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AN editorial note in January 1958 issue of literary journal Ma’arif expressed deep grief over death of Ram Babu Saksena. The note read: “He was in love with Urdu and its service. He had made serving Urdu his life’s primary work […] and in the recently held session at Hindustani Academy, where the entire atmosphere was anti-Urdu, Saksena’s was the lone voice raised in favour of Urdu.”
Aside from his career as civil servant, Saksena was a researcher and wrote on Urdu and Persian literatures. Though he had many works to his credit, Saksena’s A History of Urdu Literature (Lucknow: Naval Kishore Press, 1927) gave him the everlasting fame. According to Dr Gian Chand, no other edition of the English version of this work was ever published. But Saksena’s fame kept on rising with the passage of time because of his other literary works as well as the Urdu translation of his signature work: Mirza Muhammad Askari translated Saksena’s A History of Urdu Literature from English into Urdu and the Urdu translation was first published in 1929 by the same publisher.
But Mirza Askari was not only translator; he had made many changes and had divided the book into prose and verse portions. The original work lacked samples or excerpts from Urdu poetry and Askari added them. Askari also added some other details that had been dropped by Saksena but were there in the source material, such as Muhammad Husain Azad’s Aab-i-Hayat’. Askari expressed his views in the footnotes wherever he had a difference of opinion. On top of it, Askari made necessary corrections at many places and added some new material.
Soon the Urdu version was prescribed as textbook. Surprisingly, its Urdu version remained in print for quite long — some 50 years — since as a textbook it was reprinted umpteenth times. It was referred to and quoted until a couple of decades ago, despite certain lacuna. A new lease of life was given to the book when some scholars, such as Ghulam Husain Zulfiqar and Tabassum Kashmiri, separately revised and updated the Urdu translation. Kashmiri appended footnotes and made corrections in the light of new research that had been carried out since the publication of translation. This edition too had run into several reprints. A Hindi translation in two volumes had appeared from Allahabad in 1951.
Some scholars have criticised certain aspects of Saksena’s history of Urdu literature. For instance, it does not have footnotes and does not mention original sources from where certain information was obtained. It not only failed to reproduce samples of poetry by great poets such as Ghalib even, it also lacked the chapter on modern Urdu poets. Saksena was well aware of these shortcomings and had promised to make up for these lapses in the second edition, but it never happened.
Ram Babu Saksena’s place of birth is often quoted to be Barely, UP, and his year of birth as 1892 or 1895. But Malik Ram in his Tazkira-i-Mah-o-Saal has mentioned that Saksena was born in Pipar, a village in district of Farrukhabad, UP, on Sept 27, 1896. Saksena died on Meerut Railway Station on Dec 20, 1957, while waiting to board a Calcutta-bound train where he was going to attend a literary gathering.
As put by Tabassum Kashmiri, Saksena did his MA and LLB from Allahabad University and in 1918 was made deputy collector. In 1922, he served as private secretary to Maharaja of Baroda. Later on, he worked as secretary and other high-ranking posts. Saksena participated in the establishment of Hindustani Academy and was also a member of Sahitya Academy.
Saksena’s other works include: European and Indo-European Poets of Urdu and Persian, Auraaq-i-Pareeshan’, and Poets of Urdu and Persian. His two works, namely, Muraqqa-i-Shuara and Masnaviyaat-i-Mir Bakhatt-i-Mir are criticised by some researchers and some have expressed their doubts about the book that claimed to be a collection of Mir Taqi Mir’s masnavis in his own writing as its genuineness is questionable.
Gian Chand has named three other books that Saksena was working on at the time of his death: Symbolism and Literature with special reference to Languages of India, Hindi Poetry of Urdu and Persian Poets, and Modern Urdu Literature. Gian Chand opined that none of these works could see light of the day.
Despite all its shortcomings, Ram Babu Saksena’s history of Urdu literature is a milestone in that it was the first-ever complete history of Urdu literature that covered both prose and poetry of Urdu, unlike other works, for example Azad’s Aab-i-Hayat that covered only poetry. Saksena’s critical evaluation is generally not accepted as of a high class but it goes to his credit that he was the first, even before progressives, to recognise and appreciate the poetic merits of Nazeer Akberabadi.
Published in Dawn, December 26th, 2022
