Ghazal - is it small talk with women?

Urdu ghazal has much vitality left in its sinews. It can still arouse passions and its adherents would feel no restraint in bad mouthing the nazm enthusiasts and vice versa. Its locomotive may be of an old make but the small bogeys of its train can carry sundry loads, coal to New Castle and bamboos to Bareilly on the same track.

The nazims, as one aficionado has nicknamed the nazmgo poets, have raised many red signals but it whistles past all stations chugging through the changing landscape of life as it leaves behind haunting trails of words that weld weird situations into composite impressions and conjugate impossibilities with the flick of a phrase.

So the vices and virtues of this unique poetic form continue to be debated on various grounds, the tussle often engaging aspiring poets who can reason but cannot rhyme and piquing non-poets who look at it as a pointless exercise.

Let's go back in time with Hameed Akhtar's Rudad-i-Anjuman. It is Jeevan House, Bombay and 11th of May 1947. The young author is the secretary of the Progressive Writers' Association and is reporting the proceedings of its weekly meeting.

It is an important one. PWA General-Secretary Sajjad Zaheer has returned from a long tour of northern India bringing news of the Anjuman's branching in Punjab and Delhi. Josh Malihabadi, Saghar Nizami, Majaz, Z.A.Bukhari, Sardar Jaffri, Kaifi Aazmi, Sahir Ludhianvi, Mumtaz Mufti, Meeraji, Quddus Sehbai, Vishvamitr Aadil, Madhu Sudhan, Dr Safdar Aah, Zoay Ansari, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Rifaat Sarosh, Danyal Latifi, Ziaul Hassan, Firoze Mistri, Sultana Begum, Noor Bano, Ayub Saroor, Mohammad Mehdi, and nearly 30 others are present.

Sajjad Zaheer tells about the good meetings he had in Punjab in which Bedi, Taseer, Faiz, Zaheer Kashmiri, Taunsvi and others participated. He hoped that the movement there would now have better organization.

He also informed about the establishment of a branch in Rawalpindi and the decision to hold an all-India writers' meeting in October. (There is no talk of Pakistan which is only 94 days away).

After this report of the secretary-general's the regular proceedings begin. On agenda is a discussion on the merits and demerits of the ghazal. Opening the debate, Sardar Jaffri describes ghazal as a product of Asian decadence.

The pre-ghazal Iranian poetry bears the stamp of Firdausi's Shahnama which is neither a personal nor a courtly product. It is rooted in mass culture and traditions which explain its long hold on Iranian poetry.

Ghazal took its birth after the rampage of Iran by the hordes of Genghis Khan. Its basic theme is romantic love, all that remains in the ruins of a civilization. Following Baghdad's devastation, lovelorn ghazal assimilates the sorrows of impermanence in its soul that Hafiz combines in his verse with masterly effect.

It is in this melancholic fashion that ghazal makes its appearance in India. Iqbal cautions against Hafiz as a symbol of gloom. Nurtured in monasteries and courts a stultifying ambivalence continue to inspire ghazal content.

Whereas courtly niceties do lend it a technical gloss they also constrict its body. The elegance of similes and metaphors refines the diction but takes away some of its flexibility.

Though to some it may still constitute what poetry is all about, he said it was a fact ghazal was too fragile to move with the brutal mechanix of modern life. Iqbal, he said, gives us a happy combination of nazm and ghazal which is his greatest feat. His ghazal has a mood.

There is no art in saying one thing in one couplet and another in the next. Technique means the modulation of words that one employs in both ghazal and nazm. The traditional ghazal is of no use today, he said, unless its technique was adopted sans its traditional format.

Majrooh Sultanpuri speaking next refuted Ali Sardar Jaffri's assertion that ghazal was useless as it did not figure in peoples art. He said this could be said only if ghazal had been serviced as a peoples art form, but that was never tried.

