6. Poems Two Lines Long

The tazkirahs assume that “poetry is a game of words” and that its “principles have been passed on unchanged for ages.” A game of this kind, with well-known rules, will inevitably generate its own techniques, its own standards of proficiency, its own exemplary master players. In the game of classical ghazal, the raw materials are words and maẓmūns, and the results are a series of well-made shi‘rs. Each poet’s handling of his materials is subject to the most intense and public scrutiny, for he must follow the proper rules; the practice of iṣlāḤ is by no means confined to ustad-shagird relationships. Mushairahs are like professional workshops. As we have seen, a poet can be challenged by his peers for misusing a word, for slightly altering it, for unduly extending its associations, or for violating the logic of a traditional maẓmūn (like that of the wineglass as a “laughing” mouth), for these are all matters in which technical proficiency is involved. An ustad should be highly practiced and impeccable in his skills. His work must sustain—and even invite—comparison with that of the great masters of the past.

This general view of poetry has been well expressed by influential Arabic and Persian theorists, who have often envisioned poetry as a craft. Ibn al-Farāj Qudāmah, for example, likened poetry to carpentry: “Style of expression is the real maker of the shi‘r; vulgar maẓmūns and thoughts don’t in themselves destroy the shi‘r.” On the contrary, since “the poet is a carpenter,” he can display his ingenuity all the more markedly on unpromising material. “The virtues or flaws in the wood don’t affect his skill.”^[1] Shams-e Qais, also writing in the thirteenth century, likens the well-practiced poet first to a “skillful painter” who through his artistry “places every flower somewhere” and “uses each color in some place”; then to a “master jeweler” who knows how to make each verse a perfect pearl of elegance; and later to a “master weaver” who, while he starts with “precious stuffs,” works into them “images” that are both “graceful” and “precisely detailed.”^[2] Ibn Ḳhaldūn, in the fourteenth century, compares the poet to “a builder or weaver”: proper word combinations are “selected and packed” by the mind into a form, “just as the builder does with the mould or the weaver with the loom.” This process is intellectually stimulating: “The desire to press speech into the moulds of poetry sharpens the mind.”^[3] Even today such views can be heard: Faiẓ Aḥmad “Faiẓ” (1911-1984) has described poetry as “a craft, like that of a carpenter,” which “one must learn,” and has also compared it to “a musical composition” in which one must see “if and where a note fits.”^[4]

Like rival craftsmen (and game players), poets may properly be intensely competitive with each other. Poets may actually insist on the chance to show their mastery by working a single pattern to the point of exhaustion—as in the case of the hundreds of verses about “sticks.” Poets may compose many of their ghazals in grounds prescribed for patterned mushairahs, and many more in grounds borrowed from other poets.^[5] But even when patterns are forced on poets, willy-nilly, by a patron’s whim, the result may be superb. Ġhālib composed several of his finest ghazals in patterns imposed on him by the emperor’s command, within time limits set by the emperor’s fortnightly mushairah schedule; even in private letters to his friends he never expressed resentment at having to work within such arbitrary constraints. On the contrary, in fact: he gloried in these ghazals and expressed a deep pride in his own virtuosity.^[6] Even today ghazal poets often find that the ground comes before all else; as Faiẓ has put it, a ghazal “first requires the emergence of a rhyming scheme,” after which “one builds on it.”^[7]

The setting of patterns for shagirds is something for ustads to decide. An earlier ustad’s brilliant use of a pattern may almost retire it from service: Ġhālib peremptorily ordered a shagird to abandon work on a ghazal he was writing in one such pattern and to drop it entirely from his volume.^[8] Yet Ġhālib also recognized that, contrary to his own practice, poets traditionally borrowed much more than a pattern from their predecessors: they “put an ustad’s ghazal or ode before them, wrote down his rhyme words, and began to add words to these rhyme words.”^[9] The practice of building shi‘rs on those of earlier poets in fact goes back to Ḥāfiz̤ and beyond;^[10] it was encouraged by the memorization of thousands of verses that was—and to some extent still is—part of the training of every aspiring poet. But to model a whole ghazal specifically on that of another poet had connotations of challenge. Thus, when Żauq produced a ghazal modeled on one of Saudā’s, his ustad, Shāh Naṣīr, threw it aside and angrily asked, “So you compose a ghazal on an ustad’s ghazal? Now you’ve begun to fly higher even than Mirzā Rafī‘!” (423-24). Assigning grounds for ghazals was always an act with overtones of authority and power; in some mushairah series the ustads themselves, not the convenor, set the pattern lines (390). Sometimes an intriguing new ghazal recited in one mushairah would be chosen to provide the pattern line for the following session (460).

