- Imam Din Dirty Poetry In Urdu Language
- Imam Din Dirty Poetry In Urdu Youtube
- Ustad Imam Din Gujrati Funny Poetry In Urdu
- Imam Din Gujrati Funny Poetry In Urdu
Expression of the Indo-Muslim Mind in Urdu Ghazal
by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi
Allama Iqbal poetry in Urdu for youth for WhatsApp status but a source of inspiration for the soul. Everyone was acknowledging his humor in Urdu. This is what Iqbal needed. There were as many forms of Urdu poetry in united India. The stain pen was at the front of his craving. But this color was also new to them Allama Iqbal poetry in Hindi. 'What you seek is seeking you.'. 'Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.'. 'Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. Imam-ud-Deen (1845 - 1921) Padri Imam-ud-Deen Shahbaz, popularly known as ID Shahbaz, was born in 1845 in a small village Zafarwal near Narowal (now in Pakistan). He was born in a muslim family and was attracted to the message of Christianity from the tender age of about ten years. As an adult he joined the.
. . . in the rhyme of yearsThe object of this paper is to make a beginning towards showing that, contraryto the often politically motivated observations of some of its critics,Urdu ghazal is an expression of the Indian mind and a part of the poetictradition of the Indian heartland. Had it not been authentic, the voiceof Urdu poetry would not have stood plain over the years, but would havebeen silenced long ago -- as were silenced the voices of the numerous Indo-Anglianswho turned out yards of sentimental or patronizingly superior verse inEnglish about darkening mango groves, the murderous heat of dusty plains,the dirty but frolicsome children, the respectful bearers and ayahs, thefaithful Ganga Dins and proud Nabobs. I mention the mango groves and GangaDin advisedly. Because for all his forty years of life and death in India,Bishop Heber remained as truly British as the day he was born; and forall his marvellous insights and almost miraculous evocation of atmosphere,Kipling was not an Indian, but a colonial Englishman. To take another andyet more disparate example -- Thomas Moore, because he wrote about a girlcalled Lalla Rokh, the Princess of Hindustan, could no more claim to bean Indian poet than Shakespeare could pretend to be a Greek or Roman becausehe wrote about Greeks and Romans.
The voice of poetry stands plain.--Iosef Brodsky, trans. G. Kline
I have no sympathy for those apologists of Urdu ghazal who painstakinglyassemble evidence of its Indianness by poring over long and arid Diwansof obscure poets, triumphantly annotating all the so-called Indian allusions-- the koel, the mango tree, the rainy season, Hindu festivals and customs,and so on. No doubt such references are quite frequent in Urdu ghazal,but they are much more frequent in Kipling. Yet if these things do notmake Kipling an Indian poet, then neither can Urdu Ghazal lay claim toIndianness merely by virtue of such allusions. It is not the subject thatmatters, but the mind that works on it. It is the mind of the poet whichgives its true character to poetry. Beckmann's remark that 'it is not thesubject which matters but the translation of the subject into the abstractionof the surface by means of painting,' applies equally to poetry.
On similar grounds, Jorge Luis Borges defends the European alignmentsof contemporary Latin American literature, and asserts that it cannot betruly national without these alignments. The Muslims, particularly Iraniansand Turks, who came to India and effected a powerful cross-pollinationof two cultures at the highest literary level, were the first true internationals-- or 'extra-territorials,' a term used by Steiner for such internationalsas Becket and Borges. The Urdu poetry which sprang up in India under theinfluence of Persian-speaking Iranians, Turks, Arabs, and Pathans naturallymade use of the vast and accessible body of imagery and convention whichwas AraboIranian. The poets who wrote this poetry were almost alwaysbilingual in Persian and Urdu, if not trilingual in Persian, Urdu, andat least one other local language or dialect. Quli Qutb Shah of the Deccan,for example, used an early form of Urdu which may have travelled southalong with Persian-speaking Muslim saints and their followers who had comefrom the far-off Middle East, and whose outward culture was Arabo-Iranian.Quli Qutb Shah uses foreign forms and conventions -- yet he does not writelike an Iranian, much less an Arabo-Iranian.
Indeed, no great poetry is truly national. It borrows consciously, assimilatesunconsciously, modifies and improvises upon received knowledge and inheritedtradition almost by reflex action. Yet it retains and often heightens itsnative characteristics by virtue of such interaction. Truly national (inthe narrowest sense) poetry can only be written in primitive speech communitieswhich have not been exposed to extra-local influences, and have not gainedfrom the commerce of thought and action. Great poetry is not strictly national;not because it can speak to us from across time and space, but becauseit embraces delightfully and naturally even those modes of thought andexpression which are alien, and even occasionally antithetical, to it.Its greatness lies in its capacity to absorb alien elements, while yetpermitting them to retain their natural power. The Arab influence on Provencalpoetry, and particularly on its allegorical imagery, is a case in point.The poetic mind feels tremors of thought even from far-away places; onecan discern many tendencies common in a general way among contemporaneouspoets in distant countries. By this I do not mean the kind of parallelisms,real or fancied, which some people delight in discovering between Englishand Indian poets. I refer rather to similarities in the way of lookingat things, or of describing abstract concepts like love or fear.
Urdu ghazal, both as a body of poetry and as the expression of individualminds, is extra-territorial. Yet its innate Indianness can be judged fromthe fact that its immediate predecessor and model (which also continuedto exist contemporaneously with it), the Persian poetry written inthe Indian Style or Sabk-i Hindi, has never been acknowledged by Iranians.Sabk-i Hindi's greatest exponent, Mirza Bedil, is even today practicallyunknown in Iran; its exponents of Iranian origin who lived and worked inIndia (Sa'ib, Urfi, Naziri, Abu Talib Kalim, etc.) still do not form partof the classical canon of Persian poetry. It is only recently that Iranian-bornpoets of the Indian Style have gained some respectability (but not currency)in Iran. In spite of the identity of language and general unity of theme,the two poetries (Iranian Persian and Indian Persian) are so differentin flavour and atmosphere that a reasonably good student of Persian literaturecan almost always distinguish an Iranian from an Indian ghazal.
It is interesting to note that the last important Iranian poet of theIndian Style, Shaikh Ali Hazin, who lies buried in Varanasi in North India,was rather contemptuous of Indian Persian and Urdu poets. Undoubtedly someof his contempt grew out of the natural linguistic arrogance of the nativespeaker. But he also must have despised the fact that Urdu Ghazal had bythat time become more Indian in tone and temper than the Indian Style PersianGhazal ever was. Hazin pronounced the work of the Indo-Persian writersBedil and Nasir Ali Sirhindi to be devoid of meaning; he claimed that theformer's verse and the latter's prose would be wonderful gifts for thesatirical merriment of Iranians. There is a famous (though not entirelyauthenticated) story that Hazin told the great eighteenth-century Urdupoet Sauda that he was 'not bad among the trash merchants of India.' Suchanecdotes should not be taken to mean that Iranians held Urdu Ghazal incontempt as a bloodless imitation of the Iranian original. This viewis proved false by the fact that the Iranian classical canon even now largelyexcludes Persian poets of the Indian Style-even those of Iranian origin.For the mind and the sensibility that speak through the Indian Style aremore Indian than Iranian.
Thus the secret of the Indianness of Urdu ghazal is to be found in Sabk-iHindi, the Indian Style of Persian poetry, because Urdu ghazal was thenatural successor to this style. The Muslims and Hindus and others whowrote this ghazal may have been different, as individuals of widely differingreligious persuasions are bound to be. But in their poetry they revealeda mind which was basically Indian in temperament, in attitude to life andthe universe -- what was in short an Indian world-view. This poetic personalityworked within certain pre-existing Iranian poetic conventions and forms,and adapted or enlarged Indian poetic conventions and forms as well, tosuit the Iranian mask it had adopted. This mask I have called the IndianStyle. It is therefore necessary to have a brief look at this style.
Now that the Indian Style has become somewhat respectable -- and thereasons for this are perhaps not entirely literary -- attempts have beenmade to trace its origins in Iran itself. The contributors to Karl Jehan'shistory place its origin in Herat, but also, somewhat curiously, creditKhusrau with its invention. The latest contender perhaps is Khaqani, forwhom the Iranian critic Ali Dashti has argued at length in his book onthat poet. At any rate, everybody agrees that the style found its fullflowering in seventeenth-century India. Jehan's contributors have madea feeble attempt to relate its growth to socio-economic factors. But Iam not here concerned with investigating the historical and political antecedentsof this style. What I am trying to emphasize is that the basic stylisticfeatures of the Sabk-i Hindi are closely related to the Indian world-viewand Indian conventions.
