Brief history of ghazal
Though Ghazal has the historical baggage of clashes and conflicts on its back, No other form of any literature of the world is as popular as ghazal, because it has been continuously written in five different languages of the world viz. Arabic Persian, Turkish, Hebrew and Urdu. All those poets who have tried this genre, gained prominence in their respective societies
It was said that During the early Islamic era (622-661), there were no substantial changes in poetic practice. The pre-Islamic tradition continued more or less as it was, except that the writing of shorter poems became more popular, often for political and religious purposes. However, the ghazal was not given any particularly special attention among these shorter works.1
The ghazal came into its own as a poetic genre during the Ummayyad Era (661-750) and continued to flower and develop in the early Abbasid Era. As the ghazal came into its own during the Ummayad period, it grew into the most popular poetic genre of the time, and would remain so for centuries to come. The middle and upper classes of the new and growing urban centres of the Arab world demanded entertainment, and at the forefront of this new qasida, entertainment industry were music and song. The popularity of the ghazal reached dizzying heights due to its suitability for musical diversions.
The Ghazal was fully developed in Persia in the 10th century AD from the Arabic verse form qasida. It was brought to India with the Mogul invasion in the 12th century. The Ghazal tradition is currently practiced in Iran (Farsi), Pakistan (Urdu) and India (Urdu and Hindi). In India and Pakistan, Ghazals are set to music and have achieved commercial popularity as recordings and in movies. A number of American poets, including Adrienne Rich and W.S. Mervin, have written Ghazals, usually without the strict pattern of the traditional form.
In the early mediaeval period the most prestigious form of courtly Persian poetry was a lengthy formal ode taken over from Arabic.2 The ghazal thus seems first to have been seriously cultivated not in the courts of the sultans but at the centres of the Sufis, and one of the first and greatest collections (divan) of mystical ghazals was that composed by Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273). The ghazal soon came also to be cultivated by court poets who evolved an ingeniously ambiguous combination of human romance with mystical love for the divine. The greatest master of the ghazal in this, its classic form was Hafiz (d. 1399) of Shiraz.3
The form was also cultivated in India during the period of the Delhi Sultanate, most notably by Amir Khusrau (d. 1325) of Delhi, nowadays celebrated as a national icon retrospectively credited with a huge variety of cultural achievements, but whose classical reputation as the ‘parrot of India’ (tuti-ye hind) rested on his Persian ghazals, which are typically more direct than those of Hafiz. Under lavish Mughal patronage, India later became the most important centre for the cultivation of the courtly Persian ghazal by both émigré and native-born poets. The fashion was now for the baroque expression of the Indian style’ (sabk-e hindi) with its marked rhetorical and
conceptual elaboration of the ghazal, which reached its highest in India with Saib (d.1677) of Tabriz and Bedil (d. 1721) of Patna.
The elaborate rhetoric of the courtly Persian ghazal which was transplanted into the mainstream Urdu poetic tradition which was thereby enabled rapidly to emerge in fully-fledged form in the eighteenth century courts of Delhi and Lucknow. in the work of such masters as Mir Taqi Mir (d. 1810). It is Ghalib (d. 1869) who is now regarded as the greatest of all classical Urdu poets,4 although he professed to set greater store by his more abundant compositions in Persian. Since the classical Urdu ghazal5 is the key reference point for all later developments in South Asia, its typical formal and rhetorical features need now to be outlined.
Other languages that adopted the ghazal include Hindi, Pashto, Turkish, and Hebrew. The German poet and philosopher Goethe experimented with the form, as did the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca.
What is Ghazal
The ghazal is defined as a poetic genre by its formal features, for whose description there is a traditional set of technical terms of mostly Arabic origin,6 quite distinct from the traditional vocabulary of Indian poetics. Ghazal, which means ‘talking to women’ in Arabic, is basically poetry in praise of a woman. melancholy, love, longing, and metaphysical questions are aroused by poets. Ghazal is a collection of couplets ( shairs or ashaar ) which deal with subjects completely unrelated to each other, yet are complete in themselves. For example:
Ghar se masjid hai bahut door, chalo yun kar lein;
kisi rote hue bachche ko hansaya jaaye .