Azad offers one especially noteworthy example of such pattern setting and its consequences: an elaborate anecdote designed to show Żauq’s coming of age as an ustad in his own right, despite the jealousy of his ustad Shāh Naṣīr.

After some years, the late Shāh Naṣīr returned from the Deccan and began to hold his usual mushairahs. The Shaiḳh [Żauq], peace be upon him, had reached a high level in his practice; he too attended the mushairahs and recited his ghazals. In the Deccan, the Shāh Sahib had, at someone’s request, composed a ghazal of nine verses of which the refrain was “fire and water and earth and air.” He recited that ghazal in the mushairah and said, “Anyone who writes a ghazal in this pattern I will consider an ustad.”

Żauq promptly composed a ghazal in the specified pattern—and Shāh Naṣīr made some objections to it. Żauq then composed an ode in the same pattern and recited it at court.

Żauq’s ode was “widely discussed,” and some days later he heard that “objections had been written about it.” After having his ode checked over by a connoisseur, he took the logical next step.

The late Shaiḳh [Żauq] took the ode into a mushairah, to recite it there and have it judged in a public encounter. Accordingly, the ode was recited. The late Shāh Naṣīr presented in the gathering a quick-witted student, who was well-read in the standard books of study, and said, “He has written some objections on this.” The Shaiḳh, peace be upon him, humbly said, “I am your shagird, and I don’t consider myself worthy of having your objections addressed [directly] to me.” Shāh Naṣīr said, “It has no connection with me. He’s the one who has written something.” The late Shaiḳh said, “Well, writing is useful only when people are at a distance. While we are all here in each other’s presence, please speak about it orally.”

At this point the battle is joined. Despite Shāh Naṣīr’s use of his shagird as a proxy, he is clearly launching a personal attack on Żauq’s expertise.

The opening verse of the ode was:

Even if mountain and storm contain fire and water and earth and air,
They still won’t be able to move today, fire and water and earth and air.

The objector made the objection, “A proof is needed for fire moving inside rock.” The Shaiḳh said, “Observation.” He said, “Give a warrant drawn from a book.” The Shaiḳh said, “It is proved from history that in the time of Hoshang fire came out [from stone].”^[11] He said, “In poetry, the warrant of a verse is required. History is of no use in poetry.”

A clearer credo for the classical poetry could hardly be formulated. To invent a new maẓmūn is to alter the world of poetry, to tamper with the lines of force along which the imagination flows. The innovator is subject to public challenge. The best response is a warrant for the usage. The warrant cannot come merely from observation of the natural universe, and it cannot come simply from history. Only the tradition itself can legitimate its own development. Poetry can only be validated by poetry.

Żauq does not challenge the objector’s criteria of judgment. Tension runs high—how can he meet the attack?

Those present at the mushairah were watching the spectacle of the back-and-forth questions and answers. And they were dumbfounded at the objection, when all at once the Shaiḳh, peace be upon him, recited this [Persian] verse of Muḥsin “Tāṡīr”:

I burned down even before the appearance of the beloved
It was just as if there was fire in the stone—I was burnt in my house itself.

The moment they heard this, there was a tumultuous clamor in the mushairah. And along with it, Saudā’s line was mentioned, “In every stone there is a spark of Your presence”; and in the same way a number of similar verses were argued and debated. (436-38)

Predictably, Żauq emerges as the winner, his ustadship vindicated and no longer subject to question. In terms of historical accuracy, of course, there is every reason to doubt that these events took place as described—if they took place at all.^[12] But, as is so often the case with Azad’s creations, the anecdote is memorable and illustrative in a way quite independent of its historicity.

The story is set within a general cultural context that is by now familiar to us. It assumes the use of the mushairah as a kind of professional workshop, where technical issues of poetics can be debated before an audience of connoisseurs. It depicts the tensions that can arise between ustad and shagird, especially at the time of generational change, when the shagird becomes an ustad in his own right. It demonstrates once again the way that an ustad’s iṣlāḤ, his correcting of verses—normally a private and benign process—can be made into a weapon for public combat, and the way that this combat, for the sake of the ustad’s dignity, can be conducted by proxy. Like all the anecdotes we have examined so far, it also assumes that the unit of discourse—the unit to which iṣlāḤ can be applied—is not the whole poem, but a single two-line shi‘r.

