12. Poetry and Morality

“The literature of a nation corresponds to its conditions,” Azad tells us. “As was Indian education and civilization, as was the taste of the kings and nobles—so too was its literature.” But above all, “everything in a country advances to the extent that it is connected with the government.” European governments know how to use literature politically: “By the force of speeches and writings they make hundreds of thousands of men change in concert from one opinion to another.” The difference between their literature and ours is “that of heaven and earth.” Still, Azad notes optimistically, “the good fortune of Urdu, and its good prospects, are enviable.” It has survived what should by rights have been its doom: “Urdu emerged from Delhi—and its lamp ought to have been extinguished with the kingship of Delhi.” However, just the opposite happened: “If you stand in the midst of India and call out, ‘What’s the language of this land?’ then you’ll hear the answer, ‘Urdu’ ” (60-61).

But Urdu is the national language of an India that has entered a bewildering new era, full of technological wonders, in which the new rulers seem to control even the forces of nature:

Now the sun is the symbol of our Queen [Victoria] of the Horizons, and it has not been permitted to stray outside the margins of her written page. The postal service and the railroads, running from Europe to the east, have confined all kinds of animals in one cage. Delhi is destroyed, Lucknow desolate. Some of their authoritative people are under the ground, some wandering helplessly from door to door. Now Lucknow is like other cities, Delhi is like other cantonments and bazaars—or rather, even worse. No city remains whose people are capable of authority over language.

Most of the elders and ustads are dead. Even the occasional survivor is “like a dying autumn leaf on a tree,” his voice unheard amidst “the clamor of committees and the drumrolls of newspapers.” Azad concludes, as usual, on a somber note: “We are in a ship without a pilot, and we confide tomorrow to God” (63).

Azad has little to say, beyond general endorsement, about the use of language for political discourse and national opinion shaping; his own inner dislike for “the clamor of committees” is quite apparent. But other kinds of linguistic and literary reform concern him more closely. The Victorian attitudes taking shape in India in his time required a moral cleanup of the poetic tradition, the imposition of strict literary standards of decency to accompany the new, much more puritanical attitude toward sexual behavior. Azad, who attacks the classical tradition so forcefully for its “romantic maẓmūns” and excessive interest in love, might be expected to welcome this development. In a way, he does; but in an even deeper way, it seems that he does not. However strongly he attacks the old poetry on literary grounds, he is ambivalent about attacking it on moral grounds—and in fact he often turns to protect it against attacks from others.

One whole genre singled out for particular Victorian disapproval was the satire or insult-poem, which could often be obscene, or scatological, or both. This disapproval was a new and systematic importation of moral judgment into the literary realm. For early in the tradition the word qaṣīdah meant not just an ode but any poem with a purpose (maqṣad). Thus Mīr describes Saudā as composing a qaṣīdah dar Ḥajv, a “qaṣīdah of satire.” Praise and insult, ode and satire, were two sides of the same literary coin. Mīr describes Mīr Ja‘far “Zaṭallī” (c. 1659-1713) as going to a patron’s house to dine, equipped with both an ode and a satire—ready to recite the one or the other according to the degree of deference he was shown by his host.^[1] Neither praise nor insult was expected to be objectively true. At the most, a tiny kernel of fact might be useful: if someone could ride a horse, he might be magnified into the cavalier of the age; if someone was a bit tight with his money, he might be depicted as a ridiculous miser. Everyone knew that a good effect demanded not factuality but extravagance, hyperbole, wordplay, wit, and literary skill.

Azad, however, begins by loudly joining the Victorian chorus. “I want to make it clear that the satire is a thorny branch of our poetry that is full of unpleasantness from its fruit to its flowers.” Its “impurity of temper” has helped to make Saudā “notorious.” Azad refers, among other examples, to the incident we have earlier discussed, in which Saudā is said to have composed a vulgarly insulting quatrain (the “ass with his mouth full of excrement” one) against Makīn. This said, however, Azad springs at once to Saudā’s defense: “But the truth is that whatever came from his lips was due either to mere mischief, or to some feigned burst of anger.” Moreover, once “the words were committed to paper, his heart was cleared” of ill will. Azad even goes over to the attack, saying sarcastically, “Our age is adorned with such civilized and refined people that they consider the words of a satire to be abuse. But God is the master of hearts” (138).

