Two. Flowers on the Branch of Invention

Mīr Inshā’allāh Ḳhān…wrote a grammar of
Urdu and caused flowers of rhetoric to bloom
on the branch of invention.

5. Tazkirahs

As we have seen, Azad sympathized with those who complained about the tazkirah tradition. Tazkirahs provided too little information: they described “neither a poet’s biography, nor his temperament and character”; sometimes they even went so far as to “omit the dates of his birth and death.” Hali agreed, maintaining that tazkirah writers often “didn’t even try” to seek out this “necessary information.” Instead, they engaged in “meaningless and petty” critical discussion.^[1] Nor, according to Azad, did tazkirahs shed sufficient light on each poet’s achievement—on “the merits of his work, its strong and weak points, or its relationship to that of his contemporaries” (4). Moreover, tazkirahs sometimes gave an unrepresentative selection from a poet’s work, so that his real qualities did not clearly appear (88-89).

Yet Azad made it plain that he considered Water of Life a “tazkirah of poets” (408), and himself a “tazkirah writer” (499). He defined his territory clearly: he decided, for example, that it was “not the task of an Urdu tazkirah writer” to deal with what poets had written in Persian (499). Certainly the greater part of Azad’s material came from tazkirahs. He also drew heavily on oral sources—just as tazkirah writers had always done. He was thus confronted by many of the same problems that other tazkirah writers had faced: accounts given by different earlier tazkirahs were contradictory (118); anecdotes were sometimes vague and poorly told and had “with regret” to be omitted (410); his cherished oral sources conflicted with one another (369). Yet even while oral sources posed special problems, they were a unique treasure of information: verses missing from poets’ written volumes were often known orally, by heart, to contemporaries (230-31).

Hali praised Water of Life—tendentiously, from his stance as a modernizer—as “the first Urdu tazkirah in which the responsibilities of tazkirah writing have been carried out.”^[2] Scholars nowadays see Water of Life as a kind of hinge. It is both the last work on the list of classical tazkirahs—of which about sixty-eight, out of what was certainly a much larger number, are currently known to be extant—and the first modern literary history. Despite Azad’s criticism of the tazkirah tradition, it is not surprising that he placed himself within the most important genre of literary record and commentary that existed in Urdu—a genre, moreover, with a long and rich history.

Like so many other Urdu genres, tazkirahs were taken over from Persian. Indeed, until about 1845 most tazkirahs of Urdu poetry were themselves written in Persian. Etymologically, tażkirah is derived from an Arabic root meaning “to mention, to remember.” Historically, the literary tazkirah grows out of the ubiquitous little “notebook” (bayāẓ) that lovers of poetry carried around with them for recording verses that caught their fancy. A typical notebook would include some verses by its owner, and others by poets living and dead, both Persian and Urdu. Azad himself kept just such a private notebook; it was published some years after his death.^[3] The concise two-line length of shi‘rs, and the speed with which Urdu script can be written, make it possible to record such verses very conveniently and to memorize and recite them with ease. Lovers of Urdu poetry still frequently keep notebooks, and favorite verses still commonly circulate in conversation.

More serious, or more organized, students might compile notebooks devoted only to certain kinds of poetry: to the work of living poets, for example, or the finest poets, or poets from a particular city, or women poets, or poets in a certain genre. In a pre-print culture such compilations were of the greatest interest and value, for they were often the only means of preserving and disseminating poetry over time and space. There were, as we have seen, a great many occasional poets, but only a few of them were “possessors of a volume” (ṣāḤib-e dīvān)—poets who had had a substantial body of their own poetry systematically collected and arranged for dissemination in manuscript form.^[4] Compilers of notebooks were thus often moved to perform a public service by sharing their work with a wider circle. With the addition of a certain amount—sometimes a very small amount—of introductory or identifying information about the poets, a notebook could become a tazkirah. Tazkirahs circulated in manuscript form, and as printing developed in North India they began to be printed as well.^[5]

The tazkirahs’ roots in the “notebook” tradition explain one of their most conspicuous traits: their individuality, their insouciance, the insistence of each one on defining its own approach to its own group of poets. As we might expect from their origins, the earlier ones tend to be more like anthologies, with only brief critical commentary and minimal information about the poets; later ones tend to include more extensive biographical data, anecdotal asides, and/or critical comment. But even then, they are by no means consistent: if the compiler didn’t have certain information, or wasn’t interested in it, he simply didn’t provide it, and there was an end of the matter. After all, if a poet had composed one or two good verses, it was a valuable and enjoyable task to preserve them, even if little or nothing was known about the poet. Sometimes, in an oral culture, even the poet’s pen name was lost—yet the worth of the verses themselves remained, along with the pleasure of reciting them and sharing them with others.

The tazkirahs’ idiosyncrasies can be clearly seen in their various styles of organization. Although the majority had their contents arranged in alphabetical order by the first letter of each poet’s pen name, this scheme was by no means universal; no fewer than twenty out of the sixty-eight extant tazkirahs adopt other arrangements. The earliest three surviving tazkirahs (including a famous one by Mīr), which were all completed around 1752, present the poets in a largely random order; as late as the mid-1830s another tazkirah (no. 29) used the same haphazard approach.^[6]

Already by 1755, however, “Qā’im” Chāndpūrī had introduced in his tazkirah (no. 5) a division of poets into three chronologically defined periods: early, middle, and late. One early tazkirah (no. 7) put its poets into order according to the traditional abjad system used for chronograms. The writer of another tazkirah (no. 8) used “classes” based on chronology but divided the last class into five subgroups that he identified as follows: “leading new poets; poets of royal or noble lineage and their ministers and courtiers; poets who are local Afghan nobles and non-Afghans from nearby areas; poets who are dear friends of mine; dear friends and relatives and brothers of mine, and novices who haven’t yet written much poetry but are vain enough to regard themselves as poets.”^[7] Mīr Ḥasan’s tazkirah (no. 9) integrated both main systems, listing the poets alphabetically but then subdividing the poets within each letter into early, middle, and late. The writer of one tazkirah (no. 12) appended to his alphabetical list a separate category for his close friends; the writer of another tazkirah (no. 17) appended to his alphabetical list what was apparently his own “notebook” of three hundred favorite shi‘rs, with no attributions at all.

Among the nineteenth-century tazkirahs, alphabetical organization by pen name continued to predominate. Chronological division offered the main alternative, and the scheme most commonly adopted was the tripartite early-middle-late one. One tazkirah (no. 31) that used the chronological scheme introduced it with a kind of handbook of basic poetic knowledge, including sections on Persian grammar and usage, Urdu grammar, Urdu usage, meter, the arts of discourse and poetics, and discussion of the development of the Urdu language.^[8] Another (no. 37) arranged the poets as much as possible into poetic lineages starting from the three principal ustads, Mīr, Saudā, and MuṣḤafī, but then adding a large group—poets with unknown ustads—who were left over. Another (no. 45) began with a group of verses by known poets, and then included a separate group for which the authors were not known. Another (no. 49) was divided into three parts: first an Arabic one, then a Persian one, then an Urdu one. One huge tazkirah (no. 40) aspired to be all-encompassing, dividing its 999 poets into four chronological groups.

Others prided themselves on their selectiveness: one (no. 35) confined itself to a mere twelve poets. Another (no. 43) included only verses that had as their refrain (radīf) the name of some part of the body—and arranged them in order by body part, working from “head,” “mind,” “hair,” downward to “foot,” “heels,” “soles.” Another (no. 54) focused only on the vāsoḳht genre. Several tazkirahs confined their attention to women poets. Two of these (nos. 52 and 62) were alphabetical, while the third and largest (no. 58) was divided into two sections: the first section contained 102 bāzārī women poets, the second 49 women poets who lived in respectable seclusion (pardah). Two other tazkirahs (nos. 59 and 59a) concerned themselves exclusively with poets from Rampur; one small one (no. 55) was divided into four “gardens,” of which three were devoted to poets from Bhopal. The tradition even includes a tazkirah of Urdu poets in French (no. 34) by Garcin de Tassy, and one in English (no. 41) by Aloys Sprenger.

Enough has been said to show that tazkirah writers were a remarkably diverse and freewheeling group. This was only to be expected: since the real value of a tazkirah lay in the poetry it preserved and disseminated, the nature of the presentation was a relatively minor point, left to the personal taste of the compiler. The genre began, after all, with Mīr’s brief, mostly randomly organized tazkirah Nikāt ush-shu‘arā (Fine points about the poets, 1752), which became notorious for the acerbic adjectives Mīr applied to the many poets he disliked.^[9]The Garden of Poetry (1855), the last tazkirah published before the Rebellion, contained, as we have seen, extravagant praise of the emperor—yet Ṣābir allotted only a little over two pages to Z̤afar, while he devoted over eight pages of floridly humble rhetoric to his own life and career. Ṣābir also saw fit to begin his tazkirah with a record-breaking 111-page introduction: first a description of his own desperate search for an ustad; then various lengthy—but unfortunately not very coherent—accounts of the origin of the world, poetry, social organization, and so forth, drawn from Arabic, Persian, and also Hindu sources; then theoretical discussions about poetry, including his ideas about meter, rhyme, and genre.

Other tazkirah writers approached their task much more lightly. Many enjoyed the chance to display their own literary virtuosity by writing an elaborate prose full of elegantly rhyming phrases. Some, as we have seen, felt free to make special sections for their close friends and relations. Even more disarmingly, Abu’l-Ḥasan Amrullāh Illāhābādī, author of the early Tażkirah-e masarrat afzā (The enjoyment-enhancing tazkirah, 1780), confides his fears and hopes in his introduction:

May it not happen that this cruel and powerful age should inflict on me a change in fortune, and I should forget those things that are sheltered in my heart, and that are now prepared to manifest themselves! With this thought I took courage, and made the attempt.…I beseech the fair-minded and enlightened reader: if you stroll through this garden, please don’t wound its flowers with the fingernails of nit-picking. Because arrangement and pruning (iṣlāḤ) are difficult, while tearing apart and scattering are not hard. This tazkirah is a gift—one fit for young poets, to give them joy.

The author shows this candidly personal touch throughout. He tells an occasional corny joke; he confesses ruefully how a dancing girl outdid him in repartee; he complains of a fellow tazkirah writer who won’t share material; and he devotes fully eight affectionate pages to his brother, the poet “Ḥasrat.”^[10] His tazkirah lives up to its title: it is both enjoyable and full of joy.

For our present purposes, one tazkirah in particular, An Elegant Encounter (Ḳhush ma‘rikah-e zebā)^[11] (no. 37) by Sa‘ādat Ḳhān “Nāṣir,” deserves a closer look. It is one of the largest tazkirahs, with 809 poets; its pre-Rebellion date (1846), its focus on Lucknow, its unique arrangement according to poetic lineages, all make it a useful cross-check on Water of Life. It proves to be a very consistent supporting witness. Whatever may be the historical reliability of any individual anecdote, Nāṣir’s underlying assumptions about the literary life, and about the roles and activities that constitute it, are manifestly the same as Azad’s.

At the center of this poetic world, for Nāṣir as for Azad, is the ustad; Nāṣir’s lineage arrangement in fact makes ustad-shagird relationships the chief organizing principle of his work.^[12] (Azad, by contrast, organizes Water of Life into a sequence of five historical periods, an approach we will examine in a later chapter.) Nāṣir makes it clear that ustads often chose the pen names of their shagirds: āĠhā Ḥasan “Amānat” gave all his shagirds pen names like his own, ending in t; Shaiḳh Qalandar Baḳhsh“Jur’at” (1748-1810) named one shagird “Mihr” (Affection) because of his friendly disposition—only to find the name already occupied. The most popular pen names were constantly recycled: Nāṣir records, for example, six separate forerunners of our “Azad” and one of our “Hali.”^[13]

In such an authoritarian world, to change ustads was an awkward and delicate business: Jur’at refused to accept a former shagird of MuṣḤafī’s without MuṣḤafī’s written consent. Sometimes shagirds grew impatient with this lifelong seniority system:

In the days when I was writing this tazkirah, [the poet] “ābād” and I met in Ismail Ganj, above a confectioner’s shop. He asked, “How have you described me?” I said, “An inventive poet, shagird of Nā-siḳh.” He was disgruntled, and said, “You should have described me as my own shagird.…I’m better than he is now!”

