Ghazal - An Eastern Inheritance

Ghazal: the last words of a dying deer to its beloved, strung together in the form of rhyming couplets. Ghazal is an elegy and an ode, a lyrical and stylized lament, a whimsical play of words, a wistful cry rolled into five couplets or more. Ghazal, like sonnet or villanelle or haiku or sestina, is an example of a formal poem and is supposed to be written under strict metrical and rhyming constraints. Each couplet (sher) is a complete thought and a poem in itself. Each couplet ends with a repeating word or phrase (like tonight is the refrain or radif above), and the word immediately before the refrain (expel, cell, hell) rhymes across the couplets. The opening couplet (or matla) announces the refrain and the rhyme scheme (called kaafiya) in the first line itself, and the remaining couplets arrive in the same meter (bahr). The meter, rhyming penultimate word and the refrain synergistically provide an effect of passion, obsession, perhaps even a periodic sob or sigh, and though each new couplets begins with a first line that can travel a different landscape of feeling, the return to refrain in second couplet is like a homecoming. The penultimate word signals the return. The last couplet (maqta) often contains the chosen name or pseudonym of a poet (takhalus), as if the poet signs off with a couplet that contains his last words, his epitaph. These constraints within the form are similar to the constraints imposed by the society on love, thought, liberty and ideas. The English language is one of the few Western/European languages where ghazal (pronounced ghuzzle) has made an appearance on the page. My essay is formally about the Anglicized ghazal, but to imagine, inspire, write and judge poems in a particular form, requires an awareness of its clichés and characteristics. No poet in English must write an essay or a collection of sonnets without a certain familiarity with Shakespeare, though missing out on sonnets written in Indian languages is perhaps permissible.

In the beginning, in seventh century, ghazal was Arabic. By the tenth century, she conquered many hearts and lands in the East. The form reached its maturity as a form in the hands of Persian masters. In the West, when Goethe and Lorca experimented with this form: they were primarily inspired by the ghazal of Hafiz (or Hafez), the fourteenth century Farsi poet, said to be the greatest exponent of the form. The celebrated thirteenth century poet, Amir Khusrau was probably the first major poet to popularize ghazal in the Indian subcontinent and first to infuse words from khadi boli (early version of Hindi/Urdu). Subsequently, Urdu poets like Wali Deccani, Mir Taqi 'Mir', Ghalib, Dard, Dagh, Zauq, Momin, Faiz, Faraz, Firaq, Faiz and Faraz, as well as Dushyant Kumar (Hindi), Shiv Kumar Batalvi (Punjabi) and numerous Bollywood lyricists contributed to the popularity of ghazal in India. Ghazal, performed by celebrated, classically trained singers in varied languages have supplied many unforgettable rhymes to love-stricken as well as to literary minded classes and masses in India, Pakistan, Iran, Arab world and elsewhere. Mirza Ghalib, whose ghazals are infused with philosophical questions, is probably the most celebrated poet in the Urdu language. The introduction of ghazal to American poets is often linked to the Ghalib translation project of Aljaz Ahmed in 1960s. Adrienne Rich, William Stafford and W. S. Merwin all worked with a literal translation of Ghalib's Urdu ghazals to render their own versions in English. The translation project spawned an interest in the form, but early on, American poets wrote ghazals without an awareness of its rich, multi-cultural, multi-layered history, and without attention to any formal constraints.

In fact, before Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001) took a loudspeaker and a sledgehammer to chide poets for calling any string of couplets written by them as a ghazal, English (American) poets created verses without constraints, without refrain, without meter, without a unity that is enforced by the rhyme scheme and the lament-like undercurrent. They created so-called ghazals without allusions or gratitude to a rich Eastern inheritance. Anguished by reading what passed for ghazal in English and acutely aware of the sub-textual richness of the form due to his Indian heritage, Shahid pointed out that "the Americans had got the ghazal quite wrong". Like a teacher and Eastern mystic he patiently explained, with examples he created, how to craft a ghazal in English. He later edited an anthology "Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English" where many contemporary poets wrote ghazals that Shahid accepted into the fold (many that I would dismiss as unrealized or unsuccessful attempts). Before revisiting the formal elements necessary for composing a ghazal, here are selected couplets from a ghazal by Shahid that appears in his collection titled "Call Me Ishmael Tonight":

Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight?

