But You Don't Look Like a Muslim

by Rakhshanda Jalil

  The Indian publishing industry, with one eye on people’s interests and aspirations and another on profit margins, has been quick to gauge the popular sentiment in favour of Urdu. Publishing giants such as Penguin and HarperCollins have started Urdu publishing; smaller players such as Blaft have brought out translations of Jasoosi Duniya, the cult detective series in Urdu as mentioned earlier in this book. While some Urdu fiction is being made available either in Devnagari or in English translation, it is Urdu poetry that holds sway over the popular imagination. It is heartening to see people across the Indian subcontinent delve into the vast treasure house that is Urdu literature to pluck something or the other that gives expression to their deepest, most acutely felt emotions. Blogs and websites feed this interest in innovative and accessible ways. A snatch of Urdu poetry, a fragment of lost memory from a syncretic past, holds promise for the future of Urdu.

  The enduring cry of revolutionaries in distant parts of India is still: Inquilab Zindabad! (Long Live the Revolution!). This Urdu slogan has an interesting history. Said to have been first coined by the poet Iqbal, it has been used by people from across the political, linguistic, socio-cultural spectrum of India from the early decades of the twentieth century until present times. It has crossed the Vindhyas and is used by Malayalam- and Tamil-speaking people as it is in the north. It is, after Hindi film songs, the best example of the most vibrant use of Urdu by a heterogeneous group of people. Bhagat Singh and his revolutionary comrades too popularized the use of this slogan which was first recorded in prose, and later used as a rallying cry at a labour rally in Calcutta in 1928 by the fiery Urdu poet, Hasrat Mohani.

  Similarly, Faiz Ahamd Faiz’s ‘Bol ke lab azad hain tere/Bol zubaan ab tak teri hai’ is an anthem of protest used by people fighting oppressive regimes across the breadth of South Asia:

  Bol, ke lab azad hain tere

  Bol, zubaan ab tak teri hai

  Tera sutwan jism hai tera

  Bol, ke jaan ab tak teri hai.

  Speak, for your lips are free

  Speak, for your tongue is still yours

  Your supple body is still yours

  Speak, for your life is still yours.

  If in the above lines, we see Faiz inciting his people to speak up and reminding them that they are free despite their fetters, here is his contemporary, Majaz, addressing the young women of his age in ‘Naujawan Khatoon Se’; it has since been adopted as the slogan for the women’s movement in our part of the world:

  Tere maathe pe yeh aanchal bahut hii khub hai lekin

  Tu iss aanchal se ek parcham bana leti to achcha tha.

  The veil on your forehead is indeed very pretty

  It’d have been better still had you turned it into a banner.

  That the Urdu poet has had his finger on the pulse of the people needs no further elaboration. I am reminded of a very interesting anecdote related to me by Ahmad Faraz, the Pakistani poet who visited India often and was the toast of the mushaira circuit. I was driving him to the Delhi airport, we were stuck in traffic and I was worried he might miss his flight. Faraz sahab, in his characteristically wry, amused tone told me how, once he was very late, the counters at the Delhi airport were closing and he had excess baggage to check in. The airport staff, on the verge of refusing to let him board, looked at his passport closely, and asked: ‘Aap wohi hain … Ranjish hi sahi wale? (Are you the same … the one who wrote Ranjish hi sahi?)’ And not only did Faraz sahab catch his flight but also had his excess baggage waved through. ‘All because of Ranjish hi sahi,’ he chuckled as he narrated the incident.

  Even in an age innocent of recorded music, poets used to become famous not just because their diwans were read or they were heard at mushairas, but because their poetry was sung. I suspect it is always the singing of a particular poem that adds to its ‘shelf life’ – more than its reading. For, it is the singing that brings poetry to those nooks and crannies of the popular imagination where the written word does not reach. Now, with tapes and CDs becoming passé and YouTube and World Music having claimed our lives, many of us hear poetry more often than we read it. In India, it is also because fewer and fewer people can actually read Urdu poetry in its own script; the singer, therefore, has increasingly become a vital link in ‘accessing’ Urdu poetry.

  To conclude, it is a truism much acknowledged that Urdu has become steadily more Persianized just as Hindi has got more Sanskritized. The schism between the two languages was marked by the Partition, and the decades after 1947 saw a slow erosion of the common space between these two languages, a common space once called Hindustani but now virtually lost in the Babel of linguistic and cultural politics. Not only must this common space be retrieved but we must also work towards bridging the gaps between our bhashas. Urdu, born of a mixed marriage between many languages, dialects and cultures, provides just such a bridge.

