CONSTRUCTING A LITERARY HISTORY, A CANON AND A THEORY 71 to-be-true-ness about him. He, or his creator, seems to have all the answers, and all the luck too. I came to read SaryzQdah when I was a young boy, and even then, surrounded by all the icons of colonial rule at home and school, I could hear a number of false notes in the story. It would have been good for the British (and maybe for India too) if the British could have mass-produced people like 'Abid Husain. But it would have been no real triumph; people like "Abid Husain were preconditioned in favour of both English education and English rule. They had nothing to lose and much to gain by it. The story of moulding the Indian intellectual—or at least theNorth Indian Muslimintellectual—to British use was far more complex, and far more grim. "Abid Husain's dislike of Urdu poetry was, however, typical of the anglicised Indian generations—generations who could descry their past but dimly, and whose future seemed to have been mapped out already by the British. Unlike the somewhat mousy, unimaginative, and colourless 'Abid Husain, the author ofAb-e Hayat was the son of Agha Muhammad Baqar, a leading Shi'ite Muslim scholar and newspaper editor of Delhi. Muhammad Baqar may or may not have been a close friend of Zauq (1789-1854), one of the three leading poets in Bahadur Shah's Delhi, and Muhammad Husain Azad may or may not have been a constant companionandhero-worshippingdiscipleofZauq's^butMuhammadBaqar was undoubtedly a person of intellectual eminence and influence. He threw his weight behind Bahadur Shah in the uprising of 1857, was arrested after the British restoration (1858), and was either hanged or exected by firing squad after a drumhead trial. Azad may or may not have witnessed the actual execution of his father, but he last met or saw his father while the latter was in British custody and Azad and the rest of the family were in fear for their liberty, if not their lives. Azad and his people left home and city with just the clothes on their backs. According to Azad, all that he could rescue from their belongings was a bundle of Zauq's poems (Azad 1967/1982).4 Azad went in fear for his life not just because of his father: Azad himself had composed a highly apocalyptic, superior-sounding, moralistic poem telling the whole world about the reversal of the Christians' (= British) fortune, and their arrogance^. He actually seemed to be crowing over the British disarray and loss of morale (see Pritchett 1994:23-4). The poem was published in May 1857, just after the start of the uprising. But the British had long memories, numerous informers, and an elaborate agenda for vengeance. Though the biggest, 1857 was by no means the first popular and organised resistance against the British. They were determined this time to make an example of the rebels. Azad andhis family couldn'thave hoped for mercy at the hands of the victors; they left, and never came back. No one knows exactly where Azad and his family went from Delhi. His family (consisting of twenty-two persons, according to his account) may have found shelter in the anonymity of some small town near Delhi; Azad himself may have travelled as far to the south as Madras. He seems to have gravitated to the Punjab because of good reports about that part of the country,5 or because an amnesty was declared by the British. Having spent some time in small places, eking out a livelihood, he finally