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The Pursuit of the Urdu Ghazal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Ralph Russell
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It is now more than twenty years ago that I was first introduced to the Urdu ghazal —the classical Urdu lyric—and found with something like dismay that there was almost nothing about it which I understood and liked. This was not because I had not an adequate command of the language. I had begun speaking Urdu in 1942, and from about 1945 had acquired some competence in the language of prose literature. Nor was it because I was not moderately well read in the love poetry of various cultures and civilizations, from Sappho and Catullus to Shakespeare and Burns, not to speak of later poets. But this was a new, strange experience. From that day to this I have been convinced that to understand and appreciate the ghazal is the most difficult task that confronts the modern Western student of Urdu literature; and as my own understanding increased I have become equally convinced that this is a task which, once accomplished, brings the greatest reward. Such conclusions of my own about the ghazal as I have put into writing fall short of a comprehensive study of the form, and I have never entirely ceased to hope that others more knowledgeable than I would, either in Urdu or in English, write something in which one would find at least most of the answers to the major problems which the ghazal presents to us who study it with the values of the modern West. Hitherto this hope has not been realized, and for that reason I now attempt to set out my own views—spurred on, I should confess, by Muhammad Sadiq's judgement in his History of Urdu Literature (Oxford University Press, 1964)—the latest, longest, and (so far) best history in English—that the ghazal stands “very low in the hierarchy of literary forms” (p. 19). This judgment could hardly be more completely opposed to my own.

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The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , November 1969 , pp. 107 - 124
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Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1969

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References

1 Throughout this article I write with the ghazal poets of the 18th and 19th centuries in mind. The ghazal continues to flourish to the present day, but some of my generalizations would need some slight modification to be made fully applicable to the 20th century ghazal too.

2 I still hold this to be a correct statement, despite the common assertion of some Urdu critics that the best ghazals do show a unity of mood throughout.

3 cf. Russell, R[alph], “Some Problems of the Treatment of Urdu Metre,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, (April 1960), pp. 48–58.Google Scholar

4 The Allegory of Love, New York, Oxford University Press paperback edition, 1958, p. 13Google Scholar. This statement is perhaps potentially misleading. It is love that is idealized, and love is necessarily adulterous. But adultery as such is not the theme of medieval love poetry.

5 They are explained at length in ch. 4 of Russell, Ralph and Islām, Khūrshīdul, Three Mughal Poets, (Harvard University Press, 1968).Google Scholar

6 In the introduction to her Penguin translation of The Song of Roland (1957), p. 15.Google Scholar

7 For a brief discussion of self-pity see Three Mughal Poets, p. 108Google Scholar. For self-praise see von Grunebaum, Gustave E., Medieval Islam, (Chicago, 1953), pp. 265–266Google Scholar, and cf. Three Mughal Poets, pp. 244–246.Google Scholar

8 It is worth remarking in passing that the critics who cannot bring themselves to admit that the love portrayed in the Urdu ghazal is, in the main, illicit love, find themselves equally unable to admit that it is so even in particular cases where the poet himself clearly says so. Thus Mīr's Ma'mlāt i 'Ishq, in which he gives a frank and moving account of his own love affair, has been passed over in discreet and respectable silence even by scholars who have written at length on his life and poetry.

9 There are also many which are not on themes of love at all.

10 “Themes of Eighteenth Century Lyric Poetry in the Verse of Mīr,” in: Sasibhusan Dasgupta Commemoration Volume, Dasgupta, R. K. and Das, Sisir Kumar, eds. (Calcutta: New Age Publishers, n.d. [?1968])Google Scholar. For a fuller account see Three Mughal Poets, ch. 5.

11 In the great majority of cases the self-portrait of the Muslim mystic as a wine drinker is purely symbolic. Music, on the other hand, was in literal fact a common feature in mystic practice, as was the view that experience of earthly love was an aid to the attainment of divine love.

12 In medieval Europe the “theoreticians” of love considered the question of whether a man's beloved could be his own wife. Some, at least, were emphatic that this was quite out of the question, cf. Broadbent, J. B., Poetic Love, (London: Chatto and Windus, 1964), pp. 31–32.Google Scholar

13 This applies at both levels of interpretation. The novelist Rusvā in his great novel Umrāo Jān Adā comments aptly on this function of the ghazal at the level of earthly love. He makes Umrāo remark that in poetry a man can express without embarrassment—and in any company—things which he could never venture to speak of in ordinary conversation, cf. Ūmrāo Jān Adā, Majlis i Taraqqi i Adab edn., Lahore, 1963, p. 108Google Scholar. The book was first published in 1899.

14 cf. The Discarded Image, Cambridge University Press paperback edition, 1964, p. 190Google Scholar (and cf. also p. 162).

15 Ḥālī, , Muqaddima Shi'r o Shāiri, Ram Narain Lai, Allahabad edn. 1931, pp. 195–196Google Scholar. The book was first published in 1893.

16 I am aware of the ingenious argument by which Professor G. M. Wickens has sought to establish the existence of a subtle unity in the Persian ghazal, and note mat Mr. Carlo Coppola, in a recent review of a translation of selections from Ghalib's Urdu verse, apparently accepts this argument for Urdu too (Literature East and West, vol. XI, no. 2, pp. 203–206Google Scholar). I claim no competence to judge the issue where Persian is concerned. The strong argument against it by Dr. (now Professor) Mary Boyce, in her article A Novel Interpretation of Hāfiz (Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, vol. XV, part 2, dated 1953Google Scholar), would appear to be convincing, especially as, so far as I am aware, Professor Wickens has never made any attempt to refute it. But where Urdu is concerned I would most definitely assert that the typical ghazal has no unity of content, and that the mode by which it was (and is) transmitted to its audience is in itself adequate explanation of why this should be so.

17 The Story of an African Farm, London, 1896, p. 172.Google Scholar

18 I was struck by this point in a lecture by my colleague Dr. V. L. Ménage. He tells me that he owes it to a Turkish writer.

19 Dent, Everyman's Library, 1908, p. 285. The book was first published in 1836.