The Taste of Words: An Introduction to Urdu Poetry (4 page)

Urdu continues to be a vibrant and lively language. With the advent of the Internet, we see a proliferation of Urdu websites, of video recordings of mushairas and songs, and of the dissemination of scholarly work. The web continues to build bridges connecting the archipelago that constituted scholarly work in Urdu. Also, researchers have now begun to compile and catalogue its impressive corpus of literature and research; for instance, recently, Anwar Moazzam and Ashhar Farhan of Hyderabad have compiled a bibliography of social science research in Urdu
9
. Every day new books are published on Urdu poetry, including criticism, anthologies and collections. The language continues to struggle with religious orthodoxy, and many current debates underscore its conflicted relationship with the mosque and its affinity for the street. Urdu remains the language of the present, and by way of showcasing its cosmopolitan and its contemporary ethos, I’d like to offer a poem by Lata Haya, a poet of remarkable performative ability I encountered only through the Internet, and whose poem here congratulates Urdu on the advent of the new millennium:

Subh ka pehla payaam, Urdu

Dhalti hui se jaise sham, Urdu

Utrey jo taare wahi baam, Urdu

Badi kamsin gulfaam, Urdu

Jaise naye saal ka ye din ho naya

Aur beetey saal ki ho aakhri dua

Naya saal, nayi Ram Ram, Urdu

Tujhe nayi sadi ka salaam Urdu

The first message of the dawn, Urdu

Like the slowly setting sun, Urdu

Where the stars descend, that roof, Urdu

A youthful beauty you are, Urdu

Like the new day of the New Year

And the last blessing of the old one

Happy New Year, and a new hello, Urdu

The new century salutes you, Urdu.

To some, the twenty-first century represents the dying gasps of Urdu poetry. But to those pessimists, may I say that the rumours of Urdu’s demise have been exaggerated for well over 150 years. Urdu was on the verge of death in 1857 (post ‘mutiny’), 1901 (post ‘Nagri resolution’), 1947 (post-Partition), 1951 (when the Uttar Pradesh Official Language Act derecognized Urdu), and 2001 (post–9/11, for reasons not very clear, beyond the fact that everyone wants to associate that date with everything). However, as long as a chill runs up your spine when you hear a verse by Ghalib, as long as marchers on the street shout ‘
Inquilab Zindabad
’, and as long as film lyricists like Gulzar compose lines like ‘
Woh yaar hai jo khushboo ki tarah
/
Jis ki zuban Urdu ki tarah
’ (‘It is a friend who appears like fragrance / And whose language is [sweet] like Urdu’), we have no problem. I am counting on my great-great-grandchildren wringing their hands and lamenting the eventual demise of Urdu in 2150. And I won’t be surprised if the language continues to prevail nevertheless, for Urdu poetry is, after all, written by angels. In Chicha’s words:

Aate hain ghaib se ye mazaameen khayaal mein

Ghalib, sareer-e khaama navaa-e sarosh hai

These rare ideas I dare invent

A zephyr from paradise brings,

Ghalib’s sounds of pen on parchment

Are the flutter of angel wings
.

Mir Anees, the great marsiya poet, and arguably one of the finest exponents of the art of Urdu poetry, was reputed to have composed his first sher when he was a child of five. Having watched his pet goat die, he apparently ran weeping to his father and said:

Afsos ke duniya se safar kar gayi bakri

Aankhen to khuli reh gaeen, par mar gayi bakri

Alas the goat’s soul departed for heaven

It is truly dead, though the goat’s eyes are open

I am struck by the rhythmic quality of this couplet, fashioned so beautifully by the young Anees. The tyke seems to have had perfect rhyme and metre from the start, and as he grew older, content must have fed technique in a harmonious cycle that peaked in his extraordinary prowess, where the most complex of emotions and situations were rendered in metred verse with not an ounce of effort showing. Such are the ways in which the poets of Urdu sharpened their technique—through countless repetitions of poems, a craft practised over and over again, tested in the furnace of mushairas, where jealous contemporaries and, occasionally, gentle teachers separated the wheat from the chaff. It was not enough to be solely an exponent of form or a purveyor of content in those rarefied circles. One needed to be both.

Over time, as poets tested their craft among peers and the listening public, a protocol of sorts emerged regarding the form poetry would take. Much like the way Indian classical musicians were trained within the boundaries of specific ragas, Urdu poets learned the protocols of the ghazal and other poetic forms, which they either adhered to or tweaked. Here, I briefly discuss five forms that are relatively common in Urdu poetry, namely the ghazal, the
qataa
, the
rubaai
, the musaddas, and the nazm (along with its variant, the aazad nazm)
.
I should say at the outset that such a discussion of poetic conventions need not necessarily get between the reader and the enjoyment of poetry (just as you do not need to know the difference between a backward short leg and a leg slip to enjoy cricket). But such nuances are nonetheless interesting to know.

