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The Beloved and the Lover – Love in Classical Urdu Ghazal

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The Beloved and the Lover – Love in Classical Urdu Ghazal Cracow Indological Studies vol. XII (2010) Agnieszka Kuczkiewicz-Fraś (Jagiellonian University, Krakow) The beloved and the lover – love in classical Urdu ghazal cišq par zor nahīÓ hai yah vah ātiš sālib ki lagāye na lage aur bujhāye na bane Ghalib! love is a fire that lights itself and dies out of itself, beyond our wills.1 The theme of love (cišq2) and the poetic genre of ghazal (sazal) have been inseparably tied to each other since the times when pre-Islamic 1 Ghazal XXXIV, transl. by Adrienne Rich in Ghazals of Ghalib, ed. by Aijaz Ahmad, Delhi: Oxford University Press 1994, p. 155. There is a brilliant wordplay in this line, as the word sālib, which is the poet’s taxalluÆ or ‘nom de plume’, often conventionally inserted in the closing couplet of the ghazal, might be understood also in its literal meaning (‘overpowering, triumphant’), so the verse can be read verbatim: “Love is triumphant fire and no one has any power over it”. 2 The most popular noun used by the authors of ghazals to connote love, is cišq ‘love, excessive love, passion’, but there are also many other words that mean ‘love’ or other similar feelings and emotions, which can be found in this type of poetry, like e.g.: ulfat (P ≤≤≤ A) ‘familiarity, intimacy; attachment, affection, friendship’; šauq (P ≤≤≤ A) ‘desire, yearning, deep longing (…), inclination, affection, love (…)’; taáap ‘(…) feverish dis- quietude (of body or mind); (…) anxious eagerness or desire (…)’; lagāva (H) ‘(…) intimacy, intimate connexion; a liaison; sexual intercourse’; 200 AGNIESZKA KUCZKEWICZ-FRAŚ Bedouin poets started expressing their overwhelming feelings of passion and loneliness in this intricate form3. But although the literary tradition of ghazal can be traced as far back as the times of the Abbasids’ court and its most famous poet Abū Nuvās who lived and wrote his ghazals at the turn of the 8th century (d. 814), the actual blossoming of this genre in its complex and sublime form took place in medieval Persia. The great Persian poet Rūdakī (858-941) is con- sidered to be the true originator of the ghazal in its classical shape. Among other important authors who composed Persian ghazals are Amīr Xusrau (1253-1325), Sacdī Šīrāzī (d. 1291), Jāmī (1414-1492), cUrfī (1555-1590) and, above all, the greatest master of the art of ghazal, Ḥāfīz Šīrāzī (1320-1389). The Urdu ghazal has emerged from its Persian model both in structure and in texture, becoming one of the major elements of the Indo-Persian culture4. During hundreds of years of its evolution, the Urdu ghazal de- veloped a set of expressions and vocabulary legitimated by tradition and manifesting itself in a vast array of allusions, similes, metaphors, and historical or legendary references. The whole selection of se- mantic tools known as tasazzul5 embodies such key concepts as: the maḥabbat (P ≤≤≤ A) ‘love, affection; friendship’; mihr (P) ‘love, affection, friendship, kindness, favour (...)’; yārī (P) ‘friendship, intimacy; love (...)’ (cf. Platts 1884: passim). See also footnote no. 16. 3 In its nostalgic mood and strong emotional appeal the ghazal continues the tradition of naṣīb – the prelude part of pre-Islamic Arabian ode (qaṣīda), in which the poet recalls the happiness he shared with his beloved and describes his sorrow after they parted. 4 More on ghazal in Indo-Persian literary tradition see e.g.: Naim 1974; Faruqi 2004: 1-93; Pritchett 2003: 863-911; Jafri 2005: 1395-1397. 5 The term tasazzul, which could be translated literally as sazal-ness (‘amatory poetry; composition of ode; love element of poetry; ecstasy of love’ – Maddāh 1959: 269; STCD 1980: 195) seems to have been invented by the Urdu literary critics not very long ago and does not occur either in texts or documents prior to 1857 (cf. Faruqi 1999: 7; also Naim 1974), or even in the Persian (Steingass) or Urdu (Platts) dictionaries published in the THE BELOVED AND THE LOVER , LOVE IN .LASSI.AL 0RD0 GHA1AL 201 tavern (maixna, arb2xna) and drinker (maika, sarmast, arb ), wine (b a, mai, arb, ahb), goblet (paimna, jm, pyla, ssar), a cup-bearer at the wine-party (sq ), intoxication (ba 2mast , xumr, naa), spiritual mentor (p r, aix), madness (jun3n, sau ), the candle (4irs, qin l, am c) and the moth (parvna), the rose (gul) and the nightingale (bulbul), the falcon (jurra, hbz, ikra) and the hunted bird, the lightening (bijl , barq) striking the nest (iyna), and many more, as well as the historical or legendary figures, like Joseph (fa- mous for his beauty), Jesus (the giver of life), Solomon (the wise), famous Arabian lovers Qays (known also as Majnūn – the madman) and Laila or their Persian counterparts Farhād and Šīrīn, etc. All these, used as catalytic agents, are arranged and employed according to a poet’s