Imam Din Dirty Poetry In Urdu Language
The essence of the Indian Style has been described as a love for thebaroque, ambiguity, a close verbal texture with much word-play, and a markedinclination to divide the sher into two parts, one containing anargument or proposition and the other providing the proof. (This lattertendency is often found in the doha, or distich, of Braj Bhasha.)Khwaja Ahmad Faruqi has quoted an Iranian critic, Ali Akbar Shahabi Khorasani,who describes the Indian Style as 'weaving of thought into thought, finethemes, labyrinthine ideas, far-fetched thoughts . . . extreme hyperbole,exercise in futility, and unadmirable conceits.' These characteristicsstrongly resemble tbose of the English Metaphysical poets; thus the mainimaginative device of the Indian Style poets would be what Ransom calls'miraculism,' that is, a power of transforming ordinary experiences intonew and complex experiences. Selden Rodman says that great painters have'the capacity to draw convincingly, to compose memorably, and to make imagesnot only never before imagined but instantly recognized as their own.'Some such mechanism would appear to be at work in both the Metapbysicalsand the Indian Style Persian and Urdu poets.
Most of the above-quoted descriptive terms used for the Indian Styleare of course either disapproving or at best doubleedged. The Iranianmind, which loves simplification, and which is at its best when creatingtelling effects of clarification, does not feel at home with the complexitiesand verbal conceits so dear to the Indian. Even Ali Dashti, who is muchmore sympathetic than Ali Akbar Shahabi or the Karl Jehan authors, findsthe Indian Style laden with 'metaphor and metaphorical constructions' ofthings. He sees the hallmarks of the style as 'fine and rare thinking,going in search for new themes, howsoever unfamiliar, not resting contentwith stating the totality of a theme, but taking aid from fine details,observations, habits, avoidance of clarity and simplicity in utterances,joining up with metaphors and symbols, using cognate or metaphorical constructions,and having so much regard to word-play and verbal homogeneity that meaningis lost in it. . .'
I do not mind saying that being an Indian, I like most if not all ofthese things. I exclaim with pleasure -- but can well imagine the chagrinof an Iranian -- when confronted with such shers as these of Sa'ib:
Do not feel safe with your lower hand [with him who is down]when there is the upper hand [when you have the upper hand]
Because the bowl slowly drinks away the lifeblood of the glass [wine].
Happy is his time who like lightning, from the neckline of Existence,
Showed his head, laughed at the way of the world, and went.
The point of the second sher is that lightning, as it coursesthrough a cloud (which is equivalent to chaos and hence to existence, becausechaos is the source of all existence), appears to rip open the cloud'sneckline. Because of its brightness, lightning appears to laugh. (Brightis one of the adjectives often used in Persian for laughter.)
This reminds us of Ghalib, writing in Urdu two hundred years later:
The cloud weeps [implores]: Please make ready a festive gathering.
Lightning laughs: Do we have a moment of leisure?
The cumulative effect of two hundred years of metaphorical practiceand word..play, combined with GhaIib's superior imaginative power, hascreated a structure whose greater complexity and brilliance shine throughmy extremely inadequate translation. The cloud, being full of raindrops,is imagined to be weeping. But rain in India also brings relief from dryheat, and quickens the dead earth to new creativity; thus the cloud, throughrain, becomes the symbol of regeneration, joyfulness, and the glory oflife. The cloud weeps not in sorrow but in importunity, seeking to giveits essence to the earth (make ready a festive gathering). The traditionalmetaphor of lightning's laughter and its ephemeral appearance is now exploitedby Ghalib in a totaIly new way. Lightning laughs, but it laughs in contempt.Where is the time for me to make merry? Proud in its own ephemeralness,lightning rives the cloud apart and disappears. The cloud will no doubtburst, but the lightning's derisive laughter underscores the futility ofthe effort. All things are short-lived like the flash of lightning; thedifference is of degree, not of kind. Ghalib uses the word dam formoment; dam also means breath, the resilience of a spring, the sharpnessof a cutting instrument. Through breath, it also has the cognate meaningof life. It should be obvious that most of these connotations of tbe worddam are relevant to Ghalib's sher.
I hope I need not emphasize that although its imagery and conventionsare Persian and its language highly Persianized, Ghalib's sher standsout as Indian because of the cloud-lightning symbolism. For the Iranian,the cloud means chaos or primeval existence. For the Indian, the cloudmeans regeneration and creative explosion. Then there is the added pleasureof cloud and lightning being masculine and feminine, respectively, in Urdu.Persian knows no genders.
Sa'ib, though a major exponent of the Indian style, was after all anIranian from Tabriz, and could not countenance all the involutions of wordand thought of which the Indian mind is capable. The Iranian is essentiaIlyoutward-looking, and fights shy of abstract thought in poetry. Even Rumiinterspersed his monumental mystico-philosophical poem with numerous anecdotesthat range from solemn to bawdy. The way he draws sufistic conclusionsfrom, and enunciates philosophical concepts through, these anecdotes showsthe working of the simplifying Iranian mind at its best. By contrast, theIndian always simplifies to make more complex. Witness the famous doctrinesof the unity of body and soul, of being being equal to nothing, of allthings apparently real being but shadows yet existing as real, of all thingsbeing real because they embody God, of all things being unreal becauseonly God exists. Such ideas were weIl loved by the Urdu ghazal poet, becausehe inherited the Indian tendency to speculate. In his ghazal, the Maulanadoes not involve himself in these questions to any great extent; even inhis Masnavi, he does not speculate as much as the Urdu ghazal poet.And the pages of the greatest Iranian ghazal poet, Hafiz, who has beenalmost always acclaimed a great Sufi, are practically empty of the kindof existential speculation which is encountered at every step in Mir, Dard,Ghalib, Atash, and a host of lesser poets.
Indeed, it was this love of subtlety and indirectness that made theIndian Style Persian poets and their Urdu foIlowers prefer intricate wrd-playand figures of speech -- both as ornamentation, and as an integral poeticelement on which a good bit of the meaning depended (as we have seen abovein Ghalib). I will elaborate this later. The point I want to make hereis that the greatest Iranian ghazal poets have largely avoided involvedprocesses of thought; and even their mystic knowledge is more often expressed,according to the occasion, in terms of ecstatic exaltation, apocalypticvision, sufistic melancholy, despair at not reaching the ultimate goal,or the final triumphant identification of subject with object. There isvery little play of doubt, very little metaphor in the truest sense. Thereis of course plenty of aIlegorical expression (which again is a simplifying device), but one should always be wary, even with Hafiz, of seeingtoo much allegory and of giving fanciful interpretations to usages andimages which finally boil down to convention. It is not that the Iranianghazal poets are not great in their own way. It is only that a generalabsence of metaphorical and complex expressiveness leaves an inevitableimpression of repetitiveness and limitation of scope. The Indians usedIranian themes, but gave them the merit of variety by an abundance of word-playand verbal conceits. They gave free rein to their own speculative geniusand created something rich and strange, something expressive of the Indianmind but largely unacceptable to the Iranian.
One of the numerous examples of this development is the preoccupationof Urdu ghazal with life after death. This theme, although an importantpart of sufistic and Islamic doctrine, has rarely appeared in Iranian ghazaI.Even Indian Style Persian ghazal -- with the exception of Bedil and Ghalib-- hardly ever touches these typically Indian subjects. In Urdu ghazalthe entire range of speculation is present: there is life after death;there is no life after death; there is no death; there is no life thereforeno death either; there is rebirth after death; there is rebirth but ina different form; there is a cycle of life and death with each being anaspect of the other. A few examples:
Death is an interval of tiredness,That is, we wiIl advance after resting. (Mir)
Mir, do you know what the interval of death is in this path?
Tired and defeated as we are by the wayside, we take a little rest.(Mir)
Imam Din Dirty Poetry In Urdu Youtube
Life is but the emergence of sequential arrangement among elements,
Death is but the scattering of these very components. (Chakbast)
Not all, but only a few re-emerged as rose and poppy --
What must be the faces that lie hidden in the dust. (Ghalib)
Here, the drowned body has never resurfaced,
Never has the course of the sleep and dream river changed. (Zafar Iqbal)
Munir, when I made my way to the other shore of one,
I was to face yet another river. (Munir Niazi)
Upset and perplexed, I say I would rather die --
Where would I go if I found no peace even in death? (Zauq)
If I demanded death, I would still yearn for sleep;
If I went to drown myself, I would find the water not deep enough.(Atash)
Eternal it may be, or transient;
The moment we are not, the world is not. (Dard)
These lines, quoted offhand from memory, cover two and a half centuriesof Urdu ghazal, and point up the various attitudes toward death and thewide variety of moods in which they are expressed. The consciousness revealedin such lines is grave without being pontifically solemn, occasionallylighthearted, occasionally masterful but never 'masculine' -- in thesense that it is never impatient of detail and variety. It is perhaps 'feminine'also in its love of the decorative and the baroque.