Nāṣir is scandalized by such unseemly behavior. For a shagird to consider himself better than such a capable ustad as Nāsiḳh is outrageous—“It’s nothing but barbarous ignorance!”^[14]

For Nāṣir, just as for Azad, the ustad’s great glory is his capacity to “adorn” his shagirds’ verses with “the jewels of iṣlāḤ.” Nāṣir gives many examples of iṣlāḤ by the great poet Nāsiḳh: he changes “of few words” to “tongueless”; he easily rearranges a troublesome line; he firmly corrects, among others, Nāṣir’s own verses, overriding all objections.^[15] Junior ustads rely on their elders: when Jur’at is criticized at a mushairah for using the form gulbāzī instead of gul-e bāzī, he seeks out Saudā, who confirms that his usage is not only permissible but actually more commonly accepted. Ustads often consult each other about minor problems like exotic scansions; Nāsiḳh even sends his shagirds with questions to other ustads, so they can discover who knows and who doesn’t.^[16]

And sometimes ustads quarrel—preferably by proxy, as in one complex anecdote recounted by Nāṣir. At a patterned (t̤araḥī) mushairah sponsored by one Mirzā Ja‘far, two minor poets, “Qamar” and “Ẓamīr,” incite Mirzā “Qatīl” to humiliate the Kayasth poet Maujī Rām “Maujī,” a shagird of MuṣḤafī’s. In front of the whole mushairah Qatīl objects to two of Maujī’s usages: he has used the word gulāb to mean gul (“rose”) and has misused the word sarāb (“mirage”) by stretching its associations beyond “desert” to “sand” and “sun.” Controversy develops; Maujī goes to his ustad for support. MuṣḤafī, however, maintains that poets “shouldn’t fall out with each other over their shagirds.” Nāsiḳh himself therefore intervenes, giving Maujī a written reply to Qatīl to read aloud in the next mushairah: “Such pointless remarks from a poet like you, the pride of the age, are strange indeed! Don’t you know that ...”—and there follow a number of warrants, including verses from several respected poets (among them MuṣḤafī) that support the disputed usages. Then, for good measure, Nāsiḳh carries the war into the enemy’s camp, making an objection to one of Ẓamīr’s verses: Ẓamīr has used the image of a “fish restless under water,” while, on the contrary, “where else can a fish feel peaceful except under water?” And so on—and on.^[17]

Azad, as we have seen, shows us that passions sometimes run so high in these literary quarrels that they result in physical violence—always by proxy, which means by shagirds. Nāṣir describes the case of Javāhir Singh “Jauhar,” who was so “ignorant of the etiquette (ādāb) of gatherings” that during a mushairah held by Sirāj ud-Daulah he rudely laughed at one of the ghazals of Ḳhvājah Ḥaidar ‘Alī “ātash” (1777-1847), and used abusive language. Jauhar then recited a ghazal in reply to ātash’s, in the same pattern, and added some further taunts. Everyone present was upset by his behavior. Someone got Jauhar’s attention and gestured to him to make his escape, but “the fool didn’t understand.” After the ghazal was finished and Jauhar finally rose to leave, some of ātash’s shagirds managed to reach him and “his honor was lost.”^[18]

Nāṣir makes it clear, as does Azad, that these dramatic conflicts between ustads occur very often in connection with mushairahs. Azad describes a mushairah to which rival poets came with “swords and muskets and weapons at the ready” for the “dangerous encounter” of verbal warfare (252); in another case, a loaded gun was brandished. Dr. Leitner called mushairahs “Battles of the Bards.”^[19] As we have seen, Nāṣir frequently names in his anecdotes the sponsor of the particular mushairah at which some notable incident occurred. He mentions well-known regular Lucknow mushairah series, such as that sponsored by “Ibrat,” which took place on the fifth of every month, and that of “Saḥāb,” which was held at his house at Qandhari Bazaar.^[20] Azad himself describes the glories of the mushairah series sponsored by Mirzā Sulaimān Shikoh (254), as well as other regular Lucknow mushairahs (229, 331, 351, 382).

Mushairah series were of course held in Delhi as well—at the Red Fort, at Delhi College (459-60), at Sheftah’s house,^[21] at Shāh Naṣīr’s house (436)—and in every other city where Urdu poetry was cultivated (364). The poet āĠhā Kalb Ḥusain Ḳhān “Nādir,” a deputy collector, was undeterred by official transfers: he established his own mushairah series and always “took his mushairah with him” (358) when he traveled. In Lahore, Munshī Har Sukh Rāy not only arranged a weekly mushairah but also linked it with his newspaper, the Koh-e Nūr. The Koh-e Nūr published the best ghazals from each mushairah, and also announced the two pattern lines—one Persian, one Urdu—for the next mushairah. By the end of 1854 the Koh-e Nūr had a remarkably large circulation: fully 350 subscribers.^[22]

At the very start of the tazkirah tradition, Mīr goes into considerable detail about the mushairah held by his own Delhi circle on the fifteenth of every month: for a time it was located at Mīr Dard’s house, but then, at Mīr Dard’s request (quoted word for word), Mīr himself began to play host. Mīr mentions several other regular contemporary mushairahs as well.^[23] Mushairahs could be simple, informal gatherings held even by poets of very limited means. In Delhi in the late 1730s the respected Persian poet Ḥazīn is described as regularly entertaining his fellow poets: “In the evening the courtyard in his house is swept and sprinkled with water and colourful carpets are spread on a raised platform,” in preparation for ghazal recitations.^[24]

Mushairahs have been both studied^[25] and imaginatively depicted.^[26] (According to Azad, there were also gatherings called munāṡirahs for the reading of prose [398], but these never became well established in the tradition.) The mushairah can be shown to go back to the earliest days of Urdu poetry.^[27] In this agonistic “elegant encounter,” rival poets, vying for praise, formally presented their work by reciting it aloud to one another and to a select audience of connoisseurs. Anecdotal accounts of famous poetic battles became part of the oral history of the genre: Azad regrets that in the case of Shāh Naṣīr we don’t know “in which mushairahs and in competition with whom, which ghazals were composed” (389).

Audience response could involve quite an elaborate repertoire of reactions—but response there must be. A courteous, stylized show of at least minimal approval was almost obligatory: Azad describes Inshā’s public complaint (at a mushairah) that a certain senior poet has been treating him outrageously: “Not to speak of doing me justice—he doesn’t even nod his head at my verses!” (253). The real audience may even consist of one uniquely qualified person: when Nāsiḳh died, his great rival ātash too “ceased to compose verses, because the pleasure of composing was in hearing and reciting” (382).

Mushairahs were not always part of a regular series. They could also be arranged in honor of some special or festive occasion, often on short notice, and might continue for a series of nights. Matters of protocol were taken very seriously. The order in which poets were called upon to recite became a matter of delicate maneuvering: Which senior poet would be accorded the supreme honor of being the very last to recite? How would the poets react to one another’s verse, in a situation in which audience response and participation were integral to the performance? How would their unruly shagirds behave? A breakdown of decorum was, as we have seen, only too possible; the polished manners and refined elegance so valued in the culture were sometimes at risk. Mushairahs often started fashionably late in the evening and continued far into the night—thus posing the additional risk of putting some participants to sleep.

Almost all mushairahs were of the sort called “patterned,” meaning that the convenor(s) had given out a pattern line chosen from a well-known ghazal by some respected poet. If the mushairah was part of a series, the participating ustads might take turns in choosing the next pattern line (390). Every poet had to compose his ghazal in the same “ground” as the pattern line. This meant that it had to have the same pattern—the same meter, the same repeated refrain, and the same rhyme (qāfiyah)—as the given line.

The essence of a patterned mushairah was the extraordinary degree of comparability among the “ground-sharing” (ham zamīn) ghazals produced for it. Formally, of course, they were completely identical—the technical specifications of the ghazal are so precise that any two verses in the same ground could be part of the same ghazal. Moreover, the formal parameters tend to produce semantic effects. If the prescribed meter is very short, it may be difficult to express elaborate thoughts in it, or to use polysyllabic words. If the refrain is some notable word or phrase—such as “you may remember or not,” “door and walls,” “finger”—it may give the poet’s imagination a definite slant. Above all, the rhyme words are important. There are only so many words in the language that fit into the prescribed metrical pattern, end in the prescribed rhyme, can be made to occur directly before the prescribed refrain—and can still create an effect that seems shiguftah, “fresh, flowering.” In a patterned mushairah, most of these two dozen or so effective rhyme words occur over and over in everyone’s verses.

Since the same formal constraints and semantic suggestions operate on all the poets, the particular character of each verse stands out in high relief. The very process of hearing dozens of similar verses induces the listener to discriminate among them: a superior verse has an immediate and unmistakable impact. Rival poets gnash their teeth behind careless smiles; or if they are truly overwhelmed, they may even refuse to recite when their own turn comes (258-59). Eager shagirds take note of new possibilities; connoisseurs loudly express their admiration—and the verse is instantly recorded in various “notebooks” and memories. It follows that in a single pattern it becomes harder and harder to keep on writing fresh, striking, piquant verses—since poets are working within constraints that are narrow to begin with and are soon on the verge of exhaustion from overuse.

This very difficulty, however, is precisely what ambitious poets welcome: it becomes an irresistible technical challenge. In The Garden of Poetry, the last pre-1857 tazkirah, Ṣābir records an extraordinary anecdote of mushairah behavior. It concerns the famous Shāh Naṣīr, former ustad of the emperor.

It was during these days that Shah Naṣīr returned from Lucknow to Shahjahanabad [Delhi]. On the persuasion of “Pārsā” (Pious) the pious-natured he took part in a mushairah and recited, by way of repetition, two ghazals in new grounds that he had composed at the behest of the poets of Lucknow.

The first of these two patterns had the refrain tīliyāñ (“sticks”), the second patthar ke (“of stone”). Shāh Naṣīr’s ghazals received so much “praise and admiration” that several other ustads grew jealous and “required some of their shagirds to compose ghazals in both the grounds.”

One of these shagirds, Ḳhairuddīn “Yās,” scored a minor but genuine success: he “composed a good shi‘r in the second ground.” The reaction was swift:

Shāh Naṣīr did not like this too much, and he composed almost fifty ghazals in the first ground and had them recited in the following mushairah under the names of his students. This action made the jealousy even hotter, and after that mushairah the poets made it a condition that from then on every mushairah should have this same ground as a pattern. The result was that for some months they composed nothing but ghazals with the refrain of tīliyāñ. And these lovers of poetry were so much taken with this craze that for a long time they did nothing but pick up sticks (tīliyāñ) from the ground (zamīn) of poetry.

This “craze” generated many hundreds of tightly constrained, formally identical two-line verses, all striving to be different in content but all somehow concerning “sticks.” The display of verbal ingenuity under the most impossible conditions can seldom have been carried to such heights. Ultimately, Shāh Naṣīr outperformed and outlasted his rivals.^[28] According to Azad, he was always on the lookout, everywhere he went, for fresh maẓmūns (395). His unparalleled inventiveness earned him Ṣābir’s highest acclaim:

Other people recited no more than eight or nine shi‘rs in the mushairah. A thousand praises to the search [for maẓmūns] of Shāh Naṣīr—on every occasion he recited a “double ghazal” of sixty or seventy shi‘rs, and the ghazal of each one of his shagirds was not less than nineteen or twenty shi‘rs long. The wonder is that all their ghazals too were the creations of that master-rider in the field of poetry.^[29]

Out of all the verses in all the immensely long ghazals mentioned in this anecdote,^[30] Ṣābir describes only one—the single shi‘r composed by Yās that originally provoked Shāh Naṣīr to rivalry—as “good.” For the rest, it is the sheer ingenuity of the verses, the fact that they exist at all, that makes them impressive. They are tours de force of technical expertise under pressure; Ṣābir finds that a perfectly valid and sufficient reason for praising their creators.

At length the competition—which must have been growing more and more impossible to sustain—was ended in a graceful and appropriate manner. “Ultimately, Shaiḳh Ibrāhīm Żauq wrote an ode in this ground, praising Hazrat the Shadow of God,” the emperor himself.^[31] Apparently Żauq participated in the earlier “sticks” mushairah series as well, for a ghazal by him in this pattern survives—twenty-seven verses long, and beginning most grandiloquently with six separate opening verses.^[32]

Nāṣir as well, in An Elegant Encounter, gives many examples of poets’ rivalry in composing “ground-sharing” ghazals. In one notable case, that patron of poets Mirzā Sulaimān Shikoh was offended when MuṣḤafī used “language unsuitable for princes” in his presence; he made Inshā promise to humiliate MuṣḤafī publicly. One day MuṣḤafī recited a ghazal with the refrain kī gardan (“neck of”). Inshā instantly responded with an impromptu opening verse in the same pattern: “Your head is a mango, your neck is a picked mango slice/You are one whom neither a grasshopper’s nor a wasp’s neck fits.” This verse was a great success: “The common (bāzārī) people loved this opening verse—they even went so far as to make a song out of it.” Inshā then produced another whole ghazal in the same pattern, which ended with a personal attack: “If you look in the mirror, Shaiḳh, you’ll see/The head of an ass, the face of a swine, the neck of a baboon.”^[33]

Next Mirzā Sulaimān Shikoh himself, who was a shagird of Inshā’s, wrote a ghazal in the same pattern, describing MuṣḤafī as a fool. Not only MuṣḤafī himself but also one of his shagirds, “Ḳhalīl,” mounted an energetic defense: return salvos in the same pattern were fired at Inshā. Then Mirzā Ḥaidar ‘Alī “Garm,” another of MuṣḤafī’s shagirds, launched his own attack with another “ground-sharing” ghazal against Inshā. Finally, MuṣḤafī was advised to conciliate Inshā—which he did with yet another ground-sharing ghazal in which he twisted his previous insulting maẓmūns, claiming that they could all bear a favorable meaning if they were “wisely understood.” The outcome was an uneasy—and temporary—truce, officially formalized in the one appropriate setting: eventually, “on the night of the fifteenth, when there was a mushairah at the Prince’s [Sulaiman Shikoh’s],” MuṣḤafī and Inshā were reconciled. But the lull in hostilities was brief. At the next opportunity, the whole thing started up again, with the ustads and shagirds conducting a new round of literary quarrels in a set of insulting ground-sharing ghazals that all ended in the word uñglī (“finger”).^[34]

The connection between mushairahs and the tazkirah tradition can be seen at its strongest in a special kind of tazkirah called a bouquet (guldastah). A bouquet reproduces all or part of the poetry recited at one particular mushairah. So many bouquets have been published that “even today hundreds of them are available at various bookstores.”^[35] One notable tazkirah writer, Karīmuddīn, who owned a press, hit upon a novel plan: he sponsored a personal monthly mushairah series held at his own house, so that he could then publish the verses recited on each occasion in a series of brief pamphlets. Since almost all mushairahs were patterned, a bouquet was usually a kind of “patterned” tazkirah—it was, almost literally, a mushairah on paper.