Form and Structure of Ghazal
The ghazal is composed of a minimum of five couplets and typically no more than fifteen—that are structurally, thematically, and emotionally autonomous. Each line of the poem must be of the same length, though meter is not imposed in English. The first couplet introduces a scheme, made up of a rhyme followed by a refrain. Subsequent couplets pick up the same scheme in the second line only, repeating the refrain and rhyming the second line with both lines of the first stanza. The final couplet usually includes the poet’s signature, referring to the author in the first or third person, and frequently including the poet’s own name or a derivation of its meaning.
The Journey of Urdu Ghazal
Wali Muhammad Wali (1667–1707), (also known as Wali Deccani, was a classical Urdu poet of the subcontinent. He is the first established poet to have composed Ghazals in Urdu language and compiled a divan (a collection of ghazals where the entire alphabet is used at least once as the last letter to define the rhyme pattern).Before Wali, Indian Ghazal was being composed in Persian – almost being replicated in thought and style from the original Persian masters like Saadi Jami and Khaqani. Wali began using not only an Indian language, but Indian themes, idioms and imagery in his ghazals. It is said that his visit to Delhi along with his divan of Urdu ghazals created a ripple in the literary circles of the north, inspiring them to produce stalwarts like Zauq, Sauda and Mir. A ghazal by Wali, goes as:
Kiyaa mujh ishq ne zaalim ko aab aahistaa aahistaa,
Ke aatish gul ko karati hai gulaab aahistaa aahistaa.
Mere dil ko kiyaa bekhud teri ankhiyan ne aaKhir ko,
Ke jiyon behosh karati hai sharaab aahistaa aahistaa.
“Wali” mujh dil mein aataa hai Khayaal-e-yaar-e-beparavaah,
Ke jiyon ankhiyan mein aataa hai Khwaab aahistaa aahistaa.
This ghazal, is more in the traditional format, that we are aware of these days. It is complete with a Kafiyaa, Radif, Matla and a Maqta. Readers not familiar with urdu/hindi, can still notice that the Kafiyaa is “-aab” and the Radif is “aahistaa aahistaa” (slowly, slowly). On further analysis one can also ascertain that Wali has maintained a perfect baher (or meter) for this ghazal as per the laws of Urdu prosody.
A rough translation of the above lines are as follows:
Love has turned a hard-hearted man like me as plain water slowly slowly,
The way the Sun makes the rose bud to become a rose flower slowly slowly.
My heart has been intoxicated by your eyes fully,
The way wine makes people lose their senses slowly slowly.
“Wali” in my heart comes the thought of my beloved so casually,
The way dreams come into the eyes slowly slowly.
It is said that Wali visited Delhi (North of India), and this opened a new dimension for the poets of the north. The mixture of the thoughts and the beauty and the ease of Urdu, allowed rapid popularisation of the ghazal as a form of Urdu poetry from here on.
Mir Taqi Mir (born 1723 – died 1810), whose real name was Muhammad Taqi, and takhallus (pen name) was Mir, (sometimes also spelt as Meer Taqi Meer), was the leading Urdu poet of the 18th century, and one of the pioneers who gave shape to the Urdu language itself. He was one of the principal poets of the Delhi School of the Urdu ghazal and remains arguably the foremost name in Urdu poetry often remembered as Khuda-e-sukhan (god of poetry).7
Ibtidaa-e-ishq hai rotaa hai kyaa
Aage aage dekhiye hotaa hai kyaa
(It’s the beginning of Love, why do you wail
Just wait and watch how things unveil)
The parameters of a traditional ghazal are present here. The Kafiya is “-otaa” and the Radif is “hai Kya
1700 to mid 1800 A.D was the important period as for as the Urdu ghazal is concerned. there were famous poets like Khwaja Haier Ali Atish, Ibrahim Khan Zauq, Momin Khan Momin, Mirza Asadullah Khan Galib, Daagh Dehlvi, Ameer Minai and Bahadur Shah Zafar
Ustad ‘Zauq’ was the poet laureate of the Mughal court8 till his death. He was a poor youth, with only ordinary education but became very famous in his younger days with his poetry. Zauq was patronised by the last Mughal ruler Bahadur Shah Zafar, who was himself a reputed poet. Most of Zauq’s work got lost due to the 1857 mutiny against the British rule in India, but some work was later re-compiled and published.
