The Gopi Chand Narang Interview: ‘Mir, a master of style and lyricism, created magic in his poetry’

Professor Gopi Chang Narang, 91, is an institution unto himself. A formidable literary theorist, critic and scholar, he has published more than 65 scholarly and critical books on language, literature, poetics and cultural studies: twelve in English, eight in Hindi and more than 40 in Urdu. In his works spanning decades, the Professor Emeritus at University of Delhi and Jamia Millia Islamia has incorporated a range of modern theoretical frameworks, including stylistics, structuralism, post-structuralism and Eastern poetics.

Born in Dukki, a small town in Balochistan, in the British India (now in Pakistan), to a Saraiki family — his father, Dharam Chand Narang, was a litterateur himself, and a scholar of Persian and Sanskrit, who inspired in his son an abiding interest in literature — Professor Narang received a Master’s degree in Urdu from the University of Delhi, and a research fellowship from the Ministry of Education to complete his PhD in 1958. He taught Urdu literature at St. Stephen’s College (1957-58) before joining Delhi University, where he became a reader in 1961. In 1963 and 1968, he was a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin, also teaching at the University of Minnesota and the University of Oslo. He joined Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, as a professor in 1974, and rejoined the University of Delhi from 1986 to 1995. In 2005, the university named him a professor emeritus.

Professor Narang’s first book (Karkhandari Dialect of Delhi Urdu) was published in 1961, a socio-linguistic analysis of a neglected dialect spoken by indigenous workers and artisans Delhi. Professor Narang has produced three studies: Hindustani Qisson se Makhooz Urdu Masnaviyan (1961), Urdu Ghazal aur Hindustani Zehn-o-Tehzeeb (2002) and Hindustan ki Tehreek-e-Azadi aur Urdu Shairi (2003). Amir Khusrow ka Hindavi Kalaam (1987), Saniha-e-Karbala bataur Sheri Isti’ara (1986) and Urdu Zabaan aur Lisaniyaat (2006) are some of his socio-cultural and historical studies.

In addition to teaching, Professor Narang was the vice-chairman of the Delhi Urdu Academy (1996-1999) and the National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language (1998-2004) as well as vice-president (1998-2002) and president (2003-2007) of the Sahitya Akademi. He was Indira Gandhi Memorial Fellow of the IGNCA (2002-2004), and Rockefeller Foundation Fellow for Residency at Bellagio Study Centre, Italy (1997). He received Mazzini Gold Medal (Italy, 2005). He was a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, London, UK and his invaluable contribution to literature is acknowledged in the Dictionary of International Biography, Cambridge, UK. He is the only Urdu writer honoured by the Presidents of both India and Pakistan. In 1971, he got the President’s National Gold Medal from Pakistan for his illuminating work on Allama Iqbal. He was awarded Padma Bhushan in 2004 and Padma Shri in 1990.

In 2017, Oxford University Press published Ghalib: Innovative Meanings and the Ingenious Mind, the translation of Professor Narang’s seminal book on Ghalib by Maryland-based author and poet Surinder Deol, who served as a program manager and a senior specialist at the World Bank in Washington, DC. In 2020, Deol translated another of Professor Narang’s landmark book, The Urdu Ghazal: A Gift of India's Composite Culture, published by Oxford University Press. His recent release, The Hidden Garden: Mir Taqi Mir (Penguin Random House), translated from Urdu by Deol, introduces readers to the life and poetry of the grossly misunderstood poet, Mir Taqi Mir (1723-1810), who is widely admired for his poetic genius. “My work on Mir, which started in the early 1980s, is one continuous search for the essence or the core of his distinctive poetry for which he is called khuda-e sukhan (god of Urdu poesy),” says Professor Narang. 

Nawaid Anjum: Your new book, The Hidden Garden: Mir Taqi Mir, gives us a glimpse into the life and times, and the poetry of Mir (1723-1810), the first poet to lay bare the hidden beauty and genius of the Urdu language. What are the distinctive attributes of Mir’s poetry that mark his reputation as a pathfinder, as a master poet who held a sway over the imagination of several poets to come, including Ghalib?

Gopi Chand Narang: Mir lived during extraordinary times. The Mughal rule that had provided political stability for a long period of time was teetering between tragedy and farce. The final nail in the coffin came in the form of massive foreign invasions, massacre and plunder of Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah Abdali. Persian language that had a great hold on the local poets’ imagination started to lose its appeal as Rekhta, a pluralistic language and a by-product of the composite culture of India became a viable option. A major voice in this transition was that of Mir Taqi Mir who made very effective use of the new evolving medium reflecting voices of the people heard in the streets of Agra and Delhi. Mir wanted to reach out to people and the vehicle for that was not the Persian style that was understood and appreciated only by the literati, not the common folks. Listen to his words:

People will keep reciting my rekhta ghazals in towns and alleys

They will keep echoing them through the centuries.