Whom else from rapture’s road will you expel tonight?

I beg for haven: Prisons, let open your gates—

A refugee from Belief seeks a cell tonight.

Lord, cried out the idols, Don’t let us be broken;

Only we can convert the infidel tonight.

In the heart’s veined temple, all statues have been smashed.

No priest in saffron’s left to toll its knell tonight.

And I, Shahid, only am escaped to tell thee—

God sobs in my arms. Call me Ishmael tonight.

Celebrated ghazals by masters in Arabic, Persian, Urdu or Hindi have all the formal elements woven into a tapestry that is intricate, complex, and beautiful. In these cerebral yet popular ghazals, even through all constraints (social and literary) are respected, the resulting verses are musical and lyrical, ready to be recited or sung to diverse audiences who marvel at every turn of phrase, every choice of rhyme, and find relief, release, joy in the ageless words of the poet. In fact, performance of a ghazal in the East involves a protocol unmatched by any I know of in the Western poetry. The poet first recites a line, then repeats it, accentuating the effect by changing the tone or by stretching out or stressing a word. The audience repeats a phrase or the line, an expectation is built up. Now the second line of the couplet is released amongst much fanfare. Soon the refrain is on only everybody's lip, but the mystery of what could come before the refrain sustains the excitement. One couplet won the approval of the audience, now the next is another battle, another farewell, another journey, another quest, till the final verse brings the lament to a halt, after which only a silent ache, a memory remains.

Ghazal is by nature an address by a poet-protagonist (dying deer) to a beloved (who could be imaginary, distant or absent). Ghazal is always a declaration, but hardly ever a monologue. A farewell song with a detached sense of a lost cause, and also craving expressed with a latent hope that it will reach the intended ears. Sentimentality, abstracted to the extent that it becomes a metaphor for any unfulfilled or unrealizable dream or desire or rather every cause worth pining, dying or fighting for. The sufi poets of the subcontinent and of Persia compose verses addressing the almighty as the ultimate beloved. All good ghazals arrive in multiple incarnations, sensuous from the lips of a courtesan, spiritual in the company of dancing dervishes or sufis, entertaining when recited in a drunken party and thought provoking for critics and casual listeners. In Farsi or Urdu, every ghazal engages in a dialogue with verses that came before, and the task of writing fresh verses involves a heightened sensibility that helps in creating suspense, surprise, pleasure, catharsis, nirvana. Why must a ghazal in English care for the inheritance of loss, these cultures full of constraints, semantics of unfulfilled desires or the mysticism of foreign lands? One compelling reason, I think, is the fact that just India alone has more English speakers than the US and UK combined. If we account for all the countries and cultures that have memory of ghazal in another language, ignoring this inheritance is like imagining that English language without the backdrop of European history, religious practices, politics, literature and languages.

Is an Arbaic, Urdu, Persian, Turkish, Hindi, Punjabi, Marathi ghazal translatable into English, or is it so deeply rooted in a culture that is so alien to the Western culture and audiences that every translation is bound to fail as a poem in its own right in English? Can any English ghazal appear as true to the form to readers and poets with a bilingual imagination, familiar with excellent ghazals in another language? The difficulty in writing ghazals in English for someone like me is how to recreate her tension in a way that can appeal to a reader from the West as well as from the East simultaneously (though often due to different reasons). When the Muslim poets express their desire for wine, praise the goblet or a tavern, they break religious or regional laws. Lines can cost lives, breaking the constraints can bring shackles and prison cells. The audience in such cases derives a guilty pleasure in hearing echoes of protest within a poem outwardly addressed to a distant, lost, unresponsive or unattainable beloved. The presentation of sensual desires through seemingly platonic or Victorian lines, and the pronouncement of doubt in another (God, king, beloved) appeals as extraordinary literary feats only when insurmountable barriers exist and words carry throbbing of an anguished art. A lament, a near-blasphemy presented in such style that the listener is forced to marvel at the music and the meaning and scream in pleasure: Wow (wah!). Poetry in the west is often a leisurely activity of Lord Byrons, Emily Dickinsons, and New Englanders but when saying anything or everything is permitted, how can you find the tension, tacit protest, that sustains the paradoxical, wistful writing of a ghazal?

