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

by Sunil Sharma

  Amīr Khusrau was extremely conscious of his multicultural heritage. From his mother he acquired knowledge of the local culture and language which translated into an abiding love for indigenous traditions. As a poet writing in Persian he was aware of the larger world of Persian literary culture in which texts had a wide circulation across much of the non-Arab Islamic world. He writes with relish of the attractive quality of the Persian language:

  Truly, the language of Fars is like pickles for without pickles, food does not taste as good.

  Highly educated audiences across the Persian-speaking world read his poems, but he was also judged locally by Indian critics and by standards that may not have been universal. He belonged to multiple worlds. It would appear that the Turk (the conqueror, lover) and the Hindu (the conquered slave, beloved), an extremely popular trope in Persian court poetry, came together in his person. As he says:

  The opposition has been removed from Turk and Hindu, for Hindustan has become one with Khurasan.

  Since Khusrau was both of Turkish and Indian origins, he embodied the resolution of this conflict of opposites, and by bridging cultures he gave a distinct identity to Indo-Persian literature.

  The panegyric ode (qasīda) was the most prestigious genre for the Persian court poet of this period. Many of Khusrau’s early qasīdas are in the style of the great Persian poets of the Ghaznavid and Seljuq periods, such as Farrukhī, Anvarī, Khāqānī and Zahīr, who served as models for fledgling court poets right down to the nineteenth century. These odes are highly wrought poems that were written for ceremonial occasions and festivals such as the Iranian new year (naurūz) which was celebrated at Indian courts, and the Islamic Id al-Fitr and Id al-Azhā. Poems in this genre granted the poet an opportunity to advertise his patron’s virtues while at the same time allowing him to comment upon the relationship between himself and his patron, and between himself and the poets of the past. As Khusrau tells one patron in a qasīda:

  Even though I am the nightingale of words in the world’s rose garden,

  I flit about in this garden on the branch of your fortune.

  Don’t forget me where your kindness goes hunting,

  for crows and ravens eat the leftovers of royal falcons.

  Such poems employed an elevated and dignified diction and a wide and often learned vocabulary. Though clearly hyperbolic, they were often infused with genuine feeling, for the bond between patron and poet was sometimes very strong and, as mentioned before, poets at court often had the additional role of boon companion. Khusrau also wrote many qasīdas in praise of Nizāmuddīn Auliyā that are similarly solemn in tone but which draw on the mystical register of language. Poets normally used a highly metaphorical language to describe their patrons in panegyric poems.

  But Khusrau is better known today for his lyric poetry, in the form of the ghazal, which had become the most popular literary genre in Persian by the time he was writing; its diction is simpler than that of the qasīda and its main subject matter, love, more universal in its appeal. The setting of a ghazal could be either the ruler’s court or the Sufi cloister, and the object of desire either an earthly beauty or the sacred divine. The difficulty of categorizing Khusrau’s ghazals as either amatory or mystical is all the greater since he was active in courtly and Sufi circles at once, and the ethos of courtly love that informs his poetry can conventionally be read as an allegory of longing for the divine. This ethos will be recognizable to readers who are familiar with the European sonnet tradition: the lowly lover humbles himself as a slave, an exile, or a beggar before a beautiful, unattainable, and cruel beloved; union and fulfilment can only be imagined and suffering is inevitably the lover’s lot. In the ghazal, this love generally has a homoerotic dimension, since the beloved is often a young boy, a literary convention in early Persian ghazals which derived their context from courtly banquets where pageboys and sāqīs were present, or Sufi circles where handsome, beardless boys (shāhids) were considered a witness to divine beauty. The device of using a female voice to express longing for a lover is characteristic of Indic poetry and Khusrau used it expertly in his Hindavi poems, where grammatical gender allows the poet to adopt personas of either sex. In contrast, this remains a moot point in his ghazals since Persian has no grammatical gender and the beauty of the work, to some extent, relies on sexual ambiguity. To suggest this ambiguity in English, with its mandatory distinction between ‘he’ and ‘she’, we have used both pronouns to represent the poet’s object of desire, the elusive other without whom the lover cannot be complete.

  Although the poet in the ghazal usually speaks in the voice of the yearning, heart-sick lover, this voice is at times tinged with teasing and even lascivious banter (poems 23 or 37), or even outright reproach (poem 43). The lover on occasion even imagines or remembers rare moments of fulfilment (poems 5 or 14). On still other occasions, we hear the voice of an older man who chides himself for still being addicted to wine and boys, symbols for earthly snares that distract one from the mystical path (poems 8 or 35). This voice is closely related to the homiletic voice of the sage, who warns against the snares, deceptions, and unfaithfulness of the world or earthly existence (poems 22 or 25). Our selection of ghazals contains representatives of all these voices.

