I love this thread. My own route to an appreciation of Urdu poetry was circuitous.
As a teenager in the 1990s I was baffled by Pakistani politics. It just seemed a big merry-go-round. So I read lots of political history books on Pakistan and the politics of Muslims in British India. This certainly gave me a much richer understanding. But I felt something was missing that I still had not really understood the inner world of the people I had studied. I had not appreciated - from this reading - the importance of ideas, emotions, beliefs and culture.
So I turned to Urdu poetry. When you consider the degree to which poetry is part of everyday life in Pakistan, it took me a surprisingly long time to do this. Poetic couplets appear on trucks. Poetry from all sorts of South Asian poets provides lyrics for so many well known songs. (Imagine the poems of Shakespeare or Wordsworth or Keats being so liberally relied on in the production of English music intended for mass consumption!)
There is a clip of the late Munir Niazi reciting his poem,
hamesha der kar deta huun. The audience was moved to the point of tears. In those two minutes or so, you see it clearly: Pakistan is a society where there is a deeply rooted sensitivity and feeling for poetry.
Even though I had swam in these waters, I had taken most of this for granted and to my discredit been rather incurious about it.
Turning to Urdu poetry has enriched my understanding of history. (Many of the posts of the ‘retired’
@Nostalgic on this forum were in fact an eloquent testimony to how sensitivity to culture could deepen understanding of history.)
But is has also made me appreciate some aspects of Urdu poetry itself.
It is specifically the ghazal which has been regarded as the most venerated form of Urdu literature. Although addressing a multitude of issues, it is above all associated with love - earthly and divine. The ghazal is made up of a series of couplets, each couplet independent of one another, but stitched together in a poem by rhyme and metre conventions. We should also remember that the ghazal was historically first heard (at a musha’ira) and only appeared in print later. What results from all this?
As a couplet contains a whole thought, it is often an impactful vehicle to express concisely a profound feeling or thought. A couplet is also easier to remember and memorise and this I would think accounts in some part to the popularity of Urdu poetry and the fact that lines are often recited by elders. And as the ghazal is also produced to be heard the rhythmic and rhyming patterns are often quite pleasing to the ear.
I think the appeal of the love lyric is perhaps enhanced by its subversive quality: the determined dedication to the ideals of love in a society which, in large parts of South Asia at least, has historically been unkind to romantic love.
I also like the fact that there is often a deliberate ambiguity. On this point of multiple meanings, there is a lovely couplet from Mir:
aavaaragaan-e ishq ka poochha jo main nishaan
musht-e ghubaar le ke saba ne uda diya
I would translate this as:
When I asked for a sign of the vagabonds of love
the gentle breeze took a handful of dust and tossed it in the air
This might be understood in terms of the true lover’s indefatigability in pursuit of the beloved, until they are ground down into dust. But there are other meanings that could be inferred, indeed Frances Pritchett (in her fabulous book,
Nets of Awareness) lists nine possibilities:
“the breeze may be implying that the wanderers of love (1) end up after death as mere handfuls of dust; (2) are as nameless and unknown as handfuls of dust; (3) are, in their essence, handfuls of dust; (4) are perpetual wanderers, as restless as handfuls of dust. Or (5) the breeze may be conveying total ignorance of their fate, as in the Urdu idiom "I know dust (= nothing)" (khak khabar hai); or (6) the breeze may be expressing total lack of interest in their fate, so that it merely flings dust into the air instead of responding to the question. Or (7) the breeze may intend to fling dust into the inquirer's face as a sign of contempt: "Who are you to presume to ask about them?" Or (8) the breeze may be flinging dust on its head as a sign that its grief for the wanderers of love is beyond words. Or in fact (9) the question may not be addressed to the breeze at all: the inquirer may be asking some other, unresponsive third party, or merely thinking aloud—and receiving no answer except the ceaseless, indifferent movements of the breeze. "This is hardly a verse—it is a carved, faceted jewel."
On a more functional level, Urdu seems well suited to the type of poetry described above, possessing more rhyming words than English, for instance. In Urdu, with the verb is at end, it also means that meaning coincides with the rhyme.