Inshā was an even more conspicuous culprit than Saudā; he wrote satires too “extremely obscene” to be recorded, but his excellent work in other genres is worthy of praise (260). The satires that he and Nāsiḳh composed against each other are so funny that every line can make you burst out laughing—but “if anyone should write such things today, he would be culpable in the eyes of the courts and the law” (272). MuṣḤafī too, competing with the newcomer Inshā for the patronage of Mirzā Sulaimān Shikoh, composed satires that were unfortunately “sullied” with “the most extreme kinds of obscenity and insults.” But as Azad reflects on this kind of competitive mutual abuse, he finds extenuating circumstances. One factor was the mushairah atmosphere, in which poetic boasting was expected, every encounter was publicly and immediately won or lost, and quick, witty ripostes were much admired. Certainly the results could seem “very bad”; but it is necessary to judge carefully. “Those who pursue the art of language have a different opinion about this matter.” Such people understand that “ordinary ideas” tend to have only a “weak” effect. By contrast, satire wakes people up: “When it unites with power of expression, it makes a little tickle within sleeping hearts.” Azad even advises, “If you want to learn to create heat, quickness, and clarity of speech, studying such poems is an excellent tool for sharpening your language.” After all, we should settle, like honeybees, on the sweet flowers, and simply ignore the dirty leaves (301-2).

But future students of language will have trouble profiting from the liveliness of satires, for many satires are known only within the oral tradition, and Azad finds some of these too obscene to be recorded. Although, he says, he “wanted to create a garden” from the colorful doings and sayings of MuṣḤafī, Jur’at, Mirzā Muḥammad Ḥasan “Qatīl,” and their circle, “many of the flowers are so entangled with the thorns of obscenity that they keep shredding the paper they’re written on. For this reason, I’m afraid to spread them out openly on paper” (254). The indecent exchanges between Inshā and MuṣḤafī included verses not fit to be known even within the oral tradition: “In my memory are some verses of MuṣḤafī’s so vilely obscene that they are not fit to be in the memory,” verses “at which Refinement sometimes closed her eyes, and sometimes put her fingers in her ears” (303). Azad suggests—implicitly but strongly—that such verses should be put out of memory, and thus discreetly dropped from the canon.

Even worse than satire is the genre called reḳhtī, in which the poet assumes the persona of a woman—sometimes putting on a dupaṭṭah (a light veil-like shawl) and perhaps even adopting a falsetto voice—in order to recite suggestive verses in women’s language. Reḳhtī, says Azad, was invented by Sa‘ādat Yār Ḳhān “Rangīñ” with the aid of Inshā; it started as a “jest,” for laughter and amusement among friends (221). But it plays the same role in creating entertainment that “filth” does in the growth of plants. “Leaving aside the question of style and dress,” Azad says disapprovingly, reḳhtī has grave moral defects: “Its invention should be considered one cause of the effeminacy, lack of courage, and cowardice that grew up among the common people.” Still, he manages to say a kind word for it: “The riddles and magic spells composed in this style show a fine taste” (259). Azad plainly considers that literary effectiveness can compensate, at least to some extent and in some cases, for moral turpitude.

Moreover, Azad seemingly hesitates to condemn what was, from the Victorian point of view of his time, a particularly conspicuous form of immorality. For he considers “the love of boys instead of women” to have “special ties to Iran” (53), and he treats it as a part of Ṣūfism. In his account of the well-known Ṣūfī master Mirzā “Maz̤har” Jān-e Jānāñ (1699-1781), he presents Mirzā Maz̤har as an example of such tendencies. Yet Azad’s account is far from straightforward, and his pretense of good faith as an objective “chronicler” (133) is not at all persuasive. His own real views remain finally obscure to us; perhaps his feelings were unresolved, and thus remained obscure even to him. The following account, therefore, is a case study not of Mirzā Maz̤har, but of Azad himself.

