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Persian Poetry at the Indian Frontier Permanent Black Monographs: The ‘Opus 1’ Series Published by PERMANENT BLACK D-28 Oxford Apartments, 11, I.P. Extension, Persian Poetry Delhi 110092 Distributed by at the Indian Frontier ORIENT LONGMAN LTD Bangalore Bhubaneshwar Calcutta Chennai Ernakulam Guwahati Hyderabad Lucknow Mas‘ûd Sa‘d Salmân Mumbai New Delhi Patna of Lahore © PERMANENT BLACK 2000 ISBN 81 7824 009 2 First published 2000 SUNIL SHARMA Typeset in Adobe Garamond by Guru Typograph Technology, New Delhi 110045 Printed by Pauls Press, New Delhi 110020 Contents Acknowledgements ix Transliteration and Abbreviations xi INTRODUCTION 1 1. POETRY AT THE FRONTIER OF EMPIRE 6 A. At the Frontiers of Islam: The Poetics of Ghazâ 7 B. Lahore: The Second Ghaznavid City 14 C. The Life of Mas‘ûd Sa‘d 18 D. Mas‘ûd Sa‘d and Ghaznavid Poetry 26 2. POETS IN EXILE FROM PRIVILEGED SPACES 33 A. The Perils of Being a Court Poet 33 B. The Poetic Memory of Ghazna and Sultan Mahmûd 39 C. Manipulation of History in a Qasida by Mas‘ûd Sa‘d 43 D. Poets Complaining of Ghurbat 47 E. Mas‘ûd Sa‘d between Ghazna and Lahore 56 3. PRACTICING POETRY IN PRISON 68 A. The Genre of Prison Poetry (Habsîyât)68 B. Varieties of Habsîyât 73 viii / Contents C. The Physical State of Being Imprisoned 81 D. The Prisoner’s Lament 86 E. Mas‘ûd Sa‘d’s Use of His Name 102 4. ‘NEW’ GENRES AND POETIC FORMS 107 A. Shahrâshûb: A Catalogue of Youths 107 B. Bârahmâsâs in Persian? 116 C. Mustazâd: A Choral Poem 123 D. Ghazal: A Nascent Poetic Form 126 E. The Poet on the Craft of Poetry 127 Acknowledgements 5. THE RECEPTION OF MAS‘ÛD SA‘D 136 A. Mas‘ûd Sa‘d among his Contemporaries 136 B. Mas‘ûd Sa‘d in Iran 150 This book originated as my doctoral dissertation at the University of C. Mas‘ûd Sa‘d in India 157 Chicago. For every aspect of its existence, I owe a great debt to my dis- tinguished teachers: Professor Heshmat Moayyad, who first suggested Appendix: Persian Text of Poems Cited 165 that I work on Mas‘ûd Sa‘d; Professors John R. Perry and C.M. Naim, Bibliography 186 both exacting and patient critics of my work. Over the course of several years, each has taught me to read, understand, translate and appre- Index 201 ciate literary texts in Persian, Tajik and Urdu. I would also like to ex- press my gratitude to Professors John E. Woods, Wadad Kadi and Li Guo who have been supportive in many ways connected with this work. Frank Lewis, Carla Petievich and Yaseen Noorani, who have been friends and mentors, offered timely and thoughtful advice. In Iran, Professors Mahdî Nûrîyân and Muhammad Rizâ Shafî‘î-Kadkanî took time to read and discuss Mas‘ûd Sa‘d’s poetry with me; the latter’s presence in Cambridge this year was a blessing for me while preparing the Persian text of the Appendix. In India, Muzaffar Alam went out of his way to generously share his ideas with me, and along with his fam- ily, he has always been a wonderful host and friend. Shamsur Rahman Faruqi and Professor Nazir Ahmad also deserve my thanks for impart- ing some of their views on this topic to me. At various times and venues, Julie Meisami, J.T.P. De Bruijn, Jerome Clinton, Mahmud Omidsalar, Paul Losensky, A.L.F.A. Beelaert, Walter Andrews, Hope x/Acknowledgements Mayo and Ayesha Jalal have been willing reference sources for biblio- graphical and critical queries. Anuradha Roy and Rukun Advani at Permanent Black in New Delhi have been extremely efficient and ac- commodating in their dealings with me. I have also had the benefit of feedback from Sara Yildiz, Amanda Hamilton, Aditya Adarkar, Judith Pfeiffer, Akbar Hyder, Shafique Virani, Matthew Smith, Nar- gis Virani, Qamar al-Huda, Ben Mazer and Osman Osmani. Thanks are also due to Sugata Bose and Alka Patel for their comments at a semi- nar this year at Tufts University and to the editorial staff of Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review where a section of Chapter Two Transliteration and was published. There are other friends, scholars, colleagues and family members, too numerous to name, who have offered all manner of as- Abbreviations sistance from technical support to moral encouragement; I would like to acknowledge their silent contributions here. In the end, the errors and deficiencies in this work are my sole responsibility. There is no single system of transliterating Persian that satisfies every- body. In an effort to reflect the classical pronunciation of the language Massachusetts 2000 and opt for a standardized system, even though it differs from the pro- nunciation of Persian in Iran today, I have used a simplified