Ghazals in South Asia: Analyzing the Notions, Aesthetics, and Gender Dynamics
I still remember listening to Faiz’s aaj bazaar mein, sung by Nayyara Noor, a few months back before she passed away. The day I heard about her demise, I listened to that song almost four times. This is what death does. We clutch onto the things that they leave behind. For me, it was definitely this song. To share my bit of experience with ghazals, I’d say it has been always been Jagjit Singh, Chitra Singh, Mehdi Hassan, Begum Akhter, Nayyara Noor, and no one else. I have been kind of restricted, in this genre, because I tend to listen to the same tunes again and again. Interestingly, I did not get bored of the songs, and that’s what I think is the CHARM of ghazals. You never get sick of it. It just plays in the background and you do your work, peacefully. Ghazals have always been soothing to my ears, not gonna lie.
Let’s talk about grief. Andrew Garfield on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert spoke about grief and it has really hit me hard. I’m quoting him and I would love to do that. He said ‘’I hope this grief stays with me, this is all of the unexpressed love/ the grief that will remain with us until we pass because we never get whether someone lives until 60 or 15 or 99". And when we talk about grief, we talk about ghazals.
Anyway, so I have realized that I did not ever dive into the term ‘ghazal’ before. Hence, decided to pen down my personal thoughts about ghazals as well as do some academic research on them.
Beginning with an excerpt from one of Agha Shahid Ali’s ghazals:
From exile Mahmoud Darwish writes to the world:
You’ll all pass between the fleeting words of Arabic.
The sky is stunned, it’s become a ceiling of stone.
I tell you it must weep. So kneel, pray for rain in Arabic.
At an exhibition of miniatures, such delicate calligraphy:
Kashmiri paisleys tied into the golden hair of Arabic!
One of the primary things to look out for in a ghazal is that a rhyme precedes a repeated word or phrase at the end of each couplet. In the above excerpt, we can clearly witness the term ‘’Arabic’’ being used repeatedly. Besides that, a ghazal needs all the couplets to follow the same metre or zameen and needs to have couplets that are autonomous, implying that there is no narrative in the ghazal. But when it comes to music, Sofia Naz points out that ghazal always comes with three things: audience interaction, music, and improvisation. Every performer has their own set of skills and there is so much versatility available, which gives it the ability to be adopted to various genres, including thumri and qawwali. Hence, when a singer attempts to ‘perform’ a ghazal, they can supersede the musical structure. For example, Qureshi detected that Begum Akhtar has managed to capture the ravani of the ghazal in all its kaleidoscopic manifestations. At the end of the day, a ghazal’s excellence is dependent on the lyrics and how fine it sounds. If there is a presence of a ‘ghazalness’ or taghazzul, that supposedly makes a ghazal. Well, this taghazzul, has a few ingredients, Faruqi and Pritchett have roughly identified and said it is a ‘combination of the harmony of sound and indirectness of expression’ coupled with a balance of equilibrium between overlapping grids of meaning and sound. Adding to that is a certain aesthetic, so to speak, a fluid elegance that unifies two line sh’irs to cause beauty and pleasure.
Shifting to the terms Rekhta and Rekhti, there are a few differences between the two. First and foremost, the former is the male counterpart and is basically the old form of Urdu, and the most established example is Mirza Ghalib, being one of the poets who wrote Rekhta. The latter is the female counterpart and poets like Rangin, and Jur’ are a few examples. Vanita highlights that rekhti’s accessibility was based on its reliance on ‘’women’s speech’’, while the rekhta was more of an elitist form of Persianized Urdu, used exclusively by male poets in the public domains. Rekhti is mostly written to amuse and entertain than to create an interpretive delight, it has made a mark in feminist writing indeed. While, Rekhta is much more into an abstract aura of spiritualism, and has much more space for metaphors of transcendence. The distinct identities of rekhta and rekhti are very prominent. The former’s intricacies offer room for imagining and alternative masculinity while the latter promises a ‘’direct access to women’s discursive agency through powerful feminine trope’’ as anu aneja argues. Moreover, adding to that, rekhti holds the possibility to transfer the attention away from a juvenile male’s gaze towards an individual women’s experiences and pleasures. The enabled ghazal aesthetics is exposed to a certain perceived gendering of literary discourse. Thus, in the ghazal universe, the dynamic power play of feminine and masculine uplift a query of their divides.
A ghazal is structured upon two important axes which are predominantly mazmun afrini which is basically a metaphor/theme making and ma’ni afrini which is roughly translated to the process of meaning-making. Now, these mazmuns refer to an ocean of themes — majority focusing on unrequited love, the poet may ‘pick’ anyone for elucidation in a particular sh’ir or ghazal. Mazmun afrini involves a complex affair since the beauty of the sh’ir is often examined by its vocal artistry. It often throws light on the beloved’s ‘reality’, being lifted onto a sacred realm. Ishq-i-majazi or love in the material world merges with the divine love, called ishq-i-haqiqi. This unification demands a certain ambiance, apart from heavenly gardens called chaman, mazmuns or metaphors may be acquired from other environments as well. To give an example, maikhana or taverns linked with say, a bright blaze of candles called shama and the tavern provides an apt locale for the bereft lover. The aashiq can be compared to a lovelorn moth called parvana, who is overpowered by deewangi. He is accompanied by a saqi, a young beautiful girl who often plays the part of the beloved as well as a wine-bearer. All in all, metaphors serve as the multicoloured threads available to the poets for knitting the ghazal’s lyrical outline together, in their respective signature styles. Now the meaning-making called ma’ni afirini is subjugated to interpretations. The multivalence-ness and indirectness of ghazals make it even more ambiguous. The expansion of various layers hidden in the ghazal can be analogized to the gradual unfurling of falling petals of a rosebud.
