The Hidden Garden Read online

  GOPI CHAND NARANG

  the

  HIDDEN

  GARDEN

  Mir Taqi Mir

  Translated from the Urdu by Surinder Deol

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Preface

  The Life of Mir Taqi Mir: The Agony and the Ecstasy

  PART I: SELECTED GHAZALS

  Let’s Go to the Garden

  PART II: THE BEAUTY OF MIR’S POETIC VOICE

  A Poet of Countless Delights

  A Deceptive Simplicity

  A Delightful Synthesis of Persian and Rekhta

  Urdu’s First Complete Poet

  Footnotes

  Preface

  The Life of Mir Taqi Mir: The Agony and the Ecstasy

  A Poet of Countless Delights

  Part II The Beauty of Mir’s Poetic Voice

  A Deceptive Simplicity

  A Delightful Synthesis of Persian and Rekhta

  Urdu’s First Complete Poet

  Select Bibliography

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  When bad times hit Mir, one of his admirers, an honourable citizen, arranged for a good house in a nice neighbourhood for him to live. At the back of the room there was a window that opened into a small garden. Many years passed. A friend came for a visit. He was surprised to find that the window was bolted shut. He asked the poet, ‘There is a beautiful garden in the backyard. Why don’t you open the window and get a natural view?’ Mir directed the visitor’s attention towards a pile of papers and said, ‘I am so absorbed in taking care of this garden that I have no time for any other garden.’ A long silence followed.

  —Mohammad Husain Azad

  Aab-e Hayaat

  Preface

  Chalo tuk Mir ko sun-ne k moti se pirota hai1

  Mir Taqi Mir (1723–1810) was the first Urdu poet whose work engrossed and enthralled me. What a time I lived in and what amazing people I got to know! When I entered Delhi University in 1952 for my master’s degree in Urdu, classes were held in the historic Dilli College, located in the vicinity of Ajmeri Gate. This is the same college where Mirza Ghalib was once offered a professorship. Its alumnus included Urdu’s great writers and poets such as Imam Bakhsh Sehbai, Mohammad Husain Azad, Maulana Hali, Nazir Ahmed, Zaka Ullah, and many more.

  Partition had created a great vacuum. This was not the Dilli everyone knew. Although new students were enrolling in different programmes, I was the only one in the Urdu postgraduate studies. Everything had changed. There was a time before Partition when Baba-e Urdu Maulvi Abdul Haq used to come here to teach Wajhi’s Sabras, a Dakani prose masterpiece. In the riots preceding it, the office of Anjuman Tarraqqi Urdu in Daryaganj, where the esteemed Maulvi was secretary, had been reduced to ashes. Some half-burnt Urdu books of the Anjuman were available on the pavements of the nearby Urdu Bazar, which I bought. Ibadat Barelvi, who was popular among the progressives, had also left Dilli and gone to Lahore, where he had joined Oriental College. Among the old hands, only Khwaja Ahmed Faruqi was still there, and he lived in a little shack next to the historic Ghaziuddin madrasa adjoining the college building.

  Interestingly for me, Khwaja Sahib was writing a book on Mir. During those days, Urdu text was handwritten for printing, and he assigned me the responsibility of proofreading the calligraphed text on chemically treated yellow sheets. Gradually, Mir’s couplets found a place in my heart, and my moments of solitude, I heard echoes of Mir’s lyrical voice. For a young student in his twenties, this was a riveting experience. It was also a time when I had an opportunity to read Mir’s autobiography, Zikr-e Mir. Another work that greatly influenced me was Mohammad Husain Azad’s Aab-e Hayaat. Azad painted a picture of Mir’s life that was magical and full of colourful episodes and vignettes that left a strong imprint on the reader’s mind.

  Mir has been called Khuda-e Sukhan (the God of Poesy). It is not known who used this title for the first time, but it finds a prominent place in the history of Urdu literature. Azad emphasized the simplicity and flow of Mir’s poetic style and this comment too gained traction. Among the great Urdu poets like Nasikh and Ghalib, there was a consensus that Mir was like a pathfinder and a great master poet. Who is not familiar with Ghalib’s tribute:

  Ghalib apna y aqiida hai baqaul-e Nasikh

  aap be-behra hai jo mo’taqid-e Mir nahien

  Ghalib, it is my firm belief, also supported by Nasikh,

  you are not worthy of letters,

  if you do not believe in the greatness of Mir.

