In the Bazaar of Love: The Selected Poetry of Amir Khusrau (Penguin Hardback Classics)

by Sunil Sharma

  Qawwālī provides the form in which Amīr Khusrau’s poetry in Hindavi and Persian is still known and performed in a live context that is completely removed from the written and illustrated tradition of his writings that is part of the culture of books. As literary texts, lyrics sung in qawwālī are intertextual and combine Khusrau’s poems with occasional Arabic quotations and lines of Persian Sufi poetry. The repertoire of qawwālī is dynamic and now accommodates all kinds of Persian, Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi verses. Thus, the language of qawwālī appeals to non-Muslims as well as Muslim South Asians since the poet often expresses his devotion for Prophet Muhammad, Hazrat ‘Ali or to Nizāmuddīn Auliyā in terms that are found in Hindu devotional contexts. The combination of lyrics, especially in the order of the verses, can vary considerably and it is very difficult to establish a fixed text of these poems. Among the ghazals translated in this volume, poems 16, 23, 27 and 45 have all entered the qawwālīs’ repertoire. The renditions by the maestro Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan have especially mesmerized listeners around the world.

  Although not a ghazal, this well-known verse by Khusrau represents the deep bond between poet and pīr that made them one entity:

  man tu shudam, tu man shudī

  man jān shudam, tu tan shudī

  tā nagūyad kasī pas az-īn

  man dīgaram u tu dīgarī

  I have become you, you have become me.

  I have become life, you have become body.

  From now on, let no one say that

  I am other and you are another.

  This is not an unusual couplet in the context of the entire poem, but it has taken on a life of its own and developed into an emblematic Sufi text.

  Amīr Khusrau’s Hindavi and Persian poems are also sung in a secular context. The Afghan classical performer Ustad Mohammad Sarahang, who was both the court musician of King Zāhir and professor of music at Kabul University, has rendered the poet’s Persian ghazals in a style that is characteristic of the Kabul school of classical music with its roots in India. A range of artistes—from the maestro ghazal singers such as Iqbal Bano and Mehdi Hasan to popular singers of Bombay cinema such as Mukesh—have sung the Persian lyrics of Amīr Khusrau, contributing new dimensions to the enjoyment of the poems.

  Whether Amīr Khusrau really wrote poetry in a vernacular language and, if so, whether the Hindavi corpus ascribed to him is really his work, are difficult questions from a textual and historical point of view. As he himself says:

  I am a parrot of India if you ask me candidly.

  Ask me in Hindavi so that I can answer you correctly.

  This verse has primarily been taken to signify his pride in being a poet in his mother tongue, but is clearly no indication of what he actually composed in this language. Elsewhere, he reiterates this opinion, this time downplaying his ability to compose Arabic verse:

  I am a Turk of Hindustan, I answer in Hindavi.

  I don’t have Egyptian sugar to speak Arabic.

  ‘Sugar’ refers to the poet’s words that have the quality of sweetness. Such a display of self-deprecation appears to be merely a poetic stance and should not be interpreted literally.

  The use of a vernacular register of poetry in Hindavi, using forms such as gīt and dohā, may have started before Amīr Khusrau, but it became increasingly common from his time onwards. Alongside all the writing taking place in Persian, there was a parallel movement to produce literature in vernacular languages so as to make works more accessible to those who were not literate or who did not participate in the Persian courtly tradition. Both Sufis and Hindu poets of the bhakti devotional movement used the language spoken by people in their communities to adapt from and transform the established poetic conventions. In Khusrau’s Hindavi poetry, his pīr is called the jag ujiyāro (world illuminator) and mahārāj (emperor) along with a number of other epithets that were shared among devotees of different faiths in India. Literature produced at royal courts was meant for the international, cosmopolitan audience of the broader Persianate world. By contrast, the works found in Sufi khānaqāhs had a more local and socially inclusive audience. The entire body of Khusrau’s Hindavi poems is based on oral traditions and has been inextricably merged with other folk songs and poems. The written tradition of these works dates only to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The spoken language that was called Hindavi was constantly changing and the songs in their current state perhaps represent the first recorded recension of these works. During the medieval period, minor poets would add their own poems to the oeuvre of recognized masters in order to derive prestige by association with them. However, since nobody doubts the fact that Khusrau wrote in Hindavi and the question of authenticity is moot, the point is to focus on how these texts have been received and continue to be part of a living tradition.