Mirzā Maz̤har was revered, Azad tells us, by great numbers of both Muslims and Hindus. “Many jests about him are well known, such that if such things were found in someone today, people now would not approve of his behavior. But that was a time when the aforementioned habits were considered aspects of excellence.” As a second line of defense, Azad also maintains that small moral flaws can actually be thought of as beauty spots: “If on some clear, delicate, bright surface there is a scar, and it can be seen from a good angle, then it is not an ugly spot, but seems like embroidery; and the one who disapproves of it is not a person of good faith” (132).

This elaborately defensive preface introduces the life of Mirzā Maz̤har—who used to say of himself, according to Azad, “Love for beauty of Appearance (ṣūrat) and for the subtlety of Reality (ma‘nī) was in my heart from the beginning” (132). Mirzā Maz̤har’s father died when he was sixteen, and he at once entered into a lifelong commitment to Ṣūfism. Eventually he became not only a Persian poet and one of the early supporters of Urdu poetry, but also—and much more prominently—a well-known Ṣūfī religious figure (pīr, murshid) with many devoted followers (murīd). One of these followers was the aristocratic young poet Mīr ‘Abd ul-Ḥayy “Tābāñ” (1715-1749), “whose great beauty was so universally famous that both high and low called him a second Joseph.” Tābāñ was extremely aware of his charms: “With a fair complexion black clothes look very becoming, so he always dressed in black.” Mirzā Maz̤har “looked on him with affection and kindness” (133).

The result, as Azad depicts it, was a kind of public flirtation: “Although Hazrat [Mirzā Maz̤har], in accordance with the etiquette of gatherings for instruction, did not openly show enthusiasm, it seemed that he looked at Tābāñ and inwardly overflowed with joy”; he “enjoyed conversing with his dearly loved one” and used to exchange witty and “spicy” (namkīn, tez) anecdotes with him in whispers. Without citing any authority, Azad offers a detailed, seemingly eyewitness account of such public intimacies—and contrives, in his uniquely vivid style, to make the relationship between Mirzā Maz̤har and Tābāñ appear vulgar and salacious. Azad even inserts a footnote in order to acknowledge, with an ostentatious show of reluctance, that Culture “casts a cold eye on these matters.” Tābāñ’s story ended sadly, for he died young. “When in the flower of his youth that second Joseph wounded all hearts [by dying], the whole city grieved for him.” He thus became an even more poignant image of Azad’s lost heaven: “Oh my Delhi, everything of yours is unique in the world!” (133-34).

Azad claims to be a bit at a loss to account for Mirzā Maz̤har’s behavior. For Mirzā Maz̤har was a truly venerable religious figure, one who “fulfilled the commands of religious law with a sincere heart.” We are not to take him lightly. “His manners and ways, his courtesy and refinement, were extremely sober and appropriate: whoever spent time in his company was careful to behave discreetly.” He showed a great “delicacy of temperament” and an “inner equilibrium”: he “could not tolerate improper and ill-regulated behavior” (134). At the same time, however, in his poetry “romantic images show a remarkable vividness, and this is no cause for surprise, because he had naturally the temperament of a lover .” For other poets, “these maẓmūns are merely imaginings ”; but in his case, “they are his real state of mind” (135).

What are we to make of such an equivocal account? On the face of it, Azad seems to be asserting his own defiant, reactionary approval of now-discredited social norms. Still, he is a notably tricky writer, and one with strong personal prejudices. For example, without providing any source, he attributes to Mirzā Maz̤har a vulgarly insulting verse that contains a reference to pubic hair (92). And he mentions in a footnote, for the flimsiest of reasons and on no apparent evidence, that Mirzā Maz̤har “had installed a washerwoman in his house” (136). He also gives a deliberately distorted account of Mirzā Maz̤har’s death.^[2] Azad has been accused of systematically “making insinuations” about Mirzā Maz̤har, of “shaping events in such a way that they evoke not praise but blame”—and the accusation is entirely plausible.^[3]