The ghazal is the dominant form of the Urdu poem. It is structured relatively strictly, with a string of shers (couplets), common in metre (i.e. the first and second lines have the same number of syllables). Every second line of a couplet in a ghazal shares a rhythmic continuity with every other second line, through two artefacts known as the
qafiya
and the
radif
. The qafiya primarily refers to a convention of using certain rhyming words in the course of a verse. The radif is the refrain at the end of a certain line that gives the verse a consistent rhythm.

To explain these in concrete terms, let us take an example of three shers from a popular ghazal, such as Hasrat Mohani’s ghazal ‘
Chupke chupke
’, which was used in the 1982 film
Nikaah.
The lines go thus:

Chupke chupke raat din aansoo bahaana yaad hai

Hum ko ab tak aashiqui ka vo zamaana yaad hai

Khainch lena vo mera parde ka kona daf’atan

Aur dupatte mein tera vo moonh chhupaana yaad hai

Dopahar ki dhoop mein mere bulaane ke liye

Vo tera kothe pe nange paaon aana yaad hai

Nights, days of quiet tear-shedding, I still remember

That era of intense loving, I still remember

Suddenly, I pulled away the curtain between us

Your veiled face playfully hiding, I still remember

The afternoon sun, the hot roof, your bare, burning feet

That sweet summons, you arriving, I still remember.

The rhyme in this ghazal derives primarily from the qafiya, which in this case comes from the rhyming of ‘
bahaana
’
,
‘
zamaana
’
,
‘
chhupaana
’ and ‘
aana
’. It is here that the creativity of the poet is tested the most. The radif in this ghazal is ‘
yaad hai
’, which is a base on which the ghazal stands. In this case, every second line of every stanza would end with the words ‘
yaad hai
’ (the radif), and that phrase would be preceded by a word that rhymed with ‘
bahaana
’ (the qafiya). Ghazals typically contain between five and twenty couplets, which are not necessarily connected to each other in narrative continuity.

Two more elements of the ghazal to keep in mind are the
matla
and the
maqta.
The matla is a sher in the ghazal, usually the first couplet, where both lines rhyme. The first sher in the above ghazal is a matla. A ghazal may have more than one matla; for instance, in the Faiz ghazal ‘
Tum aaye ho
’ that I have translated in this volume, the first two shers are both considered matlas. The maqta is that sher of a ghazal which contains the poet’s name as a signature (the signature is known as the
takhallus
). Many of the ghazals in this anthology have maqtas, which are often the place where poets showed their flourish. Often, a poet may have more than one takhallus. Ghalib had two: ‘Ghalib’ and, occasionally, ‘Asad’
.
As he said:

Main ne Majnun pe ladakpan mein, Asad

Sang uthaya thha, ke sar yaad aaya

In my childhood, Asad

I raised a stone to strike Majnu dead

But then,

I remembered my own head.

Typically, the maqta is the last sher of the ghazal. But poets may choose to tweak the format. For example, in the ghazal ‘
Insha-ji utho
’ translated in this book, the matla and the maqta are the same sher.

A qataa, very simply, is a poem of four lines—a quatrain. It may occur in the middle of a ghazal (where the poet is unable to finish a thought in two lines, and chooses to use four). It may also be a stand-alone verse, un-embedded in any long poem. Here is an example of a stand-alone qataa from Faiz:

Raat yoon dil mein teri khoi hui yaad aayi

Jaise veerane mein chupke se bahaar aa jaaye

Jaise sehraaon mein haule se chale baad-e naseem

Jaise beemar ko be-vajah qaraar aa jaaye

Your faded memory visited my heart last night

As if the spring came to the ruins, real quiet

As if the zephyr silently cooled the desert

And the sick, miraculously, gained some respite.

Like a qataa, a rubaai is a four-liner, but it is always a stand-alone mini-poem in its own right. Its rhyming scheme is fixed, with the first, second and fourth line rhyming, while the third line is free. In this sense, one can say that all rubaais are also qataas but all qataas are not rubaais. Furthermore, an astute observer may ask if there is indeed a subtle difference between a stand-alone qataa that follows this fixed rhyme scheme, and a rubaai. The answer really appears to lie in an additional requirement, that the verses of the rubaai should have twelve syllables, and must be amenable to a certain kind of intonation.