In this world poetry is immersed in, and justified by, earlier poetry. The context invoked when one is attacking or defending a shi‘r is not the poem in which it occurs—not even in the case of longer poems like odes, much less in the ghazal. Rather, it is the universe of admired poems by great Persian and Urdu ustads that provides the warrant for present usage. By no means every poet’s work attains such a status. “People say that Sayyid Inshā’s poetry is not in every instance fit to be a warrant,” Azad notes, and he gives his own judgment at some length (270-72).

It is the ustad, the living bearer of the tradition who has himself “become a book,” who decides such questions, mediating between the past and the future. Ideally, he exercises a strict dominion over his shagirds, and his iṣlāḤ inspires awe:

He [Shaiḳh Nāsiḳh] was very scrupulous about the proper conduct of his sessions. He used to recline against a bolster. His shagirds (many of whom were from rich and noble families) sat respectfully around the edges of the floor-covering. They didn’t even dare to breathe. The Shaiḳh Sahib would think for a while, then write something down. When he put down a paper he would say “Mm-hmm!” Someone would begin to recite a ghazal. When a word in a shi‘r needed to be changed, or if it was possible after some thought to improve it, he would correct it. If not, he announced, “This is worthless, strike it out,” or “Its first (or second) line is not good; change it,” or “This rhyme is good but you haven’t developed its full potential; cudgel your brain a bit more.” When that person was through reading, another would read. No one else was allowed to speak. (336-37)

The conventions of iṣlāḤ were so highly developed that ustads could “correct” written verses almost the way teachers correct papers. In addition to making specific emendations, Ġhālib used to write the letter ṣvād, for the word ṣaḥīḤ (correct), next to verses he considered quite satisfactory, and draw a line through those he rejected.^[13] Other ustads would put the letter ṣvād one, two, or three times to show their degree of approval.

Since the continuity of the lineages was based almost entirely on oral transmission, once it was broken it was lost forever. As the pre-1857 generation of ustads died off, they were simply irreplaceable; poets no longer had the same access to the rigorous, personalized technical training their predecessors had enjoyed. While ustad-shagird relationships continued to be established in later generations, they achieved only a shadow of their former authority and power. For decades people mourned the loss of the old lineages, of the old poetic world. The power of collective nostalgia finally produced a remarkable monument: a work called The Adorner of Poetry (Mashshāt̤ah-e suḳhan), by “Ṣafdar” Mirzāpūrī, of which the first part was published in 1918 and the second part in 1928.

The work is today extremely rare. But at the time, according to ‘Abd ul-Ḥaq, the first part sold so briskly that within a few years not a copy was to be had anywhere. Starting in 1927, therefore, ‘Abd ul-Ḥaq serialized the second part in his journal Urdū, since he considered the work so important:

An extraordinary tradition of ustād-shāgirdī has come down to us, but now its glory and its rules of conduct no longer remain. In those days, the only way to be trained in the practice of poetry was to be accepted as the shagird of an expert ustad, who explained the subtleties of poetics, especially the correct use of words, the appropriateness of language, the clarity of colloquial speech, the principles of discourse, and the ways of expressing a maẓmūn. This was the greatest school we had.

He emphasized the technical nature of the expertise involved. The verses offered for demonstration need not be superb ones; the point was to see the process at work.

Although some of the shi‘rs are entirely unworthy of attention, the purpose is only to show the iṣlāḤ: how changing only one word, or rearranging the words, or taking out an unsuitable word and putting in a suitable one, lifts the level of the shi‘r and the maẓmūn to a new height.^[14]

The reader who has the necessary “taste” (żauq) is promised not merely enjoyment but “insight” (baṣīrat) as well.

Then follow 261 pages of exemplary iṣlāḤs, first brief ones by two Persian ustads, then more extensive compilations drawn from sixty-one Urdu ustads from Mīr to “Jalīl,” Ṣafdar’s own ustad. Ṣafdar is scrupulous about sources: he carefully notes his use of materials sent by his friends—and also by many appreciative readers of the first part who were actively helping with the second. His examples are drawn from letters, diaries, tazkirahs, and personal recollections. After each example, Ṣafdar adds a sentence or two of explanation and comment.

