But You Don't Look Like a Muslim

by Rakhshanda Jalil

  On 9 February 1956, a function was organized by the Ministry of Communications to celebrate the four-hundredth birth anniversary of Rahim Das. After this token sarkari felicitation of a man who strove to achieve the synthesis of Urdu and Hindi, the Rahiman of countless sweet and sage pronouncements was promptly consigned to the rubbish heap of history, and his tomb, despite its vantage location on one of Delhi’s busiest roads, rendered practically invisible. Few have ventured inside its sprawling grounds (at some point ‘protected’ by a tall fence built by the ASI and a five-rupee ticket) or marvelled at its perfect proportions. Originally faced with red sandstone relieved by the use of buff sandstone and marble, most of its finery was stripped for the construction of Safdarjung’s tomb a century later. Yet, neither neglect nor pillage can rob it of its solemn grandeur – befitting the brilliant poet-statesman who lies buried there.

  The fact that three great poets lie within a bare kilometre of each other – Rahim on Mathura Road, and Amir Khusrau and Mirza Ghalib close beside Hazrat Nizamuddin’s dargah – and all three being among the greatest votaries of inclusiveness and multi-culturalism, needs some attention. While the curtain of forgetfulness occasionally parts and the qawwali, geet and ghazal of Khusro and Ghalib make themselves heard, Rahim and his marvellous poetry has been largely neglected. It is laudable, therefore, that the conservation project has included within its ambit the documenting of Rahim’s contribution to culture; a compilation of his dohas (two-line pithy couplets) is in the works as is an edited volume of essays focusing on his multi-dimensional personality.

  A poet and a patron of men of learning, Rahim was a bit of a linguist himself. He spoke some Portuguese (the first Jesuit mission had already reached Akbar’s court) and wrote extensively in Braj, Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian. He translated Babur’s autobiography Baburnama from Turkish to Persian. Abdur Rahim was barely four years of age when his father Bairam Khan was assassinated. He, however, grew up into a fine young man under the fostering care of Akbar, who later gave him the title of Mirza and made him commander of five thousand with the title Khan-e-Khanan. He was appointed tutor to Prince Salim and one of his daughters was given in marriage to Prince Daniyal. After Akbar’s death, he served under Jehangir for twenty-one years. However, for all his loyalty, he was seen as a threat by Jehangir and treated shabbily. Jehangir ordered the killing of two of his sons at the Khooni Darwaza on the trumped-up charge that they were traitors. In that, he was supported by Mirza Raja Man Singh and Mirza Aziz Kokaltash, son of Akbar’s wet nurse, Maham Anagah. The bodies of the Khan-e-Khanan’s sons were left to rot and eaten by birds of prey, thus providing yet another leaf in the macabre history of Khooni Darwaza.

  Coming to his poetry, Rahim wrote for every occasion. Here’s something on the need to preserve every drop of water, for, a single drop saved inside the oyster’s shell, forms a pearl:

  Rahiman pani rakhiye bin pani sab soon,

  Pani gaye na ubare moti manus choon

  On the innate goodness of character that remains untainted, like the chandan or sandalwood tree that retains its purity despite the poisonous snakes twined around it:

  Jo Rahim uttam prakrati, ka kar sakat kusang,

  Chandan vish vyapat nahin, lipitay rahey bhujang

  On the transience of both ill and good fortune:

  Rahiman vipida ho bhali jo thoray din hoye,

  Hit anhit eeh jagat mein, jaan paday sab koi

  On placating, time and time again, those who are good at heart:

  Ruthay sujan manaiye jo ruthay sau baar,

  Rahiman phir phir poiye jo tootay tootay sau baar

  On the small versus big debate and the use of a needle when a sword is not required:

  Rahiman dekh badein ko laghu na dijiye daar,

  Jahan kaam awai sui, kahan karey talwar.

  On birds flying off from a drying lake to seek another perch, but what of the poor wingless fish:

  Sar sookhe, pachchi ure aure saran samae,

  Deen meen bin pachch ke, kahu Rahim kahan jaye?

