Shamsur Rahman Faruqi: The Doyen

Eminent Urdu poet, fiction writer, critic and theorist Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, 84, has held aloft the light of literature all his life, ever since he formally began writing in 1960. His contribution to Urdu literature and criticism has been immense. An authority on classical prosody and ilm-e-bayaan (the science of poetic discourse), he has formulated fresh modes of literary appreciation, drawing on Western principles of literary criticism. 

Faruqi, an MA in English from Allahabad University, initially worked in the Indian Postal Service (1960-1968), and served as a chief postmaster-general and member of the Postal Services Board, New Delhi until 1994. Shabkhoon, an Urdu literary magazine which he started in 1966, helped bring to the fore many modernist Urdu voices for nearly four decades till it ceased printing in 2006. In 2013, he translated his 2006 Urdu novel, Kai Chand The Sar-e-Aaasman, into English as The Mirror of Beauty.  In the year that followed, he published The Sun That Rose From The Earth, a short story collection. Both the books are populated by the literary greats, including Daagh, Mir and Ghalib, of the times they are set in: Mughal era.  

Winner of the  Saraswati Samman for She’r-e Shor-Angez, his three-volume study (1991-93) of the eighteenth-century poet Mir Taqi Mir, Faruqi, in this interview, traces his life in literature, his early literary forays and experiments, his evolving art of appreciating poetry, the need among readers to cultivate a critical way to read poetry, the spirit of reading and writing that was in the air he breathed in then, etc.   

Susmita Srivastava: What were the beginnings of your literary journey?

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi: This question has often been asked and I’m really not quite able to provide a definite answer. All that I know or can say with certainty is that even when I was very small, I somehow had the idea that I should write. That I should be a great or a famous writer was not a consideration at all. Writing came to me naturally and not because there were a lot of writers in my family. As in other middle-class Indo-Muslim families, everybody was interested in poetry, some of them actually composed a bit of poetry, casually or by way of fun, but there was no tradition of poets in my father’s family. And by the time I was born, they had become rather religious. In my mother’s family, there was a much longer tradition of Persian and they did produce some major writers in Banaras in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries but they did not figure in history, though they were important in their own environment. So, there was nothing especially remarkable in my family conducive to my becoming a poet or a writer but it came quite naturally to me to write. I composed my first line when I was about seven or eight. It wasn’t really poetry but still: it was a conscious effort on my part to express myself.

We were all rather hard up so I couldn’t afford to buy notebooks or paper. I’d cannibalise empty pages from older notebooks, cut them into smaller pages and that would be my magazine. Sometimes, I reproduced articles, sometimes I wrote some. Occasionally, my older sister Zohra wrote a few stories and thus we went on for a few years. What I knew was that writing was a noble thing, something I should do. Much later, when I was thirteen or fourteen, I became conscious that there was a thing called fame that one could aspire to.

Growing up in Azamgarh, I was handicapped by the absence of a literary environment. Or if there was, it was way above my level. There was (and still is) the famous Shibli Academy, founded by the great scholar Shibli Nomani (1857-1914) in the last year of his life. It was then called Shibli Manzil or Darul Mussanifin, House of Writers. That, I knew, was a place of great learning: scholars would reside there. Since my father was known to them, he would occasionally go there and I with him, though I was very small. I remember Syed Suleiman Nadvi, a very noble figure with a white beard, sitting at the head of what was not really a table but more like a long, low bench around which people sat and ate in the traditional manner, serving food into their plate from the main dish. It was formal but not in a westernised way: more like the customary form practised in Indo-Muslim homes in the Nineteenth century. Syed Suleiman Nadvi went off to Pakistan in 1947. Anyway, I remember two or three dinners like that.

I was four years old when I came to Azamgarh. I remember Independence Day and Mahatma Gandhi’s martyrdom but it never occurred to me to write poems about these things, to respond to things happening in my immediate social context. I remember the agitation of 1942, it was very strong in my part of U.P. The districts of Azamgarh, Ballia and Ghazipur have traditionally been hotbeds of revolutionaries since 1857. I remember something of those times. That was the first time that I underwent a kind of angst. We were sent off to Banaras to my grandparents, perhaps for safety. It must have been a question of safety because it wasn’t as if the schools were closed. Then, my father tried to join us but it took him a long time because trains were not running, stations were being set fire to… And I remember the aftermath of the Quit India movement. My father was a Sub-Deputy Inspector of Schools. He used to go and inspect rural schools. Sometimes, teachers would come to him, asking for small favours or to pay their respects. I remember one of them reporting to my father during a conversation that whole villages had been put to the torch by the Englishmen and he also said that not all the houses that had been burnt had been of those people who had actively participated in the Quit India Movement. I remember the name…Vasudha Singh was the only one, he said, who had been an active participant in the Quit India movement. The English burnt all the houses out of a spirit of revenge and retribution. 

