Hazaron Khawaishen Aisi Read online

  HAZAARON

  KHWAHISHEIN AISI

  THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF URDU GHAZALS

  Selected, Edited and Translated by

  ANISUR RAHMAN

  Dedicated to

  Rekhta Foundation,

  Sanjiv Saraf and his love for Urdu ghazal

  Ishq se tabeeyat ne zeest ka mazaa paayaa

  Dard ki dawaa paayi dard-e be-dawaa paayaa

  ASADULLAH KHAN GHALIB

  Love brought me the joys of life for sure

  A cure for pain, a pain of no cure

  Translation: ANISUR RAHMAN

  Hazaaron khwahishein aisi ke har khwahish pe dam nikle

  Bahut nikle mere armaan lekin phir bhi kam nikle

  ASADULLAH KHAN GHALIB

  Desires in thousands I had, for each I would die

  With many I had luck, for many I would sigh

  Translation: ANISUR RAHMAN

  CONTENTS

  Foreword: Tabish Khair

  Preface: Ghazal: Pretext, Text, Context

  Metaphysical Beginnings

  1. Mohammad Quli Qutub Shah

  2. Vali Deccani

  3. Mirza Mazhar Jan-e Janan

  Towards Enlightenment

  4. Mirza Mohammad Rafi Sauda

  5. Siraj Aurangabadi

  6. Khwaja Mir Dard

  7. Mir Taqi Mir

  Romance of Realism

  8. Sheikh Ghulam Ali Hamadani Mus’hafi

  9. Syed Inshaallah Khan Insha

  10. Bahadur Shah Zafar

  11. Sheikh Imam Bakhsh Nasikh

  12. Khwaja Haider Ali Atish

  13. Asadullah Khan Ghalib

  14. Momin Khan Momin

  15. Nawab Mirza Khan Dagh Dehlavi

  Advent of Modernism

  16. Khwaja Altaf Hussain Hali

  17. Shad Azimabadi

  18. Hasrat Mohani

  19. Mohammad Iqba

  20. Fani Badayuni

  21. Asghar Gondawi

  22. Yaas Yagana Changezi

  23. Jigar Moradabadi

  24. Firaq Gorakhpuri

  Progressive Poetics

  25. Asrarul Haq Majaz

  26. Faiz Ahmad Faiz

  27. Moin Ahsan Jazbi

  28. Jan Nisar Akhtar

  29. Majrooh Sultanpuri

  New Poetics

  30. Majeed Amjad

  31. Ada Jafarey

  32. Nasir Kazmi

  33. Ibn-e Insha

  34. Khalilur Rehman Azmi

  35. Hasan Naim

  36. Mohammad Alvi

  37. Munir Niazi

  38. Zeb Ghauri

  39. Jaun Eliya

  40. Ahmad Faraz

  41. Bani

  42. Zafar Iqbal

  43. Ahmad Mushtaq

  44. Mazhar Imam

  45. Shakeb Jalali

  46. Zehra Nigah

  47. Bashir Badr

  48. Adil Mansuri

  49. Shahryar

  50. Saqi Farooqi

  51. Nida Fazli

  52. Irfan Siddiqui

  53. Kishwar Naheed

  54. Sultan Akhtar

  55. Iftikhar Arif

  Beyond New Poetics

  56. Sarwat Hussain

  57. Farhat Ehsas

  58. Ashufta Changezi

  59. Jamal Ehsani

  60. Perveen Shakir

  61. Ishrat Afreen

  62. Asad Badayuni

  63. Khursheed Akbar

  64. Zeeshan Sahil

  65. Aftab Husain

  Notes

  Translator’s Note

  Shukriya

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Copyright

  FOREWORD

  TABISH KHAIR

  Originating probably as love poetry in Arabi 1 and transmuting vigorously across Asia, Africa, Mediterranean Europe and parts of eastern Europe over more than a millennium, 2 the ‘ghazal’ has been used in Urdu not just to pen love verse but also many kinds of religious, metaphysical, philosophical, realist and political poetry. Anisur Rahman’s introduction, notes and careful sample of Urdu ghazals from across five centuries illustrate the background, richness and malleability of this genre so well that I have no need to cover that ground. But the true extent of Rahman’s achievement in this anthology cannot be understood without reference to some matters which are often not discussed even by connoisseurs of the ghazal form—and more so in English where, both as translation and as borrowed genre, the ghazal has been growing in strength in recent decades. 3