Tazkirahs were thus somewhat like the kind of chess books that are published for serious players—books that record famous games by great masters, with anecdotal or analytical commentary. These books enable the chess afficionado to study the supreme performances of the past and to relish the great masters’ remarkable techniques and strategies. Authorial comment is often brief and cryptic, presupposing considerable background in the game. It would be misguided to criticize such books because they don’t teach the fundamentals of the game, or narrate its history, or explain its technical terminology. They are addressed to an audience that neither needs nor wants such information.

Similar complaints against tazkirahs are equally misguided. Azad reproached tazkirahs, as we have seen, for not being literary histories; and almost all modern Urdu critics have echoed his complaints. But tazkirahs address an audience of insiders, and give them what they want—which is above all, in a pre-print culture, access to the poetry itself. As Azad noted, people normally learned about poetry from childhood, “through accomplished family members and their circles.” People grew up hearing literary anecdotes as “the small change of conversation, suitable tidbits to be told when groups of friends were gathered together” (4). And if you were so unfortunate as to lack such a cultivated background, you learned about poetry from an ustad, not from a book! Your ustad was better than any book, and gave you all the grounding you needed, for as long as you needed it. After that, the poetry itself was your challenge and your joy.

Alas, as Azad laments, how could the tazkirah writers know that “the page of history would be turned—the old families destroyed, their offspring so ignorant that they would no longer know even their own family traditions”? In the case of Urdu poetry, the page of history was turned abruptly and vehemently—turned with (literally) a vengeance. Nowadays the critical attitudes and vocabulary used by the tazkirahs are all but unintelligible to most scholars—and in fact arouse considerable disdain. About the classical tazkirahs’ approach two respected modern critics unite in complaining,

It’s apparent that to the tazkirah writers poetry is a game of words. Its principles have been passed on unchanged for ages. Grammar, discourse, poetics, meter—all the principles come within the circle of these three or four topics and the question of going outside them doesn’t even arise. Discussion is confined to errors of grammar, discourse, and meter; terms of word choice (faṣāḤat) and rhetoric, the names of the figures—all can be found in abundance. Opinions on the poets’ works are so obscured by old-fashioned exaggerated language that it’s hard even to understand what they mean.^[36]

Although this passage is meant to reproach the tazkirahs for the narrowness of their interests, in fact it goes right to the heart of their poetics: “Poetry is a game of words,” and its “principles have been passed on unchanged for ages.”

The tazkirahs’ “old-fashioned exaggerated language” is thus a shorthand that assumes a prior grounding in the rules of the game. Only a few critics have made any attempt to understand and analyze this vocabulary.^[37] But the radical opacity of tazkirah terminology is perhaps not surprising—for modern critics are trying to overhear private, intense conversations never meant for their ears. To Mīr, a tazkirah was almost an extension of a mushairah. At the end of his own tazkirah, he warns off outsiders in no uncertain terms:

Every person who possesses a proper insight into this art understands the meaning of this; I have nothing to say to outsiders. What I have written will be taken as a warrant by my friends; it is not directed to other people. For the field of poetry is wide, and I am aware of the colorfulness of the garden of appearance. Thus, “every flower has a different color and scent.”^[38]

The diversity to which Mīr refers is enhanced by the smallness of the units of comparison. For modern critics do not always keep in mind one important point: that the whole well-established game of words, played so excitingly in the arena of the mushairah, recorded so vividly in the notebooks and tazkirahs, generally involves poems only two lines long.

Notes

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

7. The Art and Craft of Poetry

Within the larger field of rhetoric (balāĠhat), traditional Perso-Arabic theory separated the “art of discourse” (‘ilm-e bayān) from the “art of poetics” (‘ilm-e badī‘). The art of discourse concerned itself generally with the ways in which language could extend its descriptive range beyond the literal and matter-of-fact. Although it recognized the possibilities of implication (kināyah), it was chiefly concerned with the simile (tashbīh) and the metaphor (isti‘ārah). These were subdivided into numerous kinds, based in part on various possible relationships between what I. A. Richards would call the tenor and the vehicle.

The art of poetics was the branch of rhetoric that analyzed the specifically literary possibilities of language. It in turn was subdivided into two branches: what might be called “figures of meaning” (ṣanā‘-e ma‘navī) and “verbal figures” (ṣanā‘-e lafz̤ī). Figures of meaning included the various kinds of rhetorical devices available to the poet, such as different types of double meanings; ambiguities; deliberately opaque utterances; claims of ignorance; quotation of proverbs and illustrations; enumerations; analytical discriminations; affirmation followed by denial; question and answer; yoking of opposites; paradox; and hyperbole.

“Verbal figures” included all kinds of nonsemantic wordplay: numer-ous sorts of homonyms; fully or partially rhyming words and phrases; repetition; systematic alliteration; anagrams; puns; and so on. The category also included elaborate verbal and mental games that could be played with the verse: verses in which the last word of one line was the first word of the next; verses that could be read in two different meters; cryptogrammatic verses in which names were encoded; verses with their two lines in two different languages; four-line verses that had the same meaning in whichever order the lines were read; verses divided into symmetrical phrases that could be read meaningfully in any order; and other tours de force. Some verbal figures were of even more specialized and esoteric kinds: verses in which all (or none) of the consonants were labials, for example; or verses in which all the short vowels had the same sound; or verses devoid of certain basic letters; or verses made only of letters used in Arabic. Some figures consisted of extravagant orthographic performances: verses in which all the letters were undotted; verses in which dots appeared only above the words (or only below, or in some alternating pattern); verses made up only of nonconnecting letters (or only of connecting ones); verses in which letters connected in groups of two (or three, or four); and so on. Poetry as a “game of words” had thus developed, over the centuries, a wonderfully elaborate repertoire of possible moves.^[1]

Yet any such inventory of devices defined the means, rather than the ends, of poetry. Such devices played the kind of analytical and descriptive role that terms like metonymy and synecdoche played in traditional English poetics. Among poems that made use of the traditional devices, which ones were to be preferred to others, and on what grounds? When poets employed such traditional devices, what kind of effects were they seeking to achieve? The terms used to characterize these effects were of an entirely different order. Although they were widely recognized, they were never systematically arranged and defined in any one treatise. Since the poetry was almost always taught, learned, and practiced orally (in transmission from ustad to shagird) and performed orally (in mushairahs),^[2] no one seems to have felt any real need to put its theoretical basis in writing.

Thus the relevant terms must be searched out: they must be picked up from hints and allusions within the poetry itself, deduced from examples in ustads’ letters to their shagirds, disentangled from the “old-fashioned exaggerated language” of tazkirahs, extrapolated from traditional literary anecdotes. While the great ustads cherished the Perso-Arabic tradition on which their art was founded, they also shaped their own views as they shaped their own poetry. As classical Urdu poetry developed in North India, both the “Indian style” (sabk-e hindī) of Persian poetry and indigenous Indian poetic theories played a role in its evolution. The great creative period of this poetry and of its (unwritten) poetics extended for about a century and a half—roughly from 1700 to 1850.^[3]

To try to recognize and understand the operative terms of classical Urdu poetry is a formidable task, but it is also absolutely necessary. Without it we cannot read the poetry rightly at all. For to read rightly is “to read it the way that the makers of this literature expected it to be read.” While there is more than one way to read literature, “every way should be founded on the ideas present and current in the culture that created the literature.”^[4] The account I present here rests on much collaborative work with the distinguished Urdu critic Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, who makes brilliant use of his wide knowledge of Persian, Urdu, and English poetic theory.

Each two-line verse, as we have seen, inhabits the special ghazal universe with its gardens, deserts, and wine houses. This whole universe mirrors the consciousness of the passionate lover, who longs for the presence of his inaccessible (human or divine) beloved. The ghazal universe is built up and expanded chiefly by metaphor. If “metaphor is the essence of real poetry,” it is also a tool for (culturally specific) perception: “By means of metaphor, meaning is expanded.” And in fact, as al-Jurjānī has noted, “the meanings in metaphors are not those of the words that we have used, but rather those of the maẓmūn that has been presented by means of those words.”^[5] Thus the metaphor-making process is called maẓmūn āfirīnī, which might in common usage be translated as “theme creation,” but which in the case of the ghazal tends, I would argue, to mean something like “metaphorical-equation creation.” The process is based on an extended, proliferating, free-wheeling use of metaphor, one that generates a constant supply of new images, thoughts, and propositions about the ghazal universe. Over time, if a particular leap of metaphor is admired and widely adopted, it undergoes a kind of concretization, becoming a well-established part of the ghazal landscape. As such, it can readily become the jumping-off point for further leaps of metaphor. The ghazal universe with all its ramifications takes as its charter what Mark Turner calls “Aristotle’s metaphor”: “A thing is what it has salient properties of.”^[6]

To take an altogether fundamental example: the beloved is overpoweringly, cruelly, even fatally beautiful. Therefore “his” beauty slays the lover.^[7] It follows that the beloved’s beauty is a deadly weapon. This metaphor opens up a number of avenues that have long been richly developed and concretized. (1) The beloved’s glances are arrows, which lodge in the lover’s body, pierce his heart, and so forth. One who shoots arrows must have a bow, so the beloved is an archer, and comments on his archery are in order. (2) The beloved’s long curls are nets, in which the lover is hopelessly entrapped. Nets and snares are used by hunters, so the beloved is a hunter and the lover is the helpless prey. Nets and snares are also used by birdcatchers, so the beloved is a birdcatcher and the lover is a bird. As a captive bird, he is kept in a cage, and can comment on the world as it looks from his cage. (3) The beloved’s beauty pierces the lover’s heart through and through, so it is a sword. Wielding a sword, the beloved is a warrior on the battlefield whose horse wades in the blood of the lover and others whom he has fiercely and triumphantly slain. (4) Alternatively, if the beloved wields a sword, he is an executioner, ready to decapitate condemned men on the scaffold; the lover is thus a condemned man, willingly facing execution. These images have been accepted and elaborated in hundreds of thousands of Persian, Urdu, Turkish and Pashto verses,^[8] so that the beloved is well known to be, if the poet so chooses, an archer, hunter, birdcatcher, warrior, or executioner, and new maẓmūns can be based on these identities.

Moreover, each of these new identities generates an indefinite number of further maẓmūns, as its ramifications are explored; such secondary propositions are derived by extention from the basic metaphor. From the basic metaphor “The beloved is a hunter,” for example, come such maẓmūns of the hunter’s life as “The hunter lies in wait for the prey”; “The hunter slaughters the prey and makes it into kabobs”; “The hunter enjoys the vain struggles of the wounded prey”; or “The hunter does not deign to pursue the prey.”