I remember those things but it never occurred to me to make them the subjects of my poems. I remember the war, for example, very well. Not only the hardships of the war, particularly felt in a large family like ours where my father was the only one supporting us, all of us being very young. I remember the decline of my father’s prosperity. For example, he used to have a pack of camel for loading his tent and other appurtenances when he went out on tour. In the city, he used to have a tonga. I remember the horse and the syce scrubbing the horse and the huge bell on the tonga, which was fixed to the mudguard of the front wheel. It needed a lot of pressure to make it ring and it had a deep, resonant sound “blll-lll-lll’ (demonstrates) but it was so hard that I couldn’t press it. It was not intended to be used frivolously by children. Then, the camel went and the tonga went and he was reduced to cycling around. I remember those things as signs of a good middle class life but they all went away gradually. There was no electricity in Azamgarh in those times. We used lanterns and I remember how we filled them with white kerosene, which was refined. Gradually, it became rarer in the market and we had to use red kerosene, which gave out a smoky flame. 

I remember all that but I was more interested in talking about myself, maybe because I was so introspective. I certainly felt oppressed in my home. There were so many of us to feed and clothe and naturally my father could not afford proper schooling for us. 

(Chuckles) I wrote a short line: “Maloom kya kisi ko mera haal-e-zaar hai.” Who knows the state of my heart or self.

Susmita Srivastava: But do you think these early social experiences, the ideas that you absorbed early on, influenced your work at a later date? In your later fiction, we find social perception and commentary. Although this commentary is essentially rooted in the past, we also hear you talking about the disconnect between the present and the past. We also perceive subtle themes of social consciousness. So, while they may not have found expression in your early poetry, do you think these experiences in some way contributed to your perception of what literature is or how you should write?

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi: Actually, I was not writing much poetry at that time, maybe a few lines here and there. There was actually prose: stories and some attempts at writing criticism. But what I felt and what I saw in those days of the Freedom Movement, of Mahatma Gandhi, of the conflict between the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress, of the contribution of the Ulema who were mostly on the side of the Congress, the oppression of the British and the way they always ranked above everything else in India (and I was also brought up in the same tradition, that English things are better): all that went into my consciousness as a person and as an Indian, about what India was or should be. There never had been communal riots in Azamgarh or in Gorakhpur where we went when I was 13 or 14. There were certainly distinctions, people were known more by their castes rather than by their individual personas.

But what impacted more on my mind was the privilege that Indian Christians used to claim and get from everybody around. I studied at a very ancient school which is still there; it was established in 1837 by an English missionary. The principal was an Indian Christian; the manager was English or Australian, certainly a white man. There were a number of children, I could see, who had been converted from other religions, Hinduism or Islam, and they tried to speak Hindi in the manner of Anglo-Indians: Hum apne Papa pas jana mangta (I want to go to my father).  And they were privileged. I felt really bad about that. Just because they had adopted the religion of the ruling class, why should they be regarded as superior to us? 

But that was how it was. Everything English was privileged, English dress, English ways of eating, of writing, of doing things, and, of course, Englishmen were better inventors, scientists and technologists. India was backward, had nothing like technology, philosophy or science. The general intellectual environment of the times was that everything English was better than everything Indian, and also better than, for example, Japanese things. “Japani maal” at that time meant something spurious or inferior, not of good quality like the English. We were told that the Chinese were all addicted to opium and gambling, they had really no governance or culture. It took me a long time to grow out of this imprinting. For example, I remember I used to feel awed by the thought that the Englishmen wrote the first Urdu grammar, compiled the first Urdu dictionary. This is scholarship, I thought, this is the love of language, they have come here and they are learning our language, codifying it. 

It was only much later that I realised that these were tools of oppression, the Englishman learned local languages in order to rule, to be better able to command. That shows the kind of mindset we had inherited from our environment and our parents. At that time, my main interest was to gain proficiency in English and may be in Urdu as an ancillary, because at that time Urdu was not very important, was a part of household activities. We all spoke Urdu, wrote Urdu, a little bit of Persian also. My father was a hard taskmaster. He would motivate me, chastise me and try to teach me things well beyond my level of understanding. He put me to school in Class 5 when I was eight years old, which was really unfair of him. But at least he did this for me: he made me aware of the power of the English language and that a mastery of English could lead to greater things for me, which, of course, in his mind was the Civil Service, maybe a better job than he had, but subservience to the English lord and nothing like a political awareness or a literary understanding. It was not a special thing with him; this was common in India in the 1930s. It was the ethos. For the so-called sharif  (respectable) people, Hindu or Muslim, it was the apogee of life to be able to command English almost like a first language and then to enter a Civil Service and attain a position of authority in the society.