Indians have always relished a kind of anti-simplicity in the use ofdecorative elements: intricate word-play and figures of speech in poetry,complex friezes, figurettes and reliefs in architecture. A study of Hindutemples would be fruitful in this respect. Muslims, whose religion forbaderepresentation of living beings, have made do with floral motifs, curves,circles, and various kinds of flourishes, all of which can be seen in Arabicand Persian calligraphy. Though widely divergent in detail, both kindsof decoration aim at concealing the basic design and suggesting a largenumber of things at the same time. The Indian Muslim benefited from bothtraditions, and thus created a poetry which at its best was highly complexand meaningful, and even at its poorest was often felicitous with cunningturns of speech. Particularly cultivated were the pun -- which indeed embracesalmost all aspects of verbal dexterity -- and what can loosely be calledthe mura'at ul-nazir, that is, the use of words with similar associationsand meanings. ('Meaning' is used in the Coleridgean sense.)
No doubt figures of speech and word-play were recognized in classicalIran as well, but never to the extent that they were in India. Further,in Iranian poetry word-play was largely confined to qasida or prose.The accepted opinion about lyrical (or ghazal) poetry was that it 'risesfrom the heart and falls upon the heart,' being thus a simple emotionaland emotive utterance. The Aristotelian concept of metaphor must not havebeen unknown to the Iranians. Yet the definition of metaphor as given bythe twelfth-century Iranian poet and rhetorician Rashid-i Vatvat in hisHada'iq ul-Sehr fi Daqa'iq u;-Sher ('Gardens of Magic in the Nicetiesof Poetry') is curiously etiolated. Even this watered-down metaphor wasrather frowned upon by Iranian ghazal poets, who made greater use of imageryor tried to create a total symbolic structure. A throwback to the conceptof the undesirability of metaphor in ghazal can be seen in the Kashiful-Haqa'iq, an Urdu treatise by the nineteenth-century poet and rhetoricianImdad Imam Asar. He prescribed for the ghazal poet a careful avoidanceof metaphor and of all involved processes of thought!
Needless to say, all major Urdu ghazal poets remained true to theirIndian background, and derived an almost orgiastic pleasure from playingwith and on words. It is true that Ghalib, in an attempt to claim respectability,once indignantly denied that he employed verbal tricks. Yet his poetryis full of the whole range of such gimmicks, including the lowliest formof mura'at, namely the zila. And Mir, although he claimedthat his poetry was devoid of puns, was extremely fond of them. However,the one great difference between the Persian and the Urdu treatment offigures of speech and word-play (particularly the latter) is that the bestUrdu ghazal poets always used wordplay to enhance or extend the meaning:they so wove it into the fabric of the sher that withdrawal of thiselement would not only mean denial of the comparatively simple pleasureof wordplay, but would also damage the meaning. Verbal conceit thusbecame so innate to the fabric of poetry that while minor poets used itfor fun, major poets, always on the lookout for new felicities, often succeededin creating unique word arrangements which were enjoyable in themselvesas examples of the juxtapositional use of language, and often had the stillgreater merit of giving rise to new meanings and generating what can becalled a genuine creative tension. Even Iqbal, who often averred that hewas not at all bothered about the so-called beauties of poetry, but ratherwas concerned with delivering a message of thought and action, consciouslyor unconsciously imbibed -- or rather, could not to without -- this wholetradition of word-play and verbal conceit.
The mention of Iqbal brings me back to the Indianness of the imageryof Urdu ghazaI. Although Iqbal's poety is largely out of our zone of consideration,he, like Ghalib, is an interesting example of the Indian mind expressingitself through a highly Persianized mask. In one of his early poems Iqbalhas likened the cloud careening across the sky to an elephant unchained.This is a direct borrowing from a qasida of Zauq, the contemporaryof Ghalib. But the story does not end here. Ghalib, who always loved topose as an Iranian in temperament, has written (perhaps in Qat'e-e Burhan)that an Indian once recited before an Iranian a sher to the effectthat the black cloud emerged rolling from the mountainside like a black-drunk(siyah mast, which idiomatically means dead drunk). It was a slightbut delightful play on siyah mast, the blackness of the cloud, itsrolling movement calling to mind the walk of a drunkard, and also the slightlyrolling gait of an elephant. The male elephant, moreover, has its ruttingseason during which it is described as mast (the English word beingderived from the Persian via Urdu). Ghalib noted with approval that theIranian smiled pityingly and asked whether it was a grizzly or a cloudthat emerged from the mountainside. By his approving tone Ghalib meantto convey that the Iranian, with his better sense and judgment, had immediatelyspotted the inappropriate grotesqueness of the image; Ghalib implicitlyadvised his reader to cultivate the same poeticgood sense.
But this in fact was all a sham and fraud of Ghalib's vanity. Iran doesnot get her rain from monsoons striking at the top of the highest mountainrange in the world, and there are no must elephants in Iran. The imageis truly Indian and appropriate. So appropriate that Ghalib brazenly usedit in one of his own ghazals, with the fullest emploitation of the possibilitiesof word-play:
O Saqi! if the black-drunk cloud emerged from the mountainside,It is almost impossible to explain -- and that too in English -- the richcomplexity of the verbal conceits. It would certainly horrify an Iranian,because he would perhaps understand most of it and would be both repelledand attracted. I mention only the most striking:Black-drunk: Black and drunk: dead drunk; drunk on blacknes(wine is also called black water); black and must (like an elephant); thecloud is drunk because it is full of water, and because it rolls like adrunkard; the cloud is like an elephant because elephants too have a rollinggait, because elephants are black and live on the mountainside, becauseelephants roar and trumpet like clouds, because a herd of elephants hasa large mass like a cloud.
I would smash the bowl of my bond of abstinence with the stone of glass.
Bowl of my bond of abstinence: The bond is not to drink, yet has beensymbolized by a bowl of wine; it was common to set the seal on a bond overa bowl of wine; the bond of abstinence also was sealed over a bowl of wine;the bond of abstinence (paiman, literally 'promise') through theaddition of one vowel becomes paimana, 'bowl'; since paimanais bigger than paiman by one vowel, it follows that the bowl ofwine is greater than the vow of abstinence.
Stone of glass: Glass (shisha), as in English, also means drinkingvessel, particularly a wine glass; stones are used for smashing glass;by using the glass for drinking, I will have smashed the bowl of my bond-- thus my glass is stone as well; stone is one of the elements used inmaking glass; the bond of abstinence sealed over a glass of wine couldbe unsealed only over another glass.
We can see how the Indian mind unmistakably reveals itself through theIndian mask. Such poetry could only have been written by one who was absorbedin the Indo-Muslim culture. In the crucible of Urdu ghazal, Indian andIslamic elements fuse into a true Indo-Muslim consciousness.I have referred to the so-called 'feminineness' of the Indian attitudeto artistic expression. Ali Dashti stresses the 'masculineness' of theKhorasani style of poetry, and maintains that the Indian Style revealsa 'passiveness' of the mind. This does not mean lack of action, but rathera 'feminine' receptiveness and inwardness as opposed to a 'masculine' aggressivenessand outgoingness. The partiality of Urdu ghazal poets to serious as wellas sentimental introspection, to giving detailed descriptions of theirsorrows and disappointments in physical, even anatomical terms, while simultaneouslyindulging in intricate verbal architectonics, is almost totally absentin Persian. In Sanskrit, by contrast, the love of alamkara (figuresof speech, incuding word-play) is evident to an almost phenomenal degree.
