their interest to historians.) This concept of sahr-asob is very much in the critical mainstream, and it certainly does fit a number of well-known poems ir the genre. But it does not, it seems to me, fit "In the Presence of the Nightingale." True, the poem does offer an inventory of lowly social groups and professions which are presented as claiming or achieving undue eminence. Here is the full list in order: carpet-weavers, beggars, grass-diggers, fishermen, country bumpkins, carpenters, peddlers, hut-dwellers, doorkeepers, cobblers, potters, pubic-hair shavers, sweepers, ne'er-do-wells, flower-sellers, bird-sellers, match- or reed-sellers, sparrow-trappers, pimps and cuckolds, crow-catchers, carpet-spreaders, rustics, greedy businessmen, Punjabi-speakers, quacks, eunuchs, dirt-carriers, whores, lime-sellers, bird-catchers, puppeteers, pimps, fools. Now such a list cannot, it seems to me, be taken as any kind of sociological description or political analysis. It could never serve to distinguish Jur'at's own city, Lucknow, from any other city; nor could it possibly be thought to describe Lucknow's real societal ills, since across-the-board social climbing by an oddly assorted combination of lowly and despised groups was never a feudal North Indian phenomenon. The seeming specificity of the thirty-three groups and professions is illusory: their only real point is to be markedly, vulgarly, low. Thus their outrageous, absurd pretensions to high status can easily be shown up as contemptible folly. A folly equal to that of the lesser birds—ugly, crude, and insolent every one—who presume to sing before the Nightingale. Or rather, to try to sing: for of course they fail. The sheer energy of the poem, Jur'at's strong delight in his own vigor and technical skill, the relish with which the contemptible upstarts are revealed in all their vulgarity—all this vitality transcends, and transforms, the seemingly dismal situations described. The poem culminates in a final self-celebratory band in which the absolute failure of the upstarts' aspirations is driven home; with joyous contempt the poet rubs salt into his enemies' wounds: The enemy has vainly thought to equal Jur'at^s verse, Crows who copy swans forget their own gait, and end up worse! He should renounce all jealousy, go and give him the word: The rose merely laughs when, with ruffled wings, the little sunbird Tries to make her voice prevail In the presence of the nightingale. The poem is, after all, as Faruqi pointed out, a "hajw-e nau-sa'iran bil-xusus^ Zahurullah Nawa," an insult-poem directed at "the new poets, especially Zahurullah Nava." The taxallus, "Nawa" suggested the bird and song imagery of which Jur'at makes such brilliant use. Faruqi has analyzed a few examples of the poem's elegant, resonant wordplay. As a hajw, it is surely one of the outstanding achievements in Urdu; but as a sahr-asob it seems a bit idiosyncratic. It is not, in the last analysis, nostalgic, pessimistic, or backward-looking; nor it is a seriousr 38