Susmita Srivastava: So, your earlier social thoughts were governed by principles which you subsequently found erroneous and your early writing was also not influenced by what was around you. Can we then say that your interest in literature was completely unique to your personality?

What was more of a handicap to me was not that I had to strive to improve my English, because I really had a flair for English which my father sharpened and honed to a level much above the ordinary, but that I was interested in Urdu literature also, in Urdu poetry particularly, and I really found no true guides to lead me into the spirit of Urdu poetry. You see, my people, those who taught me and those who taught them, were all post-Colonials. They had been taught to see Urdu literature or any Indian literature, for that matter, through English eyes and naturally it was found to be deficient. Moreover, whatever excellence there was in poetry, whether in limited or less limited ways, was never laid down in black and white. 

For example, I remember as a child I once wrote an essay on Urdu poetry. Mostly it must have been copied from other people… (laughs). I tried to enumerate the special qualities of the major poets… Ghalib, Mir and Momin and so forth… and against Momin I wrote “muamlabandi.” I did not even know what the hell “muamlabandi” was! And nobody ever told me. My father showed it to his elder brother, who was a teacher of Arabic, Persian and Urdu in a school. My uncle was delighted and praised my paper but I did not have the courage to tell him that I did not understand what the term meant or to ask him to explain it. And I am sure that he wouldn’t have known either. So even the most basic terms, the tools to reach the threshold of understanding of Urdu poetry, were either not known or had been forgotten. And if they were known, they were not understood. “Muamlabandi” actually means an account of transactions, conversations or small events between the lover and the beloved. This is a typical “muamlabandi” sher (couplet) by Momin:

(How can I continue to be alive when I am in union with my beloved

Each and every action of hers draws my life out and kills me.)

This is a generalised “muamlabandi” which is not a very rare theme in Urdu or Persian, that it is not possible to really enjoy the beloved completely because she is so full of loverly actions that each of them kills you. 

Here is a “muamlabandi” sher from Ghalib: 

This kind of pointed short dialogue which refers to specific incidents is specific “muamlabandi.”

Susmita Srivastava: That popular ghazal “aur dupatte se tera woh munh chhupana yaad hai” would qualify as “muamlabandi”?

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi:  That, of course, is very poor “muamlabandi” from Hasrat Mohani, a third rate poet.  Behind his poem, there are other things which are not to be found in Urdu poetry at all: for example, the assumption that there’s a girl, your acquaintance or your cousin, and that you fall in love with her, take a proposition to her and that she’s shy, these things are just not there in Urdu poetry.  You see, Urdu poems are not about real love, they are about Love but they’re not love poems.

These things were not taught to us, that the extraordinary pain, the frenzy, the hyperbole of Urdu poetry are all conventions and that the over-arching assumption of these poems is that they are poems about Love without being love-poems. The nearest that they reach love-poems is in “muamlabandi.”

Susmita Srivastava: Why is it important to remain in these conventions? Can’t one break the mould and move on?

Susmita Srivastava: In that case, is there no hope for somebody who is unaware of or has not studied the past?

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi: I am sorry, there is no hope at all. 

I’ll give you an example. It was a very famous utterance at the time. In 1941, a famous book came out of Patna, written by Kalimuddin Ahmad (1908-983), a Cambridge-trained professor of English: Urdu Shayri par Ek Nazar. The first thing that he said was that the Urdu ghazal is a semi-barbarous form of art. It is not developed. Why? Because all the verses in a ghazal are separate, there is no central idea, there is no movement of the theme, and thus there is no organicity. Since all poems must have organicity, a ghazal, lacking organicity, is not a full poem: it is only half-developed and, therefore, semi-barbarous. A developed literary form, a civilised poem, would have a central idea, statement of theme, a beginning, a middle and an end. Now this particular indictment of Urdu poetry became extremely famous, so much so that it reached even my ears when I was very small, around 1944-45. From that date to now, the only person who has provided a refutation to this is me. I gave it when Kalimuddin sahab was still alive. But my point is that there have been lines and lines of professors who knew both Urdu and English, like Firaq Gorakhpuri (1896-1982), for example, who was a professor of English and a poet of Urdu, and who was a great admirer of these “semi-barbarous” poets, or like Ale Ahmad Suroor (1911-2002), who had post-graduate degrees in both English and Urdu. But they could not answer this question. For example, Suroor Sahab said that although it is true that there is no unity of theme in the ghazal, the entire ghazal has a certain mood or atmosphere. But if that is so, let us examine these two shers of Ghalib from the same ghazal. Ghalib is the most mainline poet. He never deviates from the main, serious line of ghazal poetry. He begins with a global opening statement on a thousand year old, time honoured theme:

“Sab kahan kuchh lala-o-gul mein numayan ho gayeen

But then he goes on from that global statement to this particular one:

When I went there (to the Beloved), the abuses (hurled at me) left me speechless 

All the benedictions I knew I’d used up on the doorkeeper

Now how can you say that these two shers have the same mood? So Suroor Sahab’s statement is incorrect, apologetic and a misguided attempt to defend the ghazal from the wrong angle. But what resulted was that serious critics, even up to my time, have criticised certain verses, calling them interpolations, out of place in the ghazal. 

