Ghazal-singing has a history that not many poetry aficionados know about
THE Muslim tradition of writing and singing Urdu poetry in South Asia reached its peak with the decline and fragmentation of the Mughal Empire into petty principalities, the best-known of which was the statelet of Avadh, with its capital at Faizabad, and later Lakhnau. Avadh was formerly a Mughal suba (province) that had evolved into an independent kingdom by 1720.
The mood of Avadh is sensitively captured in the work of Abdul Halim Sharar’s nostalgic book, expressively entitled The Last Example of Eastern Civilization. This book and other accounts depict a sensuous culture encompassing the poetic and performing arts nurtured by a string of rulers culminating with the benevolent reign of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah (1847-56), only to be shattered by a vengeful British crown that destroyed the delicate fabric of this regime during the War of Indian Independence in 1857.
Although to this day, the traditions that flourished in Avadh radiating from its cultural heart of Lakhnau are variously decried as decadent and degenerate, or extolled as glorious, this now lost culture still evokes the pleasures and nostalgia of an era gone by.
Among the various art forms that flourished in Lakhnau was the arrival of the sung Urdu ghazal, an affective and occasionally erotic style that conquered the Indo-Gangetic plain and today has become one of the genres that the world recognizes modern Pakistan by.
Predating the Lakhnau fashion of poetry and contemporary to it was the style emanating from the seat of the fading Muslim imperium in Delhi, a style construed to be more intellectual and philosophical, imparting a conceptual counterpoint to the sensuous eastern style of Lakhnau. This perceived dichotomy was, however, limited to poetry and not to its rendition. And by 1800, Lakhnau had replaced Delhi as the cultural centre of Muslim South Asia.
The remarkable aspect of the ghazal is that the prosody and metre of the poetry was — and still is — interpreted in music with serious attempts to harness the music with the prime aim of expressing the immanent creativity of the written form in vocal rendition. Composers who were master musicians in their own right took pains to find the right rhythmic pattern to match the poetic metre, and to capture the mood of the poet with the careful selection of a correct melodic arrangement for each poem. Classical music modes (rag) were occasionally sacrificed at the altar of poetry by combining them into a composite melodic composition that best expressed the meaning of the verse. This gave rise to the concept of a “blended confluence” (misher-mel), signifying a cluster of two or more classical music modes in the service of verse.
The sarangi (a bowed fiddle) and the tabla (a pair of kettle drums) were the mainstay of accompanying instrumentation for the vocalist. The final composition was usually the creation of a master sarangi-player modified and transformed by the singer. Interminable night-long rehearsals entailed interaction between this musician-composer and the performer, and the result of this combined creativity was a ghazal ready for singing in a gathering of connoisseurs.
ROOTS OF GHAZAL POETRY: The sung ghazal owes its name to the poetic form, which has its roots in Arabic panegyric poetry, the qasidah. From the qasidah emerged the concept of taghazzul, or “women conversing”; it also expressed the agonized cry of the gazelle acutely aware of its imminent death when cornered by the hunter.
The prevailing climate of melancholy and suffering that dominates the ghazal is reflective of its etymology, and it was this climate that inspired poets to adopt its particular form — the semantically autonomous hemstich — a form that encompassed the metaphor for all human relationships from the trivial to the most profound. By the 13th century, the ghazal had developed into the predominant poetic form of Persian literature, attaining unprecedented heights in the works of Hafiz (d. 1390) and Sa’di (d. 1292), while finding its echo in South Asia in the works of Amir Khusro (d. 1325) and others.
THE RISE OF URDU: The use of Farsi as a court language in Central and South Asia contributed to the development of the ghazal in these regions. As the favoured form in the imperial court and the Muslim intelligentsia for five centuries, the Farsi ghazal underwent such radical transformations that by the early 18th century, it began to be written in Urdu. It is no coincidence that the word Urdu means “military camp” in Turkish, sharing a common origin with the English word “horde”. This new lingua franca remained oral, and when it was written, it was only for poetry.
The successive influx of Muslims into South Asia introduced a vast vocabulary of Farsi, Turkish and Arabic blended into the local languages, which largely retained their grammar and syntax. This rich vocabulary gave Urdu poetry a broad palette of words to express nuances of meaning, a syllabic choice for precise metre and the selection of pleasing rhyme.
As the Urdu ghazal was born out of Farsi, it inherited numerous Persian conventions — images, metaphors and principal forms: the cruel, indifferent or inaccessible beloved (mehbub, ma’shuq), the desperate lover (‘ashiq), his rival (raqib) and his counsel (nasih, nadim), the wine (mai, sharab), the gathering (bazm), the tavern (mai-khana), the wine-giver (saqi) and the old spiritual master (shaikh). Beyond basic desire, the Urdu ghazal encompasses mysticism, philosophy and the chiding of the orthodoxy while celebrating inebriation and folly. The lover is the moth that consumes itself in the flame, the eyes of the beloved are like the narcissus, her eyebrows are bows from which her eyes dart arrows, her nose is like the letter alif, her brow the moon, her lips rubies, her waist the neck of a wine flask and her height that of a cypress.
