A long time ago — perhaps in the 1970s — I observed my father, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, leafing through dictionaries, searching for rare birds’ names. He was working on translating a shahr ashob of Mirza Qalandar Bakhsh Jurat (1748-1809), the mid-18th century Urdu poet mostly remembered for his romantic, racy ghazals and masnavis brimming with explicit punning and innuendoes.

A shahr ashob is a poem lamenting the decline of cities and the sophisticated culture they nurtured. How could a poet fill a shahr ashob with birds, I asked. My father explained that Jurat’s poem expresses cultural decline through the metaphor of birds.

The bulbul, the sweet singing dweller of the garden, is being opposed by a crowd of raucous birds, each of them claiming to be better than the bulbul. The metaphor of birds and their voices gives a double unity to the poem. It suggests a universal chaos born of sound. My father read out a couple of stanzas for me that he had translated:

Country bumpkins now write Urdu verse — at least, they try

Carpenters now are artists — as soon as their pictures dry

In short, it seems injustice now goes from bad to worse

The shyama with plucked feathers, born to be perverse

Tries to make her voice prevail

In the presence of the nightingale

Jurat’s shahr ashob comprises 23 stanzas of five lines each. It is a rhyming pattern called the mukhammas; the fifth line is always the same, and the repetition helps hammer the theme of the poem. I counted 35 bird names, from the common sparrow, crow and koel to the painted quail, waxwing and blue jay.

In the poetics of the ghazal universe, the garden presents both the macrocosm and the microcosm of life on earth. The big theme is the binary of existence and non-existence, being and non-being, life and death. The garden is the space where we see the unfolding of life and death. The changing of seasons from bahaar/spring to khizaan/autumn speaks of colour and a fading, birth and death, but regeneration follows — the renewal of life.

The garden’s inhabitants, most prominently the gul/rose and the bulbul, signify the lover/beloved relationship. Beauty is ephemeral, but love is eternal. There are many denizens in the garden. There is the dove, who is a messenger of peace; and the peacock, who represents the iridescence of nature’s beauty and colour. The graceful gazelle inhabits the wild gardens and meadows.

One basic idea is the contrast between the garden and the wilderness or desert — the chaman and the sehra. But there are villains lurking in the garden: the shikaari [hunter], also known as the saiyyad, who spreads a net to snare birds, put them in cages and sell them. Songbirds in gilded cages sing of the pain of separation.

Mir Taqi Mir and Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, two of the greatest Urdu poets, composed verses invoking real and imaginary birds. Let me mention the two important imaginary birds first, the anqa and the huma. Both birds symbolise the heights of imagination and aspirations.

Among Indian birds, the peacock fascinated our poets the most. No bird could have carried the weight of a gorgeous train of iridescent, patterned plumage and an overload of myth but the peacock. The peacock’s shining plumage inspired Ghalib to illustrate his favourite theme of nairang.

Nairang has a slew of meanings — fascination, bewitchment, deception, illusion, wonder. Ghalib played with illusion and deception because the peacock’s shimmering plumage could be adapted to the verbal game of hide-and-seek that he relished. He pictured the peacock’s green-blue colours hiding, even merging, with the wild, green, grassy meadows.

Par-i-taoos tamasha nazar aaya hai mujhe

Ek dil tha ke ba sad rang dikhaaya hai mujhe

[The peacock’s plumage looks like a spectacle to me

Like the one heart that displays a hundred colours]

More attractive than the peacock is the bulbul, the iconic bird of poetry. Critics of the Urdu ghazal often single out the ‘exaggerated, unrealistic passion’ symbolised by the gul-o-bulbul in order to label it ‘foreign’. It’s a Persian image they say, not indigenous to the Subcontinent.

Yet, the image was so persistent that most people have forgotten what the bulbul was called earlier. The commonest name for it was kalsiri, which means black-headed. The native species belong to the family of short-legged thrushes. In John T. Platt’s Dictionary, the Indian bulbul (Lanius boulboul) is suggested to be closer to the fork-tailed shrike.

However, there is a difference between the bulbul bird and its literary equivalent, which is the bulbul that lives in the garden of classical ghazal poetry. In mystical poetry, the bulbul’s longing for the rose serves as a metaphor for the soul’s yearning for union with God.

Trust Mirza Ghalib to come up with one of the most poignant verses on the bulbul’s song:

Kehta hai kaun nala-i-bulbul ko bay asar

Parday mein gul ke lakh jigar chaak ho gaye

[Who can call the bulbul’s lament wasted?

In the guise of the rose, a million hearts were sundered]

Turning to more everyday images of birds in Urdu poetry, a younger contemporary of Jurat, Nazir Akbarabadi (d. 1830) was known to be a people’s poet, or a poet of the bazaar, because he wrote poems on activities in everyday life.

In Nazir’s divan, I found a rich cache of poems on birds. My favourite is one on kabootar baazi [sporting pigeons]. This is one of the most remarkable poems on pigeons ever written. According to Nazir, pigeons are the most outstanding — sarfaraz — among all birds:

[What is the bulbul, the dove, the robin, big or small?

The crested lark, the small lark, finch, weaverbird, pied mynah or parrot

What of the songbird and mynah and partridge and the shrike?

All the sporting birds that you can like

The most outstanding is the pigeon

There are Basri and Kabuli, Shirazi and Nisavar

Chuya Chandan and Sabz Mukhi, Shastar and Akkar

Taoosi and Gul Potiye, Niley, Gulli. And Thaiyyar

Even stars don’t have that style in the skies’ canopy

That pigeons display when they perch on their canopy]

Another bird poem, titled ‘Chirriyon Ki Tasbeeh’ [A Rosary of Birds] surpasses Jurat’s lists of birds. This poem engages with birdsong, building on the belief that birds sing God’s praises.

There is a wealth of cultural memories enshrined in poetry. There is a whole lexicon of bird names that should be catalogued and matched with paintings of birds.

The columnist is associate professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, April 10th, 2022