A maẓmūn, therefore, may be understood as a proposition or statement that describes some aspect of the ghazal universe and that is derived metaphorically or logically from previously accepted propositions. Thus maẓmūn āfirīnī is the extension of the ghazal universe by offering new metaphorical statements or propositions—which can then be employed by other ghazal poets. Complete novelty is not required: the poet can also seek “to create some new aspect in a familiar maẓmūn, or to express it in such a way that the maẓmūn increases its scope.” Moreover, everyone borrows from everyone else: maẓmūns circulate freely, evolving as they change hands, and this is the basis of the whole system.^[9]

We have seen how this process is regulated by iṣlāḤ and argument: the maẓmūn that the wineglass is a laughing mouth is solidly based on its wide round bowl, and cannot be reversed at will to allow it to grieve instead. An unusual assertion like the claim that fire flows through rock may be publicly challenged, as we have seen, and must then be substantiated by a warrant—one drawn not from history, but from poetry. Alternatively, the poet can anchor such a claim solidly in widely accepted metaphors, as does Ġhālib: people have veins, and rocks have veins; when you strike a person, drops of blood come out, and when you strike a rock, sparks come out—thus the maẓmūn that rock veins are blood veins, so that sparks of fire flow in the veins of rocks the way drops of blood flow in human veins.^[10] The possibility of making inappropriate or unacceptable maẓmūns is so well recognized within the tradition that it can be used to humorous effect: Ġhālib says, “Don’t even ask about the errors made in maẓmūns—/People write of laments as ‘effective’!”^[11]

Even if not specifically challenged, a new maẓmūn that found no favor would simply fall by the wayside—no one would adopt it or build on it, and it could never become known as part of the real structure of the ghazal universe. A delightful case in point is the following shi‘r by ātash, which builds on the rock-solid, long-concretized maẓmūn of the beloved as hunter: “That nose is equal to a double-barreled shotgun/If only the beauty spots on the murderer’s face had acted as birdshot!”^[12] It is well accepted that the beloved’s glances and eyelashes can be arrows, shot from the bow of the eyebrow, but no one seems to have taken up the new maẓmūn that the beloved’s nostrils are shotgun barrels! T̤abāt̤abā’ī says, “Until an intellectual development has entered the language, the poet cannot use it.”^[13] But metaphors fail for other reasons as well; some poets’ volumes bristle with bizarre, extravagant, one-time-only maẓmūns that never caught on.

The obsessive pursuit of novelty for novelty’s sake in maẓmūns was a recognized tendency of certain poets: these poets were known, often in praise (for their extraordinary ingenuity), sometimes in reproach (for the extravagance and indiscriminateness of their conceits), as poets of ḳhiyāl bandī, “fancy-invention,” or nāzuk ḳhiyālī, “delicate fancy.”^[14] Azad speaks disapprovingly of poets who “enjoy the breezes of the garden of ḳhiyāl bandī and nāzuk ḳhiyālī”: they “throw away the roses and make use merely of scent without flowers.” But he concedes that their maẓmūns show “an imaginative subtlety and delicacy” that is often quite effective (377).

The process of maẓmūn āfirīnī depends heavily on a close knowledge and study of earlier poetry. One must know where the jumping-off points are, and what kind of leap might trace out a successful trajectory. This is just the sort of prowess, half technical knowledge and half imagination, that years of iṣlāḤ from a good ustad, years of notebook keeping, years of mushairah attendance, would produce. In general, a new maẓmūn should be, at the least, appropriate; better yet, it should be interlocked with preexisting maẓmūns; best of all, it should be organically connected to earlier maẓmūns in as many ways as possible. Out of innumerable cases in point, let us look for the present at one particular metaphor: the basic maẓmūn of the beloved as a cypress, with its later corollary maẓmūn of the beloved’s stature as a verse-line. The shi‘rs below have been chosen to illustrate the development of this metaphor over a span of centuries, in the hands of Persian and Urdu poets who knew their tradition well enough to build on one another’s work.^[15]

As far back as the earliest Persian poetry, the beloved has frequently been described as a cypress, with the points of comparison often carefully adduced. Then, as the metaphor became concretized, the beloved simply became a cypress, at the poet’s pleasure, and could be addressed as such with no explanation necessary, as in this verse by “Sa‘dī” Shīrāzī (c. 1200-1290):

sarv-e sīmīnā bah ṣaḥrā mī ravī
nek bad ‘ahdī kih bī mā mī ravī^[16]

Oh silver cypress, going to stroll in the countryside
You’re a true false-promiser, that you’re going without me!

Why is the beloved a cypress? Because “he” is slender, tall, and straight, like the trunk of a cypress, and sways gracefully while walking, like a cypress in the wind. Why a silver cypress? Because the beloved is fair, and the cypress is light-colored. Why then a cypress imagined as strolling around the countryside? Because the cypress is an evergreen, immune to the cycle of the seasons; thus part of its traditional identity in the ghazal universe is as a free, independent (Āzād) being. (The cypress is also straight like the letter alif, which occurs twice in the word Āzād and thus represents the freely wandering faqir.) An independent being is not anchored to one spot but can move around at will, and is likely to follow its own pleasure rather than that of another. All these metaphorical qualities of the cypress form the well-understood background; the real focus of this particular verse is the piquant juxtaposition of nek (“good”) and bad (“bad”), rendered in my translation as “true” and “false.”

But if the beloved is a cypress, “he” is also, according to Muḥsin Tāṡīr, a supreme one whom the “real” cypress tree tries in vain to emulate:

garchih yak sarv bah ra‘nā’ī-i āñ qāmat nīst
chūñkih taqt̤ī‘ kunad miṣra‘-i mauzūñ gardad^[17]

Although not one cypress has the beauty of that stature [of the beloved]
Since it does taqt̤ī‘, it becomes a mauzūñ verse-line.

Here an act of maẓmūn āfirīnī produces a new and striking proposition—new, that is, to this series of shi‘rs. Absolute newness is hard to establish, and also irrelevant: maẓmūns were always being reinvented as well as borrowed. Borrowing from a well-known poet was a form of either homage or challenge; borrowing from an obscure poet showed one’s knowledge of the tradition; and inventing enabled one to display ingenuity. The interlocking network of maẓmūns was thus a shared world that belonged to everybody—a world that had to belong to everybody, for the poetry to remain intelligible.

Within Muḥsin Tāṡīr’s verse, the word mauzūñ means “suitable, proper”; literally, it means “having been weighed” and is derived directly from an Arabic root meaning “to weigh.” Thus it also means “metrical,” since a verse-line is carefully weighed and balanced to make it scan. The word taqt̤ī‘ is derived from a root meaning “to cut” and means: (a) to scan; (b) to prune and shape; (c) to decorate. The verse rests on the idea of the beloved’s mauzūñ stature: this stature, being just what it ought to be, is ideally suitable and proper, something that has been carefully “weighed” and arranged to perfection. While the cypress can never rival the beloved’s ideal form, it is evergreen and thus (so to speak) “spruce” in appearance; moreover, it is constantly performing taqt̤ī‘—pruning and decorating itself—in a vain attempt at emulation. These feats of taqt̤ī‘—scansion—turn it finally into a “metrical verse-line” (miṣra‘-i mauzūñ), which is a thing of beauty in its own right. Three quite disparate things—the shape of the cypress, the stature of the beloved, the form of a verse-line—are all mauzūñ, all suitable, proper, perfect, weighed and balanced. An audacious, witty use of maẓmūn āfirīnī has given us the new maẓmūn of the cypress as a line of verse.

The tradition continues into Urdu, with Shamsuddīn Valī Muḥammad “Valī” Dakanī (1667-1720/25). For if the cypress is a line of verse, only the beloved’s stature can teach it that supreme metrical fluency needed to please a real connoisseur.

hai pasand-e t̤ab‘a-e ‘ālī miṣra‘-e sarv-e buland
jab sūñ gulshan meñ tirā qad dekh kar mauzūñ hu’ā^[18]

The verse-line of the tall cypress has been pleasing to a lofty mind
Ever since, in the garden, it saw your stature and became mauzūñ.

A connoisseur with a sophisticated, elevated, “lofty” taste is hard to please. If he finds the verse-line of the “tall” cypress pleasing, it is surely because the cypress has had the best example to follow: the cypress is a shagird, the beloved an ustad. The cypress is straight like a verse-line—now. For the verse records a change in state: there was an earlier time when no real connoisseur could have enjoyed the sight of the clumsy, unmetrical, non-mauzūñ cypress. That was the sterile, unimaginable time before the beloved first entered the garden. The world of the ghazal can never begin with an Eden, for the beloved has never yet been possessed as fully and lastingly as the heart of the lover demands. If there is hope, it is directed toward the future, or else entirely transcendent, or else founded in renunciation. But in the ghazal world it is always the beloved who creates the beauty of “nature,” rather than the other way around.

If the beloved’s stature can outdo that of the cypress, it can even, when scrupulously weighed, surpass that of the glorious Tree of Paradise, which is traditionally supposed to resemble a cypress. “Shākir” Nājī (1690?-1774?) envisions the beloved as supreme not merely over “natural” beauty but over the (supernatural) heavenly realm as well.

mauzūñ qad us kā chashm ke mīzāñ meñ jab tulā
t̤ūbā tab us se ek qadam adh kasā hu’ā^[19]

When his mauzūñ stature was weighed in the scale of the eyes
The Tree of Paradise turned out to be one foot less tightly constructed.

The idea that the eyes are a scale is a classic maẓmūn, for the eyes resemble the two identical round weighing-pans suspended from the central pivot in a balance scale. Such a balance scale compares the weight of two items, one of which is placed in each pan. Here the beloved’s stature is “weighed” or measured against that of the very Tree of Paradise itself—which is found to be lacking by “one foot.” The word qadam has somewhat the same range of meanings as does “foot”: it can refer either to a unit of physical length (the steps or paces used for measuring distance) or to a unit of metrical length, the “feet” (afā‘īl) that measure a line of verse. The verb kasnā means “to draw tight” and refers also to the careful fitting of a word into a metrical line, so that the word is “drawn tight” in its correct place without redundant syllables or flabbiness; another appropriate meaning of the verb is to “try, prove, test, examine”—and another is “to weigh.”

This verse offers other sources of enjoyment as well. There is the apt wordplay between qad (“stature”) and qadam (“foot”). There is also the jab tab (“when-then”) clause structure, which emphasizes the source of the judgment being made: it is when the weighing is done by the lover’s eyes that this seemingly objective measurement is reached. But the verse achieves most of its piquancy through its use of maẓmūns. By now, a century after Muḥsin Tāṡīr, the maẓmūn of equating the cypress’s mauzūñ stature with a line of verse has been concretized, so that it can be assumed without being freshly justified within the verse itself. The beloved’s stature, even more mauzūñ than that of the cypress, thus becomes an even more perfect verse-line. The wordplay with the verb kasnā and the noun qadam would otherwise remain unintelligible. Moreover, since the cypress is nowhere mentioned in the verse, the reference to the Tree of Paradise would be fully meaningful only to a reader who knew it as a kind of glorified cypress.

Soon afterward, Mīr (c. 1780) carries the maẓmūn āfirīnī a step further, by identifying the garden itself as a literary “notebook.”

sair kī rangīñ bayāẓ-e bāĠh kī ham ne bahut
sarv kā miṣra‘ kahāñ vuh qāmat-e mauzūñ kahāñ^[20]

I wandered long in the colorful notebook of the garden,
Where is the verse-line of the cypress—where is that mauzūñ stature [of the beloved’s]?

The garden is a notebook (bayāẓ) because it is the proper place to find vivid, colorful verse-lines—such as the cypress and the beloved, with their mauzūñ stature. The common Urdu sentence pattern “where is A, where is B” is a powerful interrogation: it implies that A and B are so far apart, and one of them is so incomparably superior to the other, that they cannot even be mentioned in the same breath. So the second line can be read most naturally as an implied assertion: “The beloved’s mauzūñ stature is incomparably superior to the verse-line of the cypress.” But formally the line consists of questions: “Where is the cypress, with its (mauzūñ) verse-line stature? Where is the beloved, with his mauzūñ stature?” Since both the cypress and the beloved are free and independent, they may be strolling in some other part of the garden, and the lover must wander long in search of them, hoping to enjoy the sight of their beauty.

This verse also offers a particularly elegant instance of wordplay when it juxtaposes rangīn, “colorful,” with bayāẓ, literally “whiteness” (only by extension does the word come to mean a blank “white” book for use as a notebook). But the verse’s real delight is its mapping of one domain onto another, its conflation of images: the lover wandering through the colorful garden, longing to see the graceful cypress and the much more graceful beloved; and the poet browsing through his “white” notebook, looking for certain colorful verse-lines of especially graceful and “metrical” effect. This equation of the garden with the notebook is a fine example of sophisticated maẓmūn āfirīnī: it invokes our knowledge of several maẓmūns already concretized within the tradition, and unfolds itself out of them with seeming simplicity and ease. For there even exists, as we have seen, a kind of tazkirah called a “bouquet” (guldastah).

But the process does not stop there. The maẓmūn now develops a further refinement: by comparison with the beloved’s stature, as Mīr (c. 1790) notices, the cypress is actually a defective, “nonmetrical” verse line.

sarv to hai sanjīdah lekin pesh-e miṣra‘-e qadd-e yār
nāmauzūñ hī nikle hai jab dil meñ apne toleñ haiñ^[21]

The cypress is sanjīdah, but before the verse-line of the beloved’s stature
It proves to be non-mauzūñ when I weigh it in my heart.