Rubaais were very popular in Farsi poetry (with Omar Khayyam’s poems crossing the linguistic divide into English). One of the best-regarded exponents of the rubaai was Josh Malihabadi; this is considered one of his best:

Ghunche, teri be-basi pe dil hilta hai

Tu ek tabassum ke liye khilta hai

Ghunche ne kaha ke is chaman mein baba

Ye ek tabassum bhi kise milta hai

Dear flower, my heart does shake at your sorry plight

For one smile from your love does your blossom take flight!

The flower said, ‘Dear friend, don’t mock this garden’s grace

One smile I have. That’s more than other creatures might.’

A musaddas may be simply described as a poem in which each unit consists of six lines. Typically, the first four lines of the musaddas rhyme with each other, while the last two rhyme in a different format. This poetic form lends itself to longer narratives and epic poems, and has been adopted especially by purveyors of the marsiya (an elegy that usually describes events surrounding an important event in Islamic history—the battle of Karbala). Mir Anees and Mirza Dabeer are prominent exponents of the marsiya tradition. Of the non-marsiya poems, the musaddas by Maulana Altaf Husain Hali is popular, as are Iqbal’s two long poems,
Shikva
and
Jawaab-e Shikva
. A typical musaddas may have over a hundred six-line verses.

Here, I present a verse from a marsiya by Mir Anees, which is a good exemplar of the musaddas with clean rhythms and evocative
manzar-kashi
, or the ability of the poet to depict a scene as drama. This verse describes the moment before Imam Husain leaves for his final battle. The menfolk have all perished; he is in the company of only his little daughter Sakina and his sister Bibi Zainab. This particular verse is one of the most celebrated marsiya verses, having been performed repeatedly in the public domain as well as featured in Shyam Benegal’s
Sardari Begum
(1996).

Husain jab ke chale baad-e dopahar ran ko

Na thha koi ke jo thhaame rakaab-e tausan ko

Sakina jhaad rahi thhi abaa ke daaman ko

Husain chup ke khade thhe jhukaaye gardan ko

Na aasra thha koi shah-e karbalaai ko

Faqat savaar kiya thha bahan ne bhai ko

That fateful afternoon, ready to fight stood brave Husain

No one to help him mount his horse, loneliness fed his pain

Little Sakina brushed his robe, her sadness to contain

Husain simply stood with head bowed, and quietude did reign

Karbala’s hero was alone, no friends left to pay heed

His brave sister then stepped up, to help him mount his steed.

One could speak of other categories where longer poems have been done in specific rhyme schemes, like the
mukhammas
, a nazm
with a five-line scheme (as in Nazeer Akbarabadi’s ‘
Aadmi-Nama
’
in this volume).

Nazm translates to mean ‘poem’, and in that sense, every poem is a nazm. However, in ordinary usage, nazm refers to that poem which does not fall into any specific rhythmic category. Typically, the nazm is associated with narrative continuity, that is, it tells a single story, unlike the syncopated content of the ghazal
.
It is also longer than the qataa or the rubaai, and does not follow the stringent structural demands of a musaddas. Many of the works of Sahir, Faiz, Majaz and others in this anthology, come under the nazm category.

The aazad nazm
is nothing more than a nazm liberated from the conventions of metre, and often, rhyme. The works of Noon Meem Rashid, Javed Akhtar and Gulzar in this volume are exemplars of the aazad nazm. Free verse in Urdu, however, retains still a lot more rhythm than a free verse poem in English or other European languages.

One may choose to categorize poems according to content rather than form, in which case a poem might be seen as a
naat
(a religious poem in praise of Prophet Mohammed), a
hamd
(a poem in praise of Allah), a
qaseeda
(a poem in praise of some person or being other than these two entities), or, as noted earlier, a marsiya (an elegy). One could speak of a poem according to performance, such as a qawwali, which is a group song with specific repetitive manoeuvres. For a delightful example of a performed qawwali, watch the Sabri Brothers perform ‘
Saqiya aur pila
’ (‘Some more wine please, cupbearer’) on YouTube.

Another term one hears about a lot is a
deevan.
A deevan is an anthology of a poet’s work, but usually contains only ghazals. The ghazals are ordered according to the last letter of the ghazal, and the deevan must contain ghazals that end with at least each letter of the Urdu alphabet. So the smallest possible deevan will have around twenty-five poems. Usually, they are much larger; for instance Ghalib’s deevan
has 234 poems.

I hope the reader is not daunted by these terms and categories. Like I’ve mentioned earlier, discussions of poetic form should be considered secondary to the enjoyment of a poem’s rhythms. Onwards then, to the poets and poems themselves.