The poetic form is an indeterminate number of couplets that are semantically autonomous. Each couplet (she’r) is internally organized into a structure called zamin (literally “ground”), which in turn is determined by a metric structure bahr, (literally “ocean”) and its system of versification. The metric structure is determined by a system of long and short vowels. The final rhyme has two elements, the qafiyah and the radif. The radif is the repetitive portion at the end of each verse, and the qafiyah is contained in the radif and is like western poetic rhyming. The rhyme pattern of every ghazal is aa, ba, ca, da infinitum.
THE EVOLUTION OF THE SUNG GHAZAL: The history of ghazal-singing remains a challenge, as there is practically no written material on it before the 19th century. Ghazals with mystical content were sung for Sufi gatherings in the form of qawwali, and continue to be sung in qawwali today, but we are here concerned with ghazal-gaiki, or that particular genre of ghazal-singing.
The origins of this form of singing carry a degree of stigma. Even Abdul Halim Sharar writes disparagingly about Nawab Wajid Ali Shah’s “cheap taste” in music. The prime reason for this disapproval may perhaps lie in the fact that during its formative period, it was associated with the more immodest milieu of courtesans. Courtesans have always featured in Indian civilization as early as the Gupta Period (4th to 6th century ACE), and during the Delhi Sultanate, they were a part of cultural and social life.
The sizeable and prosperous aristocracy of Avadh patronized the arts, which, apart from architecture, included music and dance. During this period, thumri, ghazal and tappa in music — and kathak in dance — reached their high point.
But the greatest patron by far was Wajid Ali Shah, the last nawab, himself a dancer, singer and poet; and it was under his rule that we see the rise of the ghazal just before the impending cataclysm.
Ghazals were sung by courtesans in gatherings of wealthy patrons. The pattern followed in performance was combination of singing, dancing and gesture. The singer sang a couplet, after which the tabla struck up a lively beat (laggi in Urdu or tha-duni in Punjabi today) and the singer probably danced between couplets in a circle marked by her clientele reclining on silk cushions. This picture is speculative because written descriptions are sparse in details of the performance, but the fact that ghazal-singing today continues to have a fast tempo improvised tabla beat as an interlude between couplets is a strong indicator of this assumption.
How did the singing of the ghazal sound in those days? We had to wait for the emergence of audio recording: the earliest recordings of the Urdu ghazal sung to music are from the early 1900s and on the resin wax cylinders of Fox Strangways (1859-1948). The earliest ghazal recordings on single-sided 78-rpm records were made in 1902 in Calcutta, featuring Gauhar Jan and Janki Bai. These recordings were made many decades after the heyday of Avadh in the cultural centres of Faizabad and Lakhnau, but oral history appears to bear out the continuity of a tradition.
What one immediately notices in the recordings of early ghazal-singing is the loudness of the voice, for there was little or no electronic amplification in those days. The recordings of Zohra Bai Agrewali, Dost Muhammad and Zinda Husain Khan are in very fast tempo. Composer Anil Biswas bemoaned the fact that in the early recordings, the emphasis was on musical technique at the cost of poetic content.
Dr Brian Silver (quoted by Dr Peter Manuel) believes that this frantic pace coupled with musical virtuosity was the Delhi style, while the true Avadh style stayed away from this kind of vocal acrobatics. There is little evidence for this, and I believe that the pace of rendition was determined more by the time limitations of earlier recordings than by a dichotomy of style. Ghazal-singing grew in a culture of unhurried languid leisure embedded in an idiom where the word for “yesterday” and “tomorrow” is the same — kal.
The best example of the Avadh tradition in the 20th century was no other than Akhtaribai Faizabadi, or Begum Akhtar, as we know her today. The ruthless time pressure imposed by the early 78 recordings is visible in her early recordings typical of the frantic style of the 1920s, while her later long-playing records have a relaxed and gentler delivery. In Mehdi Hasan’s style too, the quality of voice becomes even more relaxed.
Begum Akhtar’s mastery of ghazal-singing remained unchallenged during her lifetime. True to the origins of ghazal, her teachers were great classical musicians — Ustad Ata Muhammad Khan and Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan, respectively of the Patiala and Kirana gharanas. Following the pattern of her stylistic forbears, many of her ghazal compositions were from such masters as Ghulam Sabir Khan of Kanpur and Fayyaz Ahmad of the Kirana gharana; and like the ghazal singers of Avadh, her singing bears the unmistakable stamp of her own personal style.
The independence of Pakistan saw the meteoric rise of Mehdi Hasan, and fame that once belonged to Begum Akhtar is now with him. In the words of the late Ustad Salamat Ali Khan, “the men took the ghazal away from the women with the creation of Pakistan”.
Ghazal-singing has a history that not many poetry aficionados know about 
