Hazaron Khawaishen Aisi Read online

  In modern times, the ghazal found its larger acceptance in the English-speaking world. Adrienne Rich, John Hollander and Robert Bly in America, Jim Harrison, John Thompson, Phyllis Webb and Douglas Barbour in Canada, and Judith Wright in Australia are just a few of the many poets who brought the ghazal to new literary spaces, as they experimented with this form and made way for many others to emulate. On being introduced to Ghalib during the death centenary year of the poet in 1969, and on translating his ghazals, 4 Adrienne Rich developed an instant liking for the form. Later, she wrote her ghazals independently and published seventeen of them in Leaflets as ‘Homage to Ghalib’ and, subsequently, nine more in The Will to Change as ‘The Blue Ghazals’. In her Collected Early Poems, she acknowledged her debt and wrote: ‘My ghazals are personal and public, American and Twentieth Century; but they owe much to the presence of Ghalib in my mind: a poet, self-educated and profoundly learned who owned no property and borrowed his books, writing in an age of political and cultural break-up.’ 5 Similarly, the ghazal caught the imagination of John Hollander to the extent that he defined its poetics and wrote a ghazal on the ghazal, a kind of definitional piece, following the strict discipline of the form with its qaafia and radeef falling in place.

  At a remove from Rich and Hollander, we have quite a few Canadian poets making their forays into this form. Jim Harrison, who published sixty-five of his ghazals in Outlyer and Ghazals, was aware of the Arabic and Persian ghazal tradition and knew of Rich’s excursion into this form. He is one of the more prominent poets to discover the ghazal and find space for all that he considered crude and queer to write about, along with all that was normal and natural. ‘After several years spent with longer forms,’ he said, ‘I’ve tried to regain some of the spontaneity of the dance, the song unencumbered by any philosophical apparatus, faithful only to its own music.’ 6 Another poet, John Thompson, in his carefully crafted ghazals in Still Jack also valued the freedom that the ghazal afforded, but he did not mistake it for surrealist or free association poems violating a sense of order. Instead, he valued them as ‘poems of careful construction performing controlled progression’ 7 with no deliberate design upon the reader. He found in it a way to test the limits of imagination that might lose the track of reason, if left unguarded. Yet another variation in the writing of the ghazal may be seen in Phyllis Webb’s Sunday Water and Water and Light. She evolved the concept of ‘anti ghazal’ and found in them a space for ‘the particular, the local, the dialectical and private’. 8 She degendered the form and resorted to a subversive way by de-valorizing the female figure, which the ghazal had been traditionally valorizing ever since its inception. A much more radical position was adopted by Douglas Barbour in his ghazals included in Visible Visions and Breathtakes. He chose to try the limits of sound and form by modulating breath as a mode of expression and bringing it closer to performance poetry. With this entirely new mode of apprehension, Barbour added yet another facet to the fast emerging body of the North American ghazal. ‘Indeed, a very particular sound, for example, caught my imagination,’ he said, ‘when I thought of ghazals, the sound of breathing itself. There was a form and there was a breath. And there appeared what I call the breath ghazals.’ 9 Compositions by Douglas Lochhead in Tiger in the Skull and Max Plater in Rain on the Mountains may be read alongside the compositions by the North American poets.

  The prominent Australian poet, Judith Wright, who began as a traditionalist, turned quite experimental towards the end of her career when she too experimented with this form in a section, ‘Shadow of Fire’, containing ghazals in her collection, Phantom Dwelling. In her departure from the traditional ghazal, she maintained thematic continuity in her couplets and gave her compositions a title. Like all other poets, she too executed a variety of experiences in her couplets like the experiences of warfare, birth, growth, decay, contemporary life and the inevitability of the human fate. In the hands of all the poets mentioned above, as also many others who practised this form, it may be marked that they treated the ghazal with great respect and curiosity. It was an immigrant form for them in which they saw the prospects of simulation and assimilation to enrich their own poetic capital. They saw in it the possibility of exploring newer areas of experience that could be expressed in manners hitherto unknown in the European tradition.