Certain critics of Urdu poetry, fired by the spirit of reform, havepoked fun at Urdu ghazal poets for flying verbal parrots and mynahs (thatis, being inordinately fond of verbal conceits) and yet spending most oftheir time weeping and moaning over their sad lot. Hali, the greatest ofsuch critics, is annoyed with Ghazal poets for portraying the beloved as'unfaithful, devoid of sympathy and love, pitiless, cruel, murdering, ahunter, an executioner, hating those who are faithful and inclining towardthose who are alien, disbelieving true love and believing the lustful tobe true in love, given to suspicion, ill-natured, sharptongued, ofloose morals' -- possessed of every conceivable defect, and of no goodqualities except 'beauty, coquetry, and other acts which provoke love orpartake of loveliness.' And Hali is equally displeased with the ghazalpoet for presenting himself as 'struck by sorrows and calamities wroughtby the world or Heaven, infirm, sick, ill-fated, vagrant, of ill reputation,rejected by the people, a lover of vagabondage and illfame, a haterof popular acclaim, an avoider of happiness and peace, given to drinking,a drunkard, forgetful of self, faithful, hard toiler, sometimes a loverof freedom from all bondage, sometimes yearing for entrammelment, sometimespatient, sometimes pining, sometimes mad, sometimes sane, sometimes selfrespecting,sometimes totally brazen, an image of jealousy and envy, an enemy of rivals,suspicious of the whole world, complaining against Heaven, fed up withthe world, harrassrd by time' -- possessed of all undesirable qualities,and of only love and faithfulness among the virtues. This summing up hascarried conviction with many, because it is basically true. It has provideda convenient weapon to critics of widely differing persuasions, includingthose who were not basically opposed to the Urdu ghazal tradition but merelywanted to free it of what they thought was dead wood.
Where Hali and his successors went wrong was in their failure to appreciatethat Urdu ghazal was written by Indians, not by Iranians. Two strains,sometimes overt and clear, but very often occult and implicit, have alwaysrun through the Indian -- as against the Iranian -- poetic tradition.
The first of these strains is the prominent place which playactingand public performance occupies in our country. Although literary dramalong ago ceased to exist in India, stylized drama in the form of dancerecitals and elaborate ritual dramatic dancing like Kathakali and diverseforms of folk drama flourish to this day. It is notable that the institutionof the mushaira, a poetic symposium in which poets give public recitals,was born and evolved during the time when Indian Style poets establishedtheir sway in this country. For all its sadness and sense of alienation,the: Urdu ghazal was a work of art to be performed publicly. The elementof dramatic play-acting and stylization was nore noticeable in ghazal andmarsiya than, for instance, in masnavi, because in the formerthe poet imagined himself to be in a real sense on the stage, seeking tooutdo his rivals in creating exuberant and extravagant effects. A moresubdued style is notable for example in Dard, who did not often attendmushairas and thus did not face such direct historionic competition.
The second strain in the Indian tradition of which the zealous Haliand his followers failed to take note, is an extremely significant one,and one which is in fact associated with many of the qualities Hali mostdespised. No doubt the overwhelming abjectness of the Urdu ghazal poet'sartistic persona created an unpleasant contrast to the 'manliness' of aHafiz or a Rumi or a Sa'di. But as Muhammad Hasan Askari has observed (thoughin a different context), each people has the right to determine its ownpoetic conventions. And in Indian love poetry, whether sacred or profane,the protagonist very often assumes a feminine persona. This is particularlytrue of poetry written in folk dialects, or in languages which began asfolk dialects. Even in such advanced literary languages as Sanskrit andTamil, a sizable body of love poetry either has a feminine protagonistor has been written from a feminine point of view. Even in poems writtenin the local language by medieval Muslim and non-Muslim sufis like BabaFarid, Sultan Bahu, Baba Nanak, Amir Khusrau, and others, the protagonistis sometimes a woman; sometimes the soul is likened to a bride, with Godor ultimate truth or knowledge as the bridegroom. The classic lover inIndian poetry is the seventeenth-century woman saint Mira, whose devotionalsongs, employing the language used by lovelorn women, are known and sungall over North India by both Hindus and Muslims. In Indian love poetry,it is generally the woman who suffers the rigours of love, braves ignominyand ill-fame, pines away, 'grows spectre-thin and dies.' In his great poemof the Krishna cult, the fourteenth-century Sanskrit poet Jayadeva describesKrishna as 'crushing the breasts of gopi girls with restless hands' whilehe pines for Radha, his favourite. Even in separation and severance, themale often has other female admirers or lovers, but the woman remains lonely.
In Arabic poetry, the lover is invariably male. In Persian poetry, thelover is assumed to be male, though the beloved may be either a woman ora beautiful boy. Often the beloved's sexual identity is deliberately leftvague. It is on account of this pederastic tendency that ambiguous or 'feminine'characteristics can also be discerned in the Iranian love poet's persona.Certain tendencies often considered 'feminine' became more pronounced inPersian ghazal poets of the Indian Style, and were avidly absorbed by Urdughazal because its poets were already inclined, by virtue of their Indianethos, towards accepting a feminine persona as the proper mode for a poet.Thus the themes of shedding tears of blood, of eyes becoming rivers ofsorrow tinged with the heart's blood, of the lover wasting away and growingpale and thin, of extreme jealousy and possessiveness -- themes which distinguishIndian Style Persian ghazal from Iranian gazal -- were embraced, intensified,and deepened by Urdu ghazal. It is not for nothing that Ghalib, that mostmasterful and intellectually complex of Urdu poets, whose poetry is practicallyfree from the sentimental pulp which disfigures a good bit of mediocreUrdu ghazal, is also the most full of themes of jealousy and physical piningaway due to the rigours of love. In fact, some critics have found Ghalib'sforte to be the variety and novelty with which he has treated the themeof jealousy!
In Urdu Ghazal the beloved is occasionally represented as a woman, occasionallyas a boy, but most often in ambiguous terms. Ghalib insisted that the belovedshould be left indeterminate, so as to admit a variety of interpretations.The rather pronounced tendency of Lucknow poets to mention feminine itemsof clothing or feminine physical features when describing the beloved wasfrowned upon by purists (Hasrat Mohani notable among them). In the twentiethcentury, when poets began to use the feminine gender for the beloved, anumber of eyebrows were raised, and continue to be raised even now. Faiz,who clothed the faintly political content of his ghazal in conventionalimagery and thus became more readily acceptable to oldfashioned critics,continues to talk of hair, lips, eyes, occasionally even breasts -- whilecarefully avoiding the use of the feminine gender for the beloved (throughhe has no such scruples in his nazms). Denigrators of Urdu ghazalused this vagueness to attack ghazal poets as pederasts. In reply, academicsagain undertook the tedious exercise of picking out isolated shersin Momin, Dagh. and other major but conventional ghazal poets, in whichthe beloved was unmistakably female. Other defenders argued that the beloved'ssex had been advisedly left vague because ambiguity as well as decorumwas the soul of poetry. Critics retorted that many ghazal poets wrote asthough the beloved were a prostitute or courtesan, because he (she?) wasusually seen by the poet in public situations, surrounded by a host ofrival admirers. To this the defenders failed to find a convincing reply.
Both critics and defenders in such controversies were so blinded bythe Iranian heresy that they could not see the answer which was staringthem in the face. Though Iranian in form, Urdu ghazal was Indian in spirit:though its protagonist spoke in masculine voice (even women poets did so),the attitudes and responses were 'feminine.' It is true that courtesansplayed an important part in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century urban NorthIndian society, and that pederasty as well was quite common. But the deepertruth is that the 'woman' who sits amidst rival lovers and the 'man' whopines for her are in fact sexually reversed masks for a masculine belovedand a feminine lover. A boy beloved can of course be explained even moreconvincingly in this context. No doubt the Urdu ghazal poet does not havean exclusively 'feminine' persona. He could not, by sheer virtue of theadvanced state which urban civilization, exposed to foreign sophistications,had attained. But the main thrust remained Indian, and 'feminine' in theIndian sense.
Grammar also was of great help. For although Urdu has distinct genders,and all verbs and adjectives agree with the noun or pronoun which theygovern or qualify, the second person and third person plural forms do notalways make this distinction. In the colloquial speech of Delhi, for instance,the second and third person masculine plural verb forms can also be usedas feminine. And not only can un ('their,' third person plural oblique)be used for groups of either sex, but it can also refer to either a manor woman in the singular, since plural forms are used as a sign of respector love. Since many nouns in Urdu do not have specific masculine or feminineforms, this ambiguity of reference becomes eminently suitable, as in thissher of Dagh's:
Eye is not lightning, face is not sun,Here 'they are human' actually means 'that respected person is human,'and the person in question may be woman or man. Similarly, in colloquialspeech a woman may use the first person plural, with masculine plural verbforms, to refer to herself. Thus grammatical ambiguity helps to keep openthe question of sexual identity of lover as well as beloved in Urdu ghazal.
They are human, but there is not [in me] the daring to see.
