making out-of-print Urdu books available digitally. The Rekhta website now has about 20 million users annually, two-thirds of them younger than 35. The site has so far made available more than 120,000 pieces of work by more than 6,000 poets.

In many ways, Urdu’s poetic tradition gives it an advantage in the era of social media and short attention spans. The building block of much of Urdu poetry is a simple “sher” – two versed lines in which the first sets up an idea and the second completes it.

“The emotional power of this language – to express the deepest emotions in the shortest possible construct,” Mr Saraf said, “you cannot help but fall in love with the language.”

The poetry festival was held for the first time since the pandemic, and there was an undertone about the fragility of life. Singer Hariharan captivated the audience with a slow meditation on life taken from a poem by Muzaffar Warsi.

The festival’s main attraction was the poetry sessions, from open-mic opportunities where budding poets nervously recited their works, trying to stick to metre and rhyme, to master classes that encouraged them to keep composing even if they were struggling with the basics of Urdu script or form.

“Poetry is not just arranging words,” poet Suhail Azad, who took early retirement as a police officer to focus full time on poetry, told attendants of one master class. “If it reaches the heart, it is poetry.” NYTIMES