we can’t imagine Gazal without mentioning the name of Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib. Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan born on 27 December 1797 and died 15 February 1869),9 was a classical Urdu and Persian poet from the Mughal Empire during British colonial rule. He used his pen-names of Ghalib (ġhālib means “dominant”) and Asad. He wrote in Persian as well, but is known mostly for his Urdu ghazals
Maharaban ho ke bulaa lo mujhe chaaho jis waqt
Main gayaa waqt nahin hun ke phir aa bhi na sakuun
With kindness call me any time you wish,
I am not like the time gone by, that I cannot come back again.
After 1800 A.D. a new philosophy was introduced in Urdu Ghazals poets put aside the traditional love-struck themes of ghazal and started writing situation and philosophy based ghazals. The traditional theme of wine and beloved are not completely overthrown but they started to touch the problems of the age including the freedom struggle and problems of common masses. Iqbal, Firaq, Jigar, Josh, Majaz and Hasrat were the greatest poet of that age. Among them Hasrat Mohani gave a new dimension and outlook to the traditional ghazal by saying,
Allah ray kafir teray is husn ki masti
jo zulf teri ta-ba kamar laikay gayee hai
How can I describe the delight
that your beauty is;
that lock of hair that reaches down your waist line
Amongst the poets of the 20th century, Faiz Ahmed ‘Faiz’ (Pakistan), is considered to be the greatest of Urdu poets of the times. He was very well educated, and obtained a Master of Arts, in English Literature from Lahore. He was editor of The Pakistan Times and was a distinguished journalist. He was a fierce communist. He faced imprisonment for some time, for alleged complicity in the coup against Liaquat Ali Khan. It was in the prison that two of his most famous works were published, ‘Dast-e-Saba’ and ‘Zindan-Nama’. He was awarded the “Lenin Peace Prize” and was also nominated for the Nobel Prize.
A very famous quatrain by him:
Raat yuun dil mein teri khoee hui yaad aayee
Jaise veeraaney mein chupkey sey bahaar aa jaye
Jaise sehraaon mein haule se chale baad-e-naseem
Jaise beemaar ko bey wajhey qraar aa jaaye
Last night, your lost memories crept into my heart
as spring arrives secretly into a barren garden
as a cool morning breeze blows slowly in a desert
as a sick person feels well, for no reason
Other notable poets of his time were Ali Sardar Jafri, Kaifi Azmi, Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi and Qateel Shifai
After them Ahmed Fraz was acclaimed one of the modern Urdu poets of the last century. ‘Faraz’ is his pen name. He was born on 12 January 1931 in Kohat,10,11died in Islamabad on 25 August 2008.12,13 . He has a simple style of presenting his thoughts in gazals, and even common man can understand the feelings of his gazals
One of his ghazals is as follows:
Khamoosh ho kyon daade-jafaa kyon nahin dete
Bismil ho to qatil ko dua kyon nahi dete
vahshat ka sabab rozan-e-zindaa to nahin hai
Mehro-maho-anjum ko bujha kyon nahi dete
Ek ye bhi to andaaze-ilaaje-gam-e-jaan hai
Ay charah-garo, dard badhaa kyon nahin dete
Why are you silent? Why don’t you praise injustice
Wounded, why don’t you bless the executioner
Your solitude is not some prison chandelier
Why don’t you put it out? Extinguish moon, stars, sun?