.jpg "Din")
Thus the secret of the Indianness of Urdu ghazal is to be found in Sabk-iHindi, the Indian Style of Persian poetry, because Urdu ghazal was thenatural successor to this style. The Muslims and Hindus and others whowrote this ghazal may have been different, as individuals of widely differingreligious persuasions are bound to be. But in their poetry they revealeda mind which was basically Indian in temperament, in attitude to life andthe universe -- what was in short an Indian world-view. This poetic personalityworked within certain pre-existing Iranian poetic conventions and forms,and adapted or enlarged Indian poetic conventions and forms as well, tosuit the Iranian mask it had adopted. This mask I have called the IndianStyle. It is therefore necessary to have a brief look at this style.
Now that the Indian Style has become somewhat respectable -- and thereasons for this are perhaps not entirely literary -- attempts have beenmade to trace its origins in Iran itself. The contributors to Karl Jehan'shistory place its origin in Herat, but also, somewhat curiously, creditKhusrau with its invention. The latest contender perhaps is Khaqani, forwhom the Iranian critic Ali Dashti has argued at length in his book onthat poet. At any rate, everybody agrees that the style found its fullflowering in seventeenth-century India. Jehan's contributors have madea feeble attempt to relate its growth to socio-economic factors. But Iam not here concerned with investigating the historical and political antecedentsof this style. What I am trying to emphasize is that the basic stylisticfeatures of the Sabk-i Hindi are closely related to the Indian world-viewand Indian conventions.
Imam Din Dirty Poetry In Urdu Language
The essence of the Indian Style has been described as a love for thebaroque, ambiguity, a close verbal texture with much word-play, and a markedinclination to divide the sher into two parts, one containing anargument or proposition and the other providing the proof. (This lattertendency is often found in the doha, or distich, of Braj Bhasha.)Khwaja Ahmad Faruqi has quoted an Iranian critic, Ali Akbar Shahabi Khorasani,who describes the Indian Style as 'weaving of thought into thought, finethemes, labyrinthine ideas, far-fetched thoughts . . . extreme hyperbole,exercise in futility, and unadmirable conceits.' These characteristicsstrongly resemble tbose of the English Metaphysical poets; thus the mainimaginative device of the Indian Style poets would be what Ransom calls'miraculism,' that is, a power of transforming ordinary experiences intonew and complex experiences. Selden Rodman says that great painters have'the capacity to draw convincingly, to compose memorably, and to make imagesnot only never before imagined but instantly recognized as their own.'Some such mechanism would appear to be at work in both the Metapbysicalsand the Indian Style Persian and Urdu poets.
Most of the above-quoted descriptive terms used for the Indian Styleare of course either disapproving or at best doubleedged. The Iranianmind, which loves simplification, and which is at its best when creatingtelling effects of clarification, does not feel at home with the complexitiesand verbal conceits so dear to the Indian. Even Ali Dashti, who is muchmore sympathetic than Ali Akbar Shahabi or the Karl Jehan authors, findsthe Indian Style laden with 'metaphor and metaphorical constructions' ofthings. He sees the hallmarks of the style as 'fine and rare thinking,going in search for new themes, howsoever unfamiliar, not resting contentwith stating the totality of a theme, but taking aid from fine details,observations, habits, avoidance of clarity and simplicity in utterances,joining up with metaphors and symbols, using cognate or metaphorical constructions,and having so much regard to word-play and verbal homogeneity that meaningis lost in it. . .'
I do not mind saying that being an Indian, I like most if not all ofthese things. I exclaim with pleasure -- but can well imagine the chagrinof an Iranian -- when confronted with such shers as these of Sa'ib:
Do not feel safe with your lower hand [with him who is down]when there is the upper hand [when you have the upper hand]
Because the bowl slowly drinks away the lifeblood of the glass [wine].
Happy is his time who like lightning, from the neckline of Existence,
Showed his head, laughed at the way of the world, and went.
The point of the second sher is that lightning, as it coursesthrough a cloud (which is equivalent to chaos and hence to existence, becausechaos is the source of all existence), appears to rip open the cloud'sneckline. Because of its brightness, lightning appears to laugh. (Brightis one of the adjectives often used in Persian for laughter.)
This reminds us of Ghalib, writing in Urdu two hundred years later:
The cloud weeps [implores]: Please make ready a festive gathering.
Lightning laughs: Do we have a moment of leisure?
The cumulative effect of two hundred years of metaphorical practiceand word..play, combined with GhaIib's superior imaginative power, hascreated a structure whose greater complexity and brilliance shine throughmy extremely inadequate translation. The cloud, being full of raindrops,is imagined to be weeping. But rain in India also brings relief from dryheat, and quickens the dead earth to new creativity; thus the cloud, throughrain, becomes the symbol of regeneration, joyfulness, and the glory oflife. The cloud weeps not in sorrow but in importunity, seeking to giveits essence to the earth (make ready a festive gathering). The traditionalmetaphor of lightning's laughter and its ephemeral appearance is now exploitedby Ghalib in a totaIly new way. Lightning laughs, but it laughs in contempt.Where is the time for me to make merry? Proud in its own ephemeralness,lightning rives the cloud apart and disappears. The cloud will no doubtburst, but the lightning's derisive laughter underscores the futility ofthe effort. All things are short-lived like the flash of lightning; thedifference is of degree, not of kind. Ghalib uses the word dam formoment; dam also means breath, the resilience of a spring, the sharpnessof a cutting instrument. Through breath, it also has the cognate meaningof life. It should be obvious that most of these connotations of tbe worddam are relevant to Ghalib's sher.
I hope I need not emphasize that although its imagery and conventionsare Persian and its language highly Persianized, Ghalib's sher standsout as Indian because of the cloud-lightning symbolism. For the Iranian,the cloud means chaos or primeval existence. For the Indian, the cloudmeans regeneration and creative explosion. Then there is the added pleasureof cloud and lightning being masculine and feminine, respectively, in Urdu.Persian knows no genders.
Sa'ib, though a major exponent of the Indian style, was after all anIranian from Tabriz, and could not countenance all the involutions of wordand thought of which the Indian mind is capable. The Iranian is essentiaIlyoutward-looking, and fights shy of abstract thought in poetry. Even Rumiinterspersed his monumental mystico-philosophical poem with numerous anecdotesthat range from solemn to bawdy. The way he draws sufistic conclusionsfrom, and enunciates philosophical concepts through, these anecdotes showsthe working of the simplifying Iranian mind at its best. By contrast, theIndian always simplifies to make more complex. Witness the famous doctrinesof the unity of body and soul, of being being equal to nothing, of allthings apparently real being but shadows yet existing as real, of all thingsbeing real because they embody God, of all things being unreal becauseonly God exists. Such ideas were weIl loved by the Urdu ghazal poet, becausehe inherited the Indian tendency to speculate. In his ghazal, the Maulanadoes not involve himself in these questions to any great extent; even inhis Masnavi, he does not speculate as much as the Urdu ghazal poet.And the pages of the greatest Iranian ghazal poet, Hafiz, who has beenalmost always acclaimed a great Sufi, are practically empty of the kindof existential speculation which is encountered at every step in Mir, Dard,Ghalib, Atash, and a host of lesser poets.
Indeed, it was this love of subtlety and indirectness that made theIndian Style Persian poets and their Urdu foIlowers prefer intricate wrd-playand figures of speech -- both as ornamentation, and as an integral poeticelement on which a good bit of the meaning depended (as we have seen abovein Ghalib). I will elaborate this later. The point I want to make hereis that the greatest Iranian ghazal poets have largely avoided involvedprocesses of thought; and even their mystic knowledge is more often expressed,according to the occasion, in terms of ecstatic exaltation, apocalypticvision, sufistic melancholy, despair at not reaching the ultimate goal,or the final triumphant identification of subject with object. There isvery little play of doubt, very little metaphor in the truest sense. Thereis of course plenty of aIlegorical expression (which again is a simplifying device), but one should always be wary, even with Hafiz, of seeingtoo much allegory and of giving fanciful interpretations to usages andimages which finally boil down to convention. It is not that the Iranianghazal poets are not great in their own way. It is only that a generalabsence of metaphorical and complex expressiveness leaves an inevitableimpression of repetitiveness and limitation of scope. The Indians usedIranian themes, but gave them the merit of variety by an abundance of word-playand verbal conceits. They gave free rein to their own speculative geniusand created something rich and strange, something expressive of the Indianmind but largely unacceptable to the Iranian.
One of the numerous examples of this development is the preoccupationof Urdu ghazal with life after death. This theme, although an importantpart of sufistic and Islamic doctrine, has rarely appeared in Iranian ghazaI.Even Indian Style Persian ghazal -- with the exception of Bedil and Ghalib-- hardly ever touches these typically Indian subjects. In Urdu ghazalthe entire range of speculation is present: there is life after death;there is no life after death; there is no death; there is no life thereforeno death either; there is rebirth after death; there is rebirth but ina different form; there is a cycle of life and death with each being anaspect of the other. A few examples:
Death is an interval of tiredness,That is, we wiIl advance after resting. (Mir)
Mir, do you know what the interval of death is in this path?