  Mir received unconditional praise from many others too. When the appreciation is so wholehearted and unqualified, it is often considered futile to go any deeper. There was no such thing as literary criticism at that time, except a comment or two in tazkirahas (chronicles of poets). The point regarding ‘simplicity and flow’ attained the status of a mantra. However, there was another track that got people’s attention: ‘When he goes high, Mir really touches great heights, but when he comes down, he goes straight into the ground.’ Mir was thus presented as a poet of seventy-two nishtars (lancets)—great couplets that straightaway enter one’s heart—while the rest was all low-quality crap. Surprisingly, when a couplet of Mir was quoted from thousands of his verses to make a point, people said this was a nishtar. There was, however, no definition of which couplet was a lancet and which was not. When this discussion got nowhere, scholars like Maulvi Abdul Haq (who compiled and published the first Intikhaab-e Mir at Anjuman), Nawab Jafar Ali Khan Asar Lakhnavi, Waheeduddin Saleem, and Dr Syed Abdullah got back to their comfort zone of labelling Mir as a poet of simplicity and flow.

  This was not an unfair description, but Mir was a love poet of great magnificence. His verse contained magical features that no one discussed. Mir’s life story is also filled with terrible hardships, pain, and suffering. He had an unfulfilled love affair followed by a bout of madness early in his youth. No one tried to unravel what accounted for the torment of his unconscious and his unusual self-esteem and extraordinary disdain for others.

  In the environment of total despair and despondency that gripped the subcontinent in the aftermath of the partition, the rediscovery and revival of Mir were inevitable. Firaq Gorakhpuri (1896–1982) was the first to tread this path. He was fascinated by Mir’s Hindi roots and the rasa of his Sanskrit poetics. Around the same time, across the border, Nasir Kazmi (1925–72) led Mir’s widespread revival. He compiled an Intikhaab2 of Mir’s verse with a stimulating introduction. Pak Tea House, situated on the Mall Road in Lahore, was the hub of all avant-garde literary activity. Two discussions with Nasir Kazmi at Pak Tea House, which were initiated by Intizar Husain, are now part of Kazmi’s Intikhaab. They were first published in Savera, an influential literary journal. The time to study Mir more seriously had finally arrived. In his perceptive and insightful commentary, Kazmi cast a wide net, discussing not only both Ghalib and Iqbal in the context of Mir, but also considering the post-Partition mood—the feelings of sadness and vagrancy, and an atmosphere of despondency and suffering on both sides of the border. Kazmi, a cult figure and a leading poet of modernism, proved to be a trendsetter, and his poetry echoed Mir’s intriguing personality, forlorn sadness, and unusual alienation.

  This was also the time when a revolution was sweeping the world of literature and philosophy following the posthumous English publication of Swiss linguist and semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1857–1913) path-breaking linguistic theories. After completing my doctorate at Delhi University, I had an opportunity to learn and absorb these new ideas in humanities during my tenure at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. What surprised me most was the great affinity between these new discoveries and some of the ancient Indian poetics’ thought processes. The DNA, which is of great value in the personal identification process, can also unfold, metaphorically speaking, hereditary secrets in the structural investigation of literary thought and unravel concealed facts about a poet that were not previously known or examined. After returning to India, and especially during my tenure at Jamia Millia Islamia, I got into literary criticism as a field of research and study. At Jamia, I started organizing yearly literary seminars on shared Indo-Pak themes.

  During that time, I got an invitation from the Karachi Anjuman Tarraqqi-e Urdu to deliver the Maulvi Abdul Haq Memorial Lecture on Mir’s poetry. Since the subject was close to my heart, I wanted to talk about aspects of Mir’s oeuvre which no one had touched upon, and which needed in-depth attention. The first draft of my presentation was received well and the Karachi Anjuman published it in 1981. I continued to add to this work, and the completed book-long manuscript, titled Usloobiyaat-e Meer, was published from Delhi in 1984.