The adjective sanjīdah is a past participle of the Persian verb sanjīdan (“to weigh”), so that it literally means “weighed, measured”; but in Urdu it is used to mean “weighty” in the sense of “serious, grave.” Both meanings are elegantly invoked here: neither the cypress’s measuredness nor its stateliness enable it to stand for direct comparison “before the verse-line” (pesh-e miṣra‘) of the beloved’s stature. Since the term pesh miṣra‘ also refers to the first line of a two-line shi‘r, we see that the poet already has his mauzūñ second line (the beloved’s stature) and is trying to find a suitable first one in the same meter, as in the exercise of miṣra‘ lagānā (the kind of challenge that we saw Z̤afar fling out to Żauq). But when he weighs the two lines, he finds the cypress, alas, unmetrical; he must reject it, and where will he ever find another suitable verse-line? Plainly he never will, since even the supremely suitable cypress has failed him. The beloved’s stature must remain a unique, peerlessly mauzūñ verse-line, never to be integrated into a shi‘r, never to find a fitting equal or rival or term of comparison. Which is an elegantly paradoxical result, for the formal precision of Urdu meter makes it absolutely impossible that a line could be metrical and yet no other line could be found in the same meter to go with it. But after all, the lover is weighing the metricality of these verse-lines in his heart.

The accusation against the cypress becomes even more radical, however, as the earlier maẓmūns are concretized: Nāsiḳh has a different jumping-off place for the leap of imagination.

Ġhazab hai sarv bāndhā us parī ke qadd-e gul gūñ ko
yih kis shā‘ir ne nāmauzūñ kiyā miṣrā‘-e mauzūñ ko^[22]

What a disaster—[someone] called that Parī’s rose-colored stature a cypress!
Which poet made this mauzūñ verse-line non-mauzūñ?

Nāsiḳh here takes a stance of high indignation: as an ustad, he is denouncing an instance of entirely unsatisfactory, indefensible, technically incompetent workmanship. He actually demands the offending poet’s name, implying that the perpetrator should be drummed out of the next mushairah. The equation of the beloved with the cypress appears to be faulty on several counts: the beloved—or rather, somewhat elusively, his stature—is “rose-colored,” while a cypress would be, as we know, silver, or in another sense green (evergreen). Moreover, in a classic maẓmūn, the beloved is a Parī (= fairy). The Parī race, known for its superhuman beauty, is well established in Persian and Urdu story literature: Parīs are made of fire, so that rose-red is a natural color for them, while cypresses (and mortals) are made of earth; and Parīs fly through the air, rather than walking as the cypress is imagined to do. But the really grievous fault is to identify the beloved’s mauzūñ stature with the (by comparison) non-mauzūñ stature of the cypress. To make such an equation is, in effect, to ruin a line of verse: in a general sense, to make a suitable, perfect (mauzūñ) line unsuitable or imperfect (nāmauzūñ); in a specific technical sense, to make a metrical line unmetrical. In fact, the real charm of the verse lies in its wit: its tone of righteous indignation (“What a disaster!”), its outrage at such flagrant, inexcusable incompetence in a poet.

Eventually, however, a given line of development seems, with most maẓmūns, to be worked through to its end in terms of maẓmūn āfirīnī. It is almost as though a certain vein of poetic ore had been mined out—though of course fresh deposits are often discovered later in the same fields. There is a slight falling off in the achievement of the following verse of Nāsiḳh’s, a slackening of tension.

bāĠh meñ taqt̤ī‘ us sarv-e ravāñ kī dekh kar
sarv kā miṣra‘ mirī naz̤roñ meñ nāmauzūñ hu’ā^[23]

When I saw the taqt̤ī‘ of that ravān cypress in the garden
The verse-line of the cypress became non-mauzūñ in my eyes.

The beloved is well known to be a “walking cypress” (sarv-e ravāñ), and as we have seen, a fluent line of verse is called ravāñ (“flowing”). But apart from this smallish point, the idea of the “walking cypress” doing taqt̤ī‘—adorning itself, pruning its branches, scanning its syllables—must bear all the weight of the shi‘r, and it can hardly sustain the burden. The phrase “in the garden” appears to be mere padding, since the garden setting is not exploited within the verse. In fact, the phrase actually seems to limit the effects of the beloved’s beauty: when I saw the beloved “in the garden” I had a certain reaction, but who knows whether he would have appeared as impressive in another setting, outside the garden? The verse is apparently borrowed from Muḥsin Tāṡīr’s—but Nāsiḳh does not improve on his predecessor’s work. The verse lacks energy and concentration, and somehow feels a bit flat.

Even without new maẓmūns, however, imagery can be effectively deployed. A good measure of success can be achieved, as in this shi‘r by ātash:

pahuñchtā use miṣra‘ tāzah o tar
qad-e yār sā sarv mauzūñ nah niklā^[24]

A fresh green verse-line would have reached him—
[but] no cypress turned out to be mauzūñ like the beloved’s stature.

The basic line of thought here is the same as that of Mīr’s shi‘r above. The beloved’s stature is a verse-line, and if a line could be found to match it the result would be a complete shi‘r. The lover would like to bring the beloved such a verse-line, as a tribute: instead of flowers he would offer a “fresh green” cypress. But alas, no cypress could be found that was quite as mauzūñ as the beloved’s stature: no cypress could “reach” the beloved in the sense of coming up to his level—and therefore no cypress could “reach” the beloved in the sense of being offered to him. The real work of the verse is done by tāzah o tar, a phrase with a range of meanings centering on freshness, moistness, greenness, newness. Both adjectives are used for poetry as well. A vital, “fresh, new” verse-line (miṣra‘-e tāzah) is an excellent achievement, while new and fresh growth is just the quality one would expect to find in the (evergreen) cypress. Similarly, a “rich, verdant” verse-line (miṣra‘-e tar) is as lush as foliage still wet with dew.

Successful verses can rely not only on simplicity and freshness, but also on complexity and abstraction—as in the case of Ġhālib (c. 1816), the example par excellence of a “metaphysical poet” in Urdu.

tire sarv-e qāmat se ik qadd-e ādam
qiyāmat ke fitne ko kam dekhte haiñ^[25]

Because of your cypress-stature, by one Adam-height
I see the mischief/turmoil of Doomsday to be less.

Muslims know that Doomsday (qiyāmat) will bring terrible trials and disasters upon the sons of Adam. The literal meaning of qiyāmat is “to rise”: the dead will “rise” again from their graves to experience that day, and the various kinds of mischief and turmoil expressed in the noun fitnah are always spoken of as “arising.” Here the lover seems somehow to measure the height of the beloved against the “height” of the disaster of Doomsday.

The lover speaks as a firsthand observer, addressing the beloved intimately and making a comparative judgment: “I see the mischief of Doomsday to be one Adam-height less (than it would otherwise have been), because of your cypress-stature (which has been taken away from it).” The beloved’s beauty is so fatal, and his use of it so devastating, that the lover experiences it as a portion of Doomsday come upon him in advance. Since the beloved is made of pure qiyāmat, the remaining supply of disaster yet to come must be that much less. The measurement seems to be made in terms of height. Since the lover has known a certain amount of Doomsday already, the final Doomsday rises, in his eyes, to less of a height; its height is less by the stature of one human—who is, surely, the beloved. Moreover, if the two lines are read separately and sequentially, as they should be, a further effect emerges. The concreteness of the first line, which speaks of the beloved’s (slim, straight, swaying) “cypress-stature” as measured in precise “man-height” units, sets us thinking in terms of physical measurement. Thus the second line comes as a jolt, since the lover still pretends physically to “see” a comparison in height—of which one term is the altogether abstract and nonlinear “mischief of Doomsday.” The linking of qāmat and qiyāmat is delightful wordplay—and another fine source of rabt̤.

In the twentieth century, maẓmūn āfirīnī has, for a number of reasons, radically diminished. While modern poets may achieve other effects, their use of maẓmūns would never have satisfied a classical audience. Sulaimān “Arīb” (1922-1969) writes:

ay sarv-e ravāñ ay jān-e jahāñ āhistah gużar āhistah gużar
jī bhar ke maiñ tujh ko dekh to lūñ bas itnā ṭhahar bas itnā ṭhahar^[26]

Oh walking cypress, oh life of the world, pass slowly, pass slowly
Let me look at you to my heart’s content—only stop that long, only stop that long.

Here the complexities of the maẓmūns have been entirely disregarded. The verse gets the most out of its ravānī and sound effects: it has some internal rhyme, it makes creative use of repetition, its semantic units correspond to its metrical feet. Thus the verse sounds hypnotic, it flows swayingly and beautifully—the way the “walking cypress” moves. But it does not do anything more. The poet has stopped short: he has achieved something that is emotionally provocative but intellectually very limited. Perhaps he is not aware of the possibilities; perhaps, for all we know, he disdains them. The world of traditional poetry may be partially lost to him.

Yet that world is always available for rediscovery. A single word can give rise to a new maẓmūn: we have seen what a pivotal role was played by the word mauzūñ in generating ideas about the beloved, the cypress, and the verse-line. “A word that is fresh (tāzah) is equal to a maẓmūn,” as Shāh Jahān’s poet laureate Abū T̤ālib “Kalīm” put it.^[27] Mīr praised the appropriately named poet “Maẓmūn” for his constant “search for a fresh word.”^[28] Sometimes, in fact, maẓmūns can bear more weight than the poet nowadays even realizes: “It often happens that we, in imitation of the ancients, use maẓmūns we have found in their work, and when connoisseurs praise our verses we realize we didn’t know that this verse had these virtues.”^[29]

In short, if there is any activity central to classical ghazal poetry it is the making and using of maẓmūns. The concretization of successful maẓmūns meant that the ghazal universe was always expanding—or perhaps developing would be a better term, since mined-out fields of metaphor were sometimes (temporarily or permanently) abandoned. The smallest possible poem, the two-line shi‘r, could thus inhabit an indefinitely large and sophisticated universe. But this universe had to be brought to the poem; it had to live first of all in the minds of the poet and the audience. A difficult shi‘r can be the most demanding poem in the world and can remain, without the requisite background knowledge, utterly opaque. (In this respect—as in a number of others—it resembles the classical Japanese haiku.)^[30]

Because of the centrality of maẓmūn āfirīnī, of all genres of poetry the ghazal has surely the least interest in the “natural” world, in wildflowers and birdsongs and sunsets and rambles through the countryside. The ghazal world creates its own flowers, birds, and suns according to its own laws of metaphor, and these have only the most abstract resemblance to their namesakes in the “natural” world. Mīr was archetypally correct when he never bothered to open the shutters of his study—his own ghazal garden was much more absorbing than the “real” one outside. The fascination of the ghazal can prove overpowering: “Its pleasure so grows on the poet that he often remains ignorant of other genres of poetry.”^[31] Dr. Leitner maintained that “Persian poetry…has an almost intoxicating effect on the native mind.” (Thus it was “sternly prohibited to be heard or read by most respectable females”; still, “poetesses were by no means scarce, especially in the higher Muhammadan families.”)^[32]

With its radical completeness and self-referentiality, the ghazal universe in fact metaphorically generates the physical universe, as well as the other way around. We have seen the tribute that Ṣābir addressed to the verses of his emperor, the poet Z̤afar:

The colorfulness of festive meaning is the glistening of wine; in martial verses, the wetness of the ink is blood and perspiration. In mystical verses, the circular letters are seeing eyes; and in romantic verses, tear-shedding eyes. And in spring-related verses, [the decorations] between the lines are flowerbeds; and in sky-related verses, the Milky Way. The breath, through the floweringness of the words, is the garden breeze; and vision, through the freshness of the writing, is the vein of the jasmine. The verse-line has the stature of a cypress; the verse is the eyebrow of the beautiful women of Khallukh and Naushad.^[33]

Maẓmūn āfirīnī thus comes full circle: just as we have seen that the cypress’s stature is the stature of a verse-line, we now see that “the verse-line has the stature of a cypress.” And meaning is wine, and ink is blood and perspiration, and rounded letters on the page are eyes. Metaphor is reality. The ghazal poets claim, as a matter of course, omnipotent creative powers within their own universe—and also, it seems, beyond it.