  On using obviously ‘Hindu’ imagery despite being a Muslim, when declaring the only way to achieve salvation is through unconditional surrender to Shri Ram (the all-pervading consciousness):

  Gahi sarnagati Ram ki, bhavsagar ki naav

  Rahiman jagat udhar ko, aur na kachhu upaiy

  And the most famous of them all, on the thread of love, that once snapped, forever bears a knot:

  Rahiman dhaga prem ka, mat todu chatkai,

  Tootey phir se na milay, milay gaanth padi jai

  While it would certainly be worthwhile to revisit the dohas, chaupais and kabits written by him that transcend their time and age and speak so eloquently of the commingling of cultures, it just might be equally worthwhile to drop by and visit his tomb, see the conservation work that is in progress. Watch the layers of grime and neglect being scraped away by a team of dedicated conservationists to reveal glowing, gleaming incised plasterwork. While large parts of the monument itself are presently cordoned off due to the ongoing conservation, the parts that peep out from behind the scaffoldings nevertheless present an imposing sight.

  A massive square edifice rises from a high platform faced by arched cells on all sides. Unlike Humayun’s tomb, its predecessor and early prototype of the garden-tomb so dearly loved by the Mughals, the plan here is a plain square instead of octagonal. The charbagh pattern, too, is here though simpler, with paths instead of water channels. The lofty double-storied mausoleum rises from the centre of what was once a Mughal garden reduced to a patch of mangy grass over the years but with some handsome old trees still remaining. There is a high, deeply recessed central arch on each side and several shallow arches on the flanks in each storey. The interior of the tomb chamber has remains of beautifully incised designs in plaster and traces of paint work – all of which are being faithfully and painstakingly restored to their original colours. Four chhatris are strategically placed at the corners of the central dome giving it a perfectly balanced look, unlike, say, Safdarjung’s tomb which suffers from a peculiarly compressed and elongated look. The platform has shallow octagonal tanks connected by narrow drains – possibly for allowing rainwater to drain off. With the near-cannibalistic stripping of the marble and red sandstone from its facade to ornament other monuments in the vicinity, and rampant pilferage and looting of its parapets and lattices, the tomb looks scarred and gouged, yet venerable. It is said that, together with Humayun’s tomb, it provided the prototype for Shah Jahan’s architects to work on the spectacular Taj Mahal.

  Hopefully the ‘model conservation project’ will bring a new lease of life to this grand monument to one of India’s ablest sons; in the process if it draws attention to his poetry one can only rejoice. For surely it is time for Rahim to step out from the shadows of long-forgotten Hindi textbooks and take his rightful place among the great poets of Hindustan.

  4

  NAZIR AKBARABADI: VOICE OF THE PEOPLE, POET OF PROTEST

  NAZIR AKBARABADI, BORN IN DELHI some time in 1735 and moved to Akbarabad, as Agra was then called, possibly by 1745, and where he lived until his death in 1830, was a remarkable man for many reasons. He lived for over ninety years and witnessed a turbulent century spanning the late Mughal, early colonial period. He was educated but self-employed. And, most importantly, he lived in Agra and not in Lucknow or Delhi which were the centres of ‘high’ culture. He was also a man of independent views and remarkably different from contemporary Urdu poets.

  A people’s poet if ever there has been one in Urdu, Wali Muhammad Nazir Akbarabadi joined the ranks of Kabir, Surdas and Mira, both in his choice of subject and style. Speaking in the voice of the common man, using prosaic words of everyday Hindustani, he wrote of a syncretic culture, of festivals like Diwali, Holi and Krishna Janmashthami, of revered figures like Guru Nanak and Hazrat Ali, and chose unconventional subjects such as the kakri-seller in the bazaar of Agra, the baby bear who featured in itinerant road shows, as well as the mullah, pundit, teache
r, kotwal, courtesan and scores of ‘real’ people facing ‘real’ problems. Some of his most evocative poems, such as ‘Banjara Nama’ (The Chronicle of the Nomad), ‘Roti Nama’ (The Chronicle of Bread) and ‘Aadmi Nama’ (The Chronicle of Man) continue to be recited until this day - almost 200 years later. In a major departure from existing literary tradition, Nazir spoke of everyday struggles, sufferings and failures without resorting to any maudlin sentimentality whatsoever. He differed from his contemporaries in his clear-sighted acceptance of existing social ills and his refusal to hark back to the imagined glories of the past. In this, Nazir was a true ibn-ul waqt, a man of the moment. Yet, oddly enough, he suffered from neither extreme topicality nor the limitations of ‘novelty’ insofar as he could transcend his time and age and also speak of ageless concerns. His vast and varied ouvre reminds us of the presence of revision, reform, even radicalism in Urdu literature in the late Mughal, early colonial period.

