![]() It represents music and poetry from a different time, from a period before the slow creep of religification. A reference to ‘the Beloved’ – a common occurrence – may well stand for the supreme entity or simply a lower-case beloved or mere lover. ‘Love’ can be ambiguous and sheer like a silken scarf passing through a ring: it flits between the sacred and the profane. In a ghazal, what sounds textually like a tale of love is frequently open to multi-tiered or plausible deniability interpretation. More recent history, however, revealed a trend for couplets to be like moons in independent orbits around a planetary body. Couplet by couplet, the narrative whole or sentiment advances. Sequentially, each couplet forges another link in a chain of discrete thoughts or ideas. In terms of succinctness ghazal is much like Japanese haiku but without haiku’s bondage gear of seventeen syllables. It is a series of self-contained couplets in an AA, BA, CA, DA (and so on) rhyme scheme, each of which delivers a succinct idea. In terms of weightiness, gravitas or introspection, it might be likened to the sonnet. Ghazal itself is a continuously replenished lyrical well. There can be no doubt that there is an intellectual heft to ghazal. Special mention needs to go to the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali who, aside from translating Faiz Ahmed Faiz and befriending Begum Akhtar, also penned ghazals in English and wrote the contextual introduction for the 2000 anthology Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English. In more recent times it fed the work of the Raj-era poet Muhammad Iqbal, Bengal’s multi-talented ‘Rebel Poet’ Kazi Nazrul Islam, and Pakistan’s Faiz Ahmed Faiz who made it a vehicle for political statements. The grand fabric of ghazal interweaving includes the Persian master poets Rumi and Hafez, the last great poet of the Mughal Era Ghalib, and the German Enlightenment poet and man-of-letters Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Indicative of that, Mohd Rafi’s 1963 Gramophone Company of India LP anthology Ghazals from Films cherry-picked a dozen tracks from a dozen different flicks.Īside from the flim-flam, as a literary form, down the centuries ghazal irrigated the imaginations of many literary giants. Its name is synonymous with the vocalists Begum Akhtar, Iqbal Bano, Farida Khanum, Mehdi Hassan, Ghulam Ali and the husband-and-wife partnership Jagjit and Chitra Singh, whose 1977 LP The Unforgettables ushered in a New Age of ghazal.Īppropriated by the Bombay and Lahore film industries, the filmi ghazal genre became hugely popular. Nevertheless, it still remains a potent and driving force in light classical and popular song. Arguably qawwali has since eclipsed its importance in the popular consciousness – unsurprising given the decline of Urdu comprehension in India. Ghazal, one of the pre-eminent poetic forms in the Urdu language, was once the cornerstone of Islamicate song in the subcontinent. “He commits murder, and no one comments.” “A mere sigh, and we get a bad name,” countered Nehru. Nehru’s response was a ghazal couplet from the poet Akbar Allahabadi, the pen name of Syed Akbar Hussain Rizvi. Deshmukh, Jawaharlal Nehru’s Minister of Finance, quoted Urdu verse. During an impassioned debate in 1956 about the proposed reorganisation of Indian states on linguistic grounds, C.D. Naushad’s post-Partition blend of musical idioms helped elevate Pakeezah (Pure of Heart), Mughal-e-Azam ( Emperor of the Mughals) and Mother India to the nation’s highest cinematic pantheon.Īn exchange in the Lok Sabha – the lower house of the Parliament of India – illustrates how ingrained ghazal had grown immediately after Partition. In its Hindustani-language incarnation – once upon a time today’s Urdu and Hindi were lumped together for census purposes as Hindustani – it has proven resilient and adaptable in ways that would have delighted the music director Naushad Ali. ![]() ![]() It arose from the Muslim literary traditions of Persian and Urdu and that heritage’s commingling with the Hindu world. Associated particularly but not exclusively with the north of the subcontinent, in the popular imagination this poetic form of literary ambition and attainment is often married to music. GHAZAL IS ONE of the brightest jewels in the crown of Indian and Indo-Pakistani literature.
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