Firaq sahab said that the ghazal is a series of climaxes, which is again stupid. By creating a series of climaxes, you cannot create a homogeneous, organic poem. That reply did not address Kalimuddin sahab’s point that the ghazal lacks cohesion. 

Susmita Srivastava: So, we can say that many answers were given but nobody questioned the question.

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi: Exactly. As Mohammad Hasan Askari (1919-1978) says, each culture has the right to make its own rules for its own aesthetics and its own literary understanding. Drawing from that statement, I gave two replies to Kalimuddin sahab:

1. The definition of a poem that he adduces has been laid down only by Romantic poets. Neither do the Greeks subscribe to it nor do the modern English poets. T.S. Eliot says on numerous occasions that poetry has its own logic which is the logic of emotion, not the logic of argument. And then there are hundreds of paratactic poems which say the same thing over and over again. Where is the unity or development in those poems? The definition of poetry that Kalimuddin is talking about is Keatsian, Romantic. Coleridge spoke about organicity. Nobody said it earlier, nobody said it later. Why should we then treat is as universal?

2. If you prescribe that development means making a coherent statement, you need to take into account tenses which are the greatest factors of coherence. “Jaana (to go)” has no meaning, “gaya” (went) has a meaning, “jaoonga” (will go) has a meaning. Meaning is born of tense. But then Chinese has no tenses at all. And Arabic has only two, past and present, it has no future tense. And these are very developed languages. If these languages do not display connectivity of tense, how can we regard such connectivity as an essential feature of development?

And, finally, if your objection is that Ghalib wrote no sonnets, I raise the objection that Shakespeare wrote no ghazals. (Chuckles).

Susmita Srivastava: Apples and oranges.

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi: Precisely. We have our own rules. How can you call coats superior to sherwanis (a knee-length coat worn by men in India)? Just because the English wear them? There’s no other reason. Our clothing is suited to our climate and culture, we go in for loose and comfortable clothes, our aim is to cover rather than reveal. So, we follow different theories of clothing. Anyway, to go back to what I was saying, the disconnect that was born because of 1857 had some very unfortunate consequences. One, we tried our best to unlearn what we had learnt from our ancestors. And we did not ask this question: if, in the English scheme of things, poetry was to be about nature, about social reforms and problems, about the widow and the orphan, about rain, what were the norms which defined poetry in their literary tradition? What were they responding to? What was the thing which made an utterance a poem? We never discovered. So, what did we do? We took up some terms from the modernisers of the late Nineteenth century, like Mohammad Hussain Azad (1827-1910) and Altaf Husain Hali (1837-1914), vague terms like nazuk-khayali (delicacy of thought), bareek-beeni (profundity), buland-parwazi (loftiness), muamla-bandi and we just applied them to our poets. What is more, nobody even attempted to explain these terms. We spoke of Ghalib’s work displaying nazuk-khayali, Momin’s muamla-bandi, Mir’s soz-o-gudaz… but where do you find these terms written down? Did their contemporaries ever say about Ghalib that he was very nazuk-khyal or about Mir that he was very soz-o-gudaz?...Fine. I agree that every generation rereads the past in its own way. This is nothing new.  But the past can be reread only if it can first be read. If they do not know what a ghazal is, how can they read it? Naturally they come up with these absurd ideas: series of climaxes, mood of a ghazal. If the ghazal has to have a mood, you lose 11 shers out of 15, you find they don’t fit.

So, our great loss was this: we were taught to look at our past with contempt. It was either non-existent or contemptible. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (1817-1898) writes dismissively of qissagoi and of Mir’s poetry. He can’t even quote Mir’s name properly and he denigrates the lack of nature as a theme in Mir. So, it’s as if we dumped our 500-year-old tradition of Urdu literary activity in the dustbin. At the point in history where I stand, I’ve been told that Ghalib is a great poet, Mir is a great poet, Momin is a great poet though not as great as those two, but what distinguishes one from the other is not known to anyone. 

Susmita Srivastava: Were you patterning yourself on any writer you had read?

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi: No, no. I had read more English than Urdu at that time. I had read, in a general way, Krishan Chander (1914-977), Rajendra Singh Bedi (1915-984), Ismat Chughtai (1915-1991) and so forth and, in fact, in a certain way I rather idealised Krishan Chander as a writer of prose. I liked his prose: very sweet, very easy-flowing and very colourful.