Ġhālib uses the stature-as-verse-line metaphor to praise the power of maẓmūns within the verse: “Asad, the rising of those of devastating stature at the time of adorning [themselves]/Is the growth of lofty maẓmūns in the dress of a poem.”^[34] The beloved’s tall stature is a maẓmūn: the rising up of beloveds to their full devastating height, their adorning themselves to display their beauty, is the development of “lofty” maẓmūns within the dress or “guise” of the verse they occupy. In fact, maẓmūns were so admired that at times they were even perceived as overvalued. The great Indo-Persian poet “T̤ālib” āmulī, of the court of Jahāngīr, poked fun at certain boastful poets: “Observe how the masters of meaning have written/They have abandoned words and have written maẓmūns!”^[35] But still, maẓmūns were invaluable. Azad recognized that while Mīr and Mīr “Soz” shared a similar style, the former was a superior poet because he “introduced maẓmūns,” while the latter used “merely words and more words” (198). Words must be used not just for their own sake, but to enhance and deepen maẓmūns. For maẓmūns are far more potent than words: “As maẓmūns are increased, meanings too are increased; as words are increased, meaning is diminished.”^[36]

Notes

8. The Mind and Heart in Poetry

“A s maẓmūns are increased, meanings too are increased,” said T̤abāt̤abā’ī. Urdu poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries “mention maẓmūn and meaning (ma‘nī) again and again”; Momin, for example, boasts, “Although Momin indeed composes poetry extremely well [in general]/[Above all] where is there a meaning-maker and maẓmūn-achiever like me?”^[1] Like maẓmūn āfirīnī, ma‘nī āfirīnī,^[2] “meaning-creation,” is a fundamental goal of the ghazal poet. “The ghazal was also invented for the practice of putting meanings into ever-new forms.”^[3] At the very start of the tazkirah tradition, Mīr uses tah dārī (depth-possession) and pech dārī (complexity) as terms of praise; over and over he emphasizes the creation of meaning.^[4] He boasts of these subtle qualities in his own poetry: “A single utterance has any number of aspects, Mīr/What a variety of things I constantly say with the tongue of the pen!” And again: “Every verse is curled and twisted like a lock of hair/Mīr’s speech is of an extraordinary kind.”^[5]

Much later, near the end of the tradition, one of Ġhālib’s letters offers a famous dictum on the subject: “My friend, poetry is the creation of meaning (ma‘nī āfirīnī), not the measuring out of rhymes.”^[6] In Water of Life, Azad praises Ġhālib’s prowess as a “lion of the thickets of maẓmūns and meanings” (495); both Azad (485, 522) and Hali use ma‘nī āfirīnī as a technical term to describe effects produced not only by Ġhālib but by other poets as well.^[7] Faruqi goes so far as to argue that “the greatest achievement of the ‘Indian style’ poets, and then of our classical poets, is that they investigated the difference between meaning (ma‘nī) and maẓmūn.”^[8]

What is it, then, to “create meaning”? Essentially, since almost any line of poetry will have at least one meaning, ma‘nī āfirīnī lies in the multiplication and enrichment of meaning: it is the art of creating a single verse that will elicit two or more different meanings and/or will trail along with it many strands of implication (kināyah). ^[9] Urdu has been endowed by its own grammatical and literary development with remarkable potential for ma‘nī āfirīnī. Mīr says, for example:

kyā dilkash hai bazm jahāñ kī jāte yāñ se jise dekho
vuh Ġham-dīdah ranj-kashīdah āh sarāpā Ḥasrat hai^[10]

Let us retain the key word for purposes of discussion:

Kyā, the gathering of the world is attractive; whomever you see going away from here
he is sorrowful, grief-stricken—ah, he is utterly full of regret.

There are three different ways to interpret the first clause, all generated by the various senses in which kyā can be used. First: as an inquiry, since kyā at the beginning of a statement signals a yes-no question. “Is the gathering of the world attractive (or isn’t it)?” (We wonder why those who are leaving the party all weep.) Second: as an exclamation of wonder, with kyā meaning something like “how much.” “How attractive the gathering of the world is!” (Those who are leaving the party thus weep at having to depart.) Third: as an exclamation of scornful challenge, with kyā meaning something like “What!” “What!—[Do you think] the gathering of the world is attractive?!” (Those who are leaving thus weep over the sufferings they’ve endured.) The charm of the shi‘r—virtually its only charm, since it is not one of Mīr’s masterpieces—lies in these multiple interpretive possibilities, such that the mind swings back and forth among them with no help from the poet in selecting any one over the others.

While kyā is the most versatile, Urdu has other interrogatives as well—for example, kaisā (“what kind”), kitnā (“how much”), kahāñ (“where”)—that can be either genuinely interrogative or (positively or negatively) exclamatory. Classical ghazal was never punctuated, which of course helped to retain such multiple possibilities. The tendency of some modern editors to insert Western-derived punctuation into shi‘rs is thus an especially unfortunate barbarism, since it destroys certain kinds of ma‘nī āfirīnī; in fact, it is one more symptom of the large cultural and literary problem with which the present study is concerned. Even classical Urdu prose was punctuated only very lightly, and not at all in the modern Western way.

At the heart of many instances of ma‘nī āfirīnī is inshā’iyah (noninformative, nonfalsifiable) speech: speech in the interrogative, exclamatory, imperative, subjunctive, or vocative mode.^[11] By contrast, speech in the ḳhabariyah (informative, falsifiable) mode, which makes what purport to be factual assertions about the world, is less richly endowed with multiple possibilities. The differentiation of these modes has a long history within the Islamic literary-critical tradition, and has recently been analyzed in English poetry by John Hollander.^[12] Within the Urdu tradition, moreover, no poetic utterance need be irrevocably ḳhabariyah, for it can always be read as a yes-no question from which the introductory kyā has been omitted—an omission very common in colloquial speech.

Another grammatical feature of Urdu is also particularly fruitful for ma‘nī āfirīnī: the versatile and indispensable iẓāfat, one of the most valuable treasures Urdu appropriated from Persian. The iẓāfat is a construction that connects two words—the first usually a noun, the second either a noun or an adjective—with a small linking vowel. The two words connected by an iẓāfat can have a variety of relationships. Noun-adjective iẓāfats, for example, are relatively straightforward: kitāb-e nau (“book”-e “new”), “the book that is new.” But the far more common noun-noun iẓāfats offer multiple interpretive possibilities: kitāb-e dil (“book”-e “heart”), the book “of”^[13] the heart, may mean the book about the heart, or the book that belongs to the heart, or the book that is the heart. As can well be imagined, with a string of two or three noun-noun iẓāfats in a row the interpretive possibilities multiply rapidly—with the help, furthermore, of the normal Hindi/Urdu possessive postpositions kā/ke/kī, which themselves have an equally wide range of meaning.

Here, for example, is Ġhālib being ostentatiously Ġhālibian, with one noun-adjective iẓāfat and either four or five noun-noun ones:^[14]

nishāt̤(-e) dāĠh(-e) Ġham-e ‘ishq kī bahār nah pūchh
shiguftagī hai shahīd-e gul-e ḳhizānī-e sham‘a^[15]

Here is a literal rendering, with the noun-noun iẓāfats shown as “=of=”and the noun-adjective one in brackets:

Springtime of ecstasy (=of=) wound (=of=) grief =of= love, don’t ask
Flourishingness is martyr =of= [rose autumnal] =of= candle.

In the above verse, the parentheses show iẓāfats that, formally speaking, may or may not be there. For in addition to their multivalence, iẓāfats have a further gift for the poet, and it is often the greatest gift of all: they can be used in such a way that they may or may not be present. In classical ghazal, iẓāfats ideally are not shown by any written marker, so that the poet’s opportunities for ma‘nī āfirīnī remain as fully open as possible. In some metrical situations, an iẓāfat must be present, or must not be present, to make the line scan. But in others, the line will scan either way—with of course two (or more) different meanings. In this verse, the interpretive possibilities for the first line alone include: with all possible iẓāfats, “Don’t ask about the springtime of the ecstasy of the wound of the grief of love”; with one optional iẓāfat, “Oh ecstasy of the wound, don’t ask about the springtime of the grief of love”; with another optional iẓāfat, “Oh ecstasy, don’t ask about the springtime of the wound of the grief of love.” With all the different internal possibilities of meaning for each iẓāfat, it is clear that the verse is indeed remarkably multivalent—in Mīr’s words, “curled and twisted like a lock of hair.”

But the most wonderful effects of ma‘nī āfirīnī are often achieved by seemingly simpler means. Here is one of Mīr’s most elegantly enigmatic shi‘rs:

mīr(-e) gum-kardah chaman zamzamah-pardāz hai ek
jis kī lai dām se tā gosh(-e) gul āvāz hai ek^[16]

Now here is—not a translation, but a set of literally equivalent English words, preserving all the possibilities:

Mīr (=of=) lost garden song-performer is one
of whom song from snare to ear (=of=) rose voice is one.

Here are several interpretations, all of which are defensible readings of these two lines:

Mīr who has lost the garden is a unique singer
whose song reaches undiminished from the snare to the ear of the rose.

The lover is a captured bird, who has been snared and has thus lost his access to the garden—but whose song still reaches the ear of the rose. The song should be diminished by distance—but it isn’t. Moreover, in the ghazal universe, the rose has ears (in the form of petals), but is deaf—which raises the interesting question of how the song reaches the rose’s ear.

Mīr, the singer who has lost the garden is only one—
the same one whose song can be heard from the snare to the ear of the rose

The poet is counting up the sources of the song he hears, and concludes that there is really only one singer, not two—although the range of his powerful voice is so great that there at first seem to be two singers. Perhaps the source of his power is his unique suffering: there is only one singer who has “lost the garden,” and so only one who can sing so spectacularly.

Mīr, he whom the garden has lost is one singer;
he whose song reaches from the snare to the ear of the rose is one (other) singer.

The poet is counting up the sources of the songs he hears, and concludes that one and one make two different singers. Do they sing two different songs—the first a song of absolute failure, of having been “lost” by the garden (through the garden’s carelessness, or jealousy, or perhaps hostility?), and the second a song of success, since even in the snare one can sing with confidence right to the ear of the rose? Or do they, in their different situations, nevertheless sing the same song? (This interpretation involving two singers can be challenged, but it can also be defended.)

Mīr who has lost the garden is a unique singer
whose song, from the snare to the ear, is entirely a rose-voice.

Does the fact of losing the garden, of being enmeshed in the snare, somehow confer upon the captured bird a new, deep affinity with the garden? Now that he can never sing directly to the rose again, does he sing with the rose itself wholly present in his voice?

And so on—for we are still far from exhausting the possible permutations of meaning that can be enjoyed in this single brilliant shi‘r. The creation of multiple interpretations is one of the glories of ma‘nī āfirīnī.

But it is by no means the only effective strategy, for implication (kināyah) is also a basic technique. Hali asserts that “implication is always more eloquent than straightforwardness.”^[17] Here is a verse in which Mīr exploits the possibilities of implication: he says something very simple, and lets its suggestions and ramifications unfold.

yūñ ga’ī qad ke ḳham hu’e jaise
‘umr ik rahrav-e sar-e pul thā^[18]

It went when the stature became bent, as if
Age were a traveler on the bridge.

Unlike the verse about the singer(s) in the garden, this one is extremely easy to translate—and to translate in one straightforward way. The piquant first line withholds meaning; under actual performance conditions, it might be recited several times, with interludes, giving time for curiosity to develop before the second line resolved the mystery. But if the statement itself is simple, its implications are rich and subtle. There is, of course, the physical basis for the metaphor: the bent back of old age resembles the curved shape of a bridge. But that is only the beginning.

Bridges are places of transition, confined movement, and possible peril: travelers traditionally hurry across them. And since travelers do not linger in the middle of a bridge, they may well pause for a time at the near end, preparing to make the crossing; or they may press on and stop only at the far end, after the crossing has been made. After a long leisurely trip on a straight road (while the young man’s posture was erect), “Age” has now made a rapid final crossing over a curved bridge. The primal metaphor “Life is a journey” is obviously and powerfully invoked—with its corollary, “Death is arrival.”^[19]

Moreover, Mīr is invoking the long-established associations of the Persian/Urdu phrase sar-e pul (“on the bridge”). For example, yārān-esar-e pul, “on-the-bridge friends,” are casual companions, not intimate or trusted ones. And a va‘dah-e sar-e pul, an “on-the-bridge promise,” is one made lightly, one that will not necessarily be kept. “On the bridge” was a temporary meeting place where travelers formed relationships soon to be broken. The attitude shown by “Age” toward us humans is of exactly this kind. Such suggestive use of “on the bridge” may be called wordplay, but it is really meaning-play and ma‘nī āfirīnī as well: it creates in a small space rich and dense verbal textures, surrounded by a penumbra of suggestion.

Or consider one more example of Mīr at his (deceptively) simplest, in what to me is one of his most beautiful verses:

āvāragān-e ‘ishq kā pūchhā jo maiñ nishāñ
musht-e Ġhubār le ke ṣabā ne uṛā diyā^[20]

When I asked for a sign of the wanderers of love,
the breeze took a handful of dust and flung it into the air.