  Part of the problem is the nature of the two languages—Urdu and English. For instance, like many other languages, Urdu is not policed by punctuation as much as English. Traditionally, punctuation marks were conspicuous by their absence in Urdu and even today, borrowed from the inevitable Latin regime, they appear rather sparsely. Hence, Urdu remains a language of inflexion and nuance, not rigid punctuation.

  Any bid to translate Urdu ghazals into English that does not take into account this crucial difference is bound to be limited—and, unfortunately, even some excellent translation efforts of the past have tried to ‘correctly’ punctuate the English versions in ways that are bound to reduce the flexibility of their Urdu originals. One way to understand this is to remember that in the absence of punctuation marks, the meanings of a phrase of the ghazal, especially the repeated rhyme/refrain, can be nuanced. For instance, take this ‘sher’ by Ghalib (who is usually very good at playing with intonations and nuances):

  Na tha kuchh to khuda tha kuchh na hota to khuda hota

  Duboya mujhko hone ne na hota main to kya hota

  Translated into punctuated English, this would read more or less like this:

  When there was nothing, there was God; had there been nothing, there would’ve been God.

  I was destroyed (sunk) by coming into being; had I not been, what would have been?

  Unfortunately, even if we forget the negation (na) this sher builds on and starts with, and similar matters, the punctuation of the lines in English reduce the nuances of the sher. In the original, Ghalib is not just saying (in the second line) that we are destroyed because we come into being, or lamenting the fact of his personal unimportance in a world of such magnitude. These are the meanings that are easily excavated in punctuated English. But in unpunctuated Urdu, Ghalib is making other and, to my mind, deeper points, which is also in keeping with his philosophy: he is suggesting that nothing could have existed if he had not come into being. This he does in at least two ways again. One of them is the tongue-in-cheek poetic persona of grandiosity that he often assumes, as does, for that matter, Shakespeare in his sonnets. The other one is the greater metaphysical point that for us, as conscious beings, the universe exists only because we exist. In that sense, ‘what (kya) could have existed if I had not come into being?’

  The tyranny of punctuation cannot be totally resisted in an English translation, but Rahman makes an interesting and admirable attempt to reduce it. He needs to be praised for taking the risk.

  Then, of course, there are simpler matters, such as the tendency of many translators to turn the ghazal’s ‘sher’ into a rhyming (or unrhymed) couplet. This comes naturally to literary writers of English, a language whose alleys, if not roads, are cobbled with couplets, but it does a cardinal disservice to the ghazal form: the sher is not a collection of couplets that rhyme aa, bb, cc, and so on. Instead, structurally, it is a poem with one rhyme/refrain repeated: aa, ba, ca, da…, and at its best this repetition both involves the audience and challenges/surprises it. Rahman has paid attention to such matters and managed to suggest the beauty and power of the original ghazals despite the pressures of contextualized translation.

  Not just in English bu
t also in neighboring and overlapping linguistic-cultural traditions, such as those of Hindi and Bangla, Urdu ghazals and their writers have often enjoyed popularity at the price of being reduced to loving caricature. The common image of the Urdu poet—almost always a writer of ghazals—can be described with three ‘L’ words: lover, loser, lamenter. Anita Desai’s major novel, In Custody, provides a version of this stereotype in English. Actually, it often seems that if you write in English about Urdu poets, you cannot escape this stereotype—and one can find it in Bangla, Hindi and probably other Indian fiction too, accessed from Orientalist sources.