I personally feel that Anglicized ghazal is in an early stage of development and a Hafez or a Ghalib will arrive in English when the language and the world is ready for him (or her). I began writing ghazals in English after my friend and mentor Thomas Lux urged me to to. He tested my sensibility for the form by first giving me so-called ghazals of an American poet. After seeing my disgust, he introduced me to the Shahid's ghazals. My personal quest for the lines that are of inevitable, inexhaustible beauty continues. The biggest challenge is how to write lines that a bilingual imagination like mine does not corrupt with ideas untranslatable for listeners arriving with only one shared language. I believe Shahid managed to bring the sensibility of the East to ghazal in English. Years ago, I acknowledged the form has a formidable future in English, when I listened with astonishment, pleasure and joy to Heather McHugh recite "Ghazal of the Better-Unbegun" with a gusto that would make any Urdu or Farsi poet proud:

Too volatile, am I? too voluble? too much a word-person? 


I blame the soup: I'm a primordially


stirred person.

Two pronouns and a vehicle was Icarus with wings. 


The apparatus of his selves made an ab-

surd person.

The sound I make is sympathy's: sad dogs are tied afar. 


But howling I become an ever more un-

heard person.

McHugh, you'll be the death of me -- each self and second studied!

Addressing you like this, I'm halfway to the

third person.

**

 (PS: The poems quoted by Heather and Shahid are quoted here are the intellectual property of the poets or their representatives, and are quoted here with a deep reverence for their excellent command of the form).

Juhi, Daughter-in Law of Roohi

- For Gurudev Thomas Lux*
                   


Roohi, my mother's father's uncle's fourth daughter-in-law
was Ma's father's only relative in our father's village.
Even Roohi's husband's great-grandfather was related
as a brother to my father’s grandpa's grandpa. I called Roohi
grandma, and she treated me well. But she was one vicious 
matriarch, and her docile son married Ma's friend Juhi.


From their primary school days, whisperers Ma and Juhi

shared stories. After marriage, both talked of Mas-in-law.
Roohi, villagers said, had magical powers. All the vicious
events, deaths or diseases of cattle or men in the village,

were begotten by her squinted, accursed glance. Roohi

spewed the vilest curses… on villagers related, unrelated


to us. I was ten that morning, when an uncle, related
to Roohi, told us that on a dung-heap lay beaten Juhi.
No one dared to help her – for all were scared of Roohi.
No one dared to help her or suggest the recourse to law.
Ma and I carried Juhi back from the Shamshaan of the village.
She was turned into a red-blue pulp by that vicious


ma-in law. No movies show that bodies can face such vicious
blows. After twenty stitches, an enfeebled Juhi correlated
her story: “…for bringing the lowest dowry in the village,
for stealing and misusing Roohi's son’s money.” Later Juhi
testified: “I was attacked by ghosts.”  As if the men of law
couldn’t tell! But who could have dared to implicate Roohi?


I was fourteen, when we caught a rumor that Roohi
was starving a pregnant Juhi, another whim of her vicious
wisdom. My Ma carried prasad as food to Juhi's ma-in-law,
and fed Juhi. Ma succeeded as her father's family was prerelated
to Roohi. On the pretext of my birthday, next day we rescued Juhi
and smuggled her our on a bouncy tractor to her father's village.


At twenty-five, after three years in the US, I visited our village.
Grandma and I visited a bedridden, cancer patient Roohi.
I saw she was a shriveled dried grape now. So was Juhi,
who after twenty-six years of strife, was nursing her vicious
nemesis. Roohi had to be reminded about how we were related. 

She said, "Be good Vivek, be as good as is my daughter-in-law."


Fanning away Ma-in-law's flies, sits an aged Juhi. I feel awed by the village.

How many times have I related this story: the image of a dying Roohi,

juxtaposed on with her former vicious avatars and the ever forgiving Juhi.

Notes: Prasad is sanctified food served at Temples and the villagers believe that it cannot be refused if offered.