  Carrying the argument further, I should like to assert that the ghazal in English acquired its definite face and form with Agha Shahid Ali who wrote his own ghazals, but more importantly, he created a condition for the poets to write their ghazals, observing its formal requirements. He despaired over the way poets treated this form as a way of writing free verse, which he thought was a contradiction in terms if one wanted to write a real ghazal. Considering their efforts ‘amusing’, 10 he brought them face to face with the rigorous demands that the ghazal made. Compositions by Daine Ackerman, John Hollander, W.S. Merwin, William Matthews, Paul Muldoon, Maxine Kumin, Keki N. Daruwalla, to name just a few, included in his Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English, amply show how far the ghazal had moved towards meeting the rigorous demands of the form after Ali’s intervention.

  Considering the above examples, it may be asserted that the ghazal in English has been approached and appropriated variously. Thus, it could not be the same as it is in the Arabic, Persian and Urdu languages. It could only be a different ghazal. At best, it could be a declaration of a different creative stance, a different poetics and a different way of broadening the frontiers of literary exchanges. It donned many a garb as it travelled in many directions, was played by many hands and grew in many ways. In the process, it was identified as ‘tercet ghazal’ by Robert Bly, ‘bastard ghazal’ by John Thompson, ‘blue ghazal’ by Adrienne Rich, ‘breath ghazal’ by Douglas Barbour and ‘anti-ghazal’ by Phyllis Webb.

  Text

  Currently spelt as ‘ghazal’, this poetic form of Arabic origin has been variously written in various locations as ‘ghazel’, ‘ghasel’, ‘gazal’, ‘gazalo’, ‘gasel’, ‘gacelo’ and ‘ghuzzle’. Even though its formal features have remained the same, there have been variations in the style of its composition, as it has gone beyond the spatial confines of Arabia and Persia in particular, and the East in general. Before considering its nature as a literary form, let us consider its essential features. The ghazal is a collection of at least four independent shers, it is written in a single metrical frame and it uses the same rhyme scheme preceding a refrain throughout the composition. The first sher, called matla, has a given scheme of rhyme and refrain in both the lines but the subsequent shers do not have the rhyming phrase in the first line. An example of two shers from Ghalib should make the point:

  Dil-e naadaan tujhe huaa kyaa hai

  Aakhir is dard ki dawaa kyaa hai

  Hum ko un se wafaa ki hai ummeed

  Jo naheen jaante wafaa kyaa hai

  The rhyming words, huaa, dawaa, wafaa are called qaafia and the recurrent phrase, kyaa hai, kyaa hai, kyaa hai is called radeef. The last sher, called maqta, often bears the signature of the poet in any of the two lines, where he either addresses himself or speaks to others through a persona to impart the ghazal a sense of completion. The architectonics of each sher is interesting. Even though both the lines are thematically interconnected, the first line brings about a sense of pause with the last phrase and it makes way for the following line, even without an enjambment or a break of thought. As the first line extends into another and brings about a sense of completion, sometimes it also springs a surprise on the reader and holds him in pleasant awe. Composed as thematically independent shers, the ghazal does not have the unity of a regular poem, yet it shows an organic development and internal unity of its own. There are, however, instances where the shers are thematically interrelated and one sher leads to another to complete an idea. Since the given metrical design does not allow an extra syllable, the poet is put to severe test in order to express himself within the available space of a sher. As such, the beauty of the sher, as also of the entire gh
azal, lies in precision and in the art of achieving that precision. To achieve this quality, the poet can only work through understatement and concrete images, mixed metaphors and implicated symbols. Further, the remarkable worth of the ghazal lies in creating a condition of music and configuring a visual structure with all the shers having the same line length. As such, a ghazal is a musical unit on the one hand, and a hieroglyphic representation on the other. It knows no beginning, no middle and no end. It is a literary representation that has not turned archaic in spite of its long history. It has matured with cross-breeding between cultures and languages, and forms and genres. It is a non-finishing project, an ever-moving kaleidoscope of poetic composition which has grown with the passage of time, sher after sher, ghazal after ghazal.

