Urdu, incorporating the heterogeneous aesthetic sensibilities, pluralistic perceptions, and different literary traditions which represent our age-old cultural and linguistic coalescence and shared social legacy, is certainly more than one of the languages listed in The Eight Schedule of our Constitution. Urdu, despite being derided by some quarters as a language of listless sophistication and mannerism, is essentially a creative accumulation of diverse cultural sentience including the emerging paradigm of subaltern discourse. It will not be an exaggeration to describe Urdu as a way of thinking and a style of life. It is what constitutes the much-admired mosaic of the cultural plurality of India.

Urdu always espouses the cause of unity of humankind, broadmindedness, fellow feeling and magnanimity by deploring the feigned sectarianism. No one can pass over the longstanding tradition of brotherly love unfailingly propagated by Urdu. Creative genius of its widely admired poets such as Meer, Ghalib, Firaq and Faiz was extremely instrumental in making the plural, democratic and liberal Indian society. It is nothing but sheer injustice to equate such an elegant language to a particular religion. Urdu stunningly exemplifies the essence of Indian culture, tolerance and forbearance. Urdu is yet to get its rightful place in its birthplace, and the perpetual neglect of the language hardly goes with the pluralistic culture of the country.

India's awe-inspiring evolution from a fragmented, nascent and peripheral country to an invincible world power owes much to its inhabitants, who, notwithstanding their different religious, ethnic, linguistic and geographical affiliations, espoused the cause of nation building. Much ink has been spent over the invaluable contribution of different religious, social and linguistic groups and also the political parties who put up a fight against subjugation and exploitation but the stupendous contribution of the Urdu speaking people, especially Urdu journalists, has hardly been made the object of in-depth analysis. This chapter is aimed at supplementing what has been ignored deliberately or unwittingly, since long.

Seldom does the Muslim-dominated, protest-prone Urdu press awake one's memories of the sterling role that it played during India's first war of independence. The contemporary Urdu press, the third largest numerically, has largely been perceived as a body of casual writing that borders on the highly sentimental ‘kitsch’. The debatable nature of such a widely-held view could only be deflated, if the role of the Urdu press, during the eventful period of the freedom struggle, is made the object of a close study. It looks pertinent to turn one's attention to Urdu journalists who wielded their pens to rouse feelings against the alien rule, as a result of which the British took severe punitive measures against them.

Journalism, since its inception, has been perceived as the most effective agent of social activation, and no other social and intellectual activity can vie with journalism in propelling forward the process of social change. This is the reason that a number of political leaders, educationists, social reformists and ideologues of the pre-independence era such as Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya, Lala Lajpat Rai, Mahatma Gandhi, Maulana Mohammad Ali and Zafar Ali Khan had started their periodicals, not for literary excellence or for carving out a niche for themselves in the power structure, but for moulding public opinion against the foreign rule. There is no denying the fact that their efforts bore fruits but their missionary zeal and rhetorical and polemical writings were not fully compatible with the epistemological and professional framework of journalism.

Much has been written about Maulana Abul Kalam Azad's political statesmanship, unrivalled erudition and unequal intellectual eloquence in proffering a perceptive and innovative discussion on the topics having definite bearing on the metaphysical and physical aspects of life.

His journalistic excellence, the hallmark of his creative genius, has also come in for detailed debate. It has been pointed out, time and again, that Azad's lucid but verbose prose style unfailingly charted a new path in Urdu journalism.

Urdu, spoken by more than 60 Millions (2001 Census), has usually been, though erroneously, perceived as a language that draws heavily from ‘Erato’ or sensual themes. Seldom does its power of strengthening cultural pluralism by macerating the creative output of a number of eminent writers, get applause from different quarters. Contrary to the widely held view that it regurgitates the themes of many well-known Persian and Arabic poets, Urdu literature, since its inception, keeps an eye on the authors who write in the languages spoken in different parts of India. In line with its age-long resilience, Urdu literature turns its attention to Tagore, whose unmatched creative insight and marked accuracy of sensibility is reflected in poetry, fiction, music, painting, acting and teaching, in equal measure. It goes without saying that the multifaceted personality of Tagore fired the imagination of those who have a panache for good literature.

Much before Tagore won the Nobel Prize, Munshi Premchand, who laid the foundation of fiction in Urdu, referred to him in his letters repeatedly and candidly, admitting that he had learnt the art of juxtaposing the mundane realities of life with eternal questions that constitute the mainstay of human existence, from Tagore. In a letter addressed to Munshi Daya Narain Nigam, dated September 10, 1910, he alludes to one of his unfinished stories that owed much to Tagore.