He wrote simple words, enriched by innovative metaphors and similes. His simplicity had deep structure and dense meaning. At the end, he could legitimately claim:

If Rekhta reached the pinnacle of its greatness,

this was the work that he accomplished.

Is there anyone who does not accept 

Mir’s master mysterious touch?

Nawaid Anjum: You argue that a serious critical look at Mir’s multi-dimensional work must go beyond traditional theses that hail his poetry for its “simplicity and flow” and also for combining the rawness of Agra’s Braj with the sophistication of Delhi’s Persian and mellowness of Lucknow’s Awadhi in his diction. Why do you think the simplicity of his poetry is deceptive?

Gopi Chand Narang: Mir’s greatness as a poet does not depend on one or two factors. A serious critical look into Mir’s work must go beyond traditional theses of simplicity and flow and a synthesis of Persian segments with Prakritik Rekhta. There is much more to Mir’s simplicity. A quick assessment does not complete the picture. Mir was the first great Indian poet who used multiple lenses in his work. His deceptive simplicity was in fact his “multiplicity.” There is an impression that simplicity of the syntactic structure equals simplicity of poetic meaning which is not correct. This book establishes for the first time through textual analyses that Mir speaks in a dialogic language that apparently looks like conversational, but his simplicity is deceptive. It is an established fact that conversational language is not poetry’s language. The poetic language infused with creative devices when removed from the language of daily discourse becomes more meaningful and durable. Look at the following couplet:

I asked the rose bud, 

“How long is the life of a flower?”

The bud listened and smiled.

Nawaid Anjum: What are the hidden aspects of Mir’s vast oeuvre — six divans — that you have been trying to unravel, an exercise that resulted into your landmark book, Usloobiyaat-e-Mir (1984)? From that book to this, you have opened a new vista on the study around Mir. What did you set out to achieve in both?

Gopi Chand Narang: My work on Mir, which started in the early 1980s, is one continuous search for the essence or the core of his distinctive poetry for which he is called khudaa-e Sukhan, God of Urdu Poesy. There were so many misconceptions about him that I had to raise my voice to correct those fallacies. Mir was a multidimensional poet (“a poet of countless delights”). Critics tried to put him in a box. That was unfair and wrong. The label of simplicity was framed in a way that it degraded Mir’s work. This had to be corrected. Mir had a good mastery of Persian, but he was right in his assessment that a time had come to create a synthesis of Persian and Rekhta. I end my book by calling Mir a “complete poet.” He had the mastery of style and lyricism and he could create magic using his words. In fact, he was the first “ustaad poet” of Urdu, as he claimed in one of his couplets. Furthermore, he is not only a love poet as other love poets are, he is a metaphysical poet par excellence reflecting rainbow like synthesis of the Bhakti and Islamic Sufi thought.

If Rekhta reached the pinnacle of its greatness,

this was the work that he accomplished.

Is there anyone who does not accept 

Mir’s master mysterious touch?

Around the banks of the river of poetry mine is the true spectacle

In my tumultuous waves there are hundreds of colours, I am the gushing river!

Nawaid Anjum: In your preface, you write how you encountered Mir for the first time in your early twenties when you were studying in Delhi University. Tell us more about this early encounter with the first Urdu poet whose works enthralled you. What struck you the most about his poetry? How did your appreciation for Mir’s lyrical and romantic poetry get deepened when you read his autobiography, Zikr-e-Mir, and Mohammad Husain Azad’s Aab-e-Hayaat? Though literary criticism was non-existent at that time, what role do you think the scholars at that time, like Maulvi Abdul Haq, Nawab Jafar Ali Khan, Waheeduddin Saleem and Dr Syed Abdullah play in the critical evaluation of Mir’s work?

Gopi Chand Narang: There is a difference between what one hears and what one experiences. As a student of Urdu, I had read Mir’s poetry, just as I had read other poets. But when Khwaja Ahmed Faruqi asked me to look at the proofs of his book, I had to do that job at a slow pace, carefully looking at each word. This was an enlightening experience for me. I went deep into Mir’s syntactic structure, his use of metaphors and similes, the mellow and sometimes roaring sounds of the music of his phonics and his mixing of different styles of writing poetry. It didn’t take me long to realise that what experts had written about Mir was half-baked and basically subjective and unjustified. This whole talk of 72 nishtars and Mir being a simple poet of only 72 shers was a crisp quip but was a bogus critique, which in fact denigrated Mir. Such remarks need to be challenged and had to be exposed by tools of scientific criticism based on textual analysis and exposition of the inner creativity and aesthetics of the deep structure of Mir’s poetry.

