KHALIQ BARI, a kind of versified bilingual glossary, is a poem containing just about 200 couplets, but it has caused a long-drawn debate in Urdu as to who really wrote this poem.
The poem derives its title from the first words in its first couplet that says “Khaliq bari, surjan haar”, and apparently the author had not named it in any particular way. Because of the importance of the poem as one of the earliest traces of history of Urdu lexicography, the debate attracted attention of some of the best known scholars of Urdu, including Hafiz Mahmood Sherani, Waheed Mirza, Masood Hasan Rizvi Adeeb, Mumtaz Husain, Afsar Siddiqi Amrohvi, Jameel Jalibi and some others.
Khaliq Bari was basically intended to be used as a bilingual dictionary for educational purposes. A versified dictionary of words used in Arabic and Persian with their Urdu equivalents, Khaliq Bari proved to be a trend setter and a series of similar works entailed, making the genre (known as ‘nisaab nama’) immensely popular. It was commonly believed that Khaliq Bari was written by Ameer Khusrau (1253-1325), a great poet, Sufi, scholar, musician and a disciple of Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia.
But Hafiz Mahmood Sherani challenged the centuries-old notion that Ameer Khusrau had penned it. The title page of Sherani’s edited version of the peom, published by Anjuman Taraqqi-i-Urdu Hind, Delhi, in 1944, reads “Hifz-ul-Lisaan Maroof bah Khaliq Bari” and it adds “penned by Ziauddin Khusrau, 1031 Hijri, usually wrongly attributed to Ameer Khusrau”. In his scholarly preface, Sherani tried to prove, with historical and linguistic evidences, that Ameer Khusrau could not have written this poem. He says, for example, the other ‘nisaab namas’ or the similar works that followed were written about three centuries later in the Mughal era and the trend would have begun much earlier had Khusrau written it originally.
Sherani says Khaliq Bari was written by a person named Ziauddin Khusrau in 1031 Hijri, or 1622-23 AD, that is, in Mughal Emperor Jahangir’s reign. He was mistakenly supposed to be Ameer Khusrau as his penname ‘Khusrau’ appears in a couplet. Sherani adds that real name of the work is ‘Hifz-ul-Lisaan’ and it serves as a hint that it was to be memorised by students. Also, says Sherani, a couplet offers a hint that it was written in 1031 as the line serves as a chronogram.
Sherani had consulted several manuscripts of Khaliq Bari and was a scholar par excellence. Yet some scholars challenged his assumption and insisted that Khaliq Bari was written by Ameer Khusrau, offering their own arguments.
One of the scholars who disagreed with Sherani --- and had his own reasons to believe otherwise --- was Afsar Siddiqi Amrohvi. In his erudite article in the fourth issue of Urdu, published in 1975, by Anjuman Taraqqi-i-Urdu Pakistan, Afsar Sahib proved that ‘Khaliq Bari’ was written by Ameer Khusrau and Sherani’s hypothesis had some flaws. He says, for instance, there is no proof that justifies deriving 1031 Hijri as the year of its creation.
As for the language used in Khaliq Bari that does not sound as old as it should, Afsar Amrohvi says since the work was immensely popular and used as a textbook, in the absence of printing facilities the handwritten copies were used. And this is one of the reasons why even today we can find hundreds of manuscripts of Khaliq Bari. Every subsequent calligrapher might have changed the text to some extent which has resulted in a relatively newer Urdu diction used in the work. Afsar Amrohvi was of the view that India Office manuscript that Sherani used as basic text does not have any date and is not reliable for certain other reasons. It has 218 couplets and this adds to the doubts about its genuineness, since some manuscripts have 191 couplets or even fewer. Later on, some scholars, such as Jameel Jalibi, agreed with Afsar Sahib’s point of view.
Afsar Siddiqi Amrohvi was a poet, scholar and literary journalist. He was born on Dec 9, 1896, in Amroha. His real name was Manzoor Ahmed and Manzoor Hasan was used as a name based on chronogram, as it indicated 1314 Hijri, the year of his birth.
Afsar Amrohvi was a literary disciple of Muztar Khairabadi and Shauq Qidvai, the well-known poets. Afsar Sahib had migrated to Karachi some 20 years before creation of Pakistan. Here he worked as headmaster at a school and would arrange Sindhi and Urdu mushaeras. In 1960, he joined Anjuman Taraqqi-i-Urdu and remained associated with it in one way or the other till he breathed his last.
Aside from his collections of poetry and articles, his books on Mushafi and descriptive catalogue of Anjuman’s manuscripts in eight volumes remain a source of information and inspiration.
Afsar Siddiqi Amrohvi died in Karachi on Feb 9, 1984.
Published in Dawn, February 7th, 2022
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