An Inheritance of Imaginaries

Ours, both China and Arabia; ours, the land of India.
No home for us to dwell here, though ours all of earth’s sphere.

Our digs have been grabbed; and the benches, all nabbed.
Roving the streets does our caravan henceforth appear.

–Sahir Ludhianvi, “Chin-o-Arab Hamara” (Phir Subah Hogi, 1958); translation by KN.

The thrum and the thrust of poetry, the levels of transgression and transcendence it could achieve, were not things I initially discovered within the pages of any book. “Written” poetry would make an appearance, somewhat later, through textbooks in middle school. But those encounters—while intriguing, even enchanting at times—seemed nowhere near as vibrant, as protean, as the extra-print trysts. 

Poetry socked—actually, sucker punched—child-me, first as a sonic, kinetic, structured being, a full-blooded creature, years before scansion and prosody, Romanticism and Modernism, and their kin became a mandatory part of the school curriculum. Poetry alighted in my world, with costumes and narrative, through Kunchan Nambiar’s silvery, savage, ripostes in Ottamthullal: a vibrant dance-and-spoken-word form that the 18th-century Malayalam poet had created as performative satire on prevalent sociopolitical practices in Kerala. It was once so potent and popular an expression of criticism that local rulers responded by banning it from temple premises, the recognized site for theatre back in the day. Ottamthullal’s verses, further—and lovingly—explained by my mother after performances illustrated the charge carried by polyphony and refrain but also poetry’s history of speaking truth to power. 

Poetry arrived, in iridescent tones, through forms transposed to music. Among them were doha, kriti, ghazal, nazm, and kafi, sacred and secular, which I first heard in the voices of Begum Akhtar, Farida Khanum, and the Sabri Brothers; M.S. Subbulakshmi, Kumar Gandharva, and others. These voices scored memory and ignited the imagination. The voices and the orchestration underscored the precise metrical schemes providing the chassis to these forms. Part of their magic lay in the syncretic belief system these poets—Kabir, Andal, Meera Bai, Bulleh Shah, Amir Khusrau, mostly from the Bhakti and Sufi traditions—espoused, their nimble metrical acrobatics buttressing the religious inclusiveness, multilingualism, and gender fluidity, which they conferred on both the god in question and the worshipper/poet. The devotee-writer could change gender, switch languages, shed caste restrictions, demand the deity as lover, discard and reclaim their mortal body at will, if only within the boundaries of the poem. For the disabled child I was, swathed in bandages and shorn of conventional gender markers (jewelry, kohl and pottu, traditional attire…) to avoid further damage, juggling four languages between home and school and street, these poets’ gleeful disavowal of binaries, whether of creed or sex or tongue, was an irresistible security blanket.¹

Finally, poetry detonated, spreading through my neural networks as a glorious, multi-sensorial experience. This happened, unexpectedly, via the original soundtracks in the popular Indian cinema of the 1950s and 1960s whose lyrics were often penned by renowned Hindi and Urdu poets who had learned during the last quarter of colonial oppression (with the advent of sound film) to convey their manifestos for the desired future nation under the guise of innocuous song sequences. 

In pre-independence India, several of the lyricists working in the Hindi film industry were part of the freedom movement against the British Empire, with some charged or prosecuted for their writings and activism. Cinema at the time was subject to severe scrutiny, but the censors somehow overlooked the potent subversion in the (seldom subtitled) song sequences, and failed to note the influence of lyricists. These poet-lyricists were no less critical of the young nation-state in the first decades of independence, and their words—channeled through the most demotic of media, decoded years later for me by my father and cousins—felt as thrilling, as martial, as Bruce Lee’s stances. 

One of the lyricists’ favored forms, the ghazal, riveted me from childhood. Even today, I continue to find the ghazal fascinating because of the rigor required and the freedom bequeathed, though this took me time to unpack since the ghazal is a much-misunderstood creature, even in the Indian Subcontinent, where it is commonly misconstrued as any pensive or amatory poem written in Persian, Arabic, or Urdu. 

Pensive and amatory scores of ghazals certainly are (and great ghazal-smiths like Amir Khusrau and Mirza Ghalib wrought profound reflections on the human heart and condition), but they are characterized not by thematic or tonal predilections, nor by choice of language. A ghazal is defined solely by its structure. It comprises independent couplets (sher) of identical metrical length (beher), with an identical refrain (radif) in the second line of each sher and a rhyming pattern (kaafiya) in the words that precede each radif. Purist ghazals could have two additional distinguishing features: the radif features in the first line of the first sher as well (and is then termed the matla); and the last sher could see some form of the poet’s name, or nom de plume (takhallus), make an appearance. Admittedly, the second device, of weaving in one’s own name into the last couplet (called the maqta), was easier to deploy in an era where takhallus included words like Daag (stain), Rahi (traveller), and Sahir (magician)! 

Incidentally, the word Sahir brings me back to the ghazal excerpted at the beginning of this post: Sahir Ludhianvi’s sublime Chin-o-Arab Hamara—part of the score from Phir Subah Hogi, a film adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment—a reminder of the ghazal’s versatility as a form that could be diatribe, eulogy, serenade, and parody. Here, not only did Sahir deliver a stinging indictment of the State’s apathy toward a generation of educated, unemployed youth, he did it by subverting an existing, nationalist ghazal: Allama Muhammad Iqbal’s Sare Jahaan Se Accha Hindustan Hamara (The Finest of Nations Is India), a paean to the grandeur of the nation, one sung in schools all over the country. 

It may have taken me decades to understand the germinal influence these multifarious forms of poetry had on me as reader, as listener, as spectator, and, yes, as citizen, but I was quicker to recognize the contemporary formalist poets who have informed my entire trajectory as writer. One of the very first poems I wrote as an adult was a villanelle, encouraged by Tony Curtis’s gentle exhortation in The Guardian

of course, poets may choose to write exclusively in free verse; but writers who decide that the traditions are not for them will do so with more conviction knowing that, if they chose to, they could write in form.

Subsequently, the works of Marilyn Hacker,  Agha Shahid Ali, and Jeet Thayil, all among the great formalists of our times, led me straight back to the ghazal, this time to attempt writing a form absorbed by the mind-stream in several languages since childhood. A final confession: I delight in weaving maqtas into ghazals, each time incorporating varying meanings of my name (it helps that my parents chose a moniker with multiple inferences!). However clumsy these efforts are, I hope that my adopted literary ancestor, Sahir Ludhianvi—atheist, rationalist, rebel, feminist-ally—would approve of the intent, if not the result.