Nawaid Anjum: What is the contribution of Firaq Gorakhpuri and Nasir Kazmi in the revival of Mir’s work? Do you see these two poets’ own sensibilities as having been moulded by Mir’s ingenuity and the thematic concerns of his poetry?

Gopi Chand Narang: It is a great challenge to carry on the tradition of a great poet like Mir. The task was even more difficult because 19th century Urdu poets were so much influenced by the Persian style that they never paid much attention to Urdu “of the street” that was evolving into a beautiful language thanks to Rekhta and Khari Boli. Firaq, because of his deep understanding of languages such as Hindi, Sanskrit, Khari Boli, Urdu, and Persian, understood the essence and anguish of Mir’s voice. Firaq’s creativity was deeply inspired by Mir. Nasir Kazmi’s forlorn and despondent indigenous voice was influenced both by Mir and Firaq. The revival of Mir in present times is the legacy of both of these poets.

Nawaid Anjum: You describe Mir as a poet of the fire and torment who forged Urdu in the inner fire of his creativity. His story, you write, is not just his own story; it’s a testament to the miseries suffered by Delhi as a city and its residents in the wake of the 1857 rebellion, the invasions by Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah Abdali, the infighting between the Jats, Marathas and Rohillas, and, later, the Partition. Do you see Mir as essentially a poet of love? In what ways did his hardships and misfortunes shape the contours of Mir’s poetry?

Gopi Chand Narang: When we call Mir a poet of love, we must be careful. His concept of love is all embracing; it’s not love in a narrow sense of the word. It is inclusive and dense. It is layer upon layer. He understood human suffering and ruination of the whole of habitats. He knew well how mindless conflict and killing of innocents destroys the human spirit. Let us hear him say it:

Each couplet of Mir reveals

multiple dimensions of creativity. 

Isn’t amazing how much a poetcould say 

just with the tip of an ordinary reed pen?

Nawaid Anjum: Besides Mir, the focus of your lifelong critical engagement has been the works of other poets like Amir Khusrau, Anees, Iqbal, and eminently, Ghalib, as well as Urdu fiction writers like Bedi, Manto, Krishan Chander, Balwant Singh and Intizar Husain. What made you turn your critical eye to these poets and writers?

Gopi Chand Narang: When you are a literary critic, reading and assessing quality writing, whether of poets or storytellers, is part of your job. So that is what I did all my life. But it is the grey areas that excite me, where others erred or overlooked or simplified or did injustice to the creativity of the writer. I explore and underscore the fingerprints or the DNA of the text and bring it to light from darkness. I do not tread the path where others trampled. But an essential guiding principle of my research has always been to focus on bringing out something new, and something that others missed. I do not spend any time on repeating what others had stated or simply criticising or wasting time on picking holes what X and Y said or wrote.

Nawaid Anjum:  Your seminal book on Urdu ghazal, The Urdu Ghazal: A Gift of India’s Composite Culture, translated by Surinder Deol, like your books on Mir and Ghalib, also translated by Deol, is an exposition on the poetic diction which has been employed and enriched by poets across the centuries. You describe in detail the journey of ghazal through different socio-political and cultural changes and elaborate on how it provided new creative models to deal with literary movements like progressivism, modernism, and postmodernism. Could you sum up ghazal’s journey for us? What does the shape of contemporary ghazal appear to you?

Gopi Chand Narang: If you look at the Urdu Ghazal book, it has an epilogue that is a summary of nearly 300 years of Urdu ghazal’s journey. I don’t think I can do this in a few words. This will require time and serious reflection. I would say one thing: ghazal as a genre is stronger than ever before. There is a close connection between the words of a poet and the voice of a singer who makes those words come alive. We have many more choices of devices to read and hear ghazals today than any time in the past. That’s very helpful, indeed. There have been setbacks, of course: deaths of singers like Jagjit Singh and Mehdi Hasan and passing away of many great ghazal poets since 1980s have left a great void. But I do hope that new poets and new voices will take their place in due course and the magic of Urdu ghazal will survive for the future generations.

Nawaid Anjum: In your landmark book on Ghalib, Ghalib: Innovative Meanings and the Ingenious Mind, you introduce us with the new layers of meaning in Ghalib’s ingenious poetics by tracing the roots of his creative consciousness and enigmatic thought in Buddhist dialectical philosophy, particularly Nagarjuna’s concept of shunyata (voidness). You argue how Ghalib reinvented and polished Sabke Hindi tradition of Bedil and how the charm of his love poetry comes from his complexity and ingenuity. How did you arrive at Ghalib’s work? What makes him so central to conversations around Urdu ghazal even today? Why is Ghalib so evergreen, so relevant?