  2

  SONGS FOR ALL SEASONS: THE ORAL TRADITION IN URDU LITERATURE

  THE ORAL TRADITION HAS BEEN a part of Urdu literature virtually from its birth. Its influence and popularity can be traced in the works of Amir Khusrau (1254–1324), the original poet of the people. His dohas, sukhanas, unmil bejor, geet, paheli and dhakoslas show a remarkable linguistic and cultural synthesis. According to a popular anecdote, Amir Khusrau was given a set of four unrelated words – kutta, kheer, dhol and charkha – and challenged to string them together. From these everyday, prosaic words he produced the following four-line verse:

  Kheer pakayi jatan se

  Charkha diya jalaye

  Aaya kutta khaa gaya

  Tu baithi dhol bajaye.

  I took pains to cook kheer

  Even burnt the wooden wheel

  A dog came and ate it up

  While you sit playing the drum

  And elsewhere, Khusrau showed how the people’s idiom could clothe both the prosaic and the profound:

  Khusrau darya prem ka, ulti waa ki dhaar

  Jo utara so doob gaya, jo dooba so paar.

  O Khusrau, the river of love runs in a strange direction

  One who jumps in it drowns, who drowns gets across

  Khusrau is also credited with devising an ingenious mingling of Persian and Hindavi called mukarni. Written in Persian, it soon became very popular for it could be understood by the common people, as for instance:

  Aari aari huma bayari aari

  Mari mari birah ki mari aari

  While recognizing the quaintness and picturesqueness of verses such as the above, the great pity, however, is that literary historians tend to tie themselves up in knots verifying the authenticity of the vast bulk of the oral tradition that has, over the centuries, crept into the written word, bridging the gap between orality and textuality. The clamour for ‘critical’ versions even in orally transmitted texts has drowned the real significance of these works – both in linguistic and literary terms. In the absence of original texts and ‘reliable’ critical analysis it seems easier for literary critics to challenge the authenticity of several Hindavi compositions attributed to even a great poet such as Khusrau; needless to say, the works attributed to the lesser-known poets and unknown bards suffers from marginalization, exclusion, even effacement from tazkiras or literary histories.

  It is much the same in the case of the great Bhakta poets who relied almost solely on the folk traditions to convey larger, philosophical truths to the lay people. The sakhis, dohas, horis, jhoolnas, ulatbanis, manglas and barahmasas of Kabir convey the spirit of the times and the richness of local culture. More importantly, they give ample evidence of pluralism and syncretism that was very much a way of life. Nothing demonstrates this better than the retelling of ‘native’ stories within the received conventions of the Indo-Persian masnavis, as in Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s Padmavat. Composed in the Awadhi dialect in 1540, it celebrated the transcendent love between King Ratansen and his queen Padmavati using imagery culled from oral traditions as diverse as the Ramacharitamanas by Tulsidas, the dastans of Amir Hamza, the premakhyans su
ch as Madhumalati, as well as images from Sufi lore.

  Elements of folklore that crop up in Urdu literature from medieval times onwards in a steady, virtually unbroken stream - whether it is in the poetry of Khusrau and Kabir that influenced the rekhta and Hindavi compositions of the pre-moderns or the fictional writings of modern Urdu writers such as Qurratulain Hyder and Ismat Chughtai - show an extraordinary rootedness to the soil. Songs sung at marriages, seasonal festivals, visits to shrines, panegyric poetry such as naat, marsiya or manqabat, songs celebrating the birth of a child, the bidai (farewell) of a new bride, even a mother’s lullaby to the babe in her arms convey the easy coexistence of the local and the regional with the religious and the cultural. For the literary historian, these cameos can serve a very useful purpose; they can help locate the characters in a specific social, local, regional context. By their appearance – no matter how incidental or fleeting in larger literary narratives – they give a sense of time and place. Folk images, idioms and motifs – embedded in literary texts – leaven the narrative with a flavour that is full-bodied and robust. Like the proverbial salt of the earth, whenever the folk makes its appearance in Urdu literature, it makes the language more vital, more real and at the same time more natural.