  There is an element of truth in this stereotype: Urdu poets, especially writers of the ghazal, have sometimes tried to cultivate the Triple L persona. But the element of truth is only valid to the extent that it would be valid to see English Romantic poets as unpractical nature-lovers lolling around in meadows sniffing roses and daffodils! The ghazal tradition is myriad and varied: the Triple L cult leaves most of it obscure. It implicitly or explicitly leaves out the philosophical, political, realist, ‘sacrilegious’ and plainly irascible bits! Even authors like Asadullah Khan Ghalib, who cultivated the Triple L persona at times, also went beyond it: at his best, Ghalib’s ghazals are philosophical and political in ways which are sometimes difficult for scholars to acknowledge even today. Some of Ghalib’s shers would get his head chopped off in certain vocal circles today, and he was writing well before the early twentieth century, when the rise of poets like Mohammad Iqbal and Faiz Ahmad Faiz infused obviously political and radical commentary into the ghazal tradition.

  It is a feature of this anthology that it conveys the malleability (in form and content) of the Urdu ghazal to the reader. That alone makes it a distinctive contribution and one of the reasons why it should be read by anyone interested in poetry.

  The ghazal form has seeped out of Urdu and now exists independently in probably all major languages of north, west, east and central India, with its latest addition being snooty English. The reasons for this are various, but one of them is definitely the fact that Urdu ghazals have embraced the Indian subcontinent right from the start and continue to do so. This is worth remembering, especially today.

  ‘We have broken a mosque and made a temple,’ Mahesh Patel, a Hindutva supporter, told a news reporter in the summer of 2002. He added, ‘We used hammers. Muslims should not live in India. They should go to Pakistan.’ But the building that was torn down by Hindutva fanatics on 1 March 2002, one of many demolished during the infamous anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat, had not been a mosque. It was the tomb of a seventeenth-century poet, sometimes called the Chaucer of Urdu poetry. 4 Vali Mohammed Vali, also known as Vali Gujarati and Vali Deccani, had died in Ahmedabad in 1707 and the tomb had been built for him by the residents of the city. It must have been a tribute to his popular poetry as well as recognition of his love for the region of Gujarat, which he had praised in his ghazals.

  Deccani is one of the poets included here. His grave might have been destroyed, but his poetry lives on—as does the ghazal form in which he wrote about his places and times. Rahman’s anthology enables the reader to dip into and sample this rich world of letters, imagination, emotion and thought. To the best of my knowledge, it is the first anthology that offers a comprehensive introduction to the entire history of Urdu ghazals in English, something made possible by the high level of Rahman’s scholarship and his felicity in both Urdu and English.

  PREFACE 1

  Ghazal: Pretext, Text, Context

  Pretext

  ‘Ghazal’ is an Arabic word which literally means ‘talking to the lady love’. It is also a literary form, a quintessential mode of poetic expression that has passed through a unique trajectory in and beyond the Orient. For more than a millennium and a half now, it has been defining and redefining itself through times as distant as the classical and the modern, and climes as dissimilar as the East and the West.

  The mid-sixth century which saw the emergence of the mu’allaqaat, or the golden odes 2 in northern Arabia, witnessed the beginnings of what subsequently came to be known as the ghazal. Written in veneration of the pre-Islamic Bedouin tribes and as paeans to their patrons, these odes, or qasidas, also narrated the romantic hankering of lovers in separation, and thereby became the staple material for the development of the ghazal in the subsequent phases of Arabic literary history. Interestingly, the ghazal did not emerge as an independent form of poetry but only as a part of a larger tradition of the golden odes. It had its origin in nasib, the erotic prelude to those odes, and was meant to be recited to an audience. True to the spirit and aesthetics of poetry designed for a community of listeners, this prelude was strategically placed at the beginning of the odes and was composed in light and musical metres. To arouse the interest of the listeners, it narrated the experiences of romantic, erotic and homoerotic love and longing for the beloved left behind. It gave the poet an audience already allured and ready now to be treated with a fare of odes on a variety of themes concerning the Bedouin life and culture.

  In the ages that followed, the ghazal acquired greater ground, both literally and metaphorically. It developed independently and found a suitable clime for itself in Persian, Turkish and other Oriental languages, before it moved out of the Orient and traversed in various directions to become a major part of larger literary traditions of different lands and languages.