Tired and defeated as we are by the wayside, we take a little rest.(Mir)
Imam Din Dirty Poetry In Urdu Youtube
Life is but the emergence of sequential arrangement among elements,
Death is but the scattering of these very components. (Chakbast)
Not all, but only a few re-emerged as rose and poppy --
What must be the faces that lie hidden in the dust. (Ghalib)
Here, the drowned body has never resurfaced,
Never has the course of the sleep and dream river changed. (Zafar Iqbal)
Munir, when I made my way to the other shore of one,
I was to face yet another river. (Munir Niazi)
Upset and perplexed, I say I would rather die --
Where would I go if I found no peace even in death? (Zauq)
If I demanded death, I would still yearn for sleep;
If I went to drown myself, I would find the water not deep enough.(Atash)
Eternal it may be, or transient;
The moment we are not, the world is not. (Dard)
These lines, quoted offhand from memory, cover two and a half centuriesof Urdu ghazal, and point up the various attitudes toward death and thewide variety of moods in which they are expressed. The consciousness revealedin such lines is grave without being pontifically solemn, occasionallylighthearted, occasionally masterful but never 'masculine' -- in thesense that it is never impatient of detail and variety. It is perhaps 'feminine'also in its love of the decorative and the baroque.
Indians have always relished a kind of anti-simplicity in the use ofdecorative elements: intricate word-play and figures of speech in poetry,complex friezes, figurettes and reliefs in architecture. A study of Hindutemples would be fruitful in this respect. Muslims, whose religion forbaderepresentation of living beings, have made do with floral motifs, curves,circles, and various kinds of flourishes, all of which can be seen in Arabicand Persian calligraphy. Though widely divergent in detail, both kindsof decoration aim at concealing the basic design and suggesting a largenumber of things at the same time. The Indian Muslim benefited from bothtraditions, and thus created a poetry which at its best was highly complexand meaningful, and even at its poorest was often felicitous with cunningturns of speech. Particularly cultivated were the pun -- which indeed embracesalmost all aspects of verbal dexterity -- and what can loosely be calledthe mura'at ul-nazir, that is, the use of words with similar associationsand meanings. ('Meaning' is used in the Coleridgean sense.)
No doubt figures of speech and word-play were recognized in classicalIran as well, but never to the extent that they were in India. Further,in Iranian poetry word-play was largely confined to qasida or prose.The accepted opinion about lyrical (or ghazal) poetry was that it 'risesfrom the heart and falls upon the heart,' being thus a simple emotionaland emotive utterance. The Aristotelian concept of metaphor must not havebeen unknown to the Iranians. Yet the definition of metaphor as given bythe twelfth-century Iranian poet and rhetorician Rashid-i Vatvat in hisHada'iq ul-Sehr fi Daqa'iq u;-Sher ('Gardens of Magic in the Nicetiesof Poetry') is curiously etiolated. Even this watered-down metaphor wasrather frowned upon by Iranian ghazal poets, who made greater use of imageryor tried to create a total symbolic structure. A throwback to the conceptof the undesirability of metaphor in ghazal can be seen in the Kashiful-Haqa'iq, an Urdu treatise by the nineteenth-century poet and rhetoricianImdad Imam Asar. He prescribed for the ghazal poet a careful avoidanceof metaphor and of all involved processes of thought!
Needless to say, all major Urdu ghazal poets remained true to theirIndian background, and derived an almost orgiastic pleasure from playingwith and on words. It is true that Ghalib, in an attempt to claim respectability,once indignantly denied that he employed verbal tricks. Yet his poetryis full of the whole range of such gimmicks, including the lowliest formof mura'at, namely the zila. And Mir, although he claimedthat his poetry was devoid of puns, was extremely fond of them. However,the one great difference between the Persian and the Urdu treatment offigures of speech and word-play (particularly the latter) is that the bestUrdu ghazal poets always used wordplay to enhance or extend the meaning:they so wove it into the fabric of the sher that withdrawal of thiselement would not only mean denial of the comparatively simple pleasureof wordplay, but would also damage the meaning. Verbal conceit thusbecame so innate to the fabric of poetry that while minor poets used itfor fun, major poets, always on the lookout for new felicities, often succeededin creating unique word arrangements which were enjoyable in themselvesas examples of the juxtapositional use of language, and often had the stillgreater merit of giving rise to new meanings and generating what can becalled a genuine creative tension. Even Iqbal, who often averred that hewas not at all bothered about the so-called beauties of poetry, but ratherwas concerned with delivering a message of thought and action, consciouslyor unconsciously imbibed -- or rather, could not to without -- this wholetradition of word-play and verbal conceit.
The mention of Iqbal brings me back to the Indianness of the imageryof Urdu ghazaI. Although Iqbal's poety is largely out of our zone of consideration,he, like Ghalib, is an interesting example of the Indian mind expressingitself through a highly Persianized mask. In one of his early poems Iqbalhas likened the cloud careening across the sky to an elephant unchained.This is a direct borrowing from a qasida of Zauq, the contemporaryof Ghalib. But the story does not end here. Ghalib, who always loved topose as an Iranian in temperament, has written (perhaps in Qat'e-e Burhan)that an Indian once recited before an Iranian a sher to the effectthat the black cloud emerged rolling from the mountainside like a black-drunk(siyah mast, which idiomatically means dead drunk). It was a slightbut delightful play on siyah mast, the blackness of the cloud, itsrolling movement calling to mind the walk of a drunkard, and also the slightlyrolling gait of an elephant. The male elephant, moreover, has its ruttingseason during which it is described as mast (the English word beingderived from the Persian via Urdu). Ghalib noted with approval that theIranian smiled pityingly and asked whether it was a grizzly or a cloudthat emerged from the mountainside. By his approving tone Ghalib meantto convey that the Iranian, with his better sense and judgment, had immediatelyspotted the inappropriate grotesqueness of the image; Ghalib implicitlyadvised his reader to cultivate the same poeticgood sense.
But this in fact was all a sham and fraud of Ghalib's vanity. Iran doesnot get her rain from monsoons striking at the top of the highest mountainrange in the world, and there are no must elephants in Iran. The imageis truly Indian and appropriate. So appropriate that Ghalib brazenly usedit in one of his own ghazals, with the fullest emploitation of the possibilitiesof word-play:
O Saqi! if the black-drunk cloud emerged from the mountainside,It is almost impossible to explain -- and that too in English -- the richcomplexity of the verbal conceits. It would certainly horrify an Iranian,because he would perhaps understand most of it and would be both repelledand attracted. I mention only the most striking:Black-drunk: Black and drunk: dead drunk; drunk on blacknes(wine is also called black water); black and must (like an elephant); thecloud is drunk because it is full of water, and because it rolls like adrunkard; the cloud is like an elephant because elephants too have a rollinggait, because elephants are black and live on the mountainside, becauseelephants roar and trumpet like clouds, because a herd of elephants hasa large mass like a cloud.
I would smash the bowl of my bond of abstinence with the stone of glass.
Bowl of my bond of abstinence: The bond is not to drink, yet has beensymbolized by a bowl of wine; it was common to set the seal on a bond overa bowl of wine; the bond of abstinence also was sealed over a bowl of wine;the bond of abstinence (paiman, literally 'promise') through theaddition of one vowel becomes paimana, 'bowl'; since paimanais bigger than paiman by one vowel, it follows that the bowl ofwine is greater than the vow of abstinence.
Stone of glass: Glass (shisha), as in English, also means drinkingvessel, particularly a wine glass; stones are used for smashing glass;by using the glass for drinking, I will have smashed the bowl of my bond-- thus my glass is stone as well; stone is one of the elements used inmaking glass; the bond of abstinence sealed over a glass of wine couldbe unsealed only over another glass.
We can see how the Indian mind unmistakably reveals itself through theIndian mask. Such poetry could only have been written by one who was absorbedin the Indo-Muslim culture. In the crucible of Urdu ghazal, Indian andIslamic elements fuse into a true Indo-Muslim consciousness.I have referred to the so-called 'feminineness' of the Indian attitudeto artistic expression. Ali Dashti stresses the 'masculineness' of theKhorasani style of poetry, and maintains that the Indian Style revealsa 'passiveness' of the mind. This does not mean lack of action, but rathera 'feminine' receptiveness and inwardness as opposed to a 'masculine' aggressivenessand outgoingness. The partiality of Urdu ghazal poets to serious as wellas sentimental introspection, to giving detailed descriptions of theirsorrows and disappointments in physical, even anatomical terms, while simultaneouslyindulging in intricate verbal architectonics, is almost totally absentin Persian. In Sanskrit, by contrast, the love of alamkara (figuresof speech, incuding word-play) is evident to an almost phenomenal degree.
