DR Gopi Chand Narang has at last come to the rescue of Urdu ghazal after it was much maligned for its non-Indian origin.
In fact, Urdu ghazal had come under heavy attack soon after the catastrophe of 1857. Maulana Hali was the first to censure it for lacking in what he, in his reformist zeal, demanded of poetry in general. Others found out their own reasons to target this form of poetic expression. One among them was, as argued by hostile critics, its estrangement from the soil of this land. They heatedly argued that Urdu ghazal was steeped in an alien culture and that the whole stock of metaphors, similes, and allusions had been borrowed from the Persian literary tradition. This argument found its extension in political hands who applied it to Urdu language in general and reached the conclusion that Urdu was a foreign language with no relation to Indian soil.
This argument appeared more convincing in the aftermath of partition. Urdu in India seemed alienated for quite a number of years. It was during those years and in that anti-Urdu climate that Gopi Chand Narang emerged as an Urdu scholar. Urdu found in him a well-armed defender of a seemingly lost cause. For his doctorate, he chose to make a cultural study of Urdu poetry.
Narang was not content with obtaining a doctorate on the subject. He did not stop at what he had researched for the purposes of the doctorate. Stuck to this study, in later years he widened its scope. In consequence, we have now three volumes from him.
1. Hindustani Qisson se Makhooz Urdu Masnavian (Urdu masnavies based on Indian tales)
2. Urdu Ghazal aur Hindustani Zehn-o-Tahzeeb (Urdu ghazal and Indian mind and culture)
3. Hindustan ki Tahreek-i-Azadi aur Urdu Shairi (The freedom movement of India and Urdu poetry)
The first volume has already been discussed in this column in the year gone by. At the moment, I have the second volume before me.
In the first volume, he had shown us that most Urdu masnavis, which form a large part of Urdu poetry, have drawn inspiration and content from Indian tales. They breathe in the cultural climate of this land.
The present volume is a study in depth of the Indian mind manifesting itself initially in pre-Aryan and then in Vedic and Buddhistic cultures. With the advent of Islam in India, a new situation developed. The new religious faith comes in conflict with local religious beliefs and ideas. But, eventually, a new cultural process ensues from this conflicting situation. The conflicting elements appeared to reconcile with each other and this reconciliatory process resulted in the emergence of a new culture common to the locals and the new arrivals. It brought in its wake a common language, which eventually came to be known as Urdu.
Urdu found its best poetic expression in ghazal. And Dr Narang insists that the concept of love, or to be more precise, ishq occupies a central place in it. “But ishq formed part of the metaphysical and ideological thought and of the sociological structure of that age. In other words, it was the product of that cultural and intellectual upsurge, which was indebted for its occurrence to Bhakti and Tasawwuf.”
Narang goes one step further and asserts that Urdu ghazal owes all that is meaningful in it to a sensibility which had grown out of an amalgamation of Islamic mysticism and local cultures. So, according to him, each Urdu poet while singing of love in his ghazals will be seen carrying an echo of mysticism with a mix of the cultural influences of India.
Allied to the concept of love is the concept of beauty which has been elaborately discussed with reference to Urdu ghazal. Narang has vehemently refuted the commonly held view that the beloved we see in Urdu ghazal is just a replica of the Iranian beloved as portrayed in Persian ghazal and hence is a male. His analysis starts with the Deccani period where the beloved celebrated by the poets is a female brought up in a cultural environment with no foreign influence. The concept of beauty which informs the love poetry of this period appears to be the product of local cultural conditions. However, it undergoes a change in the cultural environment of Delhi, which was the cradle of a mixed culture, say Indo-Iranian. Now we have a concept of beauty which draws sustenance from this culture. This concept of beauty, says Narang, had the same kind of refinement which one finds in the poetry of Malik Mohammad Jaisi and in the Taj Mahal.
Narang’s analysis convincingly leads one to the conclusion that Urdu ghazal has drawn as much sustenance from the cultural climate of the land as from the Persian poetic tradition.
DR Gopi Chand Narang has at last come to the rescue of Urdu ghazal after it was much maligned for its non-Indian origin.