  The trajectory of the ghazal is unlike the trajectory of any other literary form that has had a history of traversing beyond its spatial confines. A brief tour through the passages of this poetic form and its diverse routes would reveal both the uniqueness and the universal appeal of this form. When the ghazal moved out of the Arabian Peninsula, it found a hospitable space in medieval Spain where it was written both in the Arabic and the Hebrew languages. In yet another instance, we have the ghazal reaching out to west African languages like Hausa and Fulfulde. Even while these ghazals developed their own marks, they also kept close to the Arabic model by retaining the traditional Arabic metres and forms. It was only when the ghazal reached Persia in the middle of the eighth century that it started developing its own contours even while it did not entirely disengage from the formal patterns of the Arabic ghazals. Later, the Persian ghazal acquired its definite character when it developed its own stylistic marks in refurbishing the matla, the first sher of the ghazal, and evolving a pattern of refrains (radeef ) as the last unit of expression in the second line of each sher. It also defined the length of the ghazal from seven to fifteen shers, and made way for the poets to use their signature in maqta, the last sher of the composition.

  Abdullah Jafar Rudaki, the first canonical ghazal writer of Persia towards the end of the ninth century, was followed in chronological order by other major poets like Sanai Ghaznavi and Fariduddin Attar in the twelfth century, Sadi Shirazi and Jalaluddin Rumi in the thirteenth and Hafiz Shirazi in the fourteenth century. The Persian ghazal matured further after the classical models in the subsequent centuries but it always distinguished itself for two of its most distinctive qualities: its acute mystical preoccupations and its keen philosophical concerns. The ghazal written in Persian, the dominant literary language of central Asia and India, made remarkable impact and proved quite consequential in the development of the ghazal as an archetypal form of poetic expression in the East. Even the poets who wrote in other languages looked towards Persia for mature models. Turkey, for example, being another destination of the ghazal, offered yet another variation on the Persian ghazal. Ali Shir Navai of Afghan descent, who was supposed to be the founder of Uzbek literature, brought it closer to new linguistic habits and exposed it to the extinct Chagatai language of Turkey in the mid-fifteenth century, and Fuzuli brought the ghazal to Azerbaijani Turkish in tone and tenor at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

  Outside Arabia where it originated, and Persia where it matured, it was in India that the ghazal found its most hospitable destination. Even though the ghazal in India is sometimes traced back to the thirtee
nth century in the works of Amir Khusrau, its Urdu incarnation is rightly identified in Mohammad Quli Qutub Shah towards the latter half of the sixteenth century, and Vali Deccani in the succeeding century. Looking back, one may clearly notice that it has passed through several stages of development in form, content and language, ever since its first flowering in the Deccan and its subsequent branching out in various directions of India. While prominent literary centres like the Deccan, Delhi and Lucknow created competitive conditions for the development of the ghazal, several others spread over the length and breadth of the country championed their own features of style. All of them contributed together in constructing a larger and comprehensive tradition of ghazal writing which has kept growing ever since.

  The most remarkable feature of the ghazal in India which stands out quite prominently is that the poets of various linguistic, regional and religious affiliations joined hands to broaden its thematic and stylistic frontiers and impart it a unique resilience that has stayed with it through all the phases of literary history.

  The ghazal, as a literary form which has no other approximate form in any of the literatures, has long elicited the attention of poets writing in several Western languages. When the Orient lured Germany in the nineteenth century, the ghazal reached there with the translations of Persian works. Friedrich Schlegal, an Orientalist who studied Sanskrit, chose to make his bold experiments in this form. His contemporary, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, imitated Persian models, translated ghazals, and wrote under the Oriental influence and published his collection, West-ostliche Divan. We also have, in the same line of descent, Friedrich Rückert, another Orientalist, writing his ghazals and publishing them in Ghaselen. August Graf von Platen, a master of twelve languages, is yet another example who practised this form, adhered to the Persian form of rhythm and rhyme through his qaafia and radeef, and published his collections Ghaselen and Neue Ghaselen. In modern times, the Spanish poet Frederico Garcia Lorca wrote his ghazals, called gecelos, and included them in his last collection of poems, Divan del Tamarit, which also reflected his ever-abiding interest in Arab Andalusian culture. The appeal of the ghazal travelled in other directions as well, which is exemplified by compositions in languages as diverse as French, Italian and English. 3