Mirzā Maz̤har, who was in any case a personage of far more religious than literary importance, seems to have been inserted somewhat arbitrarily into Water of Life,^[4] and is the only figure about whom such markedly suggestive anecdotes are told. (Azad does describe Mīr Dard, another religious-cum-literary figure, as having courtesans among his followers; although their visits to him are innocent, his permitting such visits is made to appear reprehensible [178].)^[5] By contrast, Azad gives Nāsiḳh, about whom pederastic anecdotes were well known,^[6] an entirely respectable treatment, even praising him for keeping his work free from the “thorns of satire” (329-41). Azad, a determined Shī‘a, may in fact have inherited his father’s well-documented taste for religious controversy. He has been suspected of indulging his partisan religious prejudices, both by presenting Ṣūfīs like Mirzā Maz̤har and Mīr Dard in a bad light and by giving favorable treatment to poets like Nāsiḳh, who was a convert to Shī‘ism. Azad might thus have made an equivocal show of embracing and defending Mirzā Maz̤har—the better to slip a knife between his ribs.

But the knife he used was an unusual object: something like a genuine antique letter-opener, perhaps, with a newly sharpened edge. For Azad could claim to have based the general outlines of his portrayal at least loosely on extant source material. Farruḳhī, a fair-minded scholar in an excellent position to judge, identifies several sources from which most of Azad’s anecdotes come, and does not seriously challenge any except the “washerwoman” one and the account of Mirzā Maz̤har’s death.^[7] One of Azad’s primary sources describes Mirzā Maz̤har as “very fond of beautiful men” and says of Tābāñ that “Mirzā Maz̤har’s heart was not the only one heated into a fiery oven by passion for him.”^[8]

Another tazkirah describes Mirzā Maz̤har as “suffering in his love for Mīr ‘Abd ul-Ḥayy Tābāñ” and as composing occasional verses in Urdu (rather than Persian) only out of regard for him.^[9] Another describes him as having “by nature the temperament of a lover” and says that he was “wounded by the dagger of the coquetry of this beloved [Tābāñ].”^[10] Another tazkirah describes Mirzā Maz̤har in more general terms: “He had an entire taste for the worship of beauty and the love of a beautiful form, and was involved with both divine and human love.”^[11] Another describes him as having “tasted the relish of love,” so that he engaged in “the worship of beauty and the game of love.”^[12] The writers of all these tazkirahs speak of Mirzā Maz̤har in respectful and sometimes even reverent terms, with full regard for his religious eminence; all mention such tendencies simply as traits of his personality, without showing the slightest self-consciousness or unease.

But then, they all composed their works before 1857, and so could live more easily in the old world. Even today, some traces of that world occasionally come to the surface. In a recent (1988) and devoutly hagiographical biography, Mirzā Maz̤har is said to have “reached a high level and a supreme rank in loverhood (‘āshiqī) and in the game of love (‘ishq bāzī).” But the author goes on to caution the reader most emphatically that for Ṣūfīs, human love “is not founded on lust” but in fact “acts as a staircase” to divine love. He illustrates this Platonic vision of love with a traditional anecdote. Once a venerable elder, while traveling, kissed “a moon-faced one” whom he passed on the road. His follower wondered, “Why are we forbidden to do these things?” When the elder became aware of his follower’s doubt, he kissed “a red-hot iron rod.” And he said to his follower, “When this much strength develops within you, then you too are entitled to kiss.”^[13]

By Azad’s time, however, the old world had come under heavy Victorian attack—and the bombardment was to continue for decades. As the redoubtable Ram Babu Saksena put it in 1927, “vitiated and perverse” Persian poetry was the source of the problem: “The boy is regarded as a mistress and his curls, his tresses, the down on his cheeks, his budding moustache, the moles on his face are celebrated with gusto in a sensual manner revolting to the mind.” This leads to unnatural, “pernicious and debased” poetry.^[14] Certainly there was actual pederasty in the old culture, just as there was adultery, prostitution, drunkenness, gambling, and other behavior officially viewed as reprehensible. And certainly classical poetry did not legitimize the physical expression of pederastic desires, any more than it legitimized actual adulterous affairs with respectable ladies, or actual public drunkenness, or actual apostasy from Islam. But people of the old culture felt able to invoke attraction to beautiful boys as a powerful, multivalent poetic image, just as they invoked illicit heterosexual love, intoxication, apostasy, and other images of forbidden behavior.

