for it created an uproar upon its publication, and far from receding into the background, it remains a work that all Urdu critics must confront, either explicitly or obliquely. It captures on paper problems which persist today. Altaf Husain's life began in the "old world" of the nineteenth century. He was born in 1837 in Panipat, a city fifty-five miles from Delhi on the banks of the Jamuna. Known to every Indian school-child as the center of three famous battles, Panipat to its inhabitants has more significance as a traditional center for Sufi saints, philosophers, and scholars. The dargah of the Sufi saint, Abu 'Alt Qalandar, is located there and the life of the city revolves around the thousands of devout pilgrims who visit the shrine and the annual celebrations of the saint's 'UPS. Even the famous mystic Shams al-Tabriz, so a legend goes, visited Panipat.1 Altaf Husain's family participated in the city's spiritual and intellectual activity. The family traced its descent from Ayyub Ansari, one of the early heroes of Islam, and according to a tradition, the family had settled in Panipat at the time of Balban. It had always held prestigious positions, its members being imams and qazts and guardians of the shrine.2 Thus, in a cultural environment that was as attuned to events of the thirteenth century as to those of the present, Altaf Husain received his early education. It was an education that differed little from that of any boy of an impoverished noble family, living in the provinces. In content it was similar to the education of the fifteenth or the sixteenth centuries. That world was still accessible in Panipat, and like thousands of other Muslim boys, Altaf Husain began his education with the Qur'an, at the age of four years, four months. There is an old tradition that the children of Panipat recited the Qur'an in the most mellifluous manner.^ Altaf Husain memorized it entirely, an early intellectual achievement, or at least no mean mnemonic feat. His family situation always interfered with his education. His father died when he was nine, leaving a large family living on diminishing land revenues. His mother was insane and died soon after his father. Hali himself speaks of this, and in her memoir, his grand-daughter describes her as "silent."^ His older brother, Khwaja Imdad Husain adopted Altaf Husain; thereafter his older siblings made the decisions about his life. In spite of his orphaning, Altaf Husain's intellectual ambitions remained high; in fact, those ambitions might have been spurred by the set-backs, for his tenacity in pursuing knowledge seems almost compulsive. Arriving at school-age, I had no one (to look out for me) except for my guardian brothers and sisters and they first had me learn the Qur'an. After this, although enthusiasm for education welled up in my heart, there was never an opportunity for a continued program of education. I had one teacher... from Delhi, Saiyid Jafar 'Ali... who helped me in Persian literature and history and medicine, and with whom I studied a few beginning books in Persian and whose conversations inspired in me a type of relationship with Persian literature. Then I was deeply interested in Arabic, and my -2-