  Another feature of the ghazal that is regularly found in Amīr Khusrau’s poems is the Sufi habit of taking an irreverent attitude towards the outer trappings of Islam, which results in blasphemous utterances. Only the poet/lover who thwarts the rules of society and religion and in the process becomes an infidel, i.e., Hindu in the Indian context and Christian or Zoroastrian in the Iranian, is able to traverse the true path of love. By drinking wine and dallying with young lads, he breaks societal and religious norms, as represented by narrow-minded practitioners of religion such as the muezzin and holy warrior (ghdāzī). The fact that many of his poems have Sufi overtones does not necessarily mean that all his lyrics should be viewed as mystical. Sufi terminology and imagery had permeated lyric poetry to such an extent that sharp distinctions between secular and mystical poetry were no longer valid. As a literary craftsman, Amīr Khusrau was well aware of his predecessors and consciously imitated them. His main predecessors in the genre of the ghazal were Sa‘dī, who did not write mystical ghazals, and ‘Irāqī, whose verses are entirely Sufi. Khusrau’s own poems draw from both types. The fact that some of his poems are part of the practice of Sufism today does render them mystical in the context of performance, but this may not have been their original context or intent. Precisely what criteria played a role in a poem being performed in a mystical setting is not an easy question to answer. Basically any ghazal of Amīr Khusrau can be considered mystical depending on the context in which it is sung. The poet may consciously have written some ghazals exclusively for use in Sufi gatherings at Nizāmuddīn Auliyā’s khānaqāh (for example, poems 18 or 30), and others that were meant for a courtly audience; but many were bound to be used in both contexts based on their appeal for contemporary audiences.

  The popularity of Urdu ghazals today among South Asians around the world provides an example of the viability and universal appeal of this poetic form from the time of Khusrau. Although the Urdu ghazal ultimately has roots in the Indo-Persian lyric of a few centuries after Khusrau, he played a central part in popularizing the form and establishing its aesthetic parameters. Khusrau sometimes combined in a subtle manner the Persian and Indic poetic traditions with which he was familiar. The first poem in his dīvān is one of the most brilliant and popular of his ghazals. The poem is reminiscent of a genre of Indian folk song where the beloved pines for her lover in the monsoon season, but here the poet has cleverly included the cloud as a participant in the drama of the lovers. Although the speaker/lover laments his imminent separation from the cruel beloved, he ends by declaring that the beloved, and not he, will be harmed by this separation.

  A look at the Persian text of the opening line of this poem suggests some of the daunting difficulties faced in recreating Persian poetry and
, in particular, the notoriously ‘untranslatable’ ghazal in English:

  abr mībārad u man mīshavam az yār judā

  chun kunam dil bi-chunīn rūz zi dildār judā.

  This verse exhibits the rhyme between half-verses—between ‘yār’ and ‘dildār—that characterizes the opening line of any ghazal; the following verses are similarly divided into two, but rhyme only at the end of the second half of the verse. A refrain-word (radīf)–‘judā’–follows each rhyming syllable. Due to differences in phonetic structure, English is rhyme-poor compared to Persian, and maintaining the mono-rhyme over all nine verses in English would inevitably sound forced and lead to unacceptable distortions in meaning and imagery. We have, however, tried to maintain the effect of the refrain by using words with the syllable ‘part’ in each stanza of our translation. Ranging between twenty-four and thirty-two syllables, the Persian ghazal verse is far longer than any conventional verse form in English, and each Persian verse is in many ways a self-standing unit in syntax and imagery. Often only a few verses from a poem would be selected for inclusion in a musical performance or anthology. In English poetics, the closest analogy to the Persian verse seems to be the stanza, and our translations frequently use short stanzas to represent each verse. Syntax and imagery can unfold in many different ways within the long Persian verse, and in the translation of poem 1, the stanzas have been shaped to reflect this. (In other ghazals, stanzas of two to five lines are used consistently throughout a poem.) Since each verse is self-contained in grammar and imagery, the connections between verses is often much looser than we are accustomed to in other literary forms. But in poem 1, as in many of Khusrau’s other ghazals, there is clear coherence of mood, setting, imagery, and tone throughout the poem. To convey the development of thought and mood between verses and over the course of the poem, we have sometimes combined consecutive verses into stanzas. Read together, the variety in the visual, metrical, and conceptual segmentation of the poems is meant to represent the aural variety of the varying rhymes and metres in Persian.

  Poem 1 also contains two conventional images that Khusrau returns to repeatedly and with particular intensity. First is the image complex of tears, weeping, and the gaze: ‘Cracks breach my eyes weeping for you.’ In the most concrete, physical terms, this image refers to the blood-red capillaries that appear in people’s eyes when they cry. But as the reiterated image of ‘bloody tears’ suggests, this physical phenomenon takes on a deep symbolic resonance. Tears are imagined to well up from the heart and, like the poem itself, to be the outward sign of the speaker’s inner turmoil and suffering. Conversely, the reflected image of the beloved in the speaker’s eyes is a visible mark of the impact which the beloved has on the poet’s mind and emotions. The gaze of the beloved is a weapon, an arrow that pierces the core of the lover’s being. Second is the image of the beloved’s hair. As in poem 1, the tresses of the beloved are often likened to chains. Their curling strands and ‘locks’ represent the dark, captivating force of desire which threatens to dismember the speaker’s personality and plunge him into a swirling abyss of passion. A strand of hair is also used to cast black-magic spells of possession. These two images are the subject of an almost endless play of metaphor and trope in Khusrau’s poetry, and embody the speaker’s psychology of yearning.