This is another way to cure life’s sadness
O, doctors! Why don’t you increase the pain?
If you are just, when will your justice be done?
If I am guilty, why don’t you render punishment
If you’re a highwayman, take both my money and my life
If a guide, why don’t you tell me where this road will end?
What has come over this garden and this garden and its anmates, Fraz,
Why don’t my friends from prison call out to me?
Parveen Shakir (Pak), Ghulam Muhammad Qasir (Pak), Nida Fazli (Ind), ‘Waseem’ Barelvi (Ind) and Bashir Badr (Ind),are the contemporaries Ahmed Fraz.
Rehtorical performance of Classical Urdu Gazal with special reference to the Gazal of Atish
yih arzu thi tujhe gul ke rubaru karte
ham aur bulbul-e betab guftagu karte.
payambar na muyassar hua to khub hua
zaban-e ghair se kya sharh-e arzu karte.
meri tarah se mah-o mihr bhi hain avara
kisi habib ki yih bhi hain justaju karte.
jo dekhte tere zanjir-e zulf ka alam
asir hone ki azad arzu karte.
na puch alam-e bargashta-tali’i Atish
barasti ag jo baran ki arzu karte.
(‘My desire was to set you opposite the rose
so I might discuss you with the pining nightingale.
It was good that no messenger was available:
how could another’s tongue have set out my desire?
Like me, the sun and moon are wandering:
they too are searching for someone that they love.
Those who see what the chain of your long hair is like
freely desire their own imprisonment.
Do not ask about my ill-starred condition, Atish:
it is a raining fire which desires the rain.’)
Sir William Jones described the verses of gazal as‘Orient pearls at random strung’, these are normally united only in their ability to draw separately upon an immense store of well established imagery whose elements interlock with one another, and which in the style favoured by the classical Urdu masters are given a top spin of rhetorical polish.14
In this ghazal, the state of the poet as ardent lover in distress is successively likened to a variety of traditional images in verses given point by the ingenuity with which the conceits are handled. The opening verse with its double rhyme illustrates the typical juxtaposition of the rose (gul) with its lover the nightingale (bulbul), here paralleled by the poet and the beloved, whom the rules of the ghazal dictate should generally be portrayed in quite abstract terms, and who should be referred to in Urdu in the masculine gender by mechanical preservation of the ambiguity inherent in the lack of grammatical gender in Persian. The next verse plays with the familiar conceit of the morning breeze in the garden which acts as the poet’s messenger, while the following one represents a familiar aggrandizement of the poetic persona through comparison of his state with those of the heavenly bodies. The fourth verse moves to the celebration of one of the principal features of the beloved’s beauty, those long tresses which may be described as overpowering with their scent, as enfolding in their coils like serpents, or with this image of their imprisoning lovers in their chains. In the final couplet, the literal meaning ‘fire’ of poet’s pen-name Atish is exploited to yield an image which combines two of the natural elements in an evocation of the lover’s state of yearning for the fulfilment of his unrequited passion.
Rehtorical performance of Modern Urdu Gazal with special reference to the Gazal of Faiz
donon jahan teri muhabbat men har ke
voh ja raha hai koi shab-e gham guzar ke.
viran hai maikada khum-o saghar udas hain
tum kya gae ki ruth gae din bahar ke.
ik fursat-e gunah mili voh bhi char din
dekhe hain ham ne hausale parvardagar ke.
dunya ne teri yad se begana kar diya
tujh se bhi dilfareb hain gham rozgar ke.
bhule se muskara to diye the voh aj Faiz
mat puch valvale dil-e nakardakar ke.
(‘With both worlds forfeited through loving you
there goes someone after a night spent in pain.
The tavern is in ruins, the wine-jar and the goblet are sad:
what a walk-out you staged to make the springtime sulk!
I got one opportunity for sin, but only for a few days:
I have seen the Provider’s plans for me.
