The Taste of Words: An Introduction to Urdu Poetry

by Mir

  But like the survivor it always was, Urdu found itself a new champion in India—in the film industry.5 The language of what is popularly known as Hindi cinema has always been friendly to Urdu expression. The producers of Indian cinema commissioned songs by Urdu poets, thereby not only providing them with livelihood opportunities, but also serving to keep Urdu idioms alive in popular usage. When Javed Akhtar uses Persianized phrases like ‘Aql-o-hosh nameedanam’ (‘Wisdom and consciousness are lost’) before exhorting the ‘hot girls’ to put their hands up and the ‘cool boys’ to make some noise in the 2007 film Om Shanti Om, he is participating in a longer tradition, where the rhythms of popular culture have been infiltrated by Urdu. This tradition of course dates back well over fifty years. For instance, while Sahir Ludhianvi was composing urgent political poems like his anti-war opus Parchhaiyan (Silhouettes) in the 1950s, he was also getting Johnny Walker in the 1957 film Pyaasa to suggest:

  Sar jo tera chakraaye, ya dil dooba jaaye,

  Aaja pyare paas hamaare, kaahe ghabraae, kaahe ghabraae

  If your head spins, or your heart sinks, my dear

  Come to me [have a massage], why fear, why fear?

  Hindi movies have used classical Urdu poems in set situations; we may remember Deepak Parashar pining for Salma Agha in the 1982 film Nikaah while Ghulam Ali belted out ‘Chupke chupke raat din aansoo bahaana yaad hai’ (‘Nights and days of quiet tear-shedding, I still remember’) from a ghazal, written originally by Hasrat Mohani a century ago. Likewise, the cognoscenti may recall the 1963 film Gumraah where a dashing Sunil Dutt sits at the piano and suggests to Sadhana, ‘Chalo ek baar phir se ajnabi ban jaayen hum dono’ (‘Come, let us become strangers again’), B.R. Chopra having reworked a previously published and already famous nazm by Sahir Ludhianvi into its narrative. More importantly, Urdu poets like Sahir, Majrooh, Kaifi, Shakeel Badayuni and others were able to infuse the idiomatic conventions of classical Urdu poetry into popular consciousness, a task that Javed Akhtar and Gulzar continue admirably today. Film music also led the way for an explosion of non-filmi music, where Urdu poetry also found representation and a place for international crossover. Pakistani singers like Ghulam Ali, Mehdi Hasan, Abida Parveen, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the Sabri Brothers, Iqbal Bano, Nayyara Noor and a host of others became household names in India, competing with such local stalwarts as Jagjit Singh, Panjak Udhas and others.

  Two other movements deserve mention. In the 1960s, several Urdu poets, whose aesthetic inclinations were linked to the aforementioned Halqa-e Arbaab-e Zauq, intensified the infusion of modernist metaphor in Urdu poetry. Their efforts were championed by the literary journal Shabkhoon (Night Attack), under the stewardship of Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, and in Pakistan by journals such as Auraq (Pages) edited by Dr Wazir Agha. The neo-modern wave in Urdu poetry fostered a conscious union between the craft of the poet and the self-conscious language of the literary critic. The traditions of jadeediyat were strengthened, poets felt free to use free verse (aazad nazm) rather than the constricting boundaries of rhyme and metre, and the symbols of personal metaphysics were valued over the collectivist ethos of progressivism. Across the Atlantic, academics in the US supported these movements through journals such as Mahfil and the Annual of Urdu Studies. It was through the support of such institutions that the postmodernist turn also reached Urdu literature, where the weariness with the metanarratives of progressivism produced poems that shrugged off the imperatives of representation, and crafted an uber-personal literary ethos.