A ghazal often finds its derivation anchored in implications circled around flirting or say, conversing with women about love. Women in medieval India, performed for men. Young girls were trained by the courtesans in Persian and Hindi music at the courts like that of Jalaluddin Khilji, as said by Ziya Barani in Tarikh-I Firoz-shahi which provides a glimpse of royal courts. This connection between ghazal and a certain ‘seductive inventiveness’ needs to be a discussion here because ghazal often discloses love and writing answers to the artistic impulse. As Pritchett puts out, the ghazal glories in its own creative powers and flaunts its artifice. The gendered categories of the ‘feminine’ and the ‘masculine’ in the ghazal universe, Anu Aneja says that they are located as they might be an object of ‘fantasy’ or as the speaking voice of the lover. Through the imagined trope of unrequited love as well as the embracing of a typical male lover’s melancholy, surrender, and defeat, ghazal demands to draw our attention towards its gendered persona. Kugle identified that Persian had no such dichotomy, it was the Urdu poets who were forced to depict gendered roles for the lover and the beloved in ways that the Persian poets did not. Hence, Urdu poetry itself became a ‘’gendered genre’’. Gendered ambiguity can be illustrated in the semantic indirectness in the Urdu ghazals. Petievich has demonstrated how grammatical interpretative indirection is enabled by a ‘’manipulation of its linguistic features’’. But at the same time, verbal clauses exist without ‘’corollary subjects’’, like the phrase ‘kehte hain’ and blurred pronouns like ‘un’ and ‘voh’. The latter ones often stand in for either female or male beloved and hence I’ll cite the most heard Urdu ghazal, sung by Jagjit Singh, originally written by Nida Fazli:
Un se nazaren kya milin, raushan fizaayein ho gayin
aaj jaana pyaar ki jaadugari kya cheez hain
The gendered dynamics in the love relationship of ghazals are often questionable and perhaps, inversed, in terms of power. Petievich made a remark that ghazal tends to romanticize the aashiq as gentle, sensitive, anti-hero, and vulnerable. Faruqi examined that the universe of ghazal has always observed the Outsider as the Hero. It contradicts the pre-Mughal and Mughal eras where there is an idealization of aggressive hyper-masculinity. Submission in the ghazal is the overused theme for this reimagined masculinity, and the lover shows the traits like weeping, which are stereotypically associated with women. Kugle has elucidated that many ‘’modern readers’’, would interpret this quality in the lover, as ‘’feminine’’.
Ghazal has one more aspect, which is the term ada. Faruqi classified Ada as nakhra or sexual delinquency, extended by ‘coquetry, dress, and manners, speech, and body language’. Seductive mannerisms are one of the integral attributes of the style that defines ghazal as a lyrical genre. Faruqi notes that this ada bandi, in Mir’s ghazals were more of the rare meetings and closeness, the frequent partings and dreadful distances between the lover and the beloved. Ada bandi presents the beloved as an assertive seductress rather than the typical passive and ‘hiding behind the purdah’ little girl. Ada bandi surrounds the pretentiousness adopted by mazmun of the lover. The metaphors are ‘manipulated’ by each poet to achieve kaifiyat, which is the ultimate aesthetic experience we are talking about. It is a delight and is provided to the audience who can experience the allure of lyricism over any emotional effect. Jacques Derrida elaborated on how the term ‘feminine’ as a ‘style’ has evolved in Spurs (1978) and it is one of the most crucial works done in the arena of poststructuralism. Derrida clarifies that the ‘feminine’ should not be confused with a ‘’woman’s feminity for female sexuality or for any other of essentializing fetishes’’. The feminine appears as ‘feminized’ through a process of ‘persuasive essentializing’ that kind of attaches ‘feminine’ tag to women. Postulating ‘woman’ as a matter of ‘style’, Derrida goes on to depict how sexual difference lacks a solid ontological truth and hides its ‘undecidability’. To give context to the term ‘ontological truth’, it is derived from the relation of being (reality)to intellect. If the being conforms to the intellect or to the ideas in the intellect, then we have ontological truth.
Attaching a song that is very close to my heart, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRZ98HX1MO8 ❤
Bibliography
- Aneja, Anu. Feminist Theory and the Aesthetics Within: A Perspective From South Asia. Abingdon, United Kingdom, Taylor and Francis, 2021.
- Naz, Sophia. South Asian Forms of Public Poetry Performance and the Ghazal: From Romance to Revolution. fenceportal.org/south-asian-forms-of-public-poetry-performance-and-the-ghazal-from-romance-to-revolution. Accessed 16 Sept. 2022.