The epistemological and theoretical aspects of literary theories have caused them to draw too much unnecessary attention towards themselves, especially with the publication of Khawaja Altaf Husain Hali's prodigious monograph, ‘Muqadma-e-Sher-o-Shaeri’ (Preface to the Debate on the Nature of Poetry) in 1893. The Preface is the first book in Urdu that goes beyond the unconditional glorification of poetry and actually tries to probe into what ails contemporary Urdu poetry. Hali, an accomplished poet, biographer, scholar and disciple of Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, tried to turn attention to the theoretical and aesthetic stand point of evaluating literature objectively.

In ‘Muqadma-e Sher-O-Shaeri’, Hali persistently puts together well established eastern and western canons for the appraisal of poetry. How does literature reflect external reality through language and rhetorical devices? What is the sort of relationship that exists between literature and individual and collective consciousness? How does poetry communicate with the reader? How does the poet along with the reader and the text, collectively give life to a piece of literature? Do social conditions leave an indelible mark on literature?

These sorts of pertinent questions are assiduously discussed in the ‘Muqadma’ and Hali also delineates the distinctive features of various genres of poetry. Hali firmly believes in the mimetic representation of the external world through literature and his intent on simplicity, spontaneity and true depiction of reality, enabled Urdu criticism to release itself from the bond of opinion-centred assessment.

Much light has been shed on the poetic dexterity and awe-inspiring aesthetic sensibility of Faiz (1911–1984) but his literary, cultural, aesthetic, artistic and social concerns, lucidly exposed to view in his prose writings, both in Urdu and English, have hardly been focussed on. Sheema Majeed's compilation of his Culture and Identity, Selected English Writings of Faiz (2005) and a few pieces on his Urdu prose (see also ‘Faiz Ek Naser Nigar: Afkar Fair Number’ by Saher Ansari, ‘Faiz Ke Tanqueedi Ravaiyye’ by Ali Ahmad Fatmil, ‘Faiz Ahmad Faiz Bahaisiyat Naqqad’ by Shafeeq Ahmad Ashrafi.) aside, seldom does one come across any discernable attempt to sift through the whole corpus of his prose writings, available in the form of a number of articles, reviews, laconic essays, prefaces, blurbs or short introductions to books, reviews, letters, speeches, discussions, radio talks, TV discussions, lectures and presidential remarks. These writings unfailingly prove that Faiz was certainly more than an aesthete who takes delight in conveying impressions in a florid style that a piece of art may evoke.

Most of his prose pieces are expository, evidently propelled along by the progressive canons of literature and many of them seem to have a pertinent point in them. The ideas get life in Faiz's tautly written prose and these pieces, embedded with fresh critical insights, establish his credentials as a sensitive critic. At times, his articles seem to make him a literary enthusiast whose writings are certainly more than the mere elucidation of pre-existent meaning.

It seems incredible to think that a 30-year-old who uses words and a painting brush with equal felicity can pick up a language learning guide from the downtown market of Ahmedabad that is famous for “things that are not in currency” as it is the area where one hardly gets to see any shopping mall, food plaza or a multiplex. It is surprising that this is the place that makes him realise that there is a life that does exist beyond selling, buying and sensual pleasures. Soon he becomes fully conversant with the nuances and idioms of a language that is apparently incompatible with his cultural ethos, ideological concerns, his value system and religious beliefs; surprisingly, within no time, he has a command on the complicated and formidable prosody of that language. Eventually, his ever-increasing proficiency in that particular language, coupled with his creative dexterity earned him the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award in 2009. It is not a piece of fiction, but what was achieved by Jayant Parmar. His transformation from a Gujarati poet and painter into an accomplished Urdu poet leaves many awe-struck. His poems make it clear that creativity transcends language barrier. His second collection of poems ‘Pencil Aur Doosri Nazmein’ got the Award of the National Academy of Letters – Sahitya Akademi – for Urdu in 2008.

Jayant Parmar who has continuously been haunted by the repugnance of hell pit admits that the atmosphere around him was hardly conducive for any creative work.

No Urdu poet can vie with Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797-1869) in terms of a dispassionate but uncontrived portrayal of the incongruities of human life. With a researcher's tenacity, he unwittingly transforms a myriad of experiences – sensuous, emotive, mystical and intellectual – into a unified pattern of unfading experience. His poetic method is clearly braced for converting the vagaries of daily life into excellent poetic material, interspersed with unsurpassable wit, and it leaves the literary critics and the common reader awe-struck.