The world has alienated me from memories of you,
Even you are out charmed by the world’s suffering.
It was by mistake that she smiled today, Faiz,
Do not ask about the feelings of this clumsy heart.’)
The first and last verses use their paired halves to explore the chaste passion of the helpless lover, while the intervening verses each evoke different parts of the genre’s vastly suggestive history. The second verse draws on the drinking imagery, always a prominent theme in the ghazal, to suggest the work of the classical Persian and Urdu masters, while the provocative address to the Deity in the third poet seems like Iqbal, and the tension expressed in the fourth verse between private romance and painful public involvement is a twentieth-century theme very characteristic of Faiz, who was personally committed to the Left. So, rather than intellectually exploiting the conceits of the traditional imagery in the classical manner, this ghazal exploits the associations of that imagery in a style which is at once readily comprehensible and immensely evocative.
Conclusion.
ghazal’ continues to inspire so many versifiers and practising poets in Pakistan and India today, along with that large public of avid listeners and would-be connoisseurs who are drawn to ghazal as a cultural icon underpinned by that nostalgia for the glorious past of Urdu culture as it is variously experienced by a significant section of the modern Hindu and Sikh middle class of India15 as well as by the Indian Muslims and Pakistanis who are its most direct heirs.
In its long and colourful journey gazal has seen various movements and upheavals from legendary to contemporary, from past to present, from conservative to progressive. Movement came, flourished and shattered but the gazal remained with its complete form, beauty and sweetness.
References
1 al-Muqbil. (p. 20)
2 See further Stefan Sperl and Christopher Shackle, eds, Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa, 2 vols, Leiden, 1996.
3 The spirit of Rumi’s ghazals has been widely spread in America and Britain throughthe very free versions by Coleman Barks, trans., The Essential Rumi, London, 1995. For more faithful versions of Hafiz, cf. A.J. Arberry, ed., Fifty Poems of Hafiz, Cambridge, 1962.
4 For a composite self-portrait of the great poet, see Ralph Russell and Khurshidul Islam, ed. and trans., Ghalib 1797-1869, Volume I: Life and Letters, London, 1969.
5 Anthologies with translations include D.J. Matthews and C. Shackle, An Anthologyof Classical Urdu Love Lyrics, London, 1972; K.C. Kanda, Masterpieces of UrduGhazal from 17th to 20th Century, New Delhi, 1992.
6 For the best account of traditional system common to all the Persianate literatures,see Walter G. Andrews, An Introduction to Ottoman Poetry, Minneapolis, 1976; cf.also F. Thiesen, A Manual of Classical Prosody, with Chapters on Urdu, Karakhanidic and Ottoman Prosody, Wiesbaden, 1982.
7 Legendary Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir passed away, [The Times of India], Rajiv Srivastava, TNN, Sep 19, 2010, 05.58am IST
8 In the lanes of Zauq and Ghalib”. Indian Express. Mar 15, 2009
9 Varma, Pavan K. (1989). Ghalib, The Man, The Times. New Delhi: Penguin Books. pp. 86. ISBN 0-14-011664-8
10 Ahmad Faraz Trust. Retrieved 2012-01-29
11 Samaa TV “Urdu News”. Samaa.tv. 26 September 2008. Retrieved 2012-01-29
12 Daily Times “Ahmed Faraz passes away”. Daily Times.com. 26 August 2008. Retrieved 2012-01-29
13 BBC.co.uk. 26 August 2008. Retrieved 20121-01-29
14 Cf. Francis W. Pritchett, Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and its Critics, Berkeley,1994, especially pp. 77-122; and the fine study of a related literature in Walter G.Andrews, Poetry’s Voice, Society’s Song: Ottoman Lyric Poetry, Seattle, 1985
15 For the ghazal as cultural icon, cf. the lavishly produced seven volumes of Raj Nigam, ed. The Ghazalnama, New Delhi, 1999 (www.ghazalnama.com).