Urdu poetry – Brown Pundits

From my SubStack:

The Ghazal–a love lyric in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish and Urdu– has historically been defined as “talking with or about women”. For example, in his Persian dictionary compiled in eighteenth century Hindustan, Tek Chand Bahar defines the genre as follows: “Talk about women, or talking about making love with them or a poem that is said in praise of women”. However, as Shad Naved– a professor of literature and translation at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University, Delhi– argues in his book The Ghazal Eros: Lyric Queerness in History (Tulika Books 2025), “the central role the ghazal played in the development of literature in Persian and Urdu during these six centuries is as a love lyric, in which men speak almost never about women but about other men and youthful boys–with the exception of Arabic, in which a strong current of love poetry about women written by male poets played an important role in the development of the ghazal” (Naved 9). Naved goes on to ask the crucial question: Why do the dictionaries lie?

For the purposes of this review, I will restrict my discussion to chapter one of Naved’s book–entitled “Sexual Orientation as Style”. It is this chapter which lays out the basis of Naved’s argument. Part Two of the book consists of three chapters that provide specific examples of lyric queerness in the Urdu ghazal. For example, chapter 2 focuses on the poet Mir Taqi Mir (1723-1810)–specifically on his poems dealing with “boy-love”. These detailed examples are outside the scope of my review. Continue reading Review: The Ghazal Eros: Lyric Queerness in History by Shad Naved

I’d said to myself: Why don’t I do my own Bhartiya-karan, that is, Indianise myself, before someone else thinks of doing it? The first problem was my name. Perhaps you don’t know: my name is Iqbal Chand. It occurred to me that “Iqbal” is an Arabic word. What kind of nationalism is it to live in India and have an Arabic name? And so, I changed my name to Kangaal Chand. As it happens, this name is far better suited to my financial condition considering that “kangaal” means “poor”. And why just me, it suits the rest of my country too.

The second problem that arose was of the dress. There was no trace of Indianness in the pants, coat and tie that I wore. In fact, all three were a reflection of my slave mentality. I was amazed that I had worn them all this while. I decided to wear pajamas instead of pants. But then, a certain Persian person told me that the pajama had come to India from Iran. And so, I began to wear dhoti and kurta. But not a kameez, as the word “kameez”, too, is of Arabic origin and it reeks of the stench and stink of an Arab!

The third problem was of hair! After all, was it not treachery against the country, a blatant form of antinationalism, to keep one’s hair fashioned in the English style? I instructed the barber to keep only one lock of long hair at the back of my head and shave off the rest. He did exactly that. I had seen images from ancient India showing men with long and lush moustaches. Following their example, I began to grow my moustache. When my friends saw the large moustache on my somewhat small face, they assumed that I had put on a fake one, possibly because I was acting in some play. Forget my friends, when I saw myself in this new look, I began to feel that I had been created not by God, but Shankar, the cartoonist. But I did not lose heart. One has to do all manner of things to be Indian.

An excerpt from a story by Kanhaiyalal Kapoor in ‘Whose Urdu Is It Anyway?: Stories by Non-Muslim Urdu Writers’, edited and translated by Rakhshanda Jalil.

As the posting on BP (and the comments) are pretty fast and furious; my capacity to edit and moderate is getting pretty stretched..