Susmita Srivastava: And did that attraction last or was it only of that time?

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi: No, my regard for that generation of writers mostly went down rather than up as time went by. In regard to poetry, it went down particularly badly. I regarded Asrar ul Haq Majaz (1911-1955) and Sahir Ludhianvi (1921-1980) as great poets and now they don’t even count in my estimation. I regarded Faiz Ahmad Faiz (1911-1984) as very great for a very long time but now he does not count all that much, he is just a mediocre, ordinary poet. Firaq I considered very great, too, but now I think he was not even a proper poet. So, a drastic change has taken place. In fiction, the problem was that there was hardly a good model in front of me. What there was, I couldn’t read. The best models were the dastans (an ornate form of oral history, consisting of a long epic story), but they were practically banned from schools and homes because they were regarded as imaginary, unreal and even pornographic. They were not pornographic but that was the general belief. The dastan is a perennial source for all kinds of prose: literary prose, scientific prose, high-sounding love transaction prose.

Susmita Srivastava: But you did not have access to it then?

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi: I did not even know about dastans then. All I knew was Bagh-o-Bahar which was written by Mir Amman (1748-1806) at the college of Fort Williams in 1801 as a text for teaching Englishmen Urdu and which was touted in our culture as the dastan par excellence, sweet, easy-flowing and free from highfalutin Arabic and Persian words.

So, I had no real model in front of me. And, in any case, I found that their relentless insistence on pet notions ultimately disgusted me… Krishan Chander or even Bedi, who is much more subtle than any of these people.  Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955) I didn’t know much about at that time. In any case, they did not remain high in my estimation.

Susmita Srivastava: But why were they high in your estimation at that time and what qualities did you perceive them later to not have?

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi: They were in the environment. Everyone was talking about Krishan Chander. Everyone was talking about Ismat Chughtai, sometimes derisively, sometimes with respect. Everyone was talking about Bedi, with great respect but also with a certain reservation. These were the names in Urdu fiction. And, of course, there was the older generation. There was Premchand: his great shadow was everywhere. Also, there was another line, what you can call the Muslim social, mostly for women, about home and household affairs, domestic disappointments, hopes, sorrows, achievements and so on. There was also a humorous line, like Azeem Baig Chughtai (1928-2009), Ismat Chughtai’s older brother. But I did not read these writers for models of prose writing; I read them only for their content, for the stories of domestic sorrows or for the humour. I wrote my prose just the way it came to me. Maybe it was influenced by some English writers I was reading, especially after I turned fifteen. But I gave up writing fiction after BA.

Susmita Srivastava: So, you didn’t write fiction for a long time?

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi: For a long time, although I began as a fiction writer, mostly, writing poetry only on the side.

Susmita Srivastava: And you always continued with poetry?

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi: Yes, I always wrote poetry, one way or another, good or bad. 

Why did I turn to criticism? There was a famous writer, Majnun Gorakhpuri (1904-1988), who taught both Urdu and English at St. Andrew’s College in Gorakhpur. He was a commanding name in my time, a learned man in the Renaissance sense. He knew Sanskrit philosophy, Greek philosophy and European philosophy, he knew Urdu, English, Persian and Arabic. He wrote two little booklets on the theory of fiction, which I read with great enthusiasm, thinking here was a man who could talk across cultures, who could talk about the Russian, English and French novels and also about Urdu. He could bring it all into one ambit. I saved those lectures, which were published as booklets titled Afsana, thinking I would use them when I went in for higher studies, MA English. But even as early as my first year in MA, when fiction was one of the important subjects being taught, I reread them and found them to be trash. They were so childish, a childish amalgamation of facts and ideas without any coherence.  A person whom I had idealised even up to BA, just a couple of years earlier! But now I had read a lot of Shakespeare and literary fiction. The point was that I knew this kind of criticism was regarded as the criticism in Urdu but it was highly derivative and absolutely empty of any kind of appreciation of the theory of fiction as such. It was only a copy of what was touted in the most elementary literary books, Hudson’s An Introduction to the Study of Literature or Scott James’ The Making of Literature, and this was the pride of Urdu critics for a very long time, including Majnun. So, then I thought I should write about literature in Urdu rather than in English.

Susmita Srivastava: What exactly had happened in these two years to suddenly mature your critical perception?

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi: I would not use the word “matured” because that is too big a word but I attribute most of this change to Shakespeare. I read only one play of Shakespeare in BA, Twelfth Night. Just before my time, there used to be four Shakespeare plays to be read in BA in Agra University colleges but then they started trying to denigrate and downplay English, to push it downwards in the Indian consciousness. By the time I passed my BA in 1953, there was only one Shakespearean play. But even that captivated me so much: Twelfth Night. And I had also read Julius Caesar in Class 12. These two plays were my world of Shakespeare till then. 