Any attempt to move from poetic imagery to social reality, however, is destined to break down.^[15] How negatively was pederastic behavior actually viewed in the society of the time? How widely was it practiced, and what forms did it take? The poetry itself, based as it is on well-established, universally accepted maẓmūns, provides no real evidence. The age of the beautiful boy, for example, is left quite unclear. He seems rarely to be envisioned as an innocent child. Quite the contrary, in fact: in general he is erotically aware, flirtatious, and ready to exploit his beauty to fulfill his own wishes and desires. He seems to be beardless, yet to reach his greatest beauty as his beard just begins to grow. When his beard has entirely grown, his charm is gone, and his lovers desert him. He seems never to be envisioned as a fully adult male, a peer of the lover himself. Yet the beautiful and universally admired Tābāñ, when he “wounded all hearts” by dying in “the flower of his youth,” was thirty-four years old—and thus not exactly a “boy.” The subject is such a touchy one that it is hard to find discussions that are not governed by obvious (and usually Victorian) emotional attitudes. The excellent work of C. M. Naim stands almost alone in considering poetic evidence in relation to social practice, with cross-cultural references to English poetry and society.^[16]

In Azad’s account of Mirzā Maz̤har, the strands of poetry, Ṣūfism, and love of masculine beauty seem impossible to separate; Azad both relishes and exploits their interconnections. Sometimes poetic personae are used as images of real personality. One tazkirah praises Tābāñ as “a beloved with the temperament of a lover.”^[17] Conversely, Azad praises Żauq’s pride and sensitivity by calling him “a lover with the temperament of a beloved.”^[18] In Azad’s more equivocal anecdotes he may indeed be playing both ends against the middle in some fashion; or he may even be confused between reality and poetry in his own feelings. For he elsewhere tells us that a certain minor poet died young: “He was himself beautiful, and loved to look at beautiful ones, and finally gave up his life in the grief of separation” (186). Did people really die of love in those days? Can ghazal conventions be said to operate as causes in the real world? Such tangles in the lines of thought are easy to see, but hard to unravel.

Azad’s ultimate word on the subject of literary morality is, however, altogether clear: it is a tribute to the irresistible power of time. For he says of Inshā:

People say that Sayyid Inshā’s poetry is libertine, and that the obscenity in it is not by way of a spice, but has come forward to rank as the main dish. This is a correct statement. But the reason for it is that Time is a powerful lord, and the popular taste is his established law. At that time everyone, from the king and the nobles to the beggar and the poor man, delighted in just these things.…If Sayyid Inshā had not done this, then what would he have done? (271-72)

Whatever we may say about the past, however we may excuse or accuse it, Azad makes it clear that Time (working now through the agency of Queen Victoria) has decreed very different tastes for the future. People must now find fresher morsels of food to chew on—and must learn to use fewer, and milder, spices.

Hali, in the conclusion of his Life of Sa‘dī (1884-86), presents his own analysis of the problem of pederasty. He offers a remarkably sweeping generalization: “All the poets of Iran laid the foundation of ‘ghazalness’ (taġhazzul)—that is, romantic verses—only on the love of youths and beardless boys.” But although on the face of it this seems “reprehensible and vile,” Sa‘dī and other Persian poets should not be accused of pederastic tendencies (amrad parastī) on these grounds alone. “In the Persian language, and under its influence in the Urdu language too, this style of poetry has come down from the beginning: that whether the poet be a man or a woman, a rake or a Ṣūfī, a lover of God or of [human] creatures, a lover of men or of women, or rather in the first place a lover or not a lover—he always writes ghazals in a manner that shows that the poet is in love with someone, and that he and his beloved are both men.” By contrast, in “Hindi” (that is, Braj Bhasha) poetry, an equally powerful tradition causes the poet to write as a woman in love with a man; and in Arabic poetry, the poet writes as a man in love with a woman. Hali then offers, as proof of these indefensibly broad generalizations, the work of Amīr Ḳhusrau, who wrote poetry in Arabic, Persian, and Hindi, and did indeed, according to Hali, observe the poetic rules of each language.^[19]