Certain critics of Urdu poetry, fired by the spirit of reform, havepoked fun at Urdu ghazal poets for flying verbal parrots and mynahs (thatis, being inordinately fond of verbal conceits) and yet spending most oftheir time weeping and moaning over their sad lot. Hali, the greatest ofsuch critics, is annoyed with Ghazal poets for portraying the beloved as'unfaithful, devoid of sympathy and love, pitiless, cruel, murdering, ahunter, an executioner, hating those who are faithful and inclining towardthose who are alien, disbelieving true love and believing the lustful tobe true in love, given to suspicion, ill-natured, sharptongued, ofloose morals' -- possessed of every conceivable defect, and of no goodqualities except 'beauty, coquetry, and other acts which provoke love orpartake of loveliness.' And Hali is equally displeased with the ghazalpoet for presenting himself as 'struck by sorrows and calamities wroughtby the world or Heaven, infirm, sick, ill-fated, vagrant, of ill reputation,rejected by the people, a lover of vagabondage and illfame, a haterof popular acclaim, an avoider of happiness and peace, given to drinking,a drunkard, forgetful of self, faithful, hard toiler, sometimes a loverof freedom from all bondage, sometimes yearing for entrammelment, sometimespatient, sometimes pining, sometimes mad, sometimes sane, sometimes selfrespecting,sometimes totally brazen, an image of jealousy and envy, an enemy of rivals,suspicious of the whole world, complaining against Heaven, fed up withthe world, harrassrd by time' -- possessed of all undesirable qualities,and of only love and faithfulness among the virtues. This summing up hascarried conviction with many, because it is basically true. It has provideda convenient weapon to critics of widely differing persuasions, includingthose who were not basically opposed to the Urdu ghazal tradition but merelywanted to free it of what they thought was dead wood.
Where Hali and his successors went wrong was in their failure to appreciatethat Urdu ghazal was written by Indians, not by Iranians. Two strains,sometimes overt and clear, but very often occult and implicit, have alwaysrun through the Indian -- as against the Iranian -- poetic tradition.
The first of these strains is the prominent place which playactingand public performance occupies in our country. Although literary dramalong ago ceased to exist in India, stylized drama in the form of dancerecitals and elaborate ritual dramatic dancing like Kathakali and diverseforms of folk drama flourish to this day. It is notable that the institutionof the mushaira, a poetic symposium in which poets give public recitals,was born and evolved during the time when Indian Style poets establishedtheir sway in this country. For all its sadness and sense of alienation,the: Urdu ghazal was a work of art to be performed publicly. The elementof dramatic play-acting and stylization was nore noticeable in ghazal andmarsiya than, for instance, in masnavi, because in the formerthe poet imagined himself to be in a real sense on the stage, seeking tooutdo his rivals in creating exuberant and extravagant effects. A moresubdued style is notable for example in Dard, who did not often attendmushairas and thus did not face such direct historionic competition.
The second strain in the Indian tradition of which the zealous Haliand his followers failed to take note, is an extremely significant one,and one which is in fact associated with many of the qualities Hali mostdespised. No doubt the overwhelming abjectness of the Urdu ghazal poet'sartistic persona created an unpleasant contrast to the 'manliness' of aHafiz or a Rumi or a Sa'di. But as Muhammad Hasan Askari has observed (thoughin a different context), each people has the right to determine its ownpoetic conventions. And in Indian love poetry, whether sacred or profane,the protagonist very often assumes a feminine persona. This is particularlytrue of poetry written in folk dialects, or in languages which began asfolk dialects. Even in such advanced literary languages as Sanskrit andTamil, a sizable body of love poetry either has a feminine protagonistor has been written from a feminine point of view. Even in poems writtenin the local language by medieval Muslim and non-Muslim sufis like BabaFarid, Sultan Bahu, Baba Nanak, Amir Khusrau, and others, the protagonistis sometimes a woman; sometimes the soul is likened to a bride, with Godor ultimate truth or knowledge as the bridegroom. The classic lover inIndian poetry is the seventeenth-century woman saint Mira, whose devotionalsongs, employing the language used by lovelorn women, are known and sungall over North India by both Hindus and Muslims. In Indian love poetry,it is generally the woman who suffers the rigours of love, braves ignominyand ill-fame, pines away, 'grows spectre-thin and dies.' In his great poemof the Krishna cult, the fourteenth-century Sanskrit poet Jayadeva describesKrishna as 'crushing the breasts of gopi girls with restless hands' whilehe pines for Radha, his favourite. Even in separation and severance, themale often has other female admirers or lovers, but the woman remains lonely.
In Arabic poetry, the lover is invariably male. In Persian poetry, thelover is assumed to be male, though the beloved may be either a woman ora beautiful boy. Often the beloved's sexual identity is deliberately leftvague. It is on account of this pederastic tendency that ambiguous or 'feminine'characteristics can also be discerned in the Iranian love poet's persona.Certain tendencies often considered 'feminine' became more pronounced inPersian ghazal poets of the Indian Style, and were avidly absorbed by Urdughazal because its poets were already inclined, by virtue of their Indianethos, towards accepting a feminine persona as the proper mode for a poet.Thus the themes of shedding tears of blood, of eyes becoming rivers ofsorrow tinged with the heart's blood, of the lover wasting away and growingpale and thin, of extreme jealousy and possessiveness -- themes which distinguishIndian Style Persian ghazal from Iranian gazal -- were embraced, intensified,and deepened by Urdu ghazal. It is not for nothing that Ghalib, that mostmasterful and intellectually complex of Urdu poets, whose poetry is practicallyfree from the sentimental pulp which disfigures a good bit of mediocreUrdu ghazal, is also the most full of themes of jealousy and physical piningaway due to the rigours of love. In fact, some critics have found Ghalib'sforte to be the variety and novelty with which he has treated the themeof jealousy!
In Urdu Ghazal the beloved is occasionally represented as a woman, occasionallyas a boy, but most often in ambiguous terms. Ghalib insisted that the belovedshould be left indeterminate, so as to admit a variety of interpretations.The rather pronounced tendency of Lucknow poets to mention feminine itemsof clothing or feminine physical features when describing the beloved wasfrowned upon by purists (Hasrat Mohani notable among them). In the twentiethcentury, when poets began to use the feminine gender for the beloved, anumber of eyebrows were raised, and continue to be raised even now. Faiz,who clothed the faintly political content of his ghazal in conventionalimagery and thus became more readily acceptable to oldfashioned critics,continues to talk of hair, lips, eyes, occasionally even breasts -- whilecarefully avoiding the use of the feminine gender for the beloved (throughhe has no such scruples in his nazms). Denigrators of Urdu ghazalused this vagueness to attack ghazal poets as pederasts. In reply, academicsagain undertook the tedious exercise of picking out isolated shersin Momin, Dagh. and other major but conventional ghazal poets, in whichthe beloved was unmistakably female. Other defenders argued that the beloved'ssex had been advisedly left vague because ambiguity as well as decorumwas the soul of poetry. Critics retorted that many ghazal poets wrote asthough the beloved were a prostitute or courtesan, because he (she?) wasusually seen by the poet in public situations, surrounded by a host ofrival admirers. To this the defenders failed to find a convincing reply.
Both critics and defenders in such controversies were so blinded bythe Iranian heresy that they could not see the answer which was staringthem in the face. Though Iranian in form, Urdu ghazal was Indian in spirit:though its protagonist spoke in masculine voice (even women poets did so),the attitudes and responses were 'feminine.' It is true that courtesansplayed an important part in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century urban NorthIndian society, and that pederasty as well was quite common. But the deepertruth is that the 'woman' who sits amidst rival lovers and the 'man' whopines for her are in fact sexually reversed masks for a masculine belovedand a feminine lover. A boy beloved can of course be explained even moreconvincingly in this context. No doubt the Urdu ghazal poet does not havean exclusively 'feminine' persona. He could not, by sheer virtue of theadvanced state which urban civilization, exposed to foreign sophistications,had attained. But the main thrust remained Indian, and 'feminine' in theIndian sense.
