72 SOCIAL SCIENTIST reached Lahore in 1861 and landed a minor job in the Post Office. In early 1864,he secured a somewhat better position in the Department of Public Instruction (= Education). Azad's peregrinations lasted just a few years, but the transformation that his tribulations wrought in him was profound. Something must have convinced him of the "tightness" of the English cause, and of the moral and intellectual superiority of the British. The superior young man of May 1857 who pontificated about—and sneered at—the vulnerability of the British, became their servant in 1861. In 1864 he graduated to a more suitable job in his preferred field, and shortly afterwards ^1865-66) he undertook a trip to Central Asia on behalf of the Government—a trip the objective of which seems to have been to carry out soft espionage. It was truly a case of sartor resartus\ but there was still more to come. In 1866, Azad began a long connection with Anjuman-e Panjab, a social-cum-literary society founded in 1865 by G. W. Leitner, a British civil servant in the Department of Education. Azad's reward for his trip to Central Asia seems to have been the Secretaryship of the Anjuman. In 1869, Azad was appointed Assistant Professor of Arabic in Lahore's Government College. The year 1870 saw the arrival in Lahore of AltBf Husain Hali (1837-1914), a disciple of Ghalib's and friend of many notables in the literary world. Both Hali and Azad may by that time have been thinking along reformist" lines. They may have met often to compare notes and exchange ideas; Halfs employment with the British brought him into touch with English works translated into Urdu, and almost all of what Hali knew about European literature must have come from these translations. While Hali ultimately wrote the major theoretical statement6 (Hali 1964/[ 1893])and placed the matter of Urdu poetry firmly on the reformist agenda, Azad went one better: he produced a highly readable, apparently sympathetic, but eventually "reformist" account of the development of Urdu poetry.7 With the publication of Ab-e Hayat (Water of Life), Azad became an instant celebrity. He did quite a lot of other, equally superb work afterAb-e Hayat, but wrote nothing remotely approaching it in staying power. In 1885 he undertook a private trip to Iran, to gather material for his work on Persian poetry. Even at that time his mind seemed somewhat inclined towards derangement. By 1889 his reason had clearly begun to fail. He was certified in 1890, but continued to write. In fact his account of Persian poetry called Su^handan-e pars, and his history of Akbar the Great called Darbar-e akbari^ were published during his madness, and the latter was almost entirely composed during lucid intervals. Obvious answers have been given to the obvious question: why did Azad go mad?8 Speculation is idle, especially because for a study of Ab-e Hayat we don't really need an answer to the question. Ab-e Hayat is the product of a very crafty, very brilliant mind, a mind that employs immense resources of innuendo, dramatic invention, and persuasive (though entirely half-baked) theorization to convey its message: If you can't be British, then buy British. There had been no histories of Urdu poetry, or even of Urdu literature, before Ab-e Hayat Detractors of Urdu literature have notched this up as yet another proof of