“Thus it is clear,” Hali concludes, “that these are all imaginary and conventional forms of expression that have no relation to actual reality.” As such, they do not please him: they show the “extreme unreality of Eastern poetry,” the principles of which are based solely and entirely on “artifice and convention.” Moreover, even as a literary convention the love of boys demands to be explained: to write as a man loving a woman (the Arabic mode) or a woman loving a man (the Hindi mode) is “according to nature,” but “for a man to fall madly in love with a man, and seek union and enjoyment with him” is something “that human nature entirely rejects.” How then did such a convention develop? Hali feels there is “hardly any doubt” that it was the genderless character of the Persian language that gave rise, over time, to misunderstandings. Another contributing factor might have been the extreme jealousy shown by Muslims toward their women, such that early ghazals depicting illicit love for women might have aroused suspicion and distrust in powerful patrons.^[20] (Both these causes, however, imply gradual change over time, and thus conflict with the absoluteness of Hali’s previous statements.)

But, Hali then adds, even if Shaiḳh Sa‘dī and other venerable poets appear from some of their poetry to have been genuinely attracted to beardless boys, “I do not give this any bad meaning.” For Ṣūfī sources make it clear that “human love, if it is pure and sinless, is a very major means to inner progress for the seeker, and in a number of venerable elders and mystics this quality has been seen, together with purity and chastity.” Such Ṣūfī poets are even exempt from the accusations of artificiality and conventionality to which other poets are subject—for they recount, in the guise of human love, the real stages and events of their own spiritual progress.^[21]

Hali does not, however, adduce any evidence for his extreme and sweeping claim of the primacy of the “beardless boy” as beloved in all Persian and Urdu ghazals. It is important to remember that in the overwhelming majority of verses, no clue at all is given about the gender of the beloved; most descriptions of beauty, cruelty, coquetry, and so on could apply either to a beautiful woman or to a beautiful boy—or, of course, to God, the ultimate Beloved. Grammar is no real help, for the beloved is by convention (almost) always grammatically masculine, even when “he” is described in terms appropriate only to a woman. Only in the occasional verse that mentions a gender-specific physical trait (beard, breasts), item of clothing (turban, blouse), or term (“boy”), can the gender of the beloved be known with certainty—for that one verse.

If the beloved indeed had a well-established gender, as Hali asserts, a gender that was tacitly assumed by all poets and audiences in the absence of specific countervailing evidence, no one has been able to prove it.^[22] For the whole Perso-Arabic tradition of literary theory, which has so much to say about language and rhetoric in the ghazal, has virtually no interest in the question of the beloved’s gender. The one real, crucial role of the beloved in the ghazal is to be absent—and a radically absent beloved becomes a fantasy being, endowed with a shifting set of traits that exist chiefly or only in the lover’s imagination. In this respect the beloved resembles the ‘anqā, the bird defined by its elusiveness. All that can be said with real certainty is that the classical ghazal includes along with its great preponderance of sexually unspecific verses, some verses in which the beloved is clearly a beautiful woman,^[23] and some verses in which the beloved is clearly a beautiful boy.^[24]

We have seen that in 1882 Hali planned “to set forth means for the iṣlāḤ of Urdu poetry, which has become extremely corrupt and injurious,” and “to make clear how much benefit poetry, if it is founded on excellent principles, can bring to the community.” This plan resulted in the Introduction, along with many other essays, books, and poems. Exactly a quarter of a century later (1907), in the last decade of his life, Hali felt that he had carried his plan through to fruition. For he wrote to a friend about his irritation when someone introduced him merely as “a poet in both Persian and Urdu” who had “no equal in India.” This, in Hali’s eyes, largely missed the point. For the speaker should have said that Hali had “made Asian poetry, which was only a useless thing, beneficial,” and that “through him a great revolution has been brought about in the thinking of the Indian Muslims.”^[25]

Certainly if the Introduction has a central theme, it is the interdependence of poetry and society, and the need for poetry to change as society changes—or, if possible, even before society changes, so as to bring about desirable conditions in society and reverse undesirable ones. For poetry has a God-given power to excite the emotions, and can thus be used the way steam power can: to run a variety of machines (15-16). Civilized nations make good use of poetry (16). Bad poetry can corrupt, but good poetry can purify (29). At the worst, a vicious circle can develop: “In the beginning the corrupt taste of society ruins poetry; but once poetry is spoiled, its poisonous atmosphere inflicts extremely severe harm on society” (38). Poetry then tends to become full of wonders, fictions, and the supernatural—and hostile to history, geography, mathematics, and science (39). The poet must make careful, discerning use of his imaginative powers, for he alone can pick grains of silver out of sand (63). The poet is, for better or worse, “the tongue of the nation” (199).

