by A. J. THOMAS
“The ghazal is a marvel of the magnetic dynamism of husn o i’shq (beauty and love) in highly charged metaphoric idiom. It is a celebration of love and freedom in an ambience of pure ecstasy and unremitting joy as well as profound capacity for enduring pain and suffering. The ghazal is the soul of Urdu poetry and the play of creativity at its peak.” This is how the author Gopi Chand Narang opens the preface to his monumental work, The Urdu Ghazal: A Gift of India’s Composite Culture.
The book is not a mere monograph on the Urdu ghazal, but a detailed inquiry into the beginnings of the form in Persian, the dawn of Sufism and its spread to India, the composite culture which developed in India through the marriage of Sufi mysticism and the Bhakti movement towards the end of thefirst millennium C.E. that nourished it, and its journey through the second millennium C.E. and its position now in the third.
Although there are many books dwelling technically on the ghazal form, from the scholarly Hazaron Khawaishen Aisi: The Wonderful World of Urdu Ghazals by Anisur Rahman to the handbook, The Art and Science of Urdu Ghazal, by Elizabeth Kurian ‘Mona”, the scope of Professor Narang’s volume far exceeds them. His deep erudition and life-long passion for the Urdu language and its literature shine through the work.
The Urdu Ghazal is a timely contribution to our era when language and literature are marked and tracked by religious and communal identities, losing sight of the underlying humanity of Urdu ghazals.
Amir Khusrau
The book primarily concentrates on the “cross-cultural roots of the Urdu ghazal”.
From the 11th century C.E., Islamic culture and Hindu culture commingled in the Indian territories, and the resulting composite culture captivated millions of people down the centuries. Amir Khusrau (1253-1325), disciple of the Chisti Sufi saint of Delhi, Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia, was a poet and musician who wrote in Persian and then in the hybrid proto-model of Hindustani, his mother tongue, which he called Hindavi. (His father was a Turkish courtier and his mother was a Rajput). When he mixed Persian to the ghazals that he wrote in Hindavi and sang them in Sufi gatherings, this language became known as Rekhta.
The Muslim rulers who extended their reign to Gujarat and the Deccan took this hybrid language along, which was called Gujari in Gujarat and Dakhani in Deccan.
This is the same language that was called Hindavi, Hindustani, Urdu, Urdu-e Mualla and Hindi.
Amir Khusrau was the first poet who pioneered folk genres such as doha, paheli, geet, qaul, quallaba, and invented the passionate, soulful song form qawwali, in which he sang his ghazals in the Persian-Rekhta mix form.
The ghazal form became quickly accepted in the languages allied to Urdu such as Punjabi, Sindhi, Saraiki and Baluchi and a neighbouring language like Kashmiri, a form in which many modern-day poets such as Sunita Raina Pandit are speciliasing; it has greatly influenced several Indian languages such as Bengali, Gujarati, Odia, Telugu and Kannada. H.S. Shivaprakash and a few other Kannada poets are known for their ghazals in that language.
Poets writing ghazals in the English language—ranging from stalwarts such as Aga Shahid Ali, to young ones such as Maaz Bin Bilal and Asiya Zahoor—have enriched the genre. Nepali and Sinhalese languages also boast of the ghazal form in their poetry.
The ghazal has conquered the popular imagination through films for almost a century now. Narang points out that “besides the wonder-world of metaphorical meaning and beauty, reality and non-reality, it has its magical innate musicality.” This quality makes the genre exclusively suitable for singing. Begum Akhtar, Kamla Jhariya, K.L. Saigal, Mehdi Hassan, Ustad Amanat Ali Khan, Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Farida Khanum, Jagjit Singh and others have made astute use of the ghazal form to hold millions in successive generations in thrall, observes Narang.
Strands of Hindavi
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