Both A Kaaba And A Temple

A judicial magistrate in colonial India who wrote voluminous poetry; an Urdu poet who wrote in the chaste and rigorous ghazal tradition as well as old forms like hori, kajri, malhar, doha, bhajan and geet in Hindi; well-versed in the fields of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) and Shariah (teachings of the Prophet) as well as the arts of calligraphy and music—Muztar Khairabadi (1869-1927) was this combination of seeming contraries. A collection of his poetry, published in five volumes by his grandson Javed Akhtar, the poet-­film lyricist, and printed by Niyogi Books, Khirman contains a cornucopia of delights.

Describing the 10-year journey that culminated in the publication of Khirman, Akhtar likens it to a dastaan with many twists. From finding a bundle of old papers in a tattered cardboard box to scouting libraries and private collections in the qasbahs of Awadh and the former princely states of Tonk, Rampur, Indore, Gwalior and Bhopal, the story of its compilation is as riveting as the contents of Khirman. The fact that these verses—some previously unpublished and some published in now-defunct literary journals and out-of-print collections—are published 90 years after the death of the poet is itself a remarkable occurrence. What is more, with the publication of Khirman, justice has finally been done in more ways than one.

A debate that has been raging for the past 80 years has been laid to rest with this book and its authoritative foreword that foregrounds the contours of an old literary controversy. The oft-repeated ghazal Na kisi kii ankh ka noor hoon, na kissi ke dil ka qarar hoon/Jo kisi ke kaam na aa sake main woh ek musht-e-ghubar hoon, asc­ribed to Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, was actually written by Muztar. Eminent literary critics such as Niyaz Fatehpuri, Ale Ahmad Suroor and Gopichand Narang had long argued that this verse was not found in Zafar’s complete works published in 1887 by the Nawal Kishore Press, and was definitely Muztar’s. The discovery of this ghazal, written in Muztar’s own handwriting and carrying his takhallus (pen name), finally puts to rest any doubt about these much-quoted and often-sung verses, wrongly said to portray Zafar’s anguish when he was exiled from Hindustan to Rangoon. Another testimony, more by way of criticism of the ghazal’s weakness but nevertheless an acknowledgement of its authorship by Muztar, comes from a contemporary, Shah Muhammad Mumtaz Ali ‘Aah’ in 1928—barely a year after Muztar’s death.

Home-tutored by his mother Saidatul Nisa, the daughter of the legendary freedom fighter Maulana Fazle Haq Khairabadi, who was imprisoned in the Andamans for his role in the uprising of 1857, Muztar drew upon the best traditions of Arabic, Persian and Urdu poetry virtually from his mother’s lap. A woman of great learning, Saidatul Nisa was also a poet herself and wrote under the name of ‘Hirma’. A young Muztar took his early poetry to his mother for correction but such were the times that he had to acknowledge a well-known poet, Amir Meenai, as his mentor rather than his mother! The abundance of local colour, the vivid descriptions of nature, the ample presence of the folk in his Hindi poetry shows a commingling of diverse traditions that he received by way of a family legacy, growing up as he did in a qasbah of Awadh.

Basant and Holi have the same importance in Hindi poetry that spring has in traditional Persian and Urdu poetry. Then there is the rainy season. One of Muztar’s most popular thumris evokes the splendour of the Indian monsoon: Chha rahi oodi ghata jiya mora ghabraye hai/Sun rii koel bavri tu kyon malhar gaye hai (The purple clouds are massing and my heart is turning over/Why, o mad koel, why are you singing the monsoon raga)

And elsewhere, there is the anguish of the virahini, the woman who has been separated from her beloved: Aao aao nagariya hamari/Tum bin sooni sajariya hamari (Come, come to my city/My bed is deserted without you).

While Hindi forms a substantial part of Muz­tar’s corpus, it is the ghazal that holds sway in these volumes and shows his mastery over this complex genre of poetry: Ai ishq ata kar de aisa mujhe kaashaana/Jo Kaabae ka Kaaba ho, but-khane ka but-khana (O love, grant me such a home/That is a Kaaba and a temple both).