Because it’s amazing how many people have no clue
There’s no documentary evidence to suggest that the capacity to enjoy ghazals can change one’s income for the better; if anything, there’s more likelihood of the opposite. However, appreciation of ghazals is reported to have added immensely to the color and richness of a minority of people’s life experiences. Mir Taqi Mir, Mirza Ghalib, Allama Iqbal, Ahmad Faraz, Nasir Kazmi, Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Jaun Eliya are some of the more notable Urdu ghazal poets.
It’s amazing how many responsible citizens have no clue what a ghazal is. This, despite ghazals being permanent features of our Urdu syllabi. Even college-magazine editors and their contributors don’t usually know their ghazals. One of my guilty pleasures whenever I can lay my hands on such a magazine is to skip over to the poetry section and find ‘ghazals’ with titles, or with sudden – and quite alarming – rhyme shifts, or lines that are quite spectacularly out of meter. Occasionally, one reads in newspapers nostalgic letters reminiscing about the days when soulful music was still made; and finds out to one’s amusement that most of the ‘ghazals’ cited to prove the melodiousness of that bygone era are not actually ghazals. The internet has done more harm than good here: a simple search such as ‘Lata Mangeshkar ghazals’ typically yields numerous compilations, each having one thing in common: most of the ‘ghazals’ being slow songs. That’s because many music enthusiasts erroneously associate classical compositions, slow rhythms and eastern orchestration with ghazals; when, of course, it’s the structure (not instrumentation) that qualifies a poetic piece as a ghazal.
The Urdu ghazal has retained the structure of its accomplished antecedent – the Persian ghazal. Both lines of the first sher (couplet), as well as the second line of each following sher features a radeef (refrain), and a qaafia (rhyme word), the former following the latter at the end of the line. The radeef can be a word or a phrase. In the sample ghazal shown, rakha hai is the refrain while daal, sambhaal, bahaal, gaal, visaal, etc., are the rhymes. Furthermore, there’s the beher (meter), which needs to be adhered to throughout.
Furthermore, each couplet of a ghazal needs to be independent of other couplets. It is not unusual for a poet to extol the beauty of his sweetheart, try to stir up a riot or a mini-revolution, remark philosophically on the ephemerality of all existence, whine about the beloved’s stone-cold attitude, resolve to face up to all tribulations manly, and congratulate himself for his own greatness – all within one ghazal. A ghazal has no subject, and therefore no title. To make a complete statement in two lines the poet needs to be extremely precise. This also makes ghazal couplets by far the most quotable – and indeed the most quoted – of all Urdu poetry genres. The twitter age may even tilt this balance further in ghazal’s favor.
Between its meter-rhyme-refrain structure (called zameen) and the compulsion of presenting the whole story in one couplet, the ghazal demands from the poet an extraordinary facility with words in addition to an unusually fertile mind. While he has at his disposal recourse to the use of some oft-used symbols (which I will come to later), he still needs to possess unusual command of the Urdu language.
Ghazal was invented by the Arabs and reached the Indian Subcontinent via Iran. The Urdu ghazal has been around for hundreds of years, and has retained its popularity despite all sorts of propaganda against it. Every few years or so, there’s some ‘progressive’ movement against the ghazal citing its unsuitability as an agent of change; and nazm (poem) becomes all the rage for a while. However, the ghazal immediately comes back with a bang when nazm fails equally badly to bring about that change. Of course, one continues meeting people who keep looking down at ghazals, but these are usually poets who lack what it takes to produce quality ghazals. Not that they write quality poems, but that story is for another day.
The Urdu ghazal has traditionally received very bad press owing to its perceived preoccupation with gul-o-bulbul. This is unfair because it is only one part of the Urdu ghazal and that too probably the least important or interesting one. While words such as mehboob, sanam, maikhaana, zaahid, haram, raqeeb, etc., are sometimes used literally; more often than not, they are used figuratively as symbols. So, haram (mosque) represents religious puritanism or fundamentalism; maikhaana represents the free-thinkers’ club; rind represents the liberated, independent-minded man; naaseh represents the spokesman of the forces of conservatism, and so on. The Urdu ghazal is predominantly anti-conservative, ant-establishment and anti-status-quo – social as well as political. Furthermore, there’s a rich sufi tradition of interpreting ghazal couplets spiritually as opposed to literally. The Urdu ghazal thus has much more to offer than gul-o-bulbul.