In 1809, when Ghalib was only 12, his poignant poetry came in for a consummate discussion in Takizra Umda-e-Muntakhiba. Having praised the merits of the promising poet, Meer Mohammad Khan Suroor, the annalist, compared Ghalib with Mirza Abdul Qadir Bedil, one of the great exponents of the Ghazal. According to him, Ghalib effectively emulates the poetic diction of Bedil. Suroor's early adulation proved to be a straw in the wind as much ink has been expended over Ghalib's sterling contribution to the Urdu Ghazal in particular and other literary genres in general. Since the publication of his Urdu ‘Deewan’, hardly can any critic resist the temptation of focussing on Ghalib, no matter how plausible or non-perceptive his interpretation might be.

Ghalib's worldview and his matchless style, coupled with frequent use of paradoxes and witty comparisons or conceits has fired the imagination of innumerable critics and interpreters.

Much ink has been expended over the artistic felicity and aesthetic acuteness of Raghupati Sahay Firaq Gorakhpuri (1896–1982) – one of the most admired poets of the subcontinent, who was also instrumental in transforming Urdu love poetry into a repository receptacle of multi-layered human consciousness that transcends the time and space barrier. Surprisingly, his wide-ranging, wholesome, discerning and equally forceful prose, containing a meticulous and candid, critical insight has hardly been subjected to dispassionate and assiduous evaluation.

Seldom do Urdu scholars and critics focus on Firaq's perceptive and sharp-witted criticism, which he practiced for almost three decades. There is no denying the fact that some Urdu critics have cursorily referred to his three books Andaze (1959), Urdu Ki Eshqia Shairi (1945) and Urdu Ghazal Goiee (1955) but they peremptorily describe him as the impressionistic critic, whose critical evaluation is based on interpreting the text in the backdrop of human emotions and impressions and who concentrates on conveying initial and stock responses which a piece of art may evoke. He takes pride in recreating the experience of the author, in the minds of the readers.

The onus of propagating such a mistaken notion rests with Firaq himself, who, on several occasions, including in the preface to ‘Andaze’, showed his penchant for impressionistic and aesthetic criticism. Firaq disagrees with the widely-accepted literary assumption that the spontaneous appreciation of poetry or the acclamation that a poet gets at any poetic symposium falls well short of criticism and most of the time, this sort of quick assessment proves to be misleading and erroneous.

Urdu poetry, since its inception, has tried to capture completely, the conscious life, the cognitive life, life beyond the mundane realities, the life of desire and the anguish involved in extracting the meaning of the mundane realities that are ostensibly uncanny, macabre and sordid. Its most-longed-for genre, the Ghazal, drawing its sustenance from the sentimental and metaphysical notion of love, apocalyptic hyperbole, tenacious and multi-sensory imagery, still tweaks the curiosity of those who have panache for good poetry.

The creative dexterity and aesthetic sensibility of some great Urdu poets such as Mir, Ghalib, Anees, Iqbal, N.M. Rashid, Meeraji, Faiz, Firaq Gorakhpuri, Nasir Kazmi, Akhtar ul Iman, Faraz and Shahryar, still receives widespread adulation. Their frequent and judicious juxtaposition of solitariness and heterogeneity is both awe-inspiring and ecstatic in effect.

The Ghazal's immense popularity aside, Urdu poetry's tendency for sentimental exoticism that betrays a kind of rejoicing in pain, has prompted some critics to tear its self-collapsing and clichéd diction apart. They describe it as a body of atonal and mushy writing, bordering on a kitsch that harps on the themes regurgitated by the eminent Persian and Arabic poets of the yore.

Despite this existent polemic in Urdu poetry, if various genres of the post-Independence breed of the poetry are sifted at once, both at the level of content and form, one will be able to see how Urdu poetry, as a whole, has broken away from the grotesque subversion of the normative requirements of neo-classical poetry.

Scarcely does a language endure as much agony in its own homeland as Urdu, and that too in the hands of those who describe it as the controlling metaphor of their distinct cultural identity as the majority of its native speakers, mostly living in north India, no longer use it as a means of communication, and the new generation is hardly even aware of its script. Still bearing the brunt of the Partition, Urdu finds it extremely difficult to preserve its script due to a continual fall in its use. However, notwithstanding the apparent decline, the language is still spoken by more than 60 million people (2001 census) in India and the literature in Urdu by distinguished poets and fiction writers like Meer, Ghalib, Iqbal, Premchand, Manto, Bedi, Firaq, Faiz, Nasir Kazmi, Ahmad Faraz, Intizar Hussain, and Shaheryar draws immense adulation from all quarters.