A few of Ṣafdar’s examples are framed within anecdotes about the great ustads of the past. One such framing anecdote is particularly evocative.

When the late Ḳhvājah [ātash] Sahib had entirely given up the practice of poetry, and neither recited verses himself nor gave iṣlāḤ to his shagirds, there was an accomplished poet of Lucknow who prided himself on his prowess, and who claimed that no one could improve on his poetry. It happened one day that when he was discussing poetry with a close friend of his, a disagreement arose over one verse. The poet said that no one in Lucknow could lay a finger on his poetry. His friend answered, “My friend, Ḳhvājah ātash is still alive!” [With great difficulty the two obtained admission to ātash’s house.] Both gentlemen presented themselves in the Ḳhvājah Sahib’s service, and sat respectfully down at the edge of the straw mat. First they expressed their thanks for the honor of being permitted into his presence; then they presented an opening verse, for iṣlāḤ. The Ḳhvājah Sahib commanded, “Read it.” The gentleman, with extreme pride, recited this opening verse:

bāt meñ farq nah āne dīje
jān jātī hai to jāne dīje.

The Ḳhvājah Sahib said, “It’s very good, there’s no need for iṣlāḤ.” But the other gentleman spoke up, “It’s my deep longing that Your Honor should apply some finishing touch to this opening verse.” When he insisted and insisted, the Ḳhvājah Sahib said, “All right, read it again.” When he recited the opening verse a second time, he commanded, “All right, change it to this:”

ān meñ farq nah āne dīje
jān jātī hai to jāne dīje.

My God, my God, when the Ḳhvājah Sahib gave this iṣlāḤ, how he showed his poetic mastery and the glory of his ustadship!^[15]

No more than a single word in a single verse is changed—but the effect is overwhelming. The brash young challenger is crushed, the veteran ustad confirmed in his supremacy. The ustad makes no parade of his power, and in fact is even reluctant to reveal it; but when he is goaded into doing so, the contest is over in an instant. Played out between wordslingers rather than gunslingers, this is the archetypal “fastest gun in the West” scene. If it didn’t always happen this way in practice, it undoubtedly could in theory—and in imagination.

Both before and after iṣlāḤ, the verse has the same simple, hortatory meaning: “Don’t let alteration come into (your) word / If (your) life goes, then let it go.” Although bāt and ān both mean “word” or “promise,” and both have the same scansion, the change immensely improves the internal structure of the verse. The first line acquires richer interpretive possibilities, since ān also means “dignity, pride, self-respect.” Moreover, ān and āne now echo each other both visually and aurally, just as jān and jāne do in the second line. As an extra touch of elegance, their relative positions within the lines are the same. The first line has been both enhanced in meaning and internally tightened, while the mutual relationship of the lines has also been tightened by their now much greater parallelism. The rabt̤ of the verse, its quality of internal tautness and “connection,” has been markedly improved.

This quality of rabt̤ was one of the basic excellences of a shi‘r. Of all the examples of iṣlāḤ given in The Adorner of Poetry, by far the greatest number involve an improvement in rabt̤, especially between the two lines of the verse. After one such example, Ṣafdar comments, “This is the meaning of iṣlāḤ—that the two lines should become involved in close combat with each other.”^[16] Such intimacy and tension between the lines can bring an invaluable cohesion to the verse. Ideally, every word comes to seem unchangeable, since it is enmeshed with every other word. The verse feels monolithic and inevitable. Mīr, in his commanding position at the very beginning of the tazkirah tradition, emphasized the importance of rabt̤.^[17] And Azad, at the end of the tazkirah tradition, attributed just this unchangeability first to Saudā [150] and later to Żauq, whose “poetry has the quality that if you forget a word, until you recall the exact original word the shi‘r gives no pleasure.” Azad then quotes Mīr Anīs as praising Żauq to the same effect: “In his verbal construction is an inborn tightness that makes his poetry powerful” (456).

One final example may help to clarify the point about rabt̤. Azad tells an anecdote that explains the origin of one of Żauq’s most famous verses.