One might naturally ask such a question of the breeze, which is itself a tireless wanderer. And what is the meaning of its response? Faruqi suggests a remarkable number of possibilities: the breeze may be implying that the wanderers of love (1) end up after death as mere handfuls of dust; (2) are as nameless and unknown as handfuls of dust; (3) are, in their essence, handfuls of dust; (4) are perpetual wanderers, as restless as handfuls of dust. Or (5) the breeze may be conveying total ignorance of their fate, as in the Urdu idiom “I know dust (= nothing)” (ḳhāk ḳhabar hai); or (6) the breeze may be expressing total lack of interest in their fate, so that it merely flings dust into the air instead of responding to the question. Or (7) the breeze may intend to fling dust into the inquirer’s face as a sign of contempt: “Who are you to presume to ask about them?” Or (8) the breeze may be flinging dust on its head as a sign that its grief for the wanderers of love is beyond words. Or in fact (9) the question may not be addressed to the breeze at all: the inquirer may be asking some other, unresponsive third party, or merely thinking aloud—and receiving no answer except the ceaseless, indifferent movements of the breeze. “This is hardly a verse—it is a carved, faceted jewel.”^[21]

The elegance of ma‘nī āfirīnī, its ability to make powerful meaning out of seemingly farfetched conceits, can be seen to special advantage in three of the following five verses; in the remaining two, its vulnerability will become equally apparent. Four of the five shi‘rs invoke the same traditional inhabitant of the ghazal universe, the auspicious Humā bird—the best of birds, the bird who might land on your head and make you a king. The verses start with the well-known fact that the Humā lives on a diet of nothing but bones.

Here is Mīr, in a verse that works obliquely, resting on the maẓmūn that love is fire. The consuming power of the lover’s passion, its glory, its fatality, its obsessiveness, are all the more strongly suggested for being kept at several removes from the surface meaning.

in jaltī haḍḍiyoñ ko shāyad humā nah khāve
tab ‘ishq kī hamārī pahuñchī hai ustuḳhvāñ tak^[22]

These burning bones—perhaps the Humā might not eat them
The fever of my love has reached to the bone.

The lover appears to be speculating—in the inshā’iyah mode, of course—quite detachedly about the fate of his bones after his (imminent?) death, and expressing only a kind of clinical observation. Traditional Indian medicine recognized a “fever of the bone,” which was more or less a name for tuberculosis. The lover describes his passion as a kind of physical disease—yet one of more than physical potency, since the fiery heat in his bones will persist after his death. It is a natural disease, “fever of the bone,” yet it takes him into nonnatural realms—for his bones will be scrutinized not by physicians but by the legendary Humā bird.

There is not an ounce of self-pity or sentimentality in the verse. But what exactly is the tone? It can be read with melancholy (the lover recognizes that his bones may be of no use), with pride (the lover savors the depth of his passion), with curiosity (the lover wonders whether, in fact, the Humā will eat the bones), with a reflective thoughtfulness (the lover realizes that his passion has now transcended the merely human realm and become the indestructible essence of his being). Eliot, who knew that “No contact possible to flesh/allays the fever of the bone,” would have understood.

Ġhālib, in one of his Persian verses, uses the same maẓmūn—love is fire, the lover’s bones are glowing coals—with less sensibility and more wit. He relies even more heavily on the power of implication; and he uses the inshā’iyah mode, issuing a command:

dūr bāsh az rezahhā-e ustuḳhvānam ay humā
kīñ bisāt̤-e da‘vat-e murġhān-e ātash-ḳhvār hast^[23]

Stay far from the fragments of my bones, oh Humā
for this feast is spread for the Fire-eater birds.

In this verse we know that the lover’s bones are desirable; in fact they are a “feast.” Pulverized into small, glowing fragments, spread out in utter disintegration, they look so delicious that the lover—who seems somehow to be present, with undiminished vitality and spirits, to preside as host—has to keep a sharp eye out for gate-crashers. Thus he warns off the Humā—perhaps out of consideration, since it will not be able to digestthe burning fragments of bone; or perhaps out of snobbery, since only the Fire-eater birds are worthy of such a uniquely radiant offering. Of course, he never tells us explicitly that the bones are burning; we know this only by way of implication. Nor does he tell us that they are burning with love; we know this only because we carry the ghazal universe with us in our heads.

By introducing the Fire-eater birds (murġhān-e ātash-ḳhvār), Ġhālib heightens the whimsical quality of the verse. Some birds are regular denizens of the ghazal universe, like the Humā and—even more integrally—the ‘anqā, the “imaginary bird” defined by the fact that it is not really there, so that no nets of awareness can ever ensnare it. By contrast, the Fire-eater birds are only casual visitors; their appearance adds a gratuitous, playful note. (One of them, named Mūsīqār, or “Musician,” burns alive while singing through the one thousand holes in its beak.) The wit of the verse rests on the vision of the lover, simultaneously dead and alive, proudly holding a feast with a very select, strictly monitored guest list—a feast consisting of his own fragmented, dispersed, and still burning bones. In this verse the lover may be speaking wryly or with resignation, but the buoyancy of his spirit is still irresistible. And, of course, he may be speaking with the exhilaration of one who has somehow triumphed in his love, who revels in it, who finds joy and pride in it even beyond death.

“Nasīm” Dihlavī (1794-1864), a shagird of Momin’s, takes the idea a step further: perhaps the fire of love will destroy the lover’s bones entirely.

tan shu‘lahhā-e Ġham se hu’ā ḳhāk ay nasīm
dekheñge ustuḳhvāñ nah hamāre humā ke nāz^[24]

My body was turned into dust by the flames of grief, oh Nasīm
my bones will not see the coquetries of the Humā.

The untranslatable nāz can include coquetry, caprice, disdainfulness, sulking, pouting, an affectation of anger, and all manner of consciously flirtatious airs and graces. The lover admires it in the beloved, and would much rather receive it than receive no attention at all. Here the suggestion is that the lover not only has failed to receive true love from the beloved, and not only has failed to receive even coquetry—but even after death will still be ignored completely. His bones will not only be denied the fine destiny of being accepted and eaten by the Humā—they will be deprived even of the Humā’s show of nāz, of the chance to be picked over with fastidious disdain. The bones are dust already, and so can receive no such attention. The lover seems to speak from a sort of limbo on the verge of death: his body has already become dust, but the (non)-event of the Humā is still in the future. The lover’s low expectations are clearly suggested: he doesn’t say that his bones will not be eaten by the Humā, but that his bones will not be picked over (and possibly rejected) by the Humā.

Once again we have a verse devoid of sentimentality, one that can be read in several tones: pride (that my passion has been so extraordinarily powerful); neutral self-examination (that this is simply the truth of the case); melancholy (that my bones will not experience even in death the kind of coquetry I longed for in life); relief (that I will be able to escape this world cleanly, leaving no trace behind). The verse turns on the many suggestions carried by the word nāz; applying this term to the Humā sets up a resonance between the Humā (the bone-eater, the king-maker) and the beloved (who can utterly destroy the lover, who can raise the lover to unimagined heights). The suggestions continue to unfold as the reader savors the verse; this is ma‘nī āfirīnī of a fine order.

But how jarring it is to bring the Humā, denizen of the ghazal universe, down into something more like the real world. Sayyid Muḥammad Ḳhān “Rind” (1797-1857), a shagird of ātash, in the same generation as Nasīm, says:

paṛā hangāmah hai shāyad hamāre ustuḳhvānoñ par
hu’ā jhagṛā humā meñ aur sagān-e kū-e dilbar meñ
^[25]

There’s perhaps been a turmoil over my bones—
A quarrel took place between the Humā and the dogs of the beloved’s street.

The ghazal universe certainly contains the possibility that the lover might die of his passion in the beloved’s street, which he constantly haunts, alone and unattended. In that case, it would be possible that the dogs of her street would devour his bones, just as real dogs in a real street would. But imagine the lofty, legendary Humā actually fighting on equal terms with such dogs! “The Humā is a street dog”—an amazing maẓmūn, capable of various kinds of piquant development. But here, unfortunately, nothing much is made of it. Since the meaning of the verse is simply, flatly, all on the surface, the ma‘nī āfirīnī is almost nonexistent.

The maẓmūn of the lover’s bones as scraps has also been used with reference not to the Humā at all, but simply to “real” dogs. “Sit̤vat” Lakhnavī, shagird of “Lat̤āfat” Lakhnavī, says:

talḳhī-e furqat thī jo beḥad nah hargiz khā sakā
haḍḍiyāñ merī sag-e jānāñ chabā kar rah gayā^[26]

The bitterness of separation was so extreme that he couldn’t possibly eat them
The beloved’s dog merely gnawed a bit on my bones, then left them.

The beloved’s own dog is, of course, a privileged creature—although even the dogs of her street are privileged, compared to all the other dogs in the world. Here the lover has had the happiness of dying at least within the beloved’s courtyard, so that either the beloved’s own dog finds the body, or the beloved has even deigned to order the body thrown to the dog. Here the maẓmūn is not of the bones as glowing coals but of the bones as scraps—with a pun on the double meaning, both culinary and mental, of “bitterness” (talḳhī). The possibility of rejection is no longer merely speculative: here the dog actually starts to gnaw the bones, then abandons them as inedible. The ma‘nī āfirīnī is minimal, while the maẓmūn āfirīinī has become crude and grotesque. The ghazal universe seems to collide in a damaging way with the “real” world.

Yet the very vulnerability, the subtlety, the refinement, of ma‘nī āfirīnī is part of its endless fascination. The Empson of the Seven Types of Ambiguity would have been overjoyed to have the chance to explore it. Ġhālib is usually compared to Donne; but many others of the finest Western poets would also have been at home in the ghazal world. It would be hard to find a more perfect example of ma‘nī āfirīn than Yeats’s lines, “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,/How can we know the dancer from the dance?”

The ghazal could accommodate the most cerebral and “metaphysical” poetry; but it always had ample room for poetry of quite a different sort. It was famous for speaking both to the mind and to the heart. Around 1750, Mīr composed a shi‘r that not only identified the two great poets of the day (and envisioned, tongue in cheek, a grim future for the language when they were gone), but also specified the qualities that marked their greatness:

nah ho kyūñ reḳhtah be shorish o kaifiyyat o ma‘nī
gayā ho mīr dīvānah rahā saudā so mastānā^[27]

Why shouldn’t Reḳhtah [= Urdu] be devoid of shorish and kaifiyat and ma‘nī
Mīr has gone mad, and there remains Saudā—who’s drunk.

In addition to the quality of ma‘nī, or meaning, Mīr names the two qualities of shorish, which may be roughly rendered as “passion,” and kaifiyat,^[28] which may be perhaps even more roughly translated as “mood.”

The term shorish has a range of meanings involving tumult, turmoil, disturbance, and bitterness; it can even be used to refer to a political insurrection. But here the reference is to inner turmoil, so that “passion” or “passionateness” might be a reasonable English counterpart. A variant form of the term, also common, is the adjectival shor angez, “passion-arousing,” which has been used occasionally by Ġhālib and repeatedly by Mīr.^[29] Mīr boasts, for example, “On every page, on every leaf, is a shor angez verse/The aspect of Doomsday is the aspect of my volume as well”; and again, “Wherever you look, a shor angez verse turns up/A turmoil like Doomsday is everywhere in my volume.”^[30] Azad speaks of a “writhing” verse (198).

A verse with shorish is a powerful, emotion-charged expression, usually not narrowly personal, of the lover’s experience of life. The form of the expression is unsentimental, and we are invited to experience it as deeply true. The verse conveys a state of strong feeling on the part of the lover and implicitly (though not directly) invites us to share it. The lover’s simplicity, authenticity, and passion make his voice authoritative. In a verse of shorish the lover speaks with a sudden surge of power that instantly comes through. Azad writes approvingly of poetry that is “as full of impact as a fingernail jabbing into the liver” (376). The appeal of shorish is immediate: the lover is the one real voice of the ghazal world, and that whole world suddenly opens to us in his speech.

For just these reasons the power of shorish is extremely hard to convey in translation. It is something that must almost be demonstrated ad hominem . If you feel it, you feel it strongly and unmistakably, but it does not lend itself readily to the kind of analysis possible in the case of maẓmūn āfirīnī or ma‘nī āfirīnī. There is much work yet to be done here. For the present I offer only a few examples, knowing that they cannot manage to be as powerful in translation.

Here is a verse of Mīr’s that is not only a masterpiece of shorish but also contains the word itself:

zindāñ meñ bhī shorish nah ga’ī apne junūñ kī
ab sang mudāvā hai is āshuftah sarī kā^[31]

Even in prison, the shorish of my madness didn’t go—
now stone is the cure for this distraction.

The lover, who sometimes behaves like a self-destructive madman, is liable at such times to be chained up in a prison cell. If the tumult and bitterness of passion cannot be controlled even by confinement, the only remaining remedy is “stone”—a stone wall to beat his head against, a stone to crush his head with, or the stones thrown by taunting boys when they see a madman. In the lover’s head is a tangle of confusion and distraction; stone is simple. The lover’s mental processes are overwhelmed by emotion; stone is unfeeling. The lover is tormented by his consciousness; stone could be used to render him unconscious. The lover suffers, ultimately, from the disease of life; stone, a means of death, a symbol of lifelessness, represents the final “cure.” All this—without a trace of self-pity—is conveyed by the lover’s own brief, stark, powerful diagnosis of his case.