Gopi Chand Narang: This again is a complex question that requires a separate session. This is a journey of centuries through the archetypal traces of the ancient Indian and Buddhist dialectal philosophy; their deep absorption in the sabk-e Hindi, Mughal age Indian Persian poetry; Bedil’s dialogic association with Indian yogis and mendicants, his knowledge of Yoga Vashishtha; and Ghalib’s inexplicable love for Bedil and his adoration as his life long mentor. I have examined all this through textual analyses throughout the book. You know how I travelled the dark lanes and alleys of Ghalib’s subconscious mind and built brick by brick the discourse of my conclusions, supported all along by the deep structure of his couplets chronologically. Here, of course I can answer your last point about Ghalib’s popularity and great current interest in Ghalib’s work. In Ghalib’s poetics, we have the confluence of two literary traditions: classicism and modernism. As I wrote in the book, he was last of the classicists and first of the modernists. He was a poet of unity of existence and brotherhood of human kind, the existential idiom which few Indians in his time understood. He was also an early protagonist of freedom of dissent, liberalism and secularism. Looking at the challenges to these ideas in today’s world, no wonder there is so much interest in Ghalib today.

Nawaid Anjum: In some ways, both Ghalib and Mir were grossly misunderstood poets. What conclusions do you draw when you look at both their creative journeys and outputs?

Gopi Chand Narang: Their journeys appear similar, they both are centre stage in the literary canon but they are quite different. Mir saw the disintegration of the Later Mughals, infighting of the regional chieftains and gruesome devastation of Delhi due to the various foreign invasions. Ghalib had a similar experience as he helplessly watched the unfolding of the heart shattering rebellion of 1857 and the blood soaked sun setting on the once great Mughal Empire. Both these poets also shared a deep understanding of human suffering and its causes. Again, both rejected religion or dogma as a solution to anything that was the need of the time. Ghalib had an ambition to be recognised as a great Persian poet. As a staunch follower of Bedil, initially uncontrollably, he thought in Persian and wanted to write in Urdu. When that did not work, he adjusted but never gave up his pole star. His highly innovative, enigmatic and dense poetry took almost a century to get an inkling of recognition. His Urdu later was accepted as Urdu-e Mualla, the exalted Urdu. Mir had no such problematic trajectory. He rejected all authority and recognition and stayed focused on where his passionate mind and love smacked heart took him. His poetry is drenched in the despondency and lonesomeness of his psyche and the times. The adoption of Wali Deccani’s legacy and then perfection of half-baked Rekhta came to Mir as events in his life unfolded with a natural flow of times and the glow of his creative mind. Zauq recognized this beautifully when he wrote:

Zauq, friends tried but were never able to capture the charm of Mir’s voice,

            They tried their best but could never reach the desired lyricism

Nawaid Anjum: How have you been navigating the lockdown? What have you been reading, writing, listening to or watching? 

Gopi Chand Narang: Sticking to one thing is not possible. The mood in the morning is different from the mood in the evening. My favourite thought is the concept of shunyata and how it has travelled from the ancient Indian metaphysics to mathematics, to Buddhist negative dialectics (via theorist Nagarjuna) to silence in language and to paradoxical meaningfulness as the kernel of creativity in Bedil and Ghalib. Everywhere the core is the fullness, or the manifestation of something indefinable. One ancient source I have stumbled upon is the last Veda (Yajurveda),  meaning Vedanta,  ends and the first of the Upanishads, the Isha Upanishad starts. The very first sholaka sings of the fullness (inversely of shunyata) of the absolute in its different manifestations. Purana, meaning fullness,  is repeated and explained in seven different ways. My evenings are mostly spent listening to music, classical or semi-classical. These days my favourites are Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Ustad Bade Fateh Ali Khan, and Ustad Amanat Ali Khan singing Raaga Malkauns, Darbari, Jaunpuri or the sorts. I also like Begum Akhtar and Mehdi Hasan’s effortless melodious renderings of Ghalib. Amanat Ali’s singing of Aatish is superb. My friend in Pakistan, the late novelist Intizar Hussain, once asked me for Mira Bhajans. I sent him a CD of M.S. Subbulakshmi, and he was thrilled. Most Ghalib lovers don’t know that M.S. also sang Ghalib, a lone piece; a fantastic rendering of ishrat-e qatra hai darya mein fana ho jana in superb deep-throated Karnataka Sangeet. In her singing, she got to the soul of the ghazal. The wonder of wonders, she subconsciously reached the fountainhead of Ghalib’s creativity, shunyata, which I consider is the fountainhead of unity and the dynamic love of humanity.