One day there was the usual durbar. The ustad [Żauq] too was in attendance. A prince entered; he was perhaps bearing a message from one of the princesses or ladies of the harem. He said something very quietly to the king, and prepared to leave. Ḥakīm AḤsanullāh Ḳhān too was present. He petitioned, “Prince, so much hurry? What is this coming, and at once going away?” From the prince’s lips there emerged, “I neither came at will, nor went at will.” The king looked toward his ustad and commanded, “Ustad! Look what a perfect line of verse that was.” The ustad without hesitation petitioned, Your Lordship,

Life brought us, we came; death took us, we went—
We neither came at will, nor went at will. (463-464)

From the accident of a metrical line of speech, the consummately practiced ustad, when challenged by his patron/shagird, at once makes a verse—and a wonderful one. He indeed shows “the glory of his ustadship.”

What Żauq did on this occasion was called “joining lines” (miṣra‘ lagānā), a highly regarded technical exercise. A similar test was said to have been imposed on Firdausī, and an even harder one on the young Amīr Ḳhusrau, who was required to extemporize a quatrain that mentioned “four discordant things, namely hair, egg, arrow, and melon.”^[18] The perceptive critic T̤abāt̤abā’ī describes joining lines as not only an excellent form of practice but also “a great art” in itself.^[19]

In the present case the second line, metrical only by chance, was supplemented by Żauq’s instantly invented first line, to make a complete opening verse for a ghazal:

lā’ī Ḥayāt ā’e qaẓā le chalī chale
apnī ḳhushī nah ā’e nah apnī ḳhushī chale

Life brought [us], [we] came; death took [us], [we] went—
[We] neither came at will nor went at will

The omission of subjects, quite permissible in Urdu, here makes for universality—the subject can be “I” (as in the prince’s statement), “we,” or any “they”—and also for tremendous compression: except for “life” (Ḥayāt) and “death” (qaẓā) every word in the first line is a verb. And these verbs echo each other both phonetically and semantically: lā’ī (“brought”) is separated by only one word from ā’e (“came”), le chalī (“took”) is immediately followed by chale (“went”).

The first line is thus full of energy, movement, even confusion—which the second line, with its slower pace and its two negators (nah), rejects. The first line consists of two affirmative sentences, the second of one negative one. The two lines are thus “involved in close combat” with each other. The first line has a semantic break at the precise metrical midpoint—just as the second does. Moreover, the word right before the midpoint (ā’e, “came”) is the same in both lines, as is the last word in the line (chale, “went”), which ties the verse strongly together both semantically (by the sequence of came-went) and formally, through the rhythmic movement of the repeated words.

There are, of course, several other repetitions in the second line, which add to its closural force. And there are the strongly marked sound effects of the three long vowels ā, ī, and e: in addition to their other occurrences, one of these vowels falls at the end of every word in the verse except Ḥayāt, in which ā is prominent, and the two inconspicuous little negators (nah). The result of so much internal rabt̤ and so many long vowels is an irresistibly sonorous verse, one that has often been recited and sung, and is still very popular today. However Żauq came to compose this verse—and of course Azad is not to be trusted as an accurate historical source—it is a masterpiece of “connection.” It has just the monolithic quality, the sense that every single word is inevitable and unchangeable, that marks a truly marbūt̤ (rabt̤-possessing) verse.

Rabt̤ is a protean quality and can involve semantic, phonetic, rhythmic, allusive, and even visual self-reflexiveness.^[20] The more rabt̤ the better: no verse is ever reproached for having too much of it. Having rabt̤, being marbūt̤, is an utterly fundamental value in a shi‘r. Nevertheless—or rather, for exactly this reason—no theorist ever sat down to explore its ramifications. To people who had taken it for granted from the beginning of their literary lives, it was entirely self-evident. Who would bother to write about something so fundamental? Who would need to read about it?

The importance of rabt̤ is bound up with the independent identity of the shi‘r as a self-contained two-line poem. The verse has, in the immediate sense, only its own resources to exploit—and (except in the case of an opening verse) these resources do not even include rhyme between the two lines.^[21] Thus the shi‘r must exploit to the fullest those resources that it does have. In the hands of a poet like Ġhālib the verse can become packed, crammed, so charged that it almost leaps off the page. So much is going on in the same small space at the same time that some of his shi‘rs are like atomic particles—they seem to be held together by their own intense and perfectly balanced energies.