Susmita Srivastava: It lit a spark.

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi: It lit a spark. Of course, I knew that there was more to Shakespeare than Twelfth Night and Julius Caesar. Luckily, somebody gave me a copy of Shakespeare’s complete works, one of the early editions, very fine print. Those days my eyes were not all that bad and so took the book home to Azamgarh after taking my BA exam and I read through about twenty-four to twenty-five plays. Whether I understood the damn thing or not, I realised that here was a world which was so total above and different from anything that I had been taught till then that it would have been foolish and futile for me to do anything but read this kind of literature, this kind of writing, whether drama or prose or poetry, and then devote some time to writing in Urdu. Immediately after my experience of reading Shakespeare, I went to Allahabad and I reread those two wretched infantile booklets. I thought to myself: fine, I should tackle basic questions of literature and then I will go on to understanding and making people understand what these people were doing. 

At that time, I did not know the fundamentals, I did not even possess the basic requirements for understanding Urdu poetry. I had read Ghalib, of course, his diwan was small in size and everyone read him, but Mir I had only read in classroom texts. His Kulliyat was not easily available and it is a big Kulliyat anyway. I had been told again and again that Mir was very unequal, there was a lot of chaff with the grain in his work and, despite his commanding reputation, he was really not a poet to waste time upon. I remember a story about Waqar Azeem, the famous literary critic who went to Pakistan. He used to edit an Urdu magazine called Ajkal. At that time, he was a student in Allahabad. He writes that he and somebody else had an argument about Mohammad Ibrahim Zauq (1789-1854). That somebody else was saying that Zauq was not a poet at all, he was a non-poet. It was decided then that somebody would read the whole of Zauq in two or three days and report the best. According to Waqar Azeem, only two and a half shers were found. Imagine this: twenty-year-old boys who know hardly any Persian, who have no idea of the tradition in which the man was writing, who do not even know what exactly he was writing, who had been told that the ghazal is a collection of all sorts of discrete ideas, incoherent and exaggerated, who have been taught to only recognise Ghalib… (Ghalib has philosophy, he has feeling! What is Zauq? Nothing)…naturally, they only find two and a half shers. Zauq is a considerable poet, a major writer, and within a hundred years of his death, it is being debated whether he was a poet or not.

Susmita Srivastava: What we can call a subtext?

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi: Not just that but that there is no other signification in it at all. What the poem says is nothing but its meaning. So, that leaves no scope for subtleties, nuances or other signification. Now, there’s a whole literary theory behind this but let me leave that for the moment. Sanskrit has a different theory. Sanskrit clearly talks about something called kavyata and something called kavivyapar, which Rajasekhara detailed. There is an easy, well-known formulation which spells out that there are different kinds of language: the language of law where you mean exactly what you say and the language of poetry where you can mean anything that you want, where what you mean may be quite different from what you say. Mammatacharya (11th century; one of the foremost scholars of Sanskrit poetics, particularly noted for his text Kavyaprakasha), said, long before Eliot or Richards discovered these things, that the meaning depends on the many things, such as the speaker’s intentions, whom he is addressing, what he wants to know etc. The Arabs also said more or less the same thing in Mammat’s time. Consequently, an utterance may have more than one meaning. This idea was taken up by our Urdu poets of the Deccan, whether they took it from Sanskrit or discovered it on their own. They distinguished mazmoon (import) from maani (meaning). What is the poem about? Is it about a book, a dog or a beloved? That is the mazmoon, the theme. What does the poem mean? That depends on what exactly you have said. There’s a poem of Mir’s about a cat. The cat is the mazmoon. But to find out the maani, the meaning, we need to know what the cat is in Mir’s eyes. Is it a four-legged animal or does it have some other qualities, is it anthropomorphic, is it wild and untamed, is it wise or unwise? So, what the poem is about is very different from what the poem means. There’s an easy way to understand this: read Baudelaire’s poem about a cat, Mir’s and John Clare’s. All three of them have written about a cat.  In all three, you will find that the cat exists but also does not.

So, the difference between the mazmoon and the mani was first described by the Urdu poets of the Deccan. This led to a consequence which was also earlier present in Persian but not completely articulated. Actually, even the Deccan poets did not state it as such but their assumptions reveal it clearly: the principle of the metaphor is that it is greater than the object for which it is brought into play. For example, you say to the beloved: You are my king, you are God to me. Obviously, the poor thing is not God. Thus, the metaphor or the simile is greater than the object of it. This is well-known in Sanskrit and Arabic as well.

Susmita Srivastava: So, was this defined by the poets of the Deccan?