  Ever since its origins in Arabia, the ghazal has been assiduously engaging with the ideas and ideals of love in all their romantic and divine manifestations. It has been a site of socio-political concerns and metaphysical-cum-mystical engagements, even as it has afforded open space to the mundane and the ordinary. During its development in the Arabic-Persian tradition, it has acquired its own features of reference and has institutionalized the traditional concepts of union and separation, ecclesia and monastery, the censor and the guard of faith, the beloved and the idol, the lover and the rival, the messenger and the confidante, the tavern and the cup bearer, and so on. Apart from enjoying a place of pride in the literary domain, the ghazal has also thrived in social spaces. The secular nature of the ghazal, its dissemination through the popular press, film songs, the schools of singing and the long, late-night sessions of mushairas, or poetry readings, where it is both recited and sung, have helped it reach a cross-section of the masses. This argument is well supported by the fact that individual shers of well-known ghazals have acquired epigrammatic value and have become a part of the common memory of both the ordinary and the educated people. These shers have remarkably supplemented their serious discourses and ordinary exchanges of ideas. To put it simply, if there is a situation, there is a sher to score a point in argument, or to earn the appreciation of the addressee. The ghazal has thus been a harbinger of a culture where the poets have emerged as social icons and their readers and listeners as figures of cultivated manners.

  Even though the ghazal has been immensely popular with poets, readers and a variety of audiences, it has also been subjected to severe criticism. There is a view that it offends healthy minds as it thrives on unbridled imagination and creates only disunities. It has, therefore, been asserted that it is a semi-savage form of poetry where the poet roams in the realms of fancy and takes the reader far away from reality. Others, who hold the opposite view, defend it exactly for what the purists choose to malign it. They argue that the worth of the ghazal lies greatly in its disunities and its free associations of ideas. They assert, therefore, that each sher of a ghazal is a climax unto itself and all the shers put together emerge as a series of climaxes. They argue that each sher is an independent unit of a poem, and that each sher tests the imaginative virility of both the poet and the reader. The fact that the best of the poets have invariably expressed themselves through the medium of ghazal, and that it is in the ghazals that the biggest capital of Urdu poetry lies invested, goes to establish its unquestionable significance. Moving beyond this controversy, it is important to note that apart from representing the broader human condition, the ghazal represents a certain cultural condition. It reflects the basic human urge to locate the truth within the truth and it connects with the reader or listener more intimately than any other literary form. The history of its origin and development in various sites of the East and the West bear it out quite amply.

  Context

  The ghazal is a literary curiosity. Its contexts are many and they are traceable broadly in the domains of language, cultural historiography, socio-political history, comparative studies and critical reception. It is, first, in the context of language that the ghazal must be assessed. Considering that the great tradition of this inimitable literary form is to be found primarily in the Eastern languages, more especially Arabic, Persian and Urdu, one may safely assert that it has something to do with the genius of these languages. Further, it is also concerned with the literary sensibility that these languages have nourished over the ages. This sensibility has called for cultivating and pruning a certain form and employing certain literary devices that are special to these languages, as are the images and metaphors, symbols and myths, wit and humour that they execute. Ultimately, they together constitute a literary culture and identify a people for their literary taste and heritage. With the passage that a language follows in the course of its development, it creates literary texts of varying degrees. In this process, a language sustains its heritage and reaches out to newer configurations. Like every other language, the Urdu language has also followed this principle. In spite of its unsteady survival in its own habitats and the complex linguistic politicking in India, the Urdu language has shown remarkable perseverance. It has negotiated with all the odds and lived on with its identified readership as an enduring language. The ghazal, being the most popular of all the literary forms in the Urdu language, offers a curious case study with relation to language, linguistic mapping and the politics of literary production and consumption.