  In a rather different vein, in the southern part of the subcontinent, poets from the Dakkani tradition like Sulaiman Khateeb and Sarwar Danda produced exquisite social commentaries through humorous poetry (mazaahiya shaayiri) that expressed through irony and wistfulness those sentiments that might have shattered the heart if spoken of directly. Protagonists of this craft in the Deccan—like Siraj Nirmali, Paagal Adilabadi, Himayatullah and Mujtaba Husain—deserve place in the Urdu canon. Their defiantly plebeian aesthetic6 connected with their audience (for theirs was first and foremost an oral tradition), and perhaps struck a middle road between the programmatic socialism of the progressives and the self-absorbed ruminations of the modernists. It is a tragic matter that the canon, which is conditioned to view aesthetic experimentation with simplicity as aesthetic failure, was never able to value the Dakkani humorists in its conventional scale.7

  Discerning readers who have come thus far in the narrative may notice a significant omission—not a single woman poet has been mentioned in the discussion yet. Was there a paucity of women poets writing Urdu poetry all these years? Were they of inferior quality compared to the masters mentioned thus far? I am inclined to answer both questions with an emphatic no, but the reality is that the work of women poets in the seventeenth–eighteenth centuries has been under-represented, and is difficult to find. To the extent that I have not made extra efforts to find it, I acknowledge my intellectual laziness, and promise to redress this in future offerings. I had heard of the poet Saeedunnisa Hirma, who wrote in the nineteenth century, but her work has been tough to locate. Also, as a Hyderabadi, I had heard of the eighteenth-century courtesan poet Mahlaqa Bai ‘Chanda’ (1767–1824), who not only wrote poetry (her Persian deevan was published in 1797 and a posthumous Urdu collection appeared in the mid-nineteenth century), but was a patron of the arts, and sustained several poets. Zahida Khatoon Shervani, another Dakkani poet, wrote Aaeena-e Haram, a collection of poems, in 1927. I am also acquainted with Baharistan-e Naz, a collection of Urdu poetry by women, and plan to do some justice to this aspect and fill the gaping hole in my own understanding as well as the representation of women poets in classical Urdu poetry in future work. I will settle now for an apology and a promise to correct the gender imbalance in my account of Urdu poetry.8 Happily, I have been able to include a variety of twentieth-century Urdu women poets in this collection, many of whom write bravely and eloquently not just about love and romance but also about patriarchy, oppression and political engagement in a way that enhances our understanding of current social and political challenges and represents the best that Urdu poetry has to offer today.

  Urdu continues to be a vibrant and lively language. With the advent of the Internet, we see a proliferation of Urdu websites, of video recordings of mushairas and songs, and of the dissemination of scholarly work. The web continues to build bridges connecting the archipelago that constituted scholarly work in Urdu. Also, researchers have now begun to compile and catalogue its impressive corpus of literature and research; for instance, recently, Anwar Moazzam and Ashhar Farhan of Hyderabad have compiled a bibliography of social science research in Urdu9. Every day new books are published on Urdu poetry, including criticism, anthologies and collections. The language continues to struggle with religious orthodoxy, and many current debates underscore its conflicted relationship with the mosque and its affinity for the street. Urdu remains the language of the present, and by way of showcasing its cosmopolitan and its contemporary ethos, I’d like to offer a poem by Lata Haya, a poet of remarkable performative ability I encountered only through the Internet, and whose poem here congratulates Urdu on the advent of the new millennium:

  Subh ka pehla payaam, Urdu

  Dhalti hui se jaise sham, Urdu

  Utrey jo taare wahi baam, Urdu

  Badi kamsin gulfaam, Urdu

  Jaise naye saal ka ye din ho naya

  Aur beetey saal ki ho aakhri dua

  Naya saal, nayi Ram Ram, Urdu

  Tujhe nayi sadi ka salaam Urdu

  The first message of the dawn, Urdu

  Like the slowly setting sun, Urdu

  Where the stars descend, that roof, Urdu

  A youthful beauty you are, Urdu

  Like the new day of the New Year

  And the last blessing of the old one

  Happy New Year, and a new hello, Urdu

  The new century salutes you, Urdu.

  To so
me, the twenty-first century represents the dying gasps of Urdu poetry. But to those pessimists, may I say that the rumours of Urdu’s demise have been exaggerated for well over 150 years. Urdu was on the verge of death in 1857 (post ‘mutiny’), 1901 (post ‘Nagri resolution’), 1947 (post-Partition), 1951 (when the Uttar Pradesh Official Language Act derecognized Urdu), and 2001 (post–9/11, for reasons not very clear, beyond the fact that everyone wants to associate that date with everything). However, as long as a chill runs up your spine when you hear a verse by Ghalib, as long as marchers on the street shout ‘Inquilab Zindabad’, and as long as film lyricists like Gulzar compose lines like ‘Woh yaar hai jo khushboo ki tarah / Jis ki zuban Urdu ki tarah’ (‘It is a friend who appears like fragrance / And whose language is [sweet] like Urdu’), we have no problem. I am counting on my great-great-grandchildren wringing their hands and lamenting the eventual demise of Urdu in 2150. And I won’t be surprised if the language continues to prevail nevertheless, for Urdu poetry is, after all, written by angels. In Chicha’s words:

  Aate hain ghaib se ye mazaameen khayaal mein

  Ghalib, sareer-e khaama navaa-e sarosh hai

  These rare ideas I dare invent

  A zephyr from paradise brings,

  Ghalib’s sounds of pen on parchment

  Are the flutter of angel wings.