The corollary of the pursuit of rabt̤ is a hatred for verbal flabbiness of any kind. Ġhālib has, for example, a shi‘r in which the word qismat (“fortune, destiny”) is repeated: “Alas for the qismat of those four measures of cloth, Ġhālib/In whose qismat it is to be a lover’s collar.” The verse relies on the well-known maẓmūn that love is madness: the passionate lover rips his collar open, tearing the unfortunate cloth. Some commentators have considered it a defect that the word qismat occurs in each line, without any poetic use being made of the fact. Editors have even gone so far as to substitute, with no textual justification whatsoever, the word qīmat (“price”) in the first line, simply to save Ġhālib from such an un-Ġhālibian flabbiness. Other commentators have defended Ġhālib, claiming that the repetition is indeed meaningful and enjoyable.^[22]

Two basic assumptions underlie this kind of controversy. First, all parties agree that the repetition of even a single word is not a neutral or minor fact; there is no leeway whatsoever for padding. Especially in a much-admired poet like Ġhālib, every word counts—if not positively, then negatively, as a “defect,” a failure to extract the last ounce of poetic effect from the available resources. Second, all parties agree that mere repetition in itself is not a contribution to rabt̤, and can even be a threat to it, a failure to involve the two lines of the verse in “close combat” with each other. Rabt̤ cannot be achieved merely by repetition; it demands a much more exciting tension between likeness and difference, one that makes the mind ricochet from point to point within the verse.

If rabt̤ delights the mind, the quality of ravānī, “flowingness,” delights the ear. It is a kind of euphonious, harmonious sound that makes people want to recite the verse aloud and savor it. The smooth, sensuous effect of ravānī is traditionally described as “pearls sliding on a sheet of silk” (260). The pearl-like words are so full of power and “movingness” (tāṡīr) that they “come rolling along on the tongue, of their own accord” (455). Ravānī seems often to involve a cherishing of long vowels and an avoidance of consonant clusters.^[23] No individual word should stand out as strange or obtrusive; the rhythm should be so fluent that the meter feels responsive to the verse, not mechanically imposed on it. While the term ravānī has been widely used at least since the time of Amīr Ḳhusrau and Ḥāfiz̤, Mīr was especially inclined to cultivate—and to boast of—the ravānī in his poetry. His ravānī at times creates such music, such rapid movement, such organic smoothness, that even an ordinary shi‘r can linger in the memory.^[24] And of all qualities ravānī is the one most certain to evaporate in translation.

Here, for example, is one of Mīr’s masterpieces of ravānī, a verse that seems to contain the flow and rhythm of the sea:

us kā baḥr-e Ḥusn sarāsar auj o mauj o talāt̤um hai
shauq kī apne nigāh jahāñ tak jāve bos o kinār hai āj^[25]

Yet how uninspired it appears in translation:

His ocean of beauty is end-to-end crests and waves and buffeting
As far as my passionate glance travels, there is kissing and embracing today.

Here the basic maẓmūn of the beloved’s beauty as an ocean is given a piquant twist: just as waves in the ocean, rising and falling, encounter only each other, so the beloved’s airs and graces, as they enhance and “embrace” each other, are available only to the lover’s eyes. Moreover, kinār (“embrace”) strongly recalls the more common kinārā (“edge, shore”)—and thus suggests how delightful but tantalizing it must be for the lover to see so much narcissistic “kissing and embracing” in the midst of that ocean of beauty, when real embraces require an edge or “shore” of physical contact.

Still, the verse’s ravānī is its real charm—and how to convey that? Euphonious sound combinations like sarāsar, auj o mauj o, and talāt̤um are only part of the story. The component long and short syllables of the lines can be shown, but no such analysis can convey how swingy and seductive their rhythm is. Let us just say that ravānī is a quality lost by definition in translation, but very much present in the Urdu, even if it is hard to describe in words. Ravānī is only a bit less fundamental than rabt̤: a verse can succeed without it, but no verse can ever have too much of it.

And, of course, rabt̤, ravānī, and other qualities are to be sought in the verse alone, not in the ghazal as a whole. The shi‘r is the fundamental unit of all presentation—whether oral or written, professional or amateur, classical or modern. When poets recite their ghazals, they often rearrange the order of verses, and even more often omit verses they judge unsuitable to the occasion and the audience’s mood. When singers sing ghazals, in concert or for recording, they take the same liberties. The “notebook” preserves selected verses rather than whole ghazals; the tazkirah does the same. (Azad presented whole ghazals in Water of Life in order to ensure representativeness, not artistic integrity.)^[26] Single verses are the units to which iṣlāḤ is applied. Single verses are quoted in conversation or recited among friends. Even the greatest connoisseurs, who know thousands of verses by heart, cannot recite whole ghazals—unless they can reconstruct them verse by verse, and even then they usually do not have the verses in order and often cannot tell whether a verse is missing. Even in a formal printed volume, no one considers it strange if a poet chooses to omit most of a ghazal and present one or two selected verses. The individual verse has always been treated as a small, complete, free-standing poem. The very existence of special terms like Ġhazal-e musalsal (“continuous ghazal”) and qit̤ah (“verse-sequence”) shows that such sequential developments are outside the norm.^[27]