imagination and sensibility6 with only one aim: to de- scribe his love and the whole range of associate feelings like sadness, loneliness, yearning, longing, desire or devotion. Love is the central theme of the ghazal and its conception is highly idealistic and sensuous. This peculiar kind of love, being one of the ghazal’s hallmarks, is often contrasted by the critics and con- noisseurs with sensual love manifested in typical love poems, in which love and the loved one are identified and never separated7. last years of the 19th century. However, it is a known fact that the Urdu poets used the lexicons or glossaries such as e.g. highly valued by Ghalib (cf. Naim 2004: 84) 5ut6alat al27u carü (“The Lexicon of Poets”, published in Lakhnau in 1854 by Siyālkotī Mal ‘Vā-rastah’), which is an important and very useful glossary, with numerous examples of phrases used by Persian and Urdu poets (cf. Storey 1984: 44). 6 The imaginative idea which allows a poet to represent the reality in his verses is known as taxayyul (‘imagining, fancying, supposing; imagin- ation, fancy’ – Platts 1884: 314; Steingass 1892: 289) and together with tasazzul constitute two core elements that create the essence of a ghazal. More on the concept of taxayyul see Hogan 2004. 7 E.g. Shamsher Rahman Faruqi explains: “Since the convention of having the «idea» of a lover or beloved instead of an actual lover/beloved freed the poet-protagonist-lover from the demands of «reality», or 202 AGNIESZKA KUCZKEWICZ-FRAŚ However, love depicted in the ghazal is first and foremost one-sided and unrequited, platonic (or even spiritual) but at the same time irresistible, sublime and idealising both the object of love and the lover’s emotion. The probable crucial reason which has motivated the evolution of such a concept of love was the fact that love pictured in ghazals was illicit in its character, as for the member of the purdah society there existed only three possibilities to experience love, and all three of them were socially not allowed: love for a woman be- trothed or married to another man, love for a courtesan, and homo- sexual love for a young and beautiful boy8. On the other hand, it must be remembered that the greatest mystics and masters of Persian ghazal of 11th-12th centuries used this poetic form as a medium for voicing and disseminating their ideas9 and – as the Urdu ghazal exactly follows the Persian model – some- times the feelings that are expressed in it are not directed towards a human beloved (ciq2e majz 10) but towards God, Supreme Power, «realism», love poetry in Urdu from the last quarter of the seventeenth century onwards consists mostly – if not entirely – of «poems about love», and not «love poems» in the Western sense of the term” (Faruqi 1999: 7). Also cf. Ali 1992: 11. 8 The question of illicit love in the Urdu ghazal has been widely discussed and argued by Ralph Russell in his books and articles, cf.: Russell 1969; Russell 1992 (esp. part 1); Islam & Russell 1994 (esp. chapter 4); Russell 1995; Russell 2000 (esp. pp. 126-131). On this subject see also: Mukhia 1999 and Singh 1997: 152. 9 Cf.: “From the very beginning mystic love was a most popular subject in ghazal poetry, or rather, ghazal poetry came to be a favourite of the mystics. The metaphorical and symbolic language of the ghazal was especially suitable for describing the secrets and mysteries of mysticism. Like the love of the ghazal poet, the love of the Sufi is subtle, impressionistic, and emotional; it dislikes detail and the logical explicitness of rational discourse” (Naim 1974: 193). 10 P majz ‘metaphoric; untrue, feigned, insincere; political; profane; superficial’ (Steingass 1882: 1174). THE BELOVED AND THE LOVER , LOVE IN .LASSI.AL 0RD0 GHA1AL 203 the absolute (ciq2e aq q 11). It is not always obvious who is the beloved described by a poet – quite often the object of affection might be equally either human or divine (or sometimes even both in the same ghazal12). This uncertainty of the beloved’s identity is deepened additionally by the Urdu convention of using the masculine gender equally for the lover (ciq) and the beloved (ma c3q), which is again a consequence of the faithful imitating of the Persian pattern, where the lack of grammatical gender implies the lack of definition of the beloved’s sex. As Faruqi recapitulates aptly: “The liberation of the beloved from the constraints of gender identity enabled the poet to use all possibilities as it suited him” (Faruqi 1999: 18). What might be really surprising for the Western reader of the ghazal is the fact that the technical term for mystic love is aq q , meaning ‘real’, while earthly love is defined as majz , ‘metaphori- cal’13. However, the difference in terminology reflects the major distinction between worldly love and divine love as it was understood by Çūfī mystics (again the idea which has come to Urdu poetry from its Persian elder sibling).
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