Fireflies, Honey, and Silk by Gilbert Waldbauer

Fireflies, Honey, and Silk by Gilbert Waldbauer is an entertaining and engrossing description of how insects have forever been of the utmost importance for human survival and progress. Ink, wax, honey, fibers, certain foods and medicines, colorants, music and jewelry are a few products that insects have provided us over the past fifty centuries or more. The author describes myriad ways in which we have used insects and products derived from their habitats. For example, honeycomb of a bee supplies both beeswax and honey. The gall made by wasps has forever been an ingredient of inks. Cocoons of silkworms have given us clothes that many poets have written about, many beauties have craved for.

Be it Indians of Americas or Asia, the natives of Africa or Australia, Chinese or Mayans, tribes -- ancient or contemporary --, all have depended upon insects for countless products. In nature too, most of the flowering plants need insects for pollination, and hence survival of their species and most ecosystems. The book provides a delightful journey into the historical, economic and cultural influences and transitions that have guided the rearing of silkworms for obtaining expensive clothing (successfully in China, less so in US), cochineals for scarlet red dye (big profits were made by the Spanish at the cost of South Americans), crickets for producing music (in China and Japan), bees for wax and honey (everywhere on earth), fireflies and jewel beetles as decorations (in India and South East Asia), termite chutney (in Africa), honeydew from ants (in Americas) and maggots of blow flies for cleaning festering wounds (sometimes works better than all antibiotics). The author writes with an enthusiasm and erudition that comes after a lifelong passionate pursuit of topics in etymology. The author writes with an inimitable joy and clarity that every every science writer must adopt and emulate, and if we do so, I am sure more readers will flock to the scientific literature.

Read and own this treasure trove for its fascinating chapters, informative illustrations, rich mixture of folklore, myths and current science, quotes from many texts, times and authors (yes, Pliny makes an appearance as does Mark Twain) and highly quotable information (be it sex habits of beetles, synchronous flashing of fireflies in South-East Asia, profits made in rearing bees, inventions and discoveries including paper making and degradable sutures attributed to watching insects). Highly recommended reading for everyone remotely interested in the world around us and in the science and study of insects.

Globalizing English by Indianizing English

When I sing or recite, follow only the melody.
My lyrics wear dresses foreign to your memory;
widows wear white, brides red. The saffron priests
praise the un-manifested or incarnate divinities. Beasts
feature in my dances and myths. Chants obey rhymes
where consonants alien to the West accent these lines.

Follow only the melody, for I decorate my lines
with mustard-oil lamps. My bamboo flute melody
recounts the deep-song of ancient cowherds, rhymes
farmers composed for harvest dances & a memory
of wheat-colored beauties and sacrosanct beasts.
Echoing hymns older than myths, like Brahmanical priests,

I invoke all deities before the fire god, Agni. Priests,
my ancestors from the Vedic times, composed such lines:
"Revere the alive and the dead, wind, water, fire, beasts,
ether, nether. Every being, thing is divine. Om is the melody
the hymn, the hum of the universe. Aatma is self, a memory
of Paramaatma, the Grand Self. We are a billion rhymes,

chimes of the Grand Self. Incoherent, unspoken half-rhymes
of the present / absent Self. Juvenile egos, minds. Our priests
are within, any knower is a Brahmin. Our harvest is a memory
grown by centuries of soul-farming". What is obscure in my lines
conceals a lyric beyond English. If you follow only the melody,
the Westernized you will notice that we are two thinking beasts,

divided only by our memory. After rebirth as ignorant beasts,
we are conditioned by our space-times, by accidental rhymes.
My wild hope, instinct, belief ever seeks to arrive at a melody
that shall bring joy and dance to every territory. All the priests
within me, with verses I forget or dread or echo in my lines
insist, all humans are blessed with a transcendental memory

enriched by soul-farming. In spite of our divergent memory,
drives, lusts, cravings and myths, we, logical, liberal beasts,
surpassing our space-times, can traverse beyond these lines,
beyond dresses alien to our memory, beyond babel rhymes,
to Ananda -- bliss and tranquility. To Moksha beyond priests,
beyond prejudices, in harmony with the universal melody.

Though I sing in English, I adorn my lines with an Indian memory.
If we focus only on the melody, we argumentative, rational beasts
could reach the locus of rhymes of our primordial verses and priests.