In a two-line poem, every word is crucial; and the relationship between the two lines is, if possible, even more crucial. When enjambement occurs—when a single thought overruns the first line and completes itself only in the second—the two lines are woven into one semantic unit. But far more often, the two lines are end-stopped: the break between lines is emphasized and exploited, and the two lines placed in some distinct logical relationship to each other. Azad put it very well: “The pleasure comes when half the thing has been said, half is still on the lips—and the listener suddenly catches it” (51). The first line will often make a general statement or claim (da‘vā), followed in the second line by a response (javāb-e da‘vā), an illustration (tamṡīl), or a supporting argument (dalīl). Or a well-known effect may be stated in the first line, then attributed in the second line to a new and unexpected cause (Ḥusn-e ta‘līl). If possible, the two lines are joined not only by this logical relationship but also by wordplay, sound effects, and related imagery; only when interlocked in several ways do they become truly marbūt̤.

The pursuit of rabt̤ is thus one of the “age-old” rules of the “game of words” played by ghazal poets. That the demand for rabt̤ is never applied to a whole ghazal is further proof of the autonomy of the individual verse. Rabt̤ is an atomistic, word-based poetic concept, one well suited to competitive arenas like that of the mushairah. There can be winners and losers: judgments can be made clearly on the basis of precise criteria within two-line poetic units. Rabt̤ is either there or it is not: if it is there, its elements can be identified; and if it is not, the verse remains a mere “two-fragment” (do laḳht) failure. Similarly, the presence or absence of ravānī becomes very apparent under mushairah performance conditions, in which the verse is heard over and over: a verse may be sung lingeringly, with many repetitions of phrases and lines; or it may be chanted, also lingeringly, in a special melodious style called tarannum; or its lines may be rhythmically recited aloud again and again, often by both the poet and the listeners.

This small poem, the two-line verse, thus stands alone, independent of the particular ghazal in which it appears. It may well boast of its extreme compression, for when a river “flows through a narrow gorge between two mountains, it flows with a great tumult and commotion,” but when the river’s flow is “spread out, no force at all remains” (298). Yet the verse’s seeming isolation is also a trick of perspective. For the shi‘r in fact inhabits the whole ghazal universe, and so becomes one node in an elaborate, richly articulated network. The ghazal universe is founded on the figure of the passionate lover, and mirrors his consciousness. The lover, while longing for his inaccessible (human) beloved or (divine) Beloved, reflects on the world as it appears to him in his altered emotional state. To him its highs are infinite heavens, its lows abysmal depths, its every scene and every moment charged with intense and complex meanings—meanings to which nonlovers, the ordinary “people of the world,” are blind.

The geography of the ghazal universe includes settings for the lover’s every mood: the garden for metaphors of harmony between “nature” and man, the social gathering for human relationships, the wine house for intoxication and mystic revelation, the mosque for ostentatious piety or impiety, the desert for solitary wandering, the madhouse or prison cell for intransigence and frenzy, the grave and its aftermath for ultimate triumph or defeat. The human inhabitants of the ghazal universe include all, and only, the supporting characters proper to a love affair: the lover’s confidant, his messenger, his rivals; the beloved’s door-guard; the sāqī who pours the wine; the fellow drinkers; the smug “advisor”; the ostentatiously pious shaiḳh; archetypal earlier lovers like Majnūn; and so on. This whole universe exists in the consciousness of the ghazal knower—who constructs it by reading or hearing verses, and constantly refines it by reading or hearing yet more verses.

It is time to look more closely at the ways in which the ghazal universe is defined and elaborated. For this whole interpretive universe, while it implicitly surrounds each small two-line poem, must be evoked and creatively exploited by the words of the poem itself. The concepts of rabt̤ and ravānī are only the starting points for a wider poetics. What can and should be accomplished within a single two-line verse? And how did the classical ghazal poets themselves describe their achievements?

Notes