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi: No, I’m telling you what they did next. They said that the metaphor was not a replacement of the object. When they called the beloved a gazelle, they did not call her so in replacement of the beloved. Rather, they poured all the attributes of the gazelle into her, thus turning the metaphor into reality as well. This meant that the beloved who is called a gazelle will be understood not just to be beautiful and graceful but also fleet of foot. Thus, the metaphorical utterance is unreal, non-literal but an attempt is made to change it into reality. Fleet-footedness is recognised as an aspect of the beloved. Thus, a chain is created: the beloved was called a gazelle because of her beauty or her eyes but because she is treated as a real gazelle, other aspects of the gazelle are ascribed to her as well. Consider the image of the beloved as a slayer. It emerges from the slim fact that the lover metaphorically dies for love of her. But the metaphor is evolved to picture the beloved as holding a sword or dagger, the weapons of those days, and also as killing whole hordes, as causing rivers of blood to flow.

Momin: 

(You slaughtered the world by a mere glance

Nobody saw the spectacle of anyone dying)

Ghalib:

(We do not find it hard, as yet, to gaze at the slaughter ground

For we haven’t seen your steed through gory waters wade)

A man like Hali, who had read Persian, could not understand or had forgotten this point: that a real qatl gah, a location for murder, is not being talked about but the basic metaphor that we die when we see her is being extended. Because we die, she is a killer. If she’s a killer, she has weapons. And she kills many because beauty has many lovers. With many deaths, much blood flows.

To appreciate the ghazal, you have to understand and appreciate these metaphor-chains.

See where this goes further. Dying can be of two kinds. You could die of the intensity of emotion or in grief or you could die at her hand. What better: that would be the apogee of love. You get to die, you get to see her and she carries out the deed with her own hands. Now, listen to Mir; Ghalib cannot achieve this level:

 

(Some were lucky, they were killed by her sword 

But when I presented my neck, she granted forgiveness) 

(Laughs)

You can really enjoy this sher, it’s fun. You can laugh or you can cry with it. And people say that ghazal is very grave and ponderous, there is no chance for any fun or games with it! But this is the wonder of it. It is like what you would call bhagwan ki leela or what we would call qudrat ka khel (nature’s sport). This leela is everywhere. It includes all kinds of things, bedbugs, mosquitoes, dogs and even rapists. The poet is a creator and he can create anything, his poetry is also like leela.

Susmita Srivastava: Dhaul dhappa us sarapa naaz ka sheva nahin… (That beauteous being is not the one to have indulged in hitting me…)

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi: (chuckles) Hum hi kar baithe the Ghalib pesh-dasti ek din (It’s only me who made advances to deserve it, Ghalib). Leela! The poet is a creator and can write anything. In this sher, for example, the idea has been brought to a low level but that level is human. 

Susmita Srivastava: Mir has also done this in his “koli mein utha loon” sher.

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi: Oh, that’s a wonderful sher. Ghalib can never reach those heights.

(I could lift you up in my arms if wished

No matter how heavy you are, I find you but a flower)

When I translated this, my editor sahib, Sheldon Pollock, who is a great Sanskrit scholar, got really upset. He asked me, “Who is this sher about?” I said probably not a boy, must be about a girl. He was shocked! Bhari!... I told him, that’s what the poet has said. He said he didn’t like the word “hefty” which I had used for “bhari.” He came up with some American word to replace “hefty.” Now that guy is a Sanskrit scholar, he has read so much Sanskrit and is immersed in it. But he cannot escape his English taste, he doesn’t like it that we can have a corpulent beloved.

Susmita Srivastava: You have elaborated on two aspects so far, but you had mentioned four. 

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi: Remind me where we were? 

Susmita Srivastava: I had asked you whether those of us who do not know Urdu or are unfamiliar with the ghazal tradition should abandon hope of ever being able to read Urdu poetry fruitfully. And you had said that there are four qualities we need to understand. One is that there is a difference between meaning and content. Another is that there is a chain of metaphors and each metaphor is a reality. 

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi: Exactly. As Aristotle said, it is a sign of genius to find similarity between two dissimilar things. Now, what was found through the metaphor was an abstract idea. But then you treat the resulting abstraction as a reality, the unknown thing as a known thing and you have the ground for a fresh metaphor.

Susmita Srivastava: So, those are the two qualities you have described so far.

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi: The third emerged in the course of our conversation. Ghazal poets have little regard for reality. They display a kind of “leela,” they will say whatever comes into their mind. The grave, serious Ghalib talks about dhaul-dhappa. Or:

(He said I could lie at the doorstep, and then changed mind

In the moment it took me to unfold my packed bedding)  

So, the shayar is not sitting on a pedestal and writing only high-flown shers. He is a man like us, like you and me. The way God rules in his creation, has his myriad ways, so is the poet like a little god in his own universe, with his own ways. In that universe, he is free to do what he wants.