form of the Library of Congress transliteration system (only long vowels are marked; the various consonants, s, t and z are not distinguished). Due to the frequency of their use, I have not italicized the word qasida. All dates are given in the Common Era system. The following abbreviations have been used: EIr = Encyclopedia Iranica EI²= Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd. ed. Q = Qasida Qt = Qit‘ah Introduction This book is a study of the poetry of the Persian poet Mas‘ûd-i Sa‘d- i Salmân (d. 1121), born in Lahore but whose roots were in Hamadan in Iran. Mas‘ûd Sa‘d was a professional court poet at the Ghaznavid courts of Lahore and Ghazna. Primarily a panegyrist for the Ghaznavid rulers and administrators, he also wrote poetry for eighteen years about his sufferings as a prisoner and an exile. Mas‘ûd Sa‘d’s early career was spent at the Ghaznavid court in Lahore, which was at the frontier of the world of Persian poetry, and this location, along with his sojourn in prison, was an impetus to his poetic creativity and innovation. It is tempting to view Mas‘ûd Sa‘d as a poet whose vast body of poetic out- put was influenced entirely by his exotic and foreign (medieval) Indian locale, but the situation is complicated by the various anxieties that consumed the poet. Living at the meeting point of two cultures, Indian and Iranian, he was anxious about being a Persian poet in a location peripheral to the centre of Iranian culture, and was very conscious of the tradition of Persian poetry. At the same time he was not unaffected by his Indian milieu. This resulted in a career driven by one chief consi- deration: how to innovatively utilize and expand the literary tradition of Persian poetry that he inherited in order to gain access to and re- cognition in courtly circles from which he was absent. 2/Persian Poetry at the Indian Frontier Introduction /3 Writing at a time when ghazâ or jihâd was the driving force of the and used his poetic virtuosity to exploit the possibilities of the qasida Ghaznavids in India, the careers of professional poets located at front- form to this end. His alienation in this respect fits into the larger mood ier cities like Lahore were primarily dedicated to extolling this cause, of his times, and his voice is one among many, others being Nâsir in addition to maintaining Iranian courtly values associated with the Khusraw and Sanâ’î, who composed poetry of protest in exile. festivals of nawrûz and mihragân. The chief vehicle of this martial and A second level of alienation is found in Mas‘ûd Sa‘d’s habsîyât, the courtly poetry was the Persian victory ode, the qasida. The victory body of poetry that he produced during his eighteen years of impris- qasida was developed at the court of Sultan Mahmûd (d. 1030) in the onment. In the third chapter, the formation of this genre and the full hands of poets like ‘Unsurî and Farrukhî, and continued to be a viable extent of the poetics deployed in it by Mas‘ûd Sa‘d are studied. Con- poetic form throughout the later Ghaznavid period. ceptualized as a discrete body of poetry by medieval Persian literary The court poetry of this period is so much linked with the historical historians and classified as a sub-genre of lyric poetry, the habsîyât are process of the rise and fall of the Ghaznavids that unfortunately it has a test-case for working out issues of the origins and development of more often been viewed as source material for historians than as the literary genres in classical Persian poetry. It was with the habsîyât that product of creative individuals. In the case of Mas‘ûd Sa‘d, his dîvân Mas‘ûd Sa‘d moved on from working solely with the qasida form to has been carefully mined for dates of conquests of Indian cities and the exploring other poetic forms such as the qit‘ah, rubâ‘î, and tarkîbband. establishment of a chronology of the Ghaznavid rulers, but has rarely It was also as a prisoner and exile, while faced with the danger of being been critically examined. Given the particular interplay of history and forgotten by the court, that Mas‘ûd Sa‘d began to fully exploit the use autobiography in this poet’s dîvân, Masud Sad’s poetry particularly of his pen as a takhallus in his poems, for which he has not been pro- needs to be contextualized against the background of a complex nexus perly credited before now. In his poetry, the takhallus is not merely a of political, social and personal histories that contributed to the multi- poetic signature appended to a poem—perhaps as an act of copy- ple levels of alienation in the poet’s work.
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