Mir Taqi Mir in Mumbai

Ek jagah par jaise bhantildevar haintilde lekin chakkar raht haiyan vatan dary hai us mentilde chr taraf haintilde safar mentilde abLike the whirlpool still centre of a giddy circlingthe homelandrsquos an ocean on which wersquore scattered in all directionsMir Muhammad Taqi composed this Urdu verse in the 18th century but he may as well have been writing about our world todayMore than 200 years after his lifetime 17231810 Mirrsquos words strike true as Mumbai poet translator and art curator Ranjit Hoskote brings the shersquors to an English audience with a new translated collection The Homelandrsquos an Ocean Mir Taqi Mir Penguin Random House IndiaMir considered one of the greatest Urdu poets lived through extraordinarily turbulent times The Mughal empire was collapsing amid raids by Afghan king Ahmed Shah Abdali and the East India Company closing in Mir called Delhi home but spent over a decade in exile in presentday Rajasthan as the Capital witnessed horrific violence This verse describes that disorienting sensation upon being displaced from onersquos home something many can relate to as migrants today says Hoskote who named the book after this coupletRanjit Hoskotersquos translated collection comes out on August 22 PicTeju ColeMir was a prolific poet composing 1916 ghazals and 13585 couplets Selecting excerpts from such a vast repertoire and maintaining the essence of the original poetry was made all the more challenging because of the very nature of the writing ldquoIn ghazals successive couplets are held together by the end rhyme or the refrain but donrsquot necessarily have a sequential logic So when the first verse is recited you know the end rhyme and therersquos a wave of expectation and suspense for the listener in every successive verse Therersquos a playful relationship between the poet and the audience On the printed page as rendered in English the whole poem is revealed at one shot and therersquos no sense of anticipationrdquo says HoskoteInstead the bookrsquos approach borrows from another tradition in Urdu poetry ldquoThe shelsquor or couplet is regarded as a poem in itself The ghazal is a collection of asharsquoar the plural of shelsquor Traditionally lovers of poetry would maintain a bayaz or notebook to which they committed their favourite ashalsquoar So this is my bayaz with 150 of Mirrsquos verses to which I respond most strongly Like every bayaz this is an additive openended projectrdquoMir is credited as one of the pioneers who gave shape to Urdu but ldquohe called it Hindi as in fact the term Urdu came into use much later by the 1780s It was the language of the everyday at that time and included elements of Braj Khari Boli and Persian By the time we get to Ghalib in the 19th century it was much more Persianisedrdquo says the authorIronically despite Mir adopting the more informal form of the language he was eclipsed by Ghalib in mainstream consciousness This perhaps is because Ghalib was in the next generation of poets in a more modern worldmdashhe went on to see his work in published form and had even been photographed ldquoIn contrast Mir missed print modernity by one year He died in 1810 and the first printed edition of his works came out in 1811 There are no photographs of him either So Mir seems to us to be more distant in time In truth though he was radically lsquomodernrsquo in his sensibility In chronological terms remember that he was not very distant from us He was a contemporary of the Romantics such as English poet William Wordsworth and German writer Friedrich Schillerrdquo says Hoskote who was introduced to Mir through Ghalib ldquoGhalib recognised no equals but it was only of Mir that he wrote lsquoMr ke shelsquor k ahvl kahntilde ky Ghlib jis k divn kam az gulshane Kashmr nahntilde Ghalib what can I say about Mirrsquos poetryHis collected works rival a garden in Kashmirrdquo he recallsIn the decade since Hoskote started reading Mirrsquos poetry the 18thcentury poet has now become a familiar figure in his mind ldquoI have grown to feel quite close to himrdquoIt is perhaps ironic that Mirrsquos poetry which comes from a time when Urdu was just being shaped in the subcontinent is now being published in a time when the language is dying in India In the introduction to the book Hoskote writes ldquoTo read Mirrsquos poems today is to defy the communitarian ideologies that have speciously splintered the Hindavi continuum into a supposedly Hindu Hindi and a supposedly Muslim UrdurdquoHe tells midday ldquoTodayrsquos dominant communal ideology perpetuates a colonial falsehood It claims that Urdu is a foreign language This is nonsense Urdu originated here There is also a persistent effort to portray Urdu as a lsquoMuslim languagersquo Any number of major Hindi writers have been Muslim whether Malik Muhammad Jayasi in Awadhi or Abdur Rahim KhaniKhanan in Braj or Asghar Wajahat today And any number of major Urdu poets have been Hindu such as Brij Narayan Chakbast and Firaq Gorakhpuri For that matter Gulzar sahab one of our most acclaimed living poets is an Urdu poet born to a Sikh family We must oppose and reject the communalisation of history and languagerdquo