  Mir’s contemporaries included some prominent names. Everyone recognized Mir’s mastery over lustrous poetic language, his breadth and depth of inventive meanings, and the superb lyrical quality of his verse. Still, for most of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the opinion about his standing as a poet was limited to a few attributes of flow and simplicity. What constituted Mir’s creative signatures and how to identify the roots of his work and the directions they led were not looked into deeply enough. In that sense, this book is the first of its kind and fruition of that endeavour. Mir’s work’s serious critical look must go beyond traditional theses of simplicity and flow and a synthesis of Persian segments with Prakritik Rekhta (the vernacular dialects that existed alongside Sanskrit and the early prototype of Urdu).

  Mir’s greatness as a poet does not depend on one or two factors. He s
aid it beautifully in his self-assessment: Rekhta rutbe ko pahunchaaya hua us ka hai (Rekhta reached the pinnacle of its glory because of his efforts). How did he do it? It resulted from a number of factors, including the mixing of magical formulations and the creative use of language that touched the reader’s heart. What are the identifiable elements and the deep-seated markers of these attributes? I have been trying to unravel these hidden aspects. It has not been a smooth ride. Mir hinted about his Dakani maa’shuuq (beloved), maa’shuuq jo apna tha baashinda dakan ka tha, i.e., the colourful raw Dakani of south India. He also said that if there were rawness and wrinkles, he straightened and perfected it with his extraordinary creative skills as an artist.

  Rekhta was an evolving and imperfect medium at that time. Mir turned it into a gemlike literary and gushing language of ghazal—highly aesthetic, skilful and rich with inventive meanings. Ghalib was deeply under Bedil’s influence, but it is also correct to say that the vessel he needed to fashion the preciousness of his verse, the ingenuity of thought, and innovative subjects also came from Mir. Urdu had to become ‘Urdu’ before it became Urdu-e Mualla of Ghalib. Mir forged Urdu in the inner fire of his creativity. All the pathways of ghazal in the nineteenth century and later find their source in Mir. To call Mir a poet of simple conversational style is not doing justice to him, although he wrote much of his poetry in the people’s language.

  It is impossible to know about the tragic mass suffering caused by 1857 without going through Ghalib’s letters. In the same way, we cannot appreciate the magnitude of the pillage, loot, and ruination during the invasions of Nadir Shah (1739) and the repeated plunder of Ahmad Shah Abdali (from 1747 onwards), and also the infighting between the Jats, Marathas, Rohillas and others without going into the soul of Mir’s verse and his life. Mir’s story is not just his own story; it is a testament to the miseries suffered by Delhi as a city and its residents. It is a story of the river of fire he had to wade through to survive in those times: ujre nagar mein jaise jale hai charagh ek (in a pillaged town engulfed in darkness shines a distant, tiny lamp somewhere). This was the same glittering city Mir had earlier eulogized and loved thus:

  Dilli ke n the kuche auraaq e musavvar the

  jo shakl nazar aai tasviir nazar aai

  The lanes of Dilli were not lanes.

  They were more like pages from an album.

  Every face that you saw was like

  a magnificent heart-stopping image.

  No one could guess better than Ghalib what the heartbroken Mir must have gone through when he shaped and perfected Rekhta in those challenging times marked by violence, barbarianism, and a complete breakdown of law and order.

  rekhte ke tumhien ustaad nahien ho Ghalib

  kahte hain agle zamaane mein koi Mir bhi tha

  You’re not the sole virtuoso of the craft of Rekhta, Ghalib!

  People say that in the times gone by, there was a poet called Mir!

  Mir is a poet of the fire of love and torment that impacts us slowly. He is a poet of agony and suffering, as well as courage and audacity. Before embarking on his poetry, it is important to understand Mir’s life’s key events so that the reader becomes familiar with the roots of Mir’s pain and scars of his psyche. He is like a candle that burns and melts continuously. Mir is not only a poet of unrequited love; his voice reveals and recreates echoes of the medieval age’s soul-touching transcendental thought of the bhakti tradition and spirituality that runs parallel to the self-consuming mystic narrative of Mansur and Majnun.

  Mir is not a simple poet by any means. This book attempts to uncover multiple aspects of Mir’s creativity. I have tried to unwrap every hidden pathway, every dark trail that zigzags, every footprint that shows something new, and every trajectory leads to a more hopeful future. There is a reason why almost after three hundred years, Nasir Kazmi said, ‘The night of Mir’s age has joined the dark night of our age.’ The creative agony of Mir’s verse reverberates the epoch of untruth that we live in. A poet’s greatness lies in the fact that the poetic voice echoes trials and tribulations of ages that follow.