***
A version appeared in Muse India in 2012; this is a highly revised nth version.  

Bravado

The twilight song is a lantern’s hum
the foxy echoes have just begun
a leopard breathes in fields, unseen
crickets coo in communal whispering.


A mother, a grandmother, and a sister hold
their tongues in their sleep. The nine year old
who watches over them, drifts into a valour
Bollywoodish, in dream-scope colour,


and fights off the leopard with bare hands,
thrashes those foxes like only dhobis can,
but before he kills, the daaku sardar’s men,
the cursed night always ends.


Published first in Reading Hour, 2011.

Kavita: Tattu (Mule)

टट्टू 

जुगत लगाए,

भक्ति दिखाए,

उपवास करे,

सब्र करे या 

गुनगुनाये,

बोझा ही ढोता है, 

जो अपना स्वामी न बने

वह अंतर्मन से खोत्ता है |

Book Review: The Agricola and The Germania by Tacitus

The Agricola and The Germania are two accounts of first century Britain and Germany respectively left to us by Tacitus. He was a Roman career diplomat/senator turned author who wrote about these territories with a lively, timeless wit. Though the author was selective in his choice of subjects he described, the prose has a particular charm because of its historical insight and its narrative style. My favorite sentences are the ones that sound like a pronouncement of senator, those comments that ring true even now, but were set down in writing with such force by the author. Here is an example from the second page: "We have indeed set up a record of subservience. Rome of old explored the utmost limits of freedom; we have plumbed the depths of slavery, robbed as we are by informers even of the right to exchange ideas in conversation. We should have lost our memories as well as our tongues had it been so easy to forget as to be silent."

Agricola was a Roman general and the father-in-law of Tacitus. In writing this book as a eulogy, the author manages to create many quotable lines, that shed light on Roman society and military. "I remember how he would often tell us that in his early youth he was tempted to drink deeper of philosophy than was allowed for a Roman and a future senator, but that his mother, in her wisdom, damped the fire of his passion... In time, age and discretion cooled his ardor; and he always remembered the hardest lesson that philosophy teaches -- the sense of proportion." Agricola found his initial fame in military exploits in Britain and Tacitus tells us: "...his spirit was possessed by a passion for military glory -- a thankless passion in an age in which a sinister construction was put upon distinction and a great reputation was as dangerous as a bad one."

Tacitus describes the geography and anthropolgy of Britain (accuracy is not his strong point): "Britain is the largest of the islands known to us Romans... These remotest shores (the northern shores) were now circumnavigated, for the first time, by a Roman fleet, which thus established the fact that Britain was an island." In another place he writes: "Who the first inhabitants of Britain were, whether natives or immigrants, is open to question: one must remember we are dealing with Barbarians. But their physical characteristics vary, and the variation is suggestive." Centuries later, the British authors wrote similar sentences about America, Africa, Asia probably without realizing a resonance with their ancient cousins! Also, Tacitus compares their language, customs and religions with Gauls and concludes: "In both countries you find the same ritual and religious beliefs. There is no great difference in language, and there is the same hardihood in challenging danger, the same cowardice in shirking it when it comes close. But the Britons show more spirit: they have not yet been enervated by protracted peace. History tells us that the Gauls too had their hour of military glory:.." The twentieth century jingoists mined Tacitus for such lines and used it to promote nationalism in Britain and Germany among others (Germania as several such quotes about Germany). Back in the day, the English weather was no better than it is now. Also Tacitus tells us how British often lost wars because of their inability to cooperate with each other; we all know how "divide and rule" was a policy Britain later used to spread its territorial control. Also we hear of rebellion once led by Boudicca, "a lady of royal descent - for Britons make no distinction of sex in their appointment of commanders." 

Tacitus provides delightful examples of  scientific (or non-scientific) beliefs of Romans in the first century. Here is an example from the book : "But report has it that this sea is sluggish and heavy to the oar, and even in a high wind does not rise as other seas do. The reason, I suppose, is that the lands and mountains, which produce and sustain storms, are further apart here, and the deep mass of an unbroken expanse of sea is more slowly set in motion. To investigate the nature of Ocean and its tides lies outside my subject and the matter as often been discussed."