Grammar also was of great help. For although Urdu has distinct genders,and all verbs and adjectives agree with the noun or pronoun which theygovern or qualify, the second person and third person plural forms do notalways make this distinction. In the colloquial speech of Delhi, for instance,the second and third person masculine plural verb forms can also be usedas feminine. And not only can un ('their,' third person plural oblique)be used for groups of either sex, but it can also refer to either a manor woman in the singular, since plural forms are used as a sign of respector love. Since many nouns in Urdu do not have specific masculine or feminineforms, this ambiguity of reference becomes eminently suitable, as in thissher of Dagh's:
Eye is not lightning, face is not sun,Here 'they are human' actually means 'that respected person is human,'and the person in question may be woman or man. Similarly, in colloquialspeech a woman may use the first person plural, with masculine plural verbforms, to refer to herself. Thus grammatical ambiguity helps to keep openthe question of sexual identity of lover as well as beloved in Urdu ghazal.
They are human, but there is not [in me] the daring to see.
Historically speaking as well, a case can be made for a 'feminine' protagonistin Urdu ghazal. The first major Urdu poet Quli Qutb Shah (1580-1612) andhis contemporaries often wrote as if the poetic protagonist were a woman.Even in cases of grammatical ambiguity, the epithets and images used forthe beloved occasionally indicated that the lover was female and the belovedmale. Earlier, during Bahmani times, the practice was no different. Evenin the age of Vali, far into the seventeenth century, we occasionally finda graammtically female protagonist; though grammatical ambiguity is onthe increase, 'feminine' emotions and experiences are unmistakable. Althoughthe lover's peregrinations and his clandestine trips to the beloved's houseor street are themes not unknown in Iranian poetry, the nightly trips tothe beloved mentioned in Urdu ghazal assume a different significance whenwe recall that Indian poetry abounds in accounts of the female lover goingout secretly to keep a nightly tryst. In the following sher of Vali's,the beloved is female but the context is clear:
So that I may not lose my way in this dark night,The girl has obviously come out to keep the tryst. The man is also on hisway to her and wishes to hear the reassuring faint silvery tinkle of herankle bracelets. She is clearly not the pursued, but rather the dominantpartner, since it is the man who is afraid of the dark and unfamiliar placeof rendezvous.
Let me hear occasionally the tinkle of thy ankle-bracelets.
By the nineteenth century, ambiguity of expression has increased, butdescriptions of the female body (not the whole body but some physical features),dress, and behaviour have also come into prominence. As a general rule,wherever the female body or dress or manners are described in specificallyfemale terms and not merely the traditional hair, eyes, lips, etc., thelevel of poetry is low and the tone is devoid of the true tension of experience.Yet where the experience of love is described, the tone is ambiguous andthe content almost always becomes more alive when seen as the expressionof a 'feminine' point of view. Consider these random shers from Siraj Aurangabadi,who comes after Vali but rather before the late-eighteenthcenturymasters of Delhi:
Alas, I uselessly burnt away my being in the harsh sun of sorrow,The word for 'the loved one,'
I did not know there was peace and safety in the shadow of the lovedone.
Ustad Imam Din Gujrati Funny Poetry In Urdu
piu, is commonly used by women torefer to a male beloved; moreover, the emotion expressed by Siraj is --in the traditional Indian context -- more appropriate to a woman than toa man.Thy dress has prints of nargis,The word for 'dress,' qaba, refers to a kind of apparel used bymen as well as women. The nargis
As if a nargis flower were freshly plucked.
Imam Din Gujrati Funny Poetry In Urdu
flower is shaped like an eye, andthe use of this word suggests a female rather than a male eye contemplatingthe beauty of the beloved in silent wonder.The disappearance of clearly female grammatical usages from the poetryof the nineteenth century is offset by the greater emphasis on 'feminine'words and conditions. I have mentioned physical wasting away as one suchcondition, and jealousy as another. The former is practically unknown inIranian ghazal, but often figures in Indian Style Persian ghazaI. ShibliNomani notices this phenomenon, but fails to relate it to the Indian ethos.He does, however, observe that much Indian Style poetry in Persian sustainsitself purely on word-play; as an example he offers the following:
My fame through the world for infirmity is not new:Shibli comments that the idiom 'to fall on people's tongues' means 'tobecome famous,' and points out that the sher has force only becauseof this word-play. This is a far cry from the much (and rightly) malignedUrdu Ghazal poet Nasikh, whose description of physical pining away vergeson the farcical:
It has been ages since through faintness I have falIen on people'stongues.
When due to excessive thinness I couldn't be seen,But perhaps the poet meant this sher to be a joke. The same subjecthas been handled with great finesse and subtlety by more intelligent poets,including Ghalib:
They laughingly said, 'Let's brush the bed [and see if he's lost inone of the folds].'
Because of infirmity, the impression of an ant's foot is aniron ring around the neck --Apart from the extremely ingenious hyperbole in the first line, the mainpoint is that the poet is using his alleged lack of strength as an excusefor not clearing out!
How can I have the strength to run from your street?
Description of the various transactions that pass between the loverand the beloved is calIed mu'amila bandi. Baba Fughani Shirazi,a sixteenth-century Persian poet who is considered by many to be the firstIndian Style poet, is also credited with introducing this theme into poetry.In the hands of the Urdu masters, mu'amila bandi developed intoa sophisticated device capable of expressing 'feminine' disappointmentsand yearnings.
But a yet more strikingly revelatory phenomenon was the emergence inthe nineteenth century of rekhti, a form of ghazal written largelyin the idiom used by women. Rekhti had a female protagonist, anexplicit common persona adopted by all its poets -- who were almost alwaysmen. Although it had occasional non-feminine themes, rekhti wasessentially a poetry about -- and purportedly by -- women. It was neverconsidered a serious form, and rarely produced poetry of more than passinginterest or merit. But that it compensated for the loss of the overtlyfemale protagonist appears to me quite certain -- especially when we observethat it evolved in Lucknow, whose regular poetry was more than usuallyfull of explicitly female beloveds being celebrated by male lovers.
The twentieth century saw the decline and disappearance of overtly femalephysical features, apparel, etc. But this was due to the reformist zealof Hali and the spread of English education (the strait-laced syllabi ofthose days being largely unaware of poets like Herrick), rather than anyregression of the 'feminine' tradition. Themes of faintness, jealousy,extreme sorrow and love-sick pining, the shedding of tears of blood, etc.,continued to be popular -- only to recede in the last fifty years or so,victims of Iqbal and of the initial onslaughts of the Progressive Movementin Urdu literature. The Progressives began by condemning ghazal; later,however, they embraced it with redoubled vigour and wrote some good ghazalswhich could, but for their linguistic atmosphere, be fitted into the earlierpattern.
The great change which has come in our time is due to a general declinein the prestige commanded by love poetry. Ghazal is no longer mainly agenre of love poetry. The influence of English has also played its part,uprooting the female lover from her position even in Hindi poetry. Butas far as Urdu is concerned, ghazal has maintained its vigour and popularitybecause -- as I have shown -- its early masters did not treat it as a limitedform, but rather gave free rein to their traditional Indian sources ofpower: mystical and abstract speculation, complex and enriching verbaltechniques, consciousness of environment, and a desire to investigate beyondobvious limits. Ghazal has these qualities still -- both in India and inPakistan. Indeed, in the latter country the tendency to hark back to pureIranian or Arab-Iranian traditions has failed to gain ground, despite muchchauvinistic support. Urdu ghazal is a flower that can bloom only in thecomposite soil of the Indo-Muslim mind.
It could be argued that the poetic personality that underlies and emergesfrom Urdu ghazal does not correspond to that of any individual, or evenof any representative group of individuals. Apart from the fact that noindividual or limited group can be claimed to fully represent such a vastculture, my answer to the objection would be: yes, it does not so correspond.But this does not really matter. It is true that Ghalib or Momin or evenYagana would have resented the idea of standing in the Indian or Hindutradition. Mir and Insha might have been delighted. Dard and Sauda wouldnot have minded either way. But the special force aad conviction conveyedby a creative stance is partially due to its owner's not being consciouslyaware of it. In the case of Urdu ghazal, the many contradictory elementsare so obvious, yet so well adjusted and so happily co-existing, that thetotality of the picture has perhaps escaped our observation so far. Thereis a famous remark of Proust's that what an author writes 'is the productof a different self from the one we display in our habits, in society,in our vices.' In this context, Roger Shattuck recalls Valery's speculationthat the author too might be the product of his work; that is, the inevitableinteraction between a work and its author may modify the personalitiesof both. Some such thing must have happened to Urdu ghazal. Radically differentas it is from the Dakhini ghazal of four centuries ago, it has grown andchanged only within the confines of its native land.