  To mould the bewitching verse of Mir and its hidden delights into a modern Western language is not an easy task. For this creative endeavour, I wholeheartedly thank Surinder Deol, who has been my translator and associate for several years. Working together, we have covered a lot of ground. The Urdu text of the ghazals in the book has been drawn from Kulliyaat-e Mir, Vol. 1 published by the National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language.

  Books have been written about Mir, and more will be written in the future, but this book attempts to open a new vista that has never been tried before. I hope that this English rendition of Mir will pave the way for further appreciation of his multidimensional work—a new critical discourse on Khuda-e Sukhan Mir, the first master poet of Urdu.

  Gopi Chand Narang

  New Delhi

  December 2020

  The Life of Mir Taqi Mir

  The Agony and the Ecstasy

  Mir was born in February 1723 in Akbarabad (as Agra was known then). He was named Mir Muhammad Taqi. When he grew up, he chose Mir as his takhallus (nom de plume). His ancestors had migrated to India from Hijaz in Iran a few generations ago. They first came to Dakan, then moved to Ahmedabad, and finally settled in Agra. His grandfather got the job of a faujdaar (a position in the Mughal army) and he lived a decent life; he died while he was travelling to Gwalior, leaving behind two sons. Mir’s father, a dervish who was called Ali Muttaqi out of reverence, pursued the path of inner knowledge from his early age. Over the years, he gained a lot of followers within and outside the community. He remained busy day and night, his eyes moist with tears, in the remembrance of God. He was a man of utmost humility, a man free of prejudice, a perfect Sufi. He never became a burden for anyone else. In his autobiography, Zikr-e Mir, Mir talks about his father in a highly respectful and reverent tone, dwelling at length about the lessons that his father gave him from his early years. Here, in a nutshell are some of the things he was told:

  ai pisar i’shq bavarz, I’shq ast k dariin karkhaana mutasarrif ast: Son, always adopt love because love is the dynamic force that binds and controls this universe. Nothing great can happen unless you put a lot of love into your endeavour. If you take love out of your life, it becomes barren. All things around you are the manifestation of love. Water is love, so is fire. Even death is love’s drunken stage. The night is the time when love sleeps; the day is when it wakes up. When you fill your heart with love, it attains perfection. Virtue is its union with love; sin arises when it separates itself from love. Paradise is attractive because it is filled with love; hell is a place of horror because there is no love to be found there. The practice of love is more significant than any prayer or pursuit of knowledge.

  Son, this world is nothing but a momentary excitement. Don’t indulge too much in it. Love for God is the only real thing. Prepare for the journey that starts after this life is over.

  My son, you are the treasure of my life. What kind of fire burns in your heart? What is your passion? What do you want to be in your life? (When Mir heard his father ask these questions, he had no answer; tears rolled down his cheeks.)

  Son, be a nightingale whose spring never ends. Admire beauty whose colours never fade. Keep your heart always strong. Always be ready to face odds in life. The world changes continuously. Do not be depressed when things get bad.1

  There is no doubt that these teachings had a lasting impact on Mir’s psyche, and he tried to live his life following these high ideals. Mir mentions that one day his father felt the urge to go to Lahore to meet another Sufi who gave sermons by the river Ravi. The old man reached Lahore with great difficulty, but to his disappointment, this so-called Sufi was a fraud who was deceiving poor people by muttering some words in Dari language which they did not understand. On his return journey, God rewarded his father by giving him a disciple, known as Sayyid, whom he brought with him to Agra, and this guest gradually became a member of the household. Sayyid taught Mir, who was seven years old at the time, to read the Quran. Mir called this person ‘uncle’ out of affection. His father and his ‘uncle’ became spiritual companions, and they could not live without each other’s company. When Sayyid died, a part of his father died with him. Mir wrote, ‘My father threw away his turban, tore open his shirt, and scarred his chest with constant battering.’ On the third day after the death, when friends and admirers gathered to mourn, Mir’s father announced that from that day onwards, he should be called Aziz Murda—someone who has lost a dear friend or a companion. He became famous by this name, and he spent the rest of his life shedding tears each day.