LATELY, 300th death anniversary of great Persian poet Mirza Abdul Qadir Bedil Azeemabadi was commemorated in five countries, including Pakistan, though it could hardly attract any attention from the media as our media is usually overwhelmed by and deluged with showbiz news.
Among the few poets who thoroughly impressed Mirza Ghalib was Bedil, though Ghalib was hardly ever impressed by any poet and he abhorred the idea of following in the footstep of any other poet, no matter how great. Bedil not only impressed Ghalib but Ghalib found himself following Bedil’s style. Ghalib has admitted how difficult it was to emulate Bedil’s poetic style, as he says:
Tarz-i-Bedil mein rekhta likhna
sadullah Khan Qayamat hai
(To write Urdu ghazal in Bedil’s style is nothing short of the Day of Judgement, i.e. extremely trying and stressful)
At the same time, Ghalib acknowledged the guiding role that Bedil’s poetry played for him, as he said:
Mujhe raah-i-sukhan mein khauf-i-gumraahi nahin Ghalib
A’saa-i-Khizr-i-sehra-i-sukhan hai khaama Bedil ka
(I do not fear going astray while I tramp the desert of poetry since Bedil’s pen serves as if it were Khizr’s walking stick, i.e. support and guidance)
Even Allama Iqbal in his poetry paid glowing tributes to Bedil. So what’s so special about Bedil, though we have a long history of Persian poetry in the subcontinent? Bedil was not a rarity when it comes to Persian poetry in the subcontinent, but he was one of the brightest stars of Persian poetry that shone on the subcontinent’s horizon. Beginning with Masood Sa’ad Salman Lahori in the Ghaznavid era, the subcontinent has produced some truly great Persian poets; for instance, Ameer Khusrau, Ghalib and Iqbal, to name but a few. But Bedil is credited with being the most prominent of poets belonging to sabk-i-Hindi, or the poetic style of Persian poetry in the subcontinent. Ghalib, too, is among the great poets of the literary school known as sabk-i-Hindi. ‘Sabk’ means, literally, a mould or system. It also means a specific poetic style with its innate attributes.
In Persian poetry, three distinct literary styles are well-known: sabk-i-Khurasani -- also known as sabk-i-Turkistani, which was initiated in the ninth century in the eastern parts of regions where Persian was spoken. When “the Saljuq Turks conquered most of the Persian world in the mid-eleventh century, the use of Persian for literary purposes spread further west ... and the second style, the Iraqi style (‘sabk-i-Iraqi’) emerged”, wrote Alexander Beecroft in his ‘An Ecology of World Literature’. The third literary style used for Persian poetry emerged when Mughals conquered India and it was named sabk-i-Hindi, or the poetic style of the subcontinent. Sabk-i-Hindi was also called sabk-i-Isfahani, as there was “a contemporary reluctance to recognize the stylistic features” of Persian poetry originating in the subcontinent, says Beecroft.
Albeit attached to geographical regions, these tags help identify the metaphorical use of expressions peculiar to some Persian poets who groomed these styles in these regions initially. They were later on adopted by the poets in other regions. But there is an air of “rakish insubordination” attached to the term sabk-i-Hindi and it has only recently been that a positive nuance has been attached to it, notes Shamsur Rahman Faruqi in his article published in ‘Annual of Urdu studies’ (vol19, 2004).
Aside from the reluctance from the Iranian scholars to accept the Indian Persian poets, some sub-continental scholars, too, were not much sympathetic to poets of sabk-i-Hindi. Faruqi says, in the same article, that the local school of Persian poetry or sabk-i-Hindi received a blow from Shibli No’mani from which it has not yet recovered. As a result the anthologies of Persian poetry published later on in India either almost entirely ignored local Persian poets like Mirza Abdul Qadir Bedil and Mirza Ghalib or only “grudgingly” allowed a page or two to these poets, who, as put by Faruqi, are the two greatest poets of sabk-i-Hindi.
It is often said that complex metaphor and extreme hyperbole are the hallmarks of sabk-i-Hindi, often rendering the verses too ambiguous and incongruous to be comprehended. It is a kind of objection that Ghalib’s contemporaries raised on his poetry -- perhaps a trait that Ghalib had picked up from Bedil.
Mirza Abdul Qadir Bedil was born in 1642 in Patna, or Azeemabad, and died in Delhi in 1720. Despite his impact on Ghalib and the entire school of thought in local Persian poetry, the tradition of not appreciating Bedil’s poetry is not limited to India: in Pakistan, too, little has been written on Bedil.
But of late, there have been some efforts to recognise Bedil’s greatness and a book to mark his 300th death anniversary was published by Rawalpindi’s Rumail Publications. Written by Akhter Usman, the book contains 18 articles on different aspects of Bedil’s poetry. The author seems quite annoyed that not only was Bedil largely ignored but his Sufi thoughts were way too emphasised, almost totally ignoring his real philosophy of life.
Published in Dawn, February 22nd, 2021
Dear visitor, the comments section is undergoing an overhaul and will return soon.