Mīr’s contemporary Dard conveys instead a passionate urgency of inquiry, in a verse of doubly inshā’iyah form:

mujh par bhī to yih ‘uqdah tū khol ṣabā bāre
z̤ulfoñ ne kise bhejā yih nāmah-e pechīdah^[32]

For me, too, open this knot at last, oh breeze!
The curls have sent this convoluted letter—to whom?

The verse is entirely in the inshā’iyah mode and addresses the breeze, which is bearing the scent of someone’s wonderful dark, twisting curls. The breeze has carried the scent from afar, conveying a hint of it to many people in passing, but ultimately what is its message, and for whom is it destined? The breeze knows, and the word “too” (bhī) suggests that others might already know, while “at last” (bāre) suggests that the lover himself has long been desperately eager to find out. To “open the knot” is a common Persian and Urdu image for what we might call unraveling a knotty problem; it also evokes the act of loosening tied-up curls of hair. The letter sent by the curls is pechīdah, literally “twisted” and thus by extension “convoluted” and hard to understand; and the lovely sinuous letters of the Urdu script curl on the page like locks of hair. A nāmah-e pechīdah is also a “fancily folded letter,” carefully creased into some elaborate shape; and something pechīdah is “complex” and has many meanings. This convoluted letter, sent not even by the beloved but by the “curls” themselves, is both thoroughly mysterious and infinitely desirable. It arouses a longing that is apparently doomed to frustration, since the verse is full of uncertainties that the lover has no means of resolving: all he asks of the breeze (which may well refuse to respond) is the name of the addressee—who is likely to be someone else entirely.

Or here is Ġhālib, imagining the lover as a wild bird who has been captured and caged in a particularly cruel manner:

pinhāñ thā dām saḳht qarīb āshiyān ke
uṛne nah pāye the kih giriftār ham hu’e^[33]

The net was hidden hard against the nest
I hadn’t managed to fly—when I was trapped.

The adverbial phrase saḳht qarīb, “extremely near,” I have translated as “hard against”; the archaic “hard by” would have been another possibility. For the literal meaning of saḳht is “hard,” and when used adverbially it means “very, extremely, excessively”—but with negative overtones that leap at once into the mind: “severely, violently, harshly, painfully, cruelly.” The lover makes a matter-of-fact statement, and permits himself only the most indirect, the most marginal comment on his fate: the secondary overtones of a single adverb. The vision of passion under such provocation, yet under such restraint, creates a classic effect of shorish.

If Ġhālib’s indirectness can be subtle, it can also be violent in its imagery of passion:

abhī ham qatl gah kā dekhnā āsāñ samajhte haiñ
nahīñ dekhā shināvar jū-e ḳhūñ meñ tere tausan ko^[34]

I still think it will be easy to see the killing-ground—
I haven’t seen your horse swimming in a river of blood.

In the early stages of love, the lover underestimates the ordeals ahead of him. He expects that to die of and for love, to die at the beloved’s command or even by the beloved’s own hand, will be pure joy. He does not realize the deadly absoluteness, the grim extravagance, of the spectacle that awaits him. He is not fated to be the only victim. The carnage will be unimaginable: blood will flow in the streets, the beloved’s horse will literally swim in it. Even the first stage, even to behold the qatl gah (place of killing), will not be an easy thing. The lover depicts himself as emotionally naive and unprepared—yet in another sense he is not, for he knows what’s in store for him. Still, knowing what he knows, he gives not the slightest hint of fear, of second thoughts, of a wish to back out while there’s still time. The lover makes wry fun of his own naïveté—but his eyes are wide open. With no illusions, no heroic posturing, he goes on.

It is clear that the love of shorish remains powerful right into the twentieth century, when other classical possibilities of the ghazal have been all too little remembered—and even less valued. Examples of modern shorish are easy to find, such as this from the early-twentieth-century poet “Jigar” Murādābādī (1890-1961):

ay muḥtaṣib nah phenk mire muḥtaṣib nah phenk
z̤ālim sharāb hai are z̤ālim sharāb hai^[35]

Oh Officer, don’t throw it out—my dear Officer, don’t throw it out!
You tyrant, it’s wine!—oh you tyrant, it’s wine!

The public-morals patrolman (muḥtaṣib) is a stock character in the ghazal world; his chief role is to detect the forbidden act of wine drinking and to destroy the wine. Here the lover makes an altogether passionate appeal to him to refrain. The appeal is urgent, even desperate; its language is entirely colloquial. And the nature of the appeal? It is purely ad hominem : how can the wretch not see that it’s wine that he’s wasting? In one sense the muḥtaṣib knows very well that it’s wine that he’s pouring off—but in another sense he obviously doesn’t know at all. The lover’s urgency and passion testify to the marvelous qualities of the wine: its power to intoxicate, to bestow visions, to bring escape from the self. Yet these qualities are conveyed only by suggestion, and only through the lover’s shorish.

The following verse, which we have already examined in another context, is also a fine example of shorish. Even in translation it retains something of its power:

ay sarv-e ravāñ ay jān-e jahāñ āhistah gużar āhistah gużar
jī bhar ke maiñ tujh ko dekh to lūñ bas itnā ṭhahar bas itnā ṭhahar

Oh walking cypress, oh life of the world, pass slowly, pass slowly
Let me look at you to my heart’s content—only stop that long, only stop that long.

If shorish is hard to describe in English, kaifiyat, or “mood,” is even more elusive. The term kaifiyat has a central meaning of “state” or “condition,” with a tendency to mean a desirable state: an exquisite, inwardly flourishing, even ineffable mood, sometimes with mystical overtones. While shorish is a quality of passion shown by the lover, who is the protagonist of the ghazal world, kaifiyat is a quality of response located in the hearer or reader of the poetry; it is a mood evoked by the verse as a whole.^[36] Azad reports that on one occasion a young poet recited a most successful verse, and its hearers repeated it again and again. Even on the following evening they were still reciting it: “In the mood (kaifiyat) of his shi‘r, the night passed with an extraordinary pleasure” (113). On another occasion, Mīr didn’t even notice a visitor’s arrival. He was pacing obliviously back and forth, apparently absorbed in the mood (kaifiyat) of a single line which he kept repeating: “This time too the days of spring have somehow or other passed” (211).

In a verse of kaifiyat, meaning is almost irrelevant; on the first hearing the meaning may hardly even register, yet a certain mood pervades the hearer’s mind. In English poetry, mysterious lines like Nashe’s “Brightness falls from the air” evoke a similar response. The mood of kaifiyat is usually a melancholy one, but always one to be savored and enjoyed. A verse of kaifiyat often has a very simple vocabulary and an air of innocence—with depths behind it, but generally not ones accessible to rational analysis. As the great Indo-Persian poet ‘Abd ul-Qādir “Bedil” (1644-1720) put it, “a good shi‘r has no meaning.”^[37] T̤abāt̤abā’ī has said of Bedil himself, “I agree with Hali’s statement that ‘you may not understand Bedil’s poetry, but it still sounds good.’ ”^[38] Eliot spoke of a certain poem as “delightful,” while admitting that he could not at all explain what it meant, and he doubted that the author could either. What he admired was the mood it evoked: the poem had “an effect somewhat like that of a rune or charm,” it produced “the effect of a dream.”^[39]

Ġhālib, in a letter to a close friend, contrasts one poet’s work that is shor angez with another’s that is taṣavvuf kī chāshnī se labrez, “overflowing with a mystical flavor.”^[40] The word chāshnī (“flavor”), with its suggestions of a sweet/sour taste, a relish, a rich syrup, combines with the adjective labrez, “overflowing, enthusiastic,” to convey the immediacy and power of kaifiyat. This is just how, according to Azad, Żauq responded to certain verses: “He used to smile, and show his joy on his face, as if he was established within the kaifiyat of the shi‘r” (494).

Giving examples of kaifiyat is of course next to impossible in translation, for the verses lose most of their magic persuasive power. But a few attempts can be made. Here is Mīr’s epitaph for the lover, which speaks in a voice absolutely simple and quiet:

nāmurādānah zīst kartā thā
mīr kā t̤aur yād hai ham ko^[41]

He used to live without hope—
I remember what Mīr was like.

In this short and seemingly plain verse, nāmurādānah (hopelessly, without hope) glows like a fine jewel in a simple setting: it is the first word, an unusually long word (while all the other words are unusually short), and it occupies fully a quarter of the syllables of the whole verse. It defines the whole memory that a friend might have of Mīr—and lingers in the hearer’s mind with a wonderful kaifiyat. Mīr provides another epitaph for the lover, in what has been called a “verse of pure kaifiyat”:

ā’ī bahār o gulshan gul se bharā hai lekin
har goshah-e chaman meñ ḳhālī hai jā-e bulbul^[42]

Spring has come, and the garden is full of roses, but
in every corner of the garden, the nightingale’s place is empty.

How many nightingales had been there, to have left empty places in “every corner” of the garden—or does the one nightingale’s absence echo so persistently? The new spring renews the roses—but where has the nightingale gone?

In a verse of shorish cited earlier, Mīr’s contemporary Dard asked the breeze about the “convoluted letter” sent by the beloved’s curls. Here he addresses the breeze in a verse-sequence of pure kaifiyat:

yahī paiġhām dard kā kahnā
gar ṣabā kū-e yār meñ gużre
kaun sī rāt ān mili’egā
din bahut intizrsār meñ gużre^[43]

Deliver this message from Dard
if, oh breeze, you ever pass through the beloved’s street:
Which night will you come and meet me?
So many days have passed in waiting.

The breeze is once again an uncertain messenger: it may or may not pass through the beloved’s street—because the beloved lives so far away, or is so inaccessible that even the breeze is denied entry. But the message is the stubborn simplicity of longing: it is patient, humble, yet importunate in the way that love must be. The meeting is, after all, presented not as a question of “if,” but merely of “when,” and it is clearly to take place by night rather than day. But as for “which night,” the expression permits uncertainty to linger (kaun sī is much vaguer than the alternative kis). The lover does—and doesn’t—and does—have hope.

Sometimes a verse of kaifiyat may have little apparent meaning, as in this famous one of MuṣḤafī’s:

chale bhī jā jaras-e Ġhunchah kī ṣadā pih nasīm
kahīñ to qāfilah-e nau bahār ṭhahregā^[44]

Keep moving along to the sound of the opening of the bud, oh breeze
Somewhere the caravan of the new spring will halt.

What does it mean exactly? It is hard to say. Buds are indeed thought to open with a tiny but audible click. It is not the verse’s meaning that appeals, but the evocative quality of the images. And what do they evoke? A promise of rest, a threat of death, an alluring melancholy—above all, a feeling of the mysteriousness of things.

Even more remarkably, a verse of kaifiyat may have an illogical meaning that somehow fails to mar its effect. Here is one of the best-known verses of Faiẓ:

nah gañvā’o nāvak-e nīm kash dil-e rezah rezah gañvā diyā
jo bache haiñ sang sameṭ lo tan-e dāĠh dāĠh luṭā diyā^[45]

Don’t waste the half-drawn arrow—I’ve laid waste to every fragment of my heart
Save the leftover stones—I’ve caused my wound-covered body to be despoiled.

There are at least two serious problems with the imagery of this verse. A heart that has been riddled with arrows, so that one more arrow is unnecessary, might look like a pincushion, but it would not be in the kind of tiny fragments (rezah rezah) that suggest a cannon shot or an explosion. Even more problematically, dāĠh dāĠh normally means “spotted, speckled” rather than “wound-covered” as I have (by courtesy) translated it above. And has the speaker really caused his own body to be “looted”? The second line is merely a weaker echo of the first, and thus anticlimactic. The verse ought to seem at least clumsy, if not somewhat ludicrous. Yet it does not. One must make a mental effort to break out of its spell and raise rational objections. The verse seduces directly, without detouring through the brain. If it succeeds, a wave of emotion flows through the reader or hearer. The contrast is traditionally drawn between complex, sophisticated verses, which evoke an exclamatory Vāh! of admiration—and verses, including those full of kaifiyat, which evoke an āh, a sigh. (Azad praises Żauq for creating such multifaceted poetry that it evokes both responses [455].)

Basic concepts like rabt̤, ravānī, maẓmūn āfirīnī, ma‘nī āfirīnī, shorish, and kaifiyat are perhaps as close as we can now come to the poetics inherited by Azad and Hali. These terms deserve much more critical attention than they have yet received. Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s work, and my own dialogue with his work, have not yet gone as far as we both intend. There is much more to be said about these terms; but on the basis of extant materials from the period, there is not nearly as much more to be said about them as we would wish. The task remains frustratingly inferential. A great deal was lost when, in the generation after 1857, the direct heirs to the classical oral tradition were unable to claim their patrimony. Instead, they had to sell their birthright for a mess of all too realistic Victorian pottage.

Notes