ऐ दर्या-ए क़ैद् दर् सीनः-ए मन् ... (اَے دَرْیَا ئ قَیدْ دَرْ سِینۂ مَنْ ۔۔۔): A Deluge of Verbs ... ?

Some years ago I had chanced on the essay "A Famine of Verbs" (in the 'Annual of Urdu Studies', vol 19, 2004) which was a translation into English of M. H. `Askari's "qaht-E af`Al" published in 1953. According to Mr. `Askari, urdU literature has stagnated since its early days and one of the root causes of this stagnation is the relative lack of non-compound verbs in modern literary works (and, indeed, in everyday use). I quote below the relevant excerpts from the essay which condense the essence of his thesis (Translation by Mr. B. Rehman):

Literature can be vibrantly alive only when not just the writers but also the readers have at least some interest in the problems of literary language and expression ... If we are still concerned about the life or death of our literature, we must learn to read before we start writing ... Pick up a magazine or a book and choose a random page as a sample. Make a list of the types of words used. The whole picture of literary stagnation will become clear.
...
The subject or the experience should be present, not just in the whole poem or short story, but it should be there in every word and phrase. If the writer has an honest and creative investment in his experience, the only proof of this would lie in his making sure that his words are not mere corpses that serve to fill a hole, but are operative in the verb mode.
...
The true poet’s words and phrases don’t just contain emotions and feelings. They also contain action.
...
Fenollosa says that a poet’s greatness can be determined by the fact that the verbs used by him contain action within them, for such verbs make us conscious of the great powers of nature ... Fenollosa has even said, use the word “is” and poetry disappears. And in reality, excessive use of this word is a sign of the entire nation’s biological decline.

Mr. `Askari acknowledges the provisional nature of the thesis and anticipates possible criticism:

To what extent these ideas are true and how closely the world’s great literature does conform to them cannot be the issue under discussion here.

He then continues:

Even a cursory look at Urdu literature will show you how far our language has declined in vigor and vitality through successive stages in its history. Mir has many verbs which describe the different actions of the human body, not like Shakespeare to be sure, but still, he has quite a few. You will find these only occasionally in Ghalib. Ghalib has always tried not to use any verb other than “to be” ... After Ghalib, and during the time of Ghalib idolizing, our literature fell on truly bad times. Writers like Niyaz Fatehpuri and his contemporaries tried to write prose which had few verbs but a whole slew of adjectives with each noun. And when the sense of action dried up, these people lost the sense of things too. By separating the object from its quality (adjective) they made both their language and diction quite hollow. As a result, their prose gives the impression of layer upon layer of bricks piled one on top of the other without mortar. A little push, and the whole pile topples over. This was a period of extreme weakness for Urdu prose.
...
Now our prose and, especially, poetry are dominated by that one verb "to be". And this reflects the attitude of all of us towards life. We have lost touch with action that is in tune with the diversity of nature’s powers ... We describe this situation as literary stagnation and feel content, although the matter is not as simple as that.
...
One disintegrative element was there already when Urdu was constructed. Persian speakers are responsible for the undesirable invention of adding "budan" ("to be") and "kardan" ("to do") to Arabic words and making verbs out of them. On top of that, the Urdu speakers imitated this style and started adding "karna" ("to do") and "hona" ("to be") to Persian words and fashioning verbs in abundance, kicking out adequate and rather useful indigenous words to make room for the neologisms ... Very few verbs have entered the Urdu language since their time. But what is most incredible today is that we seem to have forgotten verbs entirely. My estimate is that these days the newspapers or magazines don’t use more than fifty verbs ... there must be at least a minimum of a thousand verbs [in urdU] ... things have come to such a pretty pass that apart from "to do" ("karna") and "to be" ("hona") it is difficult to find a third verb in our writings.

In the same essay, Mr. `Askari asserts the following point which does not have a direct bearing on this post, but may be of interest anyway:

The problem of the use of verbs is also part of another basic problem. In many ways, our entire literature has been a victim of the ghazal. Perhaps we should thank the ghazal for not allowing a sense of architectonics to develop among Urdu poets and prose writers. Even the greatest of our non-ghazal poems do not achieve a clear symphonic form.

A gulf of over 5 decades separates Mr. `Askari's essay from present times. And whether one agrees or not in general terms with the above thesis, I thought that it may be worthwhile to have a ready list of non-compound verbs that are part of the hindUstAnI idiom. I've had the good fortune of being able to rely on the online version of Platts' dictionary maintained by the good folks at the DSAL project of the University of Chicago. I've mined the dictionary for verbs, and in doing so have been often surprised by how many verbs I was unaware of. In some cases, I was surprised that many examples of compound verbs used in urdU actually have a non-compound equivalent which I'd never encountered. I may have missed out on a few verbs here and there, but I hope this listing will be of some use to interested souls:

ऐ दर्या-ए क़ैद् दर् सीनः-ए मन् ...
(اَے دَرْیَا ئ قَیدْ دَرْ سِینۂ مَنْ ۔۔۔)

2008-04-13

A Deluge of Verbs ... ?

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