  In the centuries after he lived, selections of Amīr Khusrau’s lyrics were included in innumerable anthologies, engraved on objects, or used to display the art of calligraphy, indicating not only his prodigious output but also the universality of his appeal. Khusrau’s ghazals have had a great impact on later poets, including the master poet of this genre—Hāfiz of Shiraz. The ghazals also have a continuous oral tradition to this day, especially in Central and South Asia, even though Persian is no longer widely understood in the latter region. Even in the fifteenth century it was difficult to collect all the writings of Khusrau. From the vast corpus of Persian ghazals authored by Amīr Khusrau—1,981 in the Lahore edition used in our translations—the few that are performed today probably have long been popular in an oral setting. It is also to be expected that in an environment where orality was the privileged form of disseminating a text, there would be some degree of misattribution or confusion, as in the case of this couplet:

  Every community has its own path of religion and place of prayer.

  I have set my qibla in the direction of the one with his cap awry.

  In a mystical interpretation of this verse, the young boy with his cap awry is read as the divine beloved or his earthly representative. The context of this verse is thought to be an exchange between Nizāmuddīn Auliyā, to whom the first line is attributed, and Khusrau, who replied with the second. However, the entire ghazal is found in Hasan’s dīvān. The misattribution persists because these three individuals were so inextricably linked, a blurring of identities that only increased over time. The Mughal emperor Jahāngīr (r. 1605–16) narrates in his memoirs, Tuzūk-i Jahdngīrī, that during a qawwālī session at court when this line was being performed, a courtier passed away while trying to explain the subtleties of its meaning!

  By Amīr Khusrau’s time, the works of several major poets were coming to be recognized as the core of the classical Persian canon. Sa‘dī has already been mentioned as a master poet of love lyrics and didactic literature who was greatly admired by all Persian poets, but two other poets may have had an even greater impact on the tradition: Firdausī with his Iranian epic, Shāhnāma (Book of Kings), and Nizāmī with his quintet (khamsa) of narrative poems. Both poets composed heroic or romantic tales in the masnavī form (a narrative or discursive poem in rhymed couplets) whose topics were morality, kingship and courtly love. They had a universal appeal in the Persianate world, and the Shāhnāma, dealing with pre-Islamic kings of Iran, was especially popular in royal courts because it espoused ideals of kingship and ethical behaviour. Nizāmī’s influence on poets who wrote long narrative tales was just as extensive, and innumerable poets imitated his khamsa over the centuries. If Firdausī’s Shāhnāma was a source of political legitimacy, Nizāmī’s khamsa was one of cultural prestige. The five works in the khamsa contained all the elements that were part and parcel of the Persian literary universe: Iranian and Arab romantic legends, the pre-Islamic Greek and Iranian historical past, didactic and philosophical discourses, all of which came to be accepted as the epitome of the civilization’s cultural achievement.

  Amīr Khusrau was the first poet who set out to match Nizāmī’s achievements, not to outdo him but rather to measure up to his standard by producing works that would be more relevant to his own milieu. No one has surpassed Nizāmī in the beauty of his language and the subtlety of his thoughts. Khusrau’s strengths lay in his fast-paced narrative and light-heartedness, and his fondness for wordplay and double entendre. In these poems, he was able to express himself fully as a storyteller. He himself compares his accomplishments to the great master at the conclusion of the Hasht bihisht:

  If honey is useful,

  vinegar too has its buyers.

  If a pearl is expensive,

  amber too has value.

  This work is without blemish.

  It has glitter, if not gold.

  Elsewhere, with regard to the material he has to work with and knowing that he will be compared to his great predecessor, Khusrau playfully complains that Nizāmī had consumed the fine wine from the goblet of the subject matter of the stories, and left the dregs for the other poets.

  As part of his quintet, Amīr Khusrau wrote his versions of Nizāmī’s two most popular romances, Shīrīn and Khusrau, and Majnūn and Lailā. He inverted the order of the names of the lovers in the titles to distinguish his versions from those of Nizāmī, but did not change the basic plots of the stories, although there are a few new elements in the order of events and the portrayal of characters. The first story is set in the pre-Islamic Iranian past but is more legend than historical truth. It revolves around Shīrīn, an Armenian princess, and Khusrau Parvīz (r. 590–628), the
namesake of our poet and a ruler of Iran belonging to the Sassanian dynasty. The two fall in love early on but are separated for a long time by Khusrau Parvīz’s involvement in military campaigns and his short-lived marriages to Maryam, the Byzantine princess, and Shikar, a slave girl. In the meantime, Shīrīn becomes the object of an ardent love by Farhād, a sculptor and, in this version, the son of the emperor of China. Both Khusrau and Shīrīn have their respective rivals murdered and marry, but their union does not last long because Khusrau is killed by his son Shīrūya, who wants to marry his stepmother Shīrīn. Ultimately, Shīrīn commits suicide over Khusrau’s grave on her wedding day.