Hali is concerned to improve all the principal genres of Urdu poetry. The ode, however, is almost a hopeless case: it is so out of accord with the times that poets will have no choice but to simply take their models from European poetry and start over (202). The maṡnavī has good possibilities, but must be more refined in the future: some maṡnavīs, like those of Nawab Mirzā “Shauq,” are “immoral beyond all bounds and contrary to culture”; others are vague about their plots and explicit only about their “shamelessness,” so that they pride themselves on “mentioning before all the world things that are not to be spoken of” (226). Mīr Ḥasan’s, though, show “much respect for shame and modesty” (216); since Mīr Ḥasan was earlier than Shauq, it is not surprising that here and there, most commendably, he “painted visual pictures of natural situations” (218-19). The elegy, at its best, is the only Urdu genre worthy of being called “moral poetry.” It can achieve a special “high level of morality” and religious pathos because it can make use of the events of Karbala (193)—a point that Hali chooses to emphasize, surprisingly, by telling the whole story of Karbala at considerable length (193-98).

But Hali recognizes that “iṣlāḤ of the ghazal” is the “most important and necessary” task, because the ghazal is so protean and widely popular; everyone, educated and illiterate, old and young, has at least some interest in it. Moreover, it needs quite a number of changes. Its formal structure must be made freer: the “bonds” of rhyme and refrain, which are “impossible to endure,” must be loosened to some extent (127). And there must be changes in content as well, though these will of course be difficult, for speaking of “lust and desire” gives a pleasure that “not everyone can obtain from pure love” (128). Love is an indispensable foundation for the ghazal, but to have a real effect it must be sincere, not a literary pose or imitation. And why should it be limited to romantic love? The ghazal should find room for the love of “children for parents, parents for children, brother and sister for each other, the husband for the wife, the wife for the husband, the servant for the master, the populace for the king, friends for friends, a man for an animal, the house-dweller for the house, the homeland, the nation, the community, the family” (129-30).

In short, the ghazal should admit all the various kinds of love. Yet, most remarkably, Hali insists that a radical ambiguity is to be preserved: insofar as possible, no word is to be used that shows clearly whether the beloved is male or female! To hammer the point home, he actually provides a list of such forbidden gender-revealing words: names for items of clothing and physical traits, along with phrases like “son of,” and so on (131). This would seem, however, to demolish his project of incorporating into the ghazal all the particular kinds of love he has just finished specifying; for how could they possibly be recognized and appreciated as such, if not even the gender of the beloved could be revealed? How to celebrate one’s love for a son or daughter, a husband or wife, a brother or sister, a master—not to speak of an animal, a house, a country—without identifying them even so much as by gender? Hali seems not to realize that he has just called for a reform program with two parts that largely cancel each other out.

He then turns to the problem of the male beloved. Noting that he has already dealt with the question in detail in his conclusion to the Life of Sa‘dī, he briefly repeats his main points. The evocation of a man loving a man “is founded merely on a misunderstanding and a rashness in the thought of the community, not on realities and events.” Nevertheless, it is such a “vile and unworthy custom” that it “creates a stain on the morality of the community.” Thus “insofar as possible” it ought to be quickly abandoned, regardless of the fact that it has come down to us from “all the renowned poets” of Iran and India. “The claims of every age are different.” If we imitate the “words of obscenity and shamelessness” found in the poetry of the great ancient poets of Iran and India, we will be “adjudged guilty according to the [British antiobscenity] law.” Therefore just as we have abandoned many of our ancestors’ follies out of fear of punishment by the courts, “we ought also to abandon one or two follies merely at the command of wisdom and morality” (131-32).