  Fables or lok kathas have always been incorporated into both prose and poetry – as qissa-kahani in older times and in recent years with devastating effect by a modern writer and chronicle of the Partition such as Intizar Husain. Other elements of the oral tradition that have crept into Urdu literature take the form of folktales for children, folklore from the Panchatantra tradition, the tales of tota-maina and chira-chiriya variety, char-baits (Pathan songs from Rampur, Tonk and Bhopal), pahelis (riddles), dohas, sawarian, jokes, anecdotes, etc. Many writers have used these folk stories, some with generic beginnings such as ‘Bahut saal pehle ki yeh baat hai…’ (A long time ago…) or ‘Ek tha badshah, hamara tumhara badshah…’ (Once there was a king, yours and mine…) to spin contemporary stories.

  Urdu is replete with examples of texts that have come to rely on aurality for their popular appeal. Here, I have in mind three literary forms: (1) dastangoi, an oral narrative tradition, which narrated masnavis to rapt audiences; (2) the mushaira where poets recited their verses to a live audience and a text that was written down ‘moved’ instantly from the written to the oral space; and (3) the marsiya (elegy) tradition where, again, a text was written with the intention of being recited in the course of a majlis (congregation) and thus consigned to popular memory. Public recitation formed the cornerstone of all three and the repeated use of time-honoured, widely-accepted images and similes helped establish a rapport with the audience. The masnavi and the marsiya are in the nature of narrative poems, both incidentally borrowed from the Arabic tradition but suitably Indianized by the use of idiom, popular sayings, even local dialect. Given the ease with which Urdu has borrowed literary forms and ideas from both foreign and ‘sister’ languages, it has also shown remarkable dexterity in modifying, expanding, enriching and eventually absorbing these forms into its own corpus.

  Then there are the barahmasas (meaning songs for the twelve months of the year, i.e., the year according to the Indian lunar calendar) or songs of separation - both mystic and secular – expressing love and longing for the beloved. The singer’s moods change with the seasons and thus allow the poet to draw in the local, seasonal and natural elements. Drawing upon its ancient roots in Prakrit, Sanskrit, Hindi and regional dialects, the barahmasa is almost entirely rural. It still survives in the form of lok geet or folk songs. Or, looked at another way, one can say that the barahmasa drew upon lok geet and the existing oral tradition and gave it a more seasonal colour.

  The past and the present fuse in the barahmasa as the poet draws upon the popular Hindavi tradition of viraha or separation and creates a landscape in which there is no reality save the anguished yearning of the virahini, or a woman who lives in a state of perpetual separation from her beloved. It is this anguish that gets recorded month by month in plaintive, plentiful detail. Sometimes taking the colour of a lok geet, sometimes adopting the tone of a qissa-kahani, the barahmasa drew inspiration from a variety of sources: the Jain narrative poems describing Neminath’s desertion of his wife Rajmati on their wedding day; a swathe of devotional poetry that dwelt on Radha’s longing for Krishna; the description of the seasons in Kalidas’s epic poem Ritu Samahar (literally meaning ‘a compilation of seasons’, in this case six seasons) that, in turn, spawned a tradition of rituvarnan (poetic description of the seasons); elements of sringar rasa (the rasa or ‘flavour’ of erotica, one of the nine rasas) that have influenced the depiction of the nayika (the ‘heroine’ or female protagonist) both in verse and painting; an accumulated stock of similes and metaphors that had gained currency largely through word of mouth. Drawing upon these diverse sources, appropriating easily-understood stock images, speaking in a woman’s voice, the barahmasa allowed the fullest possible exploration of the link between memory and desire. It used the set format of the seasons - and the fairs, festivals, rites, customs, flora and fauna associated with the twelve months of the year that are constant and therefore predictable – to reinforce the near-universal experience of love and its conjoined twin, separation.

  Sometime in the early seventeenth century (1636 or so) Afzal Jhinjhanvi compiled the first barahmasa in Urdu, and called it Bikat Kahani (bikat meaning ‘immense’ or ‘terrible’):

  Ari jab kook koel ne sunayi

  Tamami tan badan mein aag lahi

  Andher rain, jugnu jagmagata

  Oo ka jalti upar tais ka jalata?

  Ah, when the cuckoo sounds her cooing

  It sets my body aflame

  The glow worm glows in the darkness of the night

  Why does it burn one already on fire?

  And, elsewhere:

  Gayi barsaat rut nikhara falak sab

  Nami danam ke sajan ghar phire kab

  Piya bin aikal kaise rahoo ri

  Sitam upar sitam kaise sahoon ri

  The rains are gone, the skies are clear

  But I don’t know when my beloved will return

  How will I live alone without my beloved?