  A Note on Poetic Form

  Mir Anees, the great marsiya poet, and arguably one of the finest exponents of the art of Urdu poetry, was reputed to have composed his first sher when he was a child of five. Having watched his pet goat die, he apparently ran weeping to his father and said:

  Afsos ke duniya se safar kar gayi bakri

  Aankhen to khuli reh gaeen, par mar gayi bakri

  Alas the goat’s soul departed for heaven

  It is truly dead, though the goat’s eyes are open

  I am struck by the rhythmic quality of this couplet, fashioned so beautifully by the young Anees. The tyke seems to have had perfect rhyme and metre from the start, and as he grew older, content must have fed technique in a harmonious cycle that peaked in his extraordinary prowess, where the most complex of emotions and situations were rendered in metred verse with not an ounce of effort showing. Such are the ways in which the poets of Urdu sharpened their technique—through countless repetitions of poems, a craft practised over and over again, tested in the furnace of mushairas, where jealous contemporaries and, occasionally, gentle teachers separated the wheat from the chaff. It was not enough to be solely an exponent of form or a purveyor of content in those rarefied circles. One needed to be both.

  Over time, as poets tested their craft among peers and the listening public, a protocol of sorts emerged regarding the form poetry would take. Much like the way Indian classical musicians were trained within the boundaries of specific ragas, Urdu poets learned the protocols of the ghazal and other poetic forms, which they either adhered to or tweaked. Here, I briefly discuss five forms that are relatively common in Urdu poetry, namely the ghazal, the qataa, the rubaai, the musaddas, and the nazm (along with its variant, the aazad nazm). I should say at the outset that such a discussion of poetic conventions need not necessarily get between the reader and the enjoyment of poetry (just as you do not need to know the difference between a backward short leg and a leg slip to enjoy cricket). But such nuances are nonetheless interesting to know.

  Ghazal

  The ghazal is the dominant form of the Urdu poem. It is structured relatively strictly, with a string of shers (couplets), common in metre (i.e. the first and second lines have the same number of syllables). Every second line of a couplet in a ghazal shares a rhythmic continuity with every other second line, through two artefacts known as the qafiya and the radif. The qafiya primarily refers to a convention of using certain rhyming words in the course of a verse. The radif is the refrain at the end of a certain line that gives the verse a consistent rhythm.

  To explain these in concrete terms, let us take an example of three shers from a popular ghazal, such as Hasrat Mohani’s ghazal ‘Chupke chupke’, which was used in the 1982 film Nikaah. The lines go thus:

  Chupke chupke raat din aansoo bahaana yaad hai

  Hum ko ab tak aashiqui ka vo zamaana yaad hai

  Khainch lena vo mera parde ka kona daf’atan

  Aur dupatte mein tera vo moonh chhupaana yaad hai

  Dopahar ki dhoop mein mere bulaane ke liye

  Vo tera kothe pe nange paaon aana yaad hai

  Nights, days of quiet tear-shedding, I still remember

  That era of intense loving, I still remember

  Suddenly, I pulled away the curtain between us

  Your veiled face playfully hiding, I still remember

  The afternoon sun, the hot roof, your bare, burning feet

  That sweet summons, you arriving, I still remember.

  The rhyme in this ghazal derives primarily from the qafiya, which in this case comes from the rhyming of ‘bahaana’, ‘zamaana’, ‘chhupaana’ and ‘aana’. It is here that the creativity of the poet is tested the most. The radif in this ghazal is ‘yaad hai’, which is a base on which the ghazal stands. In this case, every second line of every stanza would end with the words ‘yaad hai’ (the radif), and that phrase would be preceded by a word that rhymed with ‘bahaana’ (the qafiya). Ghazals typically contain between five and twenty couplets, which are not necessarily connected to each other in narrative continuity.