  Some of Amīr Khusrau’s Hindi verses show how a composite culture blending Perso-Islamic and Indian elements was created (see poem 54). In a brilliant macaronic poem attributed to him (zi hāl-i miskīn makun taghāful, durā’e nainān banā’e batiyān), the poet combines Hindavi and Persian literary tropes and metaphors in the form of a dialogue between a Persian lover (‘āshiq) and pining Indian heroine (virahinī). In a lyrical song, Nizāmuddīn Auliyā asks the Chishti Sufis to come out in their ecstatic state and join the celebrations of the Hindu spring festival of Holi, which is an occasion for great revelry and playfulness. True to their acceptance of local practices, Chishtis also celebrate the spring festival of basant. According to popular belief, it was an event in Khusrau’s life that led them to participate in this festival. One day, he saw some Hindu women singing and carrying mustard flowers to offer to their deity on the religious festival of basant panchmī. In order to cheer up Nizāmuddīn Auliyā, who was depressed about his nephew’s death, Khusrau dressed up like a Hindu woman and proceeded towards his pīr singing a song he had heard. This brought a smile to Nizāmuddīn Auliyā’s face and the festival became a major celebration, with a whole ritual associated with it that is part of the Chishti tradition. There are also songs said to have been composed by Khusrau especially for the occasion of basant. Writing in the Indic tradition, some of Khusrau’s Hindavi poems are utterances in a female voice that are often addressed to her absent lover or a parent (see poems 65–73). Translating the Hindavi poems of Khusrau poses a special problem due to the lack of a fixed text and multiple variations current in the oral repertoire. Terms like rang, literally ‘colour’ but conveying a complex range of cultural connotations, also challenge the translator of these poems (see poems 65, 67 and 72).

  In addition to the devotional songs about Nizāmuddīn Auliyā, Amīr Khusrau’s name is attached to women’s folk songs sung at weddings, riddles, and any genre of Hindavi poetry that involves double entendre or wordplay. The fact that the poet was so fond of puns and enjoyed switching language codes makes a strong case for his having authored this body of literature. In addition to Persian riddles (chīstān), there is a category (dosukhane) where the question is asked in two languages while the answer is a homonym that answers both questions:

  Tishna rā chī mībāyad? (Persian) Milāp ko kyā chāhiye? (Hindi/Urdu)

  What does the thirsty person need? What is required for a union?

  Chāh/Well/Desire

  The riddle can take another form:

  I saw a wondrous child in the land of Hindustan, his skin covered his hair, and his hair his bones!

  Answer: Mango

  There are innumerable riddles like these in a Khusravī mode whose corpus increased over the centuries.

  Folk poetry also draws on another genre, the quatrain in the shahrāshūb genre, which in Persian is a flirtatious exchange between the poet and a beautiful lad (or lady in the Indian context) who is engaged in a particular trade or task. In some of these, the first three lines are Persian while the last is mixed Persian–Hindavi. In poem 64, the last line uttered by the woman is a pun, i.e., it can be read in either Persian or Hindavi. A selection of Khusrau’s poems of th
is type has been included in the translations (see poems 55–64), although at times one has to resort to the glossary to understand the meaning of a certain term on which the conceit of the poem hinges. The range of people that the poet addresses represents the social range of a typical Indian city and reveals his fascination for the details of everyday life. Khusrau’s playful side can also be seen in a category of Hindavi poetry of a bawdy nature—called kah mukarnī—which takes the form of two female friends conversing about one of their lovers. These poems also rely on witty wordplay and were traditionally sung by women. There are a number of such mukarnīs attributed to Khusrau, and although it is difficult to capture the earthiness of the original in English, a few of these are included in this volume (poems 74–78).

  In the same way that Amīr Khusrau has been crowned as the father of Indo-Persian poetry, so he has been invoked as the founder of the Urdu language in order to enhance the prestige of the language that is relatively new in South Asia, but related to Hindavi and Persian. Thus, works like the once popular Tale of the Four Dervishes, which is extant in Urdu translations, was wrongly attributed to Amīr Khusrau, as was the dictionary of Persian–Hindi, Khāliq bārī, that is now believed to have been written in the seventeenth century by one Ziyāuddīn Khusrau.

  Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī (d. 1048), who had accompanied Sultan Mahmūd to India, was the first learned Muslim to write about India in a systematic and scientific manner in his scholarly work Kitāb al-Hind as a result of first-hand observation of its peoples and cultural practices. Although al-Bīrūnī had studied Sanskrit to be able to read Hindu texts, his viewpoint was that of an outsider. Later, in the Mughal period, the courtier Abū al-Fazl (d. 1602) in his monumental Ā’īn-i Akbarī (Institutes of Akbar) had continued the scientific tradition of documenting everything about India. But no other author in Persian can match Khusrau’s imaginative style when writing about India. From his elaborate system of languages to quotidian titbits of information, his works have done much to enhance our knowledge about thirteenth- and fourteenth-century India. However, it should be kept in mind that Khusrau is not claiming to be a detached scholar like al-Bīrūnī, and some of his fanciful ideas must be understood in the context of his creative endeavour and the different literary genres he employs.

  The Nuh sipihr (Nine Heavens) is a literary tour de force in verse that has never been matched in the history of Persian literature. Section three of this work consists of an encyclopaedic paean to the land of his birth and provides information on different aspects of Indian culture. Khusrau puts forward his belief in the superiority of India in the Islamic world in no uncertain terms and constructs several fanciful arguments to prove that India is akin to paradise: it is the land to which Adam first came after being expelled from paradise, according to one Islamic tradition; the peacock, the bird of paradise, is a native species; the climate is pleasant and moderate, he says, referring to a saying (hadīth) by Prophet Muhammad that he enjoyed the cool breeze that wafted from India; and last but not least, India is superior because the poet’s patron lives there. To settle the matter, he boasts that this is the land where a great poet like himself resides! The abundance of the flora and fauna, fruits like mangoes and bananas, spices like cardamom and cloves, and the quintessentially Indian betel leaf (pān) add to the virtues of this land. He goes on to describe the religion and learning of the Brahmins in a lively and anecdotal style. India’s contributions to world civilization include the game of chess and the book of stories Kalīla wa Dimna that was translated from the Sanskrit Panchatantra into Middle Persian and other Middle Eastern languages. There is a compendium of the different kinds of birds and animals found in India here, as well as descriptions of the marvels and wonders of the land, especially the supernatural powers of the Hindu yogis. Towards the end of the India section of the work, he comments on the intelligence of the inhabitants of the country and the openness of the culture:

  If a Khurasani, Greek or Arab comes here,

  he will not face any problems,

  for the people will treat him kindly, as their own,

  making him feel happy and at ease.

  And if they jest with him,

  they do so with blooming smiles.

  It is remarkable that this perception of India as an open society, which seems quite modern in some ways, was already formed in the early fourteenth century.

  In this work Khusrau claims that he has learned several languages, and the poet propounds a fascinating discourse on the languages of the world:

  Hindavi was the language from old times; when the Ghurids and Turks arrived [in India], Persian began to be used and every high and low person learned it … As I belong to India, it is only fitting that I talk about it. There is a different, original language in every region of this land. Sindhi, Lahori, Kashmiri, Kibar, Dhaur Samundari, Tilangi, Gujar, Ma‘bari, Gauri, the languages of Bangalah, Avadh, Delhi and its environs, all these are Hindavi, i.e., Indian languages, current since the olden days and commonly used for all kinds of speech. There is yet another language that is favoured by all the Brahmins. It is known as Sanskrit since ancient times; common people do not know it, only the Brahmins do, but one single Brahmin cannot comprehend its limits. Like Arabic, Sanskrit has a grammar, rules of syntax, and a literature … Sanskrit is a pearl; it may be inferior to Arabic but is superior to Dari … If I knew it well I would praise my sultan in it also.

  In Khusrau’s world view, the three classical languages of Islam, Arabic, Persian and Turkish, complement the host of Indian languages, and each has its specific sphere of usage, either as a language of learning, administration, literature or communication. It seems that Turkish was spoken by an elite group in India but no literature in it was produced, even by the poet, who in poem 37 playfully bemoans his inability to speak in the language of his Turkish-speaking paramour. Persian was more current in India for administrative and literary purposes, but it did not seem to be in competition with any other major language. Elsewhere, in the introduction to his third dīvān, he includes a similar discussion about languages, where he states that unlike Hindavi, which changes every hundred miles, the Persian of India, i.e., Dari, is standard from the river Indus to the Indian Ocean and does not have dialect variants as in Iran. ‘What is amusing,’ he declares, ‘is that we [Indians] have composed poetry in the languages of all people [of the world] but no one has composed poetry in our language.’