  How will I bear affliction upon affliction?

  The most-often quoted verses found in most tazkiras, however, remain the bittersweet laments:

  Paden na mil mere peim phansi

  Maran apna hai aur logon ko hansi.

  Here I am with the noose of love around my neck

  And people can only laugh at my plight.

  The virahini of the barahmasa, for all her plaintiveness, is a far cry from the anaemic, sexually indistinct beloved of the ghazal. She is full-bodied and red-blooded:

  Woh joban hai ke jyu anaar ka phal

  Bhari mithas se jyu misri ki jyu daal

  Her youth is like the pomegranate fruit

  Bursting with sweetness like a lump of sugar.

  The virahini feels the pain of separation most keenly in the month of Saawan for it is during the rains that men traditionally stayed home, or returned home as business was slack possibly because roads became impassable. Hifzullah Qadiri has this to say about his nayika in his Baramasa Neha:

  Asaarh aaya ghata chhayi gagan par

  Rasawat man mera rasiya sajan par

  The month of Asaar has come, the clouds cover the sky

  My heart pines for my feckless beloved.

  The weft of mysticism runs with the woof of love in almost all the barahmasas right from the time of Afzal and his Bikat Kahani. Scholars such as Alavi have pointed the influence of classical Persian mystic poets such as Jami and Rumi on Afzal. This is amply evident in verses such as the Persian one below, which roughly translated means that the abode of the beloved is better than the mosque and the Kaaba:

  Ba masjid kaaba-dayaar ishq ast

  Ba daar-o kucha-o bazaar ishq ast

  Agar bardar baasi humcho Mansur

  Nabashi az dar-e-dildaar mehjur

  3


  ABDUR RAHIM KHAN-E-KHANAN:

  THE PEOPLE’S POET

  Rahiman gali hai sakri, dujo nahi thah arahi

  Apu ahai to Hari nahi, Hari to aapun nahi

  The alley is narrow, Rahim, it won’t take both of us

  If I go, the Lord can’t; and if the Lord does, I cannot

  POET, STATESMAN, SOLDIER, ONE OF Akbar’s Navratna or ‘Nine Jewels’, an early-day proponent of a secular, all-embracing, all-encompassing culture of inclusiveness, which has been ‘native’ to this land long before the proponents of ‘Akhand Bharat’ became clamorous, founding father of the movement to popularize the people’s language as the language of poetic and creative expression instead of the high-brow Persian and Turkish of the Mughal court, and patron saint of modern-day translators – Abdur Rahim Khan-e-Khanan was all this and much more. The son of Bairam Khan – Akbar’s uncle, tutor and regent after Humayun’s death - Abdur Rahim Khan-e-Khanan (1556–1627) not merely accompanied Akbar on his military expeditions, most notably the one to Gujarat, but also became the Mir Ard, the one who heard the thousands of applications addressed to the emperor. But for our purpose here, he is also the Rahim Das that most of us have encountered in Hindi textbooks in school along with the famous triumvirate of medieval Bhakta poets, Sur, Tulsi and Kabir.

  Clearly a man of many parts, it is difficult to reconcile the bhakta Rahim Das - the Servant of Rahim (one of the ninety-nine names for Allah, al-Rahim meaning ‘the compassionate one’) - and the aesthete-courtier-military-strategist seen in many gilded Mughal-era paintings. Yet, such a man existed. He lies buried in a vast and crumbling mausoleum on Mathura Road (once part of the Mughal Grand Trunk Road) at the mouth of Nizamuddin East in New Delhi, in a grand edifice built by Rahim for his wife, making it the first Mughal tomb of its kind built for a lady. Its proximity to the dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia, the thirteenth-century Sufi saint, makes it part of a cluster of over one hundred monuments, mostly mausoleums and mosques that together comprise the densest ensemble of medieval monuments anywhere in India. The Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC), having successfully undertaken repair and renovation work on the Humayun’s Tomb and several other monuments in its vicinity, has turned its attention to Rahim’s Tomb as part of its Nizamuddin Urban Renewal initiative. While the conservation work being undertaken by the AKTC, in collaboration with the Inter Globe Foundation, is of great architectural significance, laying out as it is a blueprint for conservation projects elsewhere in India, the intention to revisit Rahim’s legacy is equally laudable.