At this point Hali renews his insistence on evoking a beloved of indeterminate gender. If the beloved is depicted either as a respectable married or engaged woman, or as a prostitute (bāzārī besvā), it is shameful in either case to trumpet one’s love in public (132). And a beloved left in a desirable state of “nonparticularity” (it̤lāq) requires grammatical masculinity, for in “the languages of the world” masculine forms are used for universal statements. Given this masculine grammatical form, if sexually specific words are used about the beloved, and if these words are sometimes male and sometimes female, “this will mean that the beloved is neither a man nor a woman, but a eunuch or a transsexual (hījṛā).” The best course is thus to continue the tradition of the numerous Persian and Urdu verses based on generalized or spiritual or divine love: the verse should give “absolutely no information” about whether the desired one is a man or a woman (133).

If poets observe this one great rule of gender ambiguity, they can say in the ghazal anything they want to say. They can write about “anything that arises with a true fervor” in their hearts: “happiness, or grief, or longing, or friendship, or gratitude, or complaint, or patience, or pleasure, or contentment, or trust, or desire, or hatred, or mercy, or justice, or anger, or surprise, or hope, or despair, or passion, or waiting, or love of country, or national (qaumī) sympathy, or turning to God, or supporting faith and religion, or the impermanence of the world and the thought of death, or any other human feeling.” However much the ghazal takes as its true subject love alone, it can in fact say anything (138).

Hali recognizes that “moral maẓmūns” may prove less exciting than romantic ones; to make them effective is an “extremely difficult task.” If the ghazal becomes too full of “advice and counsel,” it may lose its charm. But a great revolution is now happening in the world. A lifetime is not long enough to describe it. New events constantly arouse strong emotions: surprise, regret, fear, despair. What better material could there be for the ghazal? If the scope of a two-line verse seems insufficient for the purpose, poets should remember the “continuous ghazal” used by many ustads, in which all the verses are part of a linear treatment of a single theme. “For example, the feelings aroused by every season, the scenes of morning and evening, the pleasure of a moonlit night, the verdancy of a forest or garden, the hustle and bustle of fairs and festivals, the desolation of a graveyard, the events of a journey, the heartfelt devotion to one’s homeland, and many other things of this type” can be expressed very well in a “continuous ghazal” (140-41).

Despite—and also because of—the many self-contradictions in Hali’s arguments, it is clear that poets of the future are being asked to destroy the classical ghazal in order to save it. In the space of a few pages Hali exhorts them: to loosen the ghazal’s strict formal structure; to replace its vision of (illicit) erotic love with a variety of “virtuous” and almost entirely nonerotic loves; to be scrupulously careful never to reveal the gender of the beloved; to write not merely about love but about any emotion they genuinely feel; and to tie together the ghazal’s autonomous two-line verses into a connected genre capable of natural description and even of narrative. We are back in the realm of Colonel Holroyd, whose chosen mushairah themes—“The Rainy Season,” “Winter,” “Hope,” “Patriotism,” “Peace,” “Justice,” “Compassion,” “Contentment,” “Civilization”—would fit excellently into Hali’s lists of “moral maẓmūns.” Except, of course, that all this naturalness is somehow required to coexist with a strikingly unnatural convention, emphasized by Hali as it never was in the classical ghazal: the absolute, rigorously maintained sexual indeterminacy of the beloved.

Azad and Hali were thus doomed to twist and turn, vainly seeking to escape the horns of an impossible dilemma. Poetry must be natural—and poetry must also be moral. If the classical ghazal depicted real, actual loves, as natural poetry should, then it was thoroughly immoral: it spoke of a society obsessed with adultery, illicit seduction, prostitution, and pederasty. But if the ghazal in fact indirectly depicted (by exploiting its immense metaphorical resources) morally correct loves, then it had to be seen as so arcane, complex, and conventionalized that it could never be described as natural. Try as they might, Azad and Hali could never manage to make the ghazal both natural and moral at the same time. But they could never afford to abandon their grip on either adjective. For while the ghazal couldn’t really be seen as having both virtues, it could all too easily be seen as having neither. And to be both unnatural and immoral was to be utterly decadent, to be without redeeming social importance, to be part of a page of history that had already been turned. “In a time of ascendant fortune, moods of love and desire were appropriate,” Hali told his countrymen grimly. “Now that time has gone” (141).

Notes