  Nazir chose to celebrate all those spheres of cultural life that had been marginalized by the highbrow and elitist poets of his time. Quite naturally, therefore, he was marginalized by the upholders of good taste; his poetry was dismissed as sensationalist and his worldview pedestrian. Like a poet of the folk tradition, he was a spectator, one of the crowd, writing for and about the common folk in a language that was simple and spontaneous. Despite being ostracized and excluded from the literary canon, Nazir’s poetry continued to be popular with the people not just in his own time but centuries later.

  Nazir chose not only wit and humour to portray a world that was hurtling towards change but also displayed a remarkable and consistent humanity and tolerance about human foibles. His world is vastly different from the world of the traditional ghazal writer. Courtesans, pimps, merchants, sufis and mendicants, rustic folk who come to cities to eke out a living find a place in his poetry, as do robbers and nomads, kite-fliers and swimmers. He wrote not just about different sorts of people, but different things as well: the pankha (fan) or tarbuz (watermelon) or something as whimsical as chuhe ka achar (the pickled rat, which was a tongue-in-cheek elegy to the grocers who sold substandard goods at exorbitant rates!).

  More importantly, Nazir chose simple Hindustani, instead of the highbrow Persianized Urdu. Showing how tradition and modernity are two sides of a coin, his choice of language and subject shows both a break from tradition and harking back to an older tradition. By using simple Hindustani, he fashioned a language that was tensile, robust, capable of expressing a myriad moods and one that was uniquely rooted to the soil in a manner that is reminiscent of Amir Khusrau and Kabir. He brought the Urdu of the military camps and the courts to the bazaars and made it speak of new and altogether modern concerns. In the process, given his child-like delight in onomatopoeia, alliteration, word-play and abundant ingenuity, he coined scores upon scores of new words, thus adding to the growing ‘word bank’ of Hindustani.

  And in his choice of subject he shows the influence of the folk. The following lines give a sense of the richness of his thought and the lucidity of expression clothed though it is in the simple and the natural which is the hallmark of the folk tradition. Here’s Nazir writing on a range of subjects that had hitherto figured in the folk literature of upper India but not in ‘classical’ or ‘high’ literature.

  On the ghats of Yamuna during Holi:

  Ya svang kahun ya rang kahun ya husn bataoon Holi ka

  Sab abran tan par jhamak raha aur kesar ka maathe tiika

  Shall I talk of the play-acting or the colours or the beauty of Holi

  The body is resplendent with finery and the forehead is decorated with a tika of kesar

  On the marriage of Shiv ji in ‘Mahadev ji ka Byaah’:

  Pahle naam Ganesh ka, lijiye siis navae

  Ja se karaj siddh hon, sada mahurat laae

  Begin with the name of Ganesh with your head bent low

  So that your task is completed well and auspiciously

  On the dubious pleasures of a belly filled with bread in ‘Roti Nama’:

  Jab aadmi ke peit mein aati hain rotiyaan

  Phuli nahin badan mein samaati hain rotiyan

  When the rotis come into a man’s belly

  They can barely hide their glee at being inside his body

  And on ‘Muflisi’ (Poverty):

  Jab aadmi ke haal pe aati hai muflisi

  Kis kis tarah se usko satati hai muflisi

  When poverty comes upon the state of a man

  It troubles him in so many ways

  Poems like ‘Muflisi’ and ‘Shahr Ashob’ show his understanding of the contradictions of everyday life. Others such as ‘Pari ka Sarapa’ list the minutest details of contemporary women’s fashion, jewellery and accessories. In fact, Nazir’s voluminous collection shows a gamut of moods and emotions – from the sensuous to the lascivious and occasionally vulgar, from the humorous to the didactic and from the realistic to the mystical. He was popular in his day but among the courtesans or itinerant singers who sang his songs, or the aam aadmi who memorized some of his eminently hummable ballads, not among the highbrow literary critics or connoisseurs.

  The fastidious among the Urdu critics continued to exclude Nazir for another half century. Nazeer was discovered in the modern age when literary fashions changed and ‘popular’ was no longer considered a dirty word. Until the advent of the progressive writers in the 1930s, he was the first Urdu poet who not only came in contact with common people but celebrated that contact in joyful, abundant verse.