Moreover, he said, one was not always in a mood to engage in rational debate and listen to serious harangues (that were often the subject of nazm); there were subtler things that ghazal alone expresses. It was true in our time nazm had acquired much importance but to reject ghazal altogether for that reason is not correct.

Josh then stood up and said: ghazal is defined as guftagu kardan ba zanan, i.e. conversing with women, or engaging women in small talk or saying sweet nothings to women.

Both thought and speech are petty, trivial and trite. Then you must say different things in different couplets. Continuity in ghazal is out of place. The genuine ghazal covers a variety of subjects.

One couplet expresses the tortures of waiting, the next relishes the pleasures of union followed by an altercation with the Sheikh. Once talking to Faani I said, how terrible! There's a nail in my shoe. Atta prices have gone up. It is raining out of season. It is so hot. Faani looked at me. What's wrong with you, he said. I said, I am reciting a ghazal!

Josh sahib continued: ghazal is akin to petty thinking and small talk. It is like playing the harmonium keys with different fingers. Speech without thought or passion is chatter that ghazal poets indulge in endlessly addressing their unborn beloveds, who don't exist.

No passion can sustain the variety of emotion it is made to suffer in a ghazal or stretch to the length of a 60-line composition. As to love, although the beloveds don't exist they still are the most faithless lot on earth who would rather have the poet thrashed by the ugly rival than favour him with a smile.

Concluding, Josh sahib said: Look at Meer Sahib. His divan is a desert. Traversing its great distances you come across slushy pools of mud, heaps of filth, ditches and potholes. Thus slogging 10,000 miles you will at last spot a flower. I tell you, ghazal is an unnatural thing. It should be wound up.

Majrooh Sultanpuri rose again: Josh sahib's main charge against ghazal is that it is trivial. The same thing can be said about nazm which sometimes aggrandizes very small matters.

A good ghazal always has a mood which it reinforces with a variety of instances. Technically ghazal is a two-line poem but since that does not yield a good measure of satisfaction the poet lines up several couplets to raise a structure of thought or feeling. Josh and Sardar Jaffri disagreed with this two-line definition of the ghazal.

Safdar Aah Sitapuri said: ghazal is more than just small talk with women. It has philosophy, mysticism, enlightenment and all that. Agreed, these subjects are not taken up with women so often, but this bundling of disparate thought is what ghazal is all about.

Since its arrival in India it has influenced other languages of the subcontinent like the Hindi doha. And if one found decadence in this form it is because there were no progressives at that time.

Ghazal themes have been changing with time. It has expressed things other than love and mysticism. A ghazal couplet has the kind of completeness that a nazm can never have.

A nazm couplet is incomplete in relation to both the preceding and following couplets. But the ghazal couplet is entire in itself, capable of alluding to more than one event or occasion.

Josh Sahib retorted that leaving aside one or two good couplets the ghazal was a totally unnatural thing. Sardar Jaffri asked Dr Safdar to explain what he meant by taghazzul which he regarded as an essential part of ghazal couplets.

Dr Safdar replied that even nazm could have taghazzul by which, in a rough sense, he meant musicality and rhythm. But that was not exclusive to ghazal only, Sardar Jaffri remarked. Dr Safdar said he was talking more about the spirit of ghazal than its form. Ghazal alone, he asserted, could sustain poetry; it was its be all and end all.

Winding up the discussion Sajjad Zaheer who was presiding agreed that ghazal had had its day and no doubt there was great poetry to be found in it but it did not meet the literary requirements of our time.

However it was not right to compare the two forms particularly if they were true to their nature, were meaningful and also technically correct. But it was also a fact that the ghazal tradition puts limitations on poetic expression. These were not sacrosanct and could be broken. Still we had poets who were good at ghazal and others good at nazm and some good at both.

Thus ended without conclusion that conclave on ghazal of more than half a century ago. The debate goes on. But where is the Anjuman's Rawalpindi branch that Sajjad Zaheer had brought the good news about. Prof Khwaja Masood is probably its lone surviving member.