Mehr Afshan Farooqi 
There is an unfinished portrait of the 19th century Urdu and Persian poet Momin Khan Momin (1800-1851). It is a drawing with wash and some colour on paper. It is attributed to the painter Jivan Ram. The portrait was in the personal collection of Stuart Carey Welch who bequeathed it to Harvard University’s Art Collection.
In the portrait or sketch, because it is incomplete, Momin is shown sitting cross legged, wearing a fine angarkha through which his chest hair is faintly visible. He is looking straight into the viewer’s eye. The drawing of the head and neck appear finished while the remaining part is roughly sketched in pencil.
Momin’s bright, piercing eyes, his full head of long curly hair falling to his shoulders, lips tinged with a natural pinkish hue, are depicted sensitively, and the effect of this incomplete portrait is riveting.
Momin lived in Delhi in the first half of the 19th century. He belonged to a family of hakeems (physicians) who had migrated from Kashmir and made Delhi their home during the reign of Shah Alam II (ruled between 1760-1806). Momin’s father Hakeem Ghulam Nabi Khan was a follower of the Naqshbandi Sufi order and Shah Abdul Aziz (1746-1824) was his spiritual mentor.
It was Shah Abdul Aziz who personally recited the azaan in the new born’ s ear and gave Hakeem Ghulam Nabi Khan’s son the name “Momin”. The young Momin was an exceptionally bright but easily distractable child. He received his early education in Arabic and Persian at the madrasah of Shah Abdul Aziz where he received thorough grounding in Arabic and Persian. He learned the art and skill of hakimi at the feet of his father and uncles. Soon he was writing prescriptions.
Momin’s sharp mind was always searching for new fields to conquer. He became interested in astrology and palmistry and ramal. There are several stories about his expertise in this field. The story I like most is the one about lizards. Once Momin was playing chess with his favourite pupil Hakeem Sukkha Nand Raqam when the latter pointed to a lizard on the wall presumably to distract Momin from the game. Momin looked at the lizard and spontaneously made a prediction: this lizard will not leave until its mate arrives from the East.
“How will that happen?” quipped his pupil. Shortly afterwards a cloth merchant arrived from Banaras. He was accompanied by a labourer carrying a large bundle of fine silk cloth on his head. When the bundle was untied, a lizard jumped out from it and ran to the wall where the first lizard was clinging. Both lizards moved off together. Momin’s prediction was proved right.
‘Dehli ki Akhri Shama’
Delhi, in the first half of the 19th century, sparkled with poets and literati. (My father Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s novel Kai Chand the Sar-e Asman has superb details of Delhi’s socio-literary culture in this period.) The great Ustad Ibrahim Khan Zauq and Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib were Momin’s contemporaries.
Mirza Farhatullah Beg’s Dehli ki Akhri Shama provides a fictitious but highly realistic pen portrait of the luminous poets and scholars at a Delhi mushairah. Essayist, humourist and poet Mirza Farhatullah Beg (1885-1947) was a student of the illustrious deputy Nazeer Ahmad. Upon his Ustad’s death he penned a khakah (pen portrait) Nazeer Ahmad ki Kahani, Kucch Meri Kuchch Kuchch Unki Zabani (Nazeer Ahmad’s Story Narrated Partly by Me and Partly by Him) which was highly acclaimed.
This style of narration that went back and forth between the author and the subject was very lively and engaging. Beg’s prose evoked the feeling of the unpretentious, idiomatic, ‘everyday speech’ and transported readers back into the era he described.
Dehli ki Akhri Shama is a series of sketches artfully strung together through a first-person narrator to recreate the planning and environment of a mushairah in which Delhi’s glittering poets lead by the poet-king Bahadur Shah Zafar II and his son Mirza Fakhru are portrayed.
Ustad Zauq, Ghalib, Momin, Sheftah, Sehbai etc. are described eloquently. But Momin’s portrayal is the most colourful. Beg constructed Momin’s portrayal from Muhammad Husain Azad’s description of Momin in Ab-e Hayat which in turn is based on information received from Altaf Husain Hali.