Tacitus details steps taken by Agricola to enslave the minds and habits of British chieftains and their sons. Similar methods were often employed by the colonial powers. These included preference for "Latin language", "togas were everywhere to be seen", "And the population was led to demoralizing temptations of arcades, baths and sumptuous banquets. The unsuspecting Britons spoke of such novelties as 'civilization', when in fact they were only features of their enslavement." In our world, many features of this enslavement remain (or appear at every opportunity), and twentieth century shows, in countries like India, we continue to fall prey to methods Agricola demonstrated twenty centuries ago.

In Germania, the opening passages describe Germans as "indigenous" with "very little foreign blood", who "have never contaminated themselves by intermarriage with foreigners but remain of pure blood, distinct and unlike any other nation" a belief used centuries later to promote genocide and segregation. Of course, Tacitus cannot be blamed for what his writing was used for centuries later. Tacitus tells us that name Germani was used by a tribe that fought Gauls by crossing Rhine and later the name became associated with the whole group of people in that nation.

The lines that would intrigue anyone familiar with ancient Indian mythology (or history based on Hindu oral & written tradition) follow on the second page of Germania. "In the traditional songs which form their only record of the past the Germans celebrate an earth-born god called Tuisto. His son Mannus is supposed to be fountainhead of their race and himself t have begotten three sons who gave their names to three groups of tribes -- the Ingaevones, nearest to the sea; the Herminones, in the interior; and the Istaevones, who comprise all the rest. Some authorities, with the freedom of conjecture permitted by ancient antiquity, assert that Tuisto had numerous descendants and  mention more tribal groups as Marsi, Gambrivii, Suebi and Vandilii -- names which they affirm to be both genuine and ancient." In Hindu mythology, Manu was the fountainhead, the word Man is derived from the same word root as Manu. Manu had many sons, Ikshvaku probably was the most famous one. Rig Veda mentions Tvastr or Tvastar as the progenitor is the universe, and again the similarity with Tuisto has been commented on by many before me. 

In Germania too, Tacitus creates a narrative on various aspects of warfare, society, industry, agriculture and family life, all of which are engaging and worth-reading. I will mention a few select sentences/ phrases here. On women: "... they believe that there resides in women an element of holiness and a gift of prophecy; and so they do no scorn to ask their advice, or lightly discard their replies." On religion: "...count it no sin, on certain feast days, to include human victims in the sacrifices offered..." On clothes: "The universal dress in Germany is a cloak fastened with a brooch, or failing that, a thorn. They pass their whole days by fireside wearing no garments but this. It is a mark of great wealth to wear undergarments..." On family life (where Tacitus moralizes thinking of the Roman counterparts): "They are almost unique among barbarians in being content with one wife apiece..." "dowry is brought by husband to wife"... "Clandestine love letters are unknown to men and women alike. Adultery is very rare..." On economics: "The employment of capital in order to increase it by usury is unknown in Germany; and ignorance here is a surer defence than any prohibition". The present world has made usury possible, though history and theology is full of arguments against it, and I guess Tacitus marvels at the lack of practice in Germany as it was widely practiced among the Romans. Germania by Tacitus details many tribes that live north or east to the Germany. Again the historical perspective offered on these tribes gives a flavor of customs, corruptions, myths, languages, and classes that existed among the Europeans in the first century. 

Reading ancient books provides a sobering realization of the limitations of man's vision and understanding, and also a hope that immortality can be achieved in and through the written word. What we know and recall from human past was handed down to us in words scribed by individuals like us. Technology changes, intrigues and instincts don't; we are not too different from our forefathers in the way we love, fight, dress, marry and pray, but we have changed our symbols, and call the old ideas by a different name. Writers like Tacitus allow readers to recreate in their imagination a version of a lost world, experience a nostalgia for a time that exists only in unconscious memory stamped either into our language or into the biochemical concoctions within our brains and bodies. To experience that nostalgia, to appreciate the connection between colonialists of every era, and to contrast humans belonging to different coordinates in space and time, read "The Agricola and The Germania" by Tacitus.

**

Based on translation by H. Mattingly, published as Penguin Classics.

Read on a road trip to Newport, Rhode Island in May 2011.