  Two more elements of the ghazal to keep in mind are the matla and the maqta. The matla is a sher in the ghazal, usually the first couplet, where both lines rhyme. The first sher in the above ghazal is a matla. A ghazal may have more than one matla; for instance, in the Faiz ghazal ‘Tum aaye ho’ that I have translated in this volume, the first two shers are both considered matlas. The maqta is that sher of a ghazal which contains the poet’s name as a signature (the signature is known as the takhallus). Many of the ghazals in this anthology have maqtas, which are often the place where poets showed their flourish. Often, a poet may have more than one takhallus. Ghalib had two: ‘Ghalib’ and, occasionally, ‘Asad’. As he said:

  Main ne Majnun pe ladakpan mein, Asad

  Sang uthaya thha, ke sar yaad aaya

  In my childhood, Asad

  I raised a stone to strike Majnu dead

  But then,

  I remembered my own head.

  Typically, the maqta is the last sher of the ghazal. But poets may choose to tweak the format. For example, in the ghazal ‘Insha-ji utho’ translated in this book, the matla and the maqta are the same sher.

  Qataa

  A qataa, very simply, is a poem of four lines—a quatrain. It may occur in the middle of a ghazal (where the poet is unable to finish a thought in two lines, and chooses to use four). It may also be a stand-alone verse, un-embedded in any long poem. Here is an example of a stand-alone qataa from Faiz:

  Raat yoon dil mein teri khoi hui yaad aayi

  Jaise veerane mein chupke se bahaar aa jaaye

  Jaise sehraaon mein haule se chale baad-e naseem

  Jaise beemar ko be-vajah qaraar aa jaaye

  Your faded memory visited my heart last night

  As if the spring came to the ruins, real quiet

  As if the zephyr silently cooled the desert

  And the sick, miraculously, gained some respite.

  Rubaai

  Like a qataa, a rubaai is a four-liner, but it is always a stand-alone mini-poem in its own right. Its rhyming scheme is fixed, with the first, second and fourth line rhyming, while the third line is free. In this sense, one can say that all rubaais are also qataas but all qataas are not rubaais. Furthermore, an astute observer may ask if there is indeed a subtle difference between a stand-alone qataa that follows this fixed rhyme scheme, and a rubaai. The answer really appears to lie in an additional requirement, that the verses of the rubaai should have twelve syllables, and
must be amenable to a certain kind of intonation.

  Rubaais were very popular in Farsi poetry (with Omar Khayyam’s poems crossing the linguistic divide into English). One of the best-regarded exponents of the rubaai was Josh Malihabadi; this is considered one of his best:

  Ghunche, teri be-basi pe dil hilta hai

  Tu ek tabassum ke liye khilta hai

  Ghunche ne kaha ke is chaman mein baba

  Ye ek tabassum bhi kise milta hai

  Dear flower, my heart does shake at your sorry plight

  For one smile from your love does your blossom take flight!

  The flower said, ‘Dear friend, don’t mock this garden’s grace

  One smile I have. That’s more than other creatures might.’

  Musaddas

  A musaddas may be simply described as a poem in which each unit consists of six lines. Typically, the first four lines of the musaddas rhyme with each other, while the last two rhyme in a different format. This poetic form lends itself to longer narratives and epic poems, and has been adopted especially by purveyors of the marsiya (an elegy that usually describes events surrounding an important event in Islamic history—the battle of Karbala). Mir Anees and Mirza Dabeer are prominent exponents of the marsiya tradition. Of the non-marsiya poems, the musaddas by Maulana Altaf Husain Hali is popular, as are Iqbal’s two long poems, Shikva and Jawaab-e Shikva. A typical musaddas may have over a hundred six-line verses.

  Here, I present a verse from a marsiya by Mir Anees, which is a good exemplar of the musaddas with clean rhythms and evocative manzar-kashi, or the ability of the poet to depict a scene as drama. This verse describes the moment before Imam Husain leaves for his final battle. The menfolk have all perished; he is in the company of only his little daughter Sakina and his sister Bibi Zainab. This particular verse is one of the most celebrated marsiya verses, having been performed repeatedly in the public domain as well as featured in Shyam Benegal’s Sardari Begum (1996).