Azad’s canonical tazkirah (biographical details of poets with samples of work) is regarded as the first “history of Urdu poetry”. While tazkirahs were organised alphabetically, Azad organized his tazkirah historically by dividing it into eras. Ab-e Hayat was first published in 1880. Azad had forgotten to mention Momin entirely in the first edition. When this egregious error was brought to his notice, he made up the excuse that he had tried to get authentic information but none was forthcoming. A second revised edition was brought out in 1883. Azad made several amendments in the second edition.
Although Farhatullah Beg based his description of Momin on Azad’s account, he added many finer details that Azad’s description appears bland in comparison. Momin’s khakah is the finest in Dehli ki Akhri Shama and became the source of how we view Momin. I have summarised Beg’s description below:
Tall with a fair complexion tinged with pink with a hint of green. Big bright eyes fringed with long lashes, well-drawn eyebrows; he had a perfectly sculpted nose and lips tinted red with residue from paan. His teeth/gums were crusted with missi, he had a slight moustache and beard.
Muscular shoulders, broad chest with a slender waist; he had long fingers. His abundant hair was curly, and he wore it long in ringlets that carelessly lay on his back and shoulders. Some strands twisted in ringlets hung on his forehead and he wore long curls on both sides of his face.
He wore an angarkha of sharbati mulmul (a kind of fine handspun cloth) that was low cut and did not wear a kurta underneath it. One could glimpse his body through the fine cloth. Around his neck he wore a black ribbon from which a golden ta’viz was suspended. A crimson dupatta was twisted and tied around his waist, its ends hanging in front.
In his hand he carried a slender back scratcher (khar pusht). He wore red gulbadan payjamas that were loose on the top and had narrowed cuffs. […] On his head was do palri topi (cap with two folds) edged with lace. The topi was capacious enough to cover his head. One could glimpse his hair part through the fine cloth of the topi […]
Jivan Ram’s sketch of Momin
In Jivan Ram’s sketch, Momin is bare headed. But he does wear his thick curly hair parted in the middle and the angarkha is indeed transparent. The question is why did Jivan Ram choose Momin as a subject? Did the poet and the artist know one another? Did Momin sit for the portrait? And why is it incomplete?
We know almost nothing about Jivan Ram’s early life except the he was the son of Lalji of Delhi. Lalji was a pioneer in European naturalistic style. Eminent art historian of the 19th century Indian art, J.P. Losty observes that Lalji was a pupil of Johann Zoffany, which is perhaps the root of the European manner which made its way to his son Jivan Ram’s work.
According to Losty, Jivan Ram flourished between 1820 and 1840, was employed by the British in India for their portraits, done in a European-style naturalistic manner in oil, and also in gouache on ivory. He had a busy period in 1827, painting a number of officers, but he was to be found later painting members of the entourage of the Begum Samru in the 1830s (some of these are now in the Bodleian Library, dated 1835).
In 1831-32, he was attached to the staff of Lord William Bentinck, and visited the Sikhs, painting a portrait of Maharajah Ranjit Singh. Emily Eden came across him in 1838 at Meerut, where he sketched her brother, the Governor-General, Lord Auckland. Colonel William Sleeman, in his Rambles and Recollections of and Indian Official (1844), recorded that Jivan Ram (‘an excellent portrait-painter, and a very honest and agreeable person’) had painted the portrait of the Mughal emperor Akbar II (who reigned until 1837). ‘Raja’ was an honorary title bestowed by the Mughal emperor.
Momin’s masnavis
There are several Urdu adjectives that describe Momin’s vivacious personality. He was a rind, banka, a janbaz ashiq mijaz. That is, he was known for being a dandy and a campy lover boy. We learn about his numerous love affairs from his masnavis. In Momin’s masnavis the stories are personal. His love stories are not idealistic like the ghazal stories of love. His mahbubas are women of flesh and blood who live in a social world.