  In this encyclopaedic section on India in his work, Amīr Khusrau is attempting to put forward an alternative world view, one that is Indo-centric and that challenges the existing ideas about the classification of civilizations in the world of Islam. Islam is central to this new world view, but there is room for all the complexities of Indian cultural traditions. Khusrau’s hyperbolic arguments must be seen as rhetorical exercises intended to impress his audience. What he is trying to do in this work is to instill a sense of pride in Indians, Muslims in particular, and to give them a distinct culture within the context of a larger Islamic civilization, just as the Arabs and Persians had their own culture from early Islamic times. He sincerely believes that the sharī‘at attained perfection in India and that it was the ideal place for the flowering of Muslim civilization.

  Amīr Khusrau’s Persian Poetry

  Amīr Khusrau’s literary achievements in Persian form a seminal part of both the Indo-Persian tradition and of the broader, trans-regional Persian literary canon that includes the works of classical poets such as Nizāmī, Sa‘dī and Hāfiz. The first generation of Persian poets in India from the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries in Ghaznavid Lahore, such as Abū al-Faraj Rūnī and Mas‘ūd Sa’d Salmān, continued the Persian literary traditions of the Iranian courts in the poetic genres and imagery that they employed. Of these two early poets, it is in the works of Mas‘ūd Sa’d Salmān that we find the earliest consciousness of a new poetics and the expansion of the traditional world view to include elements of the new landscape. Gradually, a distinctly Indo-Persian lite
rature came into existence that lasted until the twentieth century. In the two centuries intervening between this time and that of Amīr Khusrau, Persian poetry was written and cultivated in the subcontinent, mostly at the Ghaznavid court in Lahore, but much of this body of work is lost to us and only stray verses survive as quotations in dictionaries, historical works or anthologies. When Delhi became the capital city of the new rulers, it inherited many of the cultural institutions and literary practices of the earlier Ghaznavid court, causing a new literary florescence. The primary agents in this process were Amīr Khusrau and Hasan. The Sufi literary scene of Khusrau’s time was as brisk as the courtly one. There were a number of non-courtly Sufi writers such as Ziyāuddin Nakhshabī, author of the Persian rendition of the popular Sanskrit work Tūtīnāma (Tales of the Parrot), and the ecstatic mystic Bū ‘All Qalandar who had migrated from Iraq to keep company with the Chishtis.

  The Sufi khānaqāh was an important location in medieval Indian society where poetry was produced and performed in a less elitist atmosphere than the royal court. Amīr Khusrau seems to be one of the few poets who was simultaneously a court poet in the business of praising kings as well as a Sufi poet whose poems were performed in a mystical context. Khusrau’s affiliation with the Chishti Sufis strengthened during the time when Nizāmuddīn Auliyā was achieving an eminent status in the city, and his meeting place (khānaqāh or jamā‘atkhāna) in the village of Ghiyaspur (the present-day Nizamuddin area of Delhi) was a spiritual centre where people from all walks of life gathered to listen to his words and join in mystical sessions. The Sufis had a major role in the conversion of Indians to Islam and their presence in Delhi acted as a stabilizing force in the face of the uncertainties of court politics for they looked after the spiritual welfare of the community. ‘Alāuddīn Khaljī’s son, Khizr Khān, who was one of Amīr Khusrau’s patrons, was also a devoted follower of Nizāmuddīn Auliyā. Although ‘Alāuddīn Khaljī himself did not frequent the Sufi khānaqāhs, he was positively inclined towards them, and thus Khusrau dedicated many of his works—in fact, all the poems of his khamsa—to both his mentors simultaneously. Khusrau celebrated his spiritual master, who was known as the mahbūb-i ilāhī (Beloved of God), in poems written in all the literary genres available to him. For example, in poem 17, Khusrau almost certainly refers to Nizāmuddīn as ‘God’s good servant’, his refuge from life’s transience, and in poem 50, he celebrates his court as the place where angels flock like doves.