Urdu has won a fair share of admirers for its ingrained quality of bringing different cultural sensibilities together as well as detractors for allegedly championing the cause of the Partition. In this backdrop, one has to study Urdu literature, and the articles included in this book are braced for understanding the dynamics of the power of cultural paradox that is evidently manifested in the case of Urdu. What kind of cultural and ethnic identity is being fostered by Urdu literature? Who are the prominent authors of the post-Partition Urdu literature? These questions are delineated in these articles that revolve around Urdu writers in India. This book, an assortment of twelve essays, is an attempt to analyze Urdu's inherent prowess of strengthening liberal values, pluralism and ingesting new literary trends, ideological positions and current socio-political discourses.

a. Early Signs of Life and Native American Cultures

About 60,000–25,000 years ago, the Bering land bridge that joined Siberia to Alaska was created because of falling sea levels. Migrations of humans from Eurasia to the Americas took place through this bridge till around 12,000 years ago. Linguistic and genetic data attest the fact that the early Paleo-Americans soon spread throughout the Americas and diversified into many hundreds of culturally distinct nations and tribes. The North American climate stabilized by 8000 BCE, followed by widespread migration, cultivation of crops, and subsequently, a dramatic population spurt in the North and South Americas.

A conservation law in the physical world is a consequence of some symmetry. A number of conservation laws exist. Some of them are exact and some are approximate. There are conservation laws pertaining to energy, momentum, angular momentum, charge, number of baryons (protons, neutrons and heavier elements), strangeness and various quantities. In this book, we are mainly interested in the conservation of energy, momentum and angular momentum. The conservation laws are powerful tools because of the following:

1. Conservation laws are independent of the details of trajectory and often of the details of the particular force.

2. Conservation laws may be used even when the force is not known. This applies particularly in the physics of elementary particles.

3. Conservation laws have an intimate connection with invariance.

4. Even when the force is known exactly, a conservation law may be a convenient help in solving for the motion of a particle.

Elastic and inelastic collisions

Generally, we consider collision between two bodies. A collision between two bodies may be either elastic or inelastic. In an elastic collision, total kinetic energy of the two bodies before collision is equal to the total kinetic energy of the bodies after collision. That is, in an elastic collision, the kinetic energy of the system of bodies is conserved. However, the kinetic energy may be shared among the bodies during collision. On the other hand, in an inelastic collision, the kinetic energy of the system is not conserved.

The final declaration of the three-tiered results was completed by the beginning of the monsoon season in 2008. The seats comprised 335 under the Proportional System, 240 under the FPTP and 26 Appointments by the Council of Ministers.

In the FPTP ballot, the Maoists got 120 seats, whereas the former ruling parties—the Nepali Congress and Unified Marxist Leninist got 37 and 33 seats respectively. The Maoists 120 seats, therefore, represented 50 per cent of the total FPTP seats—almost three times that of the Congress party or the UML party. This result implies that if the electoral system had not become a mixed system the Maoist party would have secured a clear majority in the Constituent Assembly election.

The newly emerged Madhesi Forum party secured 30 seats, making it the fourth largest party in the FPTP race, and the Lokatantrik party nine seats, making it the fifth largest party in the FPTP race. In the previous parliamentary elections in 1999, after the Congress and UML parties, the most successful party was the royalist Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP). Before this election, sensing public mood, the RPP removed from its constitution its policy of supporting constitutional monarchy. But still, the RPP—and other royalist splinter factions—made considerable losses.

Unfortunately, the representation of women, and other previously underrepresented groups, remained low in this FPTP race. In the case of women, for example, female candidates represented less than 10 per cent candidates nominated by all the parties.

‘It is a rich tale of the continuing interplay between soaring ideals and gritty reality, aspiration and compromise, accident and purpose, and the will of the United States and the often contrary will of countless other international actors.’ The United States’ rise to ‘superpower’ in the aftermath of the WWII in a gradually emerging unipolar world is the saga of its unique political diplomacy, economic domination and control, and cultural hegemony over the other nations.

a. WWII – The Context, Entry of the United States, and Allied Victory

In the mid-1930s, as war clouds began to gather in Europe and Asia, Americans who found themselves in the depths of the Depression did not want to get involved in a world war, and retreated into a deeper position of isolationism.