Listen to Mir:

(O degraded! I have heard from your partners

That you drink wine at night with the cunning)

 

(Chuckles) And then they say that Mir is always weeping, he never laughs. That there is never a smile on his face or only the most fleeting of smiles.

But Mir does everything. He jokes with the Creator. He fights with and roundly abuses the beloved and then he also praises her better than even Shakespeare could. Understand that the ghazal poet is a God in his world and in that world he can say anything: politics, philosophy, love. 

Susmita Srivastava: But with some conventional restrictions?

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi: No restrictions. At the most, a few ideas such as the faithlessness of the beloved, if you want to call them conventions.

Listen to this great sher from Ghalib:

  

(The love of the beloved is sheer chance, otherwise, o mate! 

Whether it’s the effect of heart’s lament or sadness, who knows)

What I mean to say is that these conventions can be broken or twisted. They are very simple conventions. All love poetry, or poetry of love, whether Sanskrit, Arabic, Greek, French or Chinese, demands the premise of separation. This separation may have happened in any way…on its own, or she’s left him or run away with someone… but the necessary thing is, there should be distance. The next step then is faithlessness. She has many lovers and she flirts with them all. These conventions are few and broad, but the principle behind them is that love poetry is based on the idea of distance. Love poetry cannot be written without distance.

The fourth point is that regarding the ghazal as the poet’s own story or descriptive of his own emotional life is the height of foolishness. These poems are not love poems: they are poems about love. Love has many shades. There may be children born of it, there may be fights, there may even be fisticuffs. There is a high level in it and a low level. A major critic once said, angrily, that the poets of today cannot write poetry because they have not loved. Arre bhai! Who knows who has loved and who not? Ghalib once wrote that he also “has killed a sitampesha domni.” What the poet blurts out about himself… who knows what is true and what is not? It isn’t necessary that it is true. And even if true, show me where a poet’s poetry is his diary! And what gives us the right to read a poet’s private diary? The assumption behind this idea is completely idiotic. We drew this idea from the poetry of the Romantics, where it existed to an extent, though not exactly so. We said that the emotion behind the poem had to be genuine. Now, who laid this down, one asks. Mr Wordsworth, it was answered. “Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity.” “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” This man was born 250 years ago in England, he had an antecedent literary tradition which he was repudiating, he could say whatever he wanted to in his own context. Why is he being thrust upon us? So, the last point is that these poems, these ghazals, are not autobiographical, they are not his own experiences. And, even if they are, we don’t read them as his own experiences.

A man like Ghalib who returned… Have you heard the story about the hundred-rupee professorship offered to him at Delhi College for teaching Persian? Ghalib thought he’d accept it and set off in his palanquin with a couple of outriders. He reaches the college gate and sends in word that Ghalib sahib has arrived. No response. He sends in word a second time and then a third. Finally, the English principal emerges and asks in surprise, “My dear sir! Why are you still here? Please do come inside!” Ghalib says, “Well, I was waiting for you to come and welcome me in.” So, the principal says, “Sir, you’re an employee here. Now, come in and go to the class and teach.” So, Ghalib says, “I was under the impression that working for the government would make me a more respected figure, but it seems to be having the opposite effect. I don’t think I want this job after all.” And off he goes.

So, how does a man like that say:

The man is completely dependent on the English but he still has so much self-respect that he waits for the English Bahadur to welcome him in before he agrees to enter the college. How can a man like that write a sher like this? And, if he does, he’s lying. (Incidentally, the same professorship was offered to the poet Momin Khan. Momin took umbrage because he was offered eighty rupees against the hundred offered to Ghalib and turned down the job, too).

The point is that dignity and bearing in life, good or bad as it may be… Ghalib has many flaws of character, as does Momin. Momin was a hakim, a doctor and he fell in love with a woman who was his patient, in violation of professional ethics. (Laughs) Such misconduct! He even wrote a long poem about it, but anyway…

Maybe, just maybe, a shayar may add an autobiographical element to a masnavi, but even for a masnavi, to say that the work is essentially autobiographical is foolish. Recall that poem of Mir, Khab-o-khayal-e-Mir, where he says that he’s fallen in love with a girl who lives in the moon. Now, people take this as a real life reference. Why, though? Mir has merely mentioned in his autobiography that he perceived a face in the moon which resulted in his confining himself to his house for a long time and developing a kind of vahshat (lunacy.) From this single mention, an entire story is concocted about how Mir had gone raving mad and the conclusion is drawn that the Khab-o-khayal-e-Mir is autobiographical. Merely the two lines which say that he saw a beautiful fairy in a dream are autobiographical. What I mean to say is, please don’t read these ghazals and even masnavis as having any authentic autobiographical content.

So, those are the three or four points you must bring to your reading of ghazals before you can move ahead.