The Hidden Garden, Gopi Narang [cheapest way to read ebooks txt] 📗

GOPI CHAND NARANG

the

HIDDEN

GARDENMir Taqi MirTranslated 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