His love affairs are frowned upon by his parents and relatives. His experiences of meeting and separation ring true. Such realism was unusual in poetry in Momin’s time; his unabashed descriptions of love play did not go down well with critics. Momin wrote his first masnavi, Shikayat-e Sitam, at 17. It was followed by Qissa-e Gham, then came Qaul-e Ghamgin. There are six long masnavis all devoted to love affairs. Qaul-e Ghamgin is regarded as Momin’s best masnavi.
It is the story of his love affair with Ummatul Fatima whose penname was Sahab ji. Momin wrote openly about Sahab ji, in one playful ghazal, the radif itself is Sahab but I will talk about in my book on Momin.
Perhaps it was Momin’s reputation as a womaniser that made it difficult for his parents to find a suitable match. He was married fairly late at the age of twenty-three (1823) to the daughter of a “Kamidan” (could be commander of troops) from Sardhana.
Momin, an urbane, city boy did not like Sardhana. The marriage did not last long. In one of his letters, he speaks of Sardhana as a kharabah or a wasteland. “How can a bird of paradise make a home in wilderness and that too one gripped by autumn?” (murgh-e chaman dar biyaban-e khizan zadeh tarh-e ashiyan na bandad.) With his propensity for composing chronograms, he wrote a charming qita affirming the year of his marriage in which he lamented how the bulbul was caught in the net of the hunter, and how a free-roaming Momin’s feet were put in chains. The qita concludes with the chronogram:
Murgh-e be baal-o par andar qafas amad faryad (1240+241-999+240=1239/1823)
From the flightless bird in prison emerged this lament.
Nonetheless, Sardhana is the space where Momin and Jivan Ram’s paths might have intersected. Jivan Ram painted Begum Samru of Sardhana and her entourage throughout the 1930s. Jivan Ram’s portrait of the Begum shows her wrapped up in a voluminous yellow Kashmir shawl, wearing a hat with a tassel of pearls and holding her hookah snake.
The Begum (1745-1836) was one of the most extraordinary and formidable characters of nineteenth-century India. According to J.P Losty, apparently, she was from Kashmir as she is reported to be fair complexioned and Muslim. In 1765 she married the German mercenary soldier Walther Reinhardt (c. 1720-78) nicknamed Sombre because of his swarthy appearance (Samru supposedly being an Indian corruption of Sombre).
On his death in 1778 she succeeded to his jagir at Sardhana, some fifty miles north-east of Delhi and close to Meerut, and to the command of his mercenary troops. The Begum often led the troops into battle. She converted to Catholicism in 1781, under the name Johanna Nobilis. With her well-trained troops she came several times to the aid of the beleaguered Emperor Shah ‘Alam II. In 1820 she had begun to build a huge church dedicated to the Virgin Mary and in 1834 persuaded the Vatican to make it into a cathedral with her chaplain Father Giulio Cesare Scotti as the first (and last) bishop. (Interested readers can learn more about Begum Samru from Michael H. Fisher’s work. Fisher focuses especially on her career in the nineteenth century and relationships with her dependents, the Mughals and the British: ‘Becoming and Making “Family” in Hindustan’, in Indrani Chatterjee (ed.), Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia (Delhi, 2004).
Jivan Ram seems to have established himself in Meerut (close to Sardhana) by 1824. He was working for the Begum from 1827 onwards. Losty’s article, Raja Jivan Ram: A Professional Indian Painter of the Early Nineteenth Century, provides valuable information about our painter. He was not a raja; the Mughal emperor Akbar Shah II had conferred this title on him after he painted his portrait. Losty’s article has a magnificent array of Jivan Ram’s work, but he doesn’t mention our poet Momin or the portrait I am discussing here.
Jivan Ram’s portrait of Momin has a rough sketch of the Begum on the back. This is how I was able to make the connection between Sardhana, Momin and Jivan Ram. Momin was in Sardhana in 1823, and it is within the realm of possibility that the gifted, wayward poet and the talented painter met there.
Mehr Afshan Farooqi is an associate professor at the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Virginia, US.