  To conclude, by being eclectic rather than narrow-minded, inclusive rather than exclusive, pluralistic rather than singular, all-embracing rather than rejectionist, Nazir was displaying the traits of modernism. And, despite the hedonism and Dionysian enjoyment of life that one finds in such ample measure in his poetry, there is also rationality, awareness and detachment. I will rest my case by quoting these lines from ‘Aadmi Nama’:

  Achcha bhi aadmi hi kahta hai, ai Nazir

  Aur sab main jo bura hai, so hai woh bhi aadmi

  They who are the best of all, are but men O Nazir

  And they who are the worst of all, they too are men.

  5

  ALE AHMAD SUROOR: THE GRAND OLD MAN OF URDU TEHZEEB

  A NATION’S SOCIAL AND INTELLECTUAL history can be reconstructed by the life and work of its men of letters. Ale Ahmad Suroor (1911–2002), a major literary voice in the Indian subcontinent, was witness to the most tumultuous and exciting part of the nation-building project. His long innings as a poet, prose stylist, literary critic and teacher bear testimony to a time when learning was not gleaned from books alone but distilled, drop by drop, from the press of life and living.

  Born in the historic city of Badayun (for which it has been said that if you were to stand at any crossroad and toss a pebble, it is sure to strike a poet - or two!), he had sipped the heady wine from a very early age. His pen name, Suroor, was appropriate yet brimful of delicious irony for a teetotaller. Characteristically, he once wrote:

  Hamare daur mein thorhi sii pii ke mast thhey log

  Tumhare daur mein kam hai nasha sharaab bahut

  In our time there was less wine but more ecstasy

  In your time you have far more to drink, but still less rapture.

  Poetry, Suroor sahab maintained, is not the language of 2+2=4; nor is it necessarily the opposite of prose, but something that runs parallel. In the epilogue to his autobiography, Khwab Baqui Hain (Dreams Still Remain), he wrote:

  Good poetry should illumine the mind; it should refresh the known and familiar and familiarize that which is fresh and invigorating. With its peculiar and unique use of language, its multi-layered allusions, its play on words, its capacity to contain a river in a goblet, poetry brings us closer to life, its many-splendored, magical, sweeping, often-contradictory selves. In doing so it makes us more sensitive, more sentient … Poetry does not bring about revolutions; it creates the right environment for upheavals in the mind. It is not a sword, but a lancet.

 
; Suroor sahab’s own poetry had none of the wild passion and rebellion that marked much of the poetry of Urdu progressive writers – with whom he was a fellow-traveller in the early, less trenchant days - especially the poetry written in free verse. Like beauty, he believed, poetry too had a thousand faces. In contrast to his vastly erudite and extremely scholarly critical writings, his ghazals and nazms have a sweet simplicity and a melodious, distinctly non-cerebral quality. Where his scholarly work is written from the head and appeals to reason and good sense and learning, his poetry is written from the heart. It is insightful, instinctive and completely inornate. However, despite early critical and popular acclaim, he left behind only three collections (the fourth, entitled Lafz, was published posthumously by his daughter, Mehjabeen Jalil, who later also put together a collection of his gharelu nazmein comprising poems written on the saalgirah, mehndi, rukhsati, sehra-bandi, etc. for his children and grandchildren), as against a pile of prose writings. Why would a man so enthralled by the magic of words, so enraptured by the ‘rhythmical creation of beauty’ be so circumspect? In his own words:

  Haan jaan kar ummid ki maddhim rakhi hail au

  Ab aur paas-e khatir-e naashaad kya karein

  Yes, I have kept lambent the flame of my longing

  Knowing full well the hopelessness of desire

  Suroor sahab’s poetry enriched his criticism and his criticism nourished his poetry. Both were rooted in his vast and varied reading of Indian and Western literatures. Single-handedly, Suroor sahab took the Urdu writer as also the Urdu critic out of his self-referential web and taught him to work not in isolation but in tandem with the great literatures of the world. Among his contemporaries he was the most balanced, moderate yet far-seeing. He wanted to go forward and experiment, taking along all that was the best and brightest from his own tradition, culture and values. A critic and writer, he believed, should never be put into neat pigeonholes such as progressive, Marxist, realist, surrealist or whatever happened to be the latest critical theory or fad. In Khwab Baqui Hain, he says: