Urdu Literature History

One the sweetest languages in the world, the history and origin of Urdu literature is vivid, colorful and harmoniously conjoined that has led to the development of this language. The style of writing the Urdu language has developed tremendously with the domination of Ghazals and nazms, the most dominant forms of verses. The evolution of Urdu literature history has been slow yet steady and today, it is still one of the preferred languages for writing poetry and songs that express true meaning and feelings. Read on further to know about Urdu literature origin. To know more about the Urdu literature, continue to read this insightful article on it.

History Of Urdu Literature
The Urdu literature has a heavy domination of poetry. It is this domination that has led to the expansion and development of writing style in literature. In the contemporary world, Urdu is still popular in India and Pakistan and other south Asian countries. The origin of Urdu literature can be traced to the 14th century in India during the Mughal rule. It was very much prevalent among the urbane Persians in the elite Muslim classes. The origin of the Urdu literature struck a fine balance between the new cultural amalgamation of a vocabulary of Sanskrit and Persian words and firm retention of the best of Persia and Afghanistan. One of the most influential people who initiated the growth and development of Urdu literature is undoubtedly, the famous Amir Khusro. He is credited with categorizing of north Indian classical music, which is popularly known as Hindustani music. He frequently wrote in both Persian and Hindi and often mixed the two ingeniously. His influence was so vast that even a century after his death, the famous Quli Qutub Shah took an immense liking to this language that was called Urdu.

Dastaan
Urdu literature is considered to me comprising more of poetry than prose. Dastaan or the epic stories are the only elements of the Urdu literature that has got the Prose quality to it. These Dastaans were originally written in the Persian language. These prose like stories used to have a fantastical background with the plots revolving around the mythical creatures and the magical world. This genre of writing was originated in Iran. It was initially spread around by the folk teller of tales but in the later years it was put together into writing by various authors. Dastan was very famous as a genre in the Urdu literature and has always been closely related to other genre of writing form Eastern literatures like: Persian masnawi, Punjabi qissa, Sindhi waqayati bait, etc. The oldest dastaan in the history of Urdu literature is Dastan-i-Amir Hamza. It is said to have been written in the 17th century. The dastaans with the narrative quality was recorded to have been written in the 18th century. Some of the examples of narrative dastaans are: Bagh-oBahar (The Garden and the Spring) written by Mir Amman, Mazhab-i-Ishq (The Religion of Love) written by Nihalchand Lahori, Araish-i-Mahfil (The Adornment of the Assembly) written by Hyderbakhsh Hyderi, Gulzar-i-Chin (the Flower Bed of Chin) written by Khalil Ali Khan Ashq, Jazb-I 'ishq (The Corageous Love) written by Shah Husain Haqiqat, etc.

Tazkiras
These are like literary memoirs, which include verses by the great Urdu poets with comments on their style of writing or the kind of life they had. These are usually just the collection of names, along with a brief introduction of the poet with a commentary on his/her composition. One can get a lot of biographical introduction of a particular writer or a poet. These Tazkiras methodically evaluate an author or poet's works, sometimes even better than the work of anthologists. These are chronologically mentioned.

Novellas
There was a time when Urdu novels used to focus on the urban life and stories were weaved around the aspects of metropolitan life. But eventually, it started to include the rural life in it as well. Under the famous Progressive Writer's Movement (PWM), the novel writing started to get a bit too different as the changing times and progressions also started to find its place in the stories. During partition, a huge difference was seen in the works of the novel writers as the questions on the identity crisis and violent separation of people from people and people from land as well. Migration as a dislocated emotion was put into stories in Urdu novellas of the times during partition. Writers like Abdullah Hussain, Quratul Ain Haider started using partition in their writing. In this new century, more and more Indian Urdu writers are concentrating towards writing about young generations and their contemporary issues, lifestyles and life choices. These writers writing on current generations and contemporary life are Paigham Afaqui (writer of Makaan), Abdus Samad (writer of Do Gaz Zameen), Ghazanfer (writer of Pani), etc. Some of the very famous novels from the Urdu Indian literature are: Mirat-al-Urus, Bina-tul-Nash, Zindagi, Taubat-un-Nasuh, Fasaana-e-Mubtalaa, etc.