  The second context of the ghazal lies in cultural historiography. This may be done in terms of locating the individual poets, periods and poetic practices in a cultural matrix. The ghazal as a cultural sign may be assessed through its particular form and its various genres like the romantic, the mystical, the philosophical, the ironic, the mundane and the innumerable others. All cultural histories written in terms of chronology and ages, individual icons and art forms, ideological preoccupations and stylistic formations, beliefs and practices, must take the literary life of a language and their people into consideration for a broader understanding of a larger cultural condition. The ghazal, being the most primordial way of poetic expression, holds a distinct position in this scheme of reading. Considered in this perspective, it is likely to authenticate the long-preserved reputation of this art-form in a larger framework of cultural iconography. A cultural mapping of art-forms, with the ghazal as an example, may help determine its value even among those who are not directly exposed to this language but have come to enjoy its riches only through popular cultural agencies like the musical soirees where a ghazal is sung, or a mushaira where it is heartily recited, or a public platform where it is creatively performed.

  The socio-political histories of the lands and the people where the ghazal found its acceptance should be the third context for our consideration. Apart from meeting several other aims, history in its simplest term also catalogues people as addresses, receivers or beneficiaries of political dispensations and socio-cultural boons and banes. Literature, in turn, and to be specific, the ghazal in its own way, has chronicled them all. It has created its own metaphors of acceptance or denial. While it has reiterated its stock metaphors, it has also created metaphors of difference by which it has acquired its resilience. Since the socio-political context is an important mainstay of modern knowledge, one of its sources lies in the life of the ghazal as much as it lies in the life of the people it has addressed. The ghazal in its socio-political context is a forte not much explored, although so worth exploring, in terms of the identity of people, places and their essential predicaments.

  The fourth context of the ghazal lies in comparative studies. We may discover its worth in comparison with other literary forms and genres and their attendant advantages and compulsions. This makes way further for studying the phenomenon of impact and response at the levels of form, genre, language and style. It provides a way to study the texts and tropes, cultural milieu, and prescriptive or oppositional discourses at multiple levels. This might happen within a homogenous or even an alien cultural site. Living literary forms are not sacrosanct and if they remain so, they grow effete in their splendid isolation, which the ghazal has denied throughout its history of
birth, growth and development. It has been remarkable for broadening its frontiers by incorporating a range of literary and related references. The comparative studies that call for the determination of a text in relation to other languages, literary cultures, residual, dominant or emergent fields of reference, thematic and generic intermixing, inherited and invented interplay of texts, could locate the ghazal in a larger framework of reading. It could, thus, impart the ghazal its larger relevance and demonstrate, in turn, its greater meaningfulness.

  The fifth context of the ghazal may be found in its critical reception. It may be read in semiotic terms in relation to archetypes, signs and symbols. This would afford an understanding of the basic references that a text creates around itself. The possible intents of the ghazal may also be explored in psychoanalytical terms to which it lends itself quite easily with reference to the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. Yet another interesting way of reading the ghazal could be found in the feminist method by examining the elements of jouissance, patriarchy and phallocentrism, or even the queer practice of referring to the issues related to sexuality, gender and identity. A literary text in our times that has already lent itself for adoption in larger geographical and linguistic areas may be read quite appropriately in a post-colonial way with reference to its hybridity, alterity and difference. It would be rewarding, in this manner, to examine it as a liberal form of art that is historically and culturally situated. Politics of interpretations and dissident readings in relation to cultural materialism, as also the phenomenological reduction, being the hallmarks of our current reading practices, may bring the ghazal to a newer field of interpretation. The ghazal is multifaceted in its merits and it rightly qualifies for multifaceted readings.