'Love in the Time of Hate' Review |A Labour Of Love For Urdu Poetry

In the introduction to her new book, Love in the Time of Hate: In the Mirror of Urdu, Rakhshanda Jalil writes: “There are love jihads and there are love jihads. Mine turned into a labour of love.” “Labour of love” is, of course, a bold and brilliantly astute translation of “love jihad”. It is also a translation that seizes from the jaws of hate a love worth fighting for.

This book is Jalil’s labour of love. It is a khazana, a treasury, of Urdu shayari that provides succour in our dark time. Over the course of 80 short essays, drawing on her deep love and knowledge of Urdu poetry written over many centuries by both Muslims and non-Muslims, Jalil attends to a startlingly wide array of themes: from politics (religious intolerance, the plight of migrant workers, the perils of populism) and people (Gandhi and Nehru, Bose and Bhagat Singh, Dilip Kumar and Lata Mangeshkar) to passions (the hope of spring, the joy of paan, the untranslatability of love) and places (Delhi, Banaras, Kashmir). The thread that links all these diverse meditations is Urdu poetry’s championing of inclusivity over hatred.

Jalil’s labour of love consists of using shayari aphoristically, of taking a line or two out of their original contexts and applying them, in sadness and in hope, to our broken present. Like T S Eliot in The Waste Land, she uses the fragments of old poetry to “shore against my ruins”.

The book opens with this poignant statement: “I am sixty years old and confess to a crushing fear…I suspect that I am not alone in this. I feel this fear among a great many Muslims in urban India.” As this statement suggests, Jalil’s labour of love is a deeply felt personal struggle to deal with the hatreds of the current moment. Her struggle is evident in the many postscripts to the chapters. These not only inject a personal element into the book but also allow her to express doubt about its very project: Jalil wonders whether reminding us of Urdu poetry’s embrace of pluralism serves any purpose when hatred is so rampant. But this note of near-despair is also coupled with messages of hope. One particularly moving instance is the postscript to Jalil’s chapter on the tiranga; in it, she describes how she has never felt so proud of being Indian as when she spied the tricolour in Saudi Arabia in 2012, flying above the camp set up by the Indian government for Indian hajis. It’s a startling moment—a reminder of Muslim love for country and also of a government’s care for its citizens and their welfare, regardless of their faith.

The phrase “labour of love” hints at how much work is required to overcome hate. Sigmund Freud asserted that hatred is primal: rejection of the other is the condition for forming an identity. Hate, then, comes easily to us, but love requires work. The untranslatability of love, as Jalil keeps reminding us, means we have to keep working to define and inhabit it. Many of the poets she quotes rework love in unexpected ways. Some transform it into a political possibility: Faiz remakes “ishq” into the zeal required to organise against totalitarian power. Others imagine it as more than just an individual’s feelings for a lover or for God—it is also the glue of a collective “hum sab” that transcends religious and communal identity. But that collective spirit has been too often undone by the project of pitting Hindu and Muslim against each other. As Saghar Khayyami writes:

Nafraton ki jang mein dekho to kyaa kho gayaa

Sabziyaan Hindu huinn bakra Musalman ho gayaa

(See what all has happened in this battle of hatred

Vegetables have become Hindu and the goat Muslim)

Communalising our eating habits is easy in a climate of nafrat. What demands hard graft is the work of building love. To quote Sahir Ludhianvi:

Nafraton ke jahaan mein hum ko pyaar ki bastiyaan basaanii hain

Duur rahnaa koi kamaal nahiin paas aao to koi baney

(In this world of hatred we have to set up habitations of love

Staying away is no big deal, coming closer is the real thing)

At the heart of Love in the Time of Hate’s labour of love is Hindi cinema, for which Ludhianvi wrote some of his finest shayari. Jalil keeps returning throughout the book to films, and not just in her chapters on Dilip Kumar and Lata Mangeshkar. One of the open secrets of Hindi cinema, at least until fairly recently, is that it was never “Hindi”—at least not in the hyper-Sanskritised form that we often hear now in official discourse. It was, rather, Hindustani, a rekhta or a mix of Hindu and Urdu—something Jalil reminds us of in regard to Mangeshkar, who cultivated perfect Urdu pronunciation to master the film songs that made her famous.

Films have increasingly jettisoned the Urdu-inflected shayari that was once synonymous with Hindi cinema. Yet there have been some notable holdouts. Let me finish with an example from a recent film that is a fitting companion for Jalil’s book. Gully Boy’s (Zoya Akhtar, 2019) signature tune, ‘Apna Time Aayega’ (My/Our Time Will Come), is a rap song with Urdu lyrics by Javed Akhtar:

Taakat ki hai, aafat ki, himaakat ki, ibadat ki

Adaalat yeh hai chaahat ki, mohabbat ki, amaanat ki …

Kyunki apna time aayega

(The need is of strength, of troubles, of madness, of prayers

This is the court of desire, of love, of possession…

My/our time will come)

As the massive popularity of the song attests, Urdu shayari still speaks to us—though now in new forms. Yet the message is the same: the future promises mohabbat, but in a time of aafat, that promise can materialise only through commitment and hard work. Jalil proves that with her labour of love. It is up to the rest of us to make sure that her labour is also apna.

Jonathan Gil Harris is Professor of English at Ashoka University