Passions. Places. People. Politics. Poetry.

“‘So jaate hain footpath pe akhbaar bichha kar
Mazdoor kabhi neend ki goli nahin khaate…’
(They sleep on the footpath on a newspaper
The labourers never need a sleeping pill…)”
-- Munawwar Rana

In the beginning was the word. You can very well say, in the beginning was the Urdu couplet! Mirza Ghalib wrote: “Such is the deliciousness of speech in what he says… That I understood everything to be what is in my heart…”

Rakhshanda Jalil writes: “For, indeed, the Urdu poet has written something for every occasion, every sentiment, every impulse that flickers through this human heart.

“There may be plenty one might disagree with, but there is always something to be found on nearly every subject. Nothing is beyond the pale, nothing is sacrosanct or questionable.”

Passions. Places. People. Politics. Poetry.

There are love jehads, and love jehads. There are fake love jehads and socially-engineered one-sided brutality against a community, as in Western Uttar Pradesh just before the ‘acche din’ arrived in the harsh and fated summer of 2014.

There are mob-lynchings as public spectacles. In Jharkhand, a man riding a cycle, was lynched for no rhyme or reason on the street. he was beaten so badly by a mob, that you could see his dead soul peeping through his eyes. A man going to sell cattle in a cattle-fair in Jharkhand, was hung on a tree in a desolate area, his terror-stricken son, hiding and watching.

There are school girls, again in the same state, and all this happened during the last BJP regime, returning from school in their uniform, their stoic and grief-stricken mother in their sprawling house, unable to hold her tears. Their father, a flourishing second-hand car dealer, branded as child-lifter, was beaten to death by a mob at midnight.

I have met the families and the survivors, as a reporter; walking through those by-lanes, under watch by the brave vigilant-protagonists of this ‘holy war’, I have often felt that next, perhaps, it might be my turn!

There are talented and aspiring school girls banned from wearing hijab to school. Many of them, thus, are compelled to drop out.

There are brilliant, young Muslim scholars, rotting in prison for almost four years now, simply because they were peaceful dissenters.

There are women, as in Iran, burning their hijabs on the cross-roads of Tehran, openly defying the moral police establishment, cutting their hair in public, holding hands and hugging each other, singing songs of revolution, going round and round in vibrant circles, dancing around a bonfire.

There are hate speeches in that nook, and, in this corner. A Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader made a hate speech, when the mothers and sisters of Shaheen Bagh in Delhi, sat on a protracted, peaceful protest- sit-in for months against the polarising Citizenship (Amendment) Act. He is rewarded soon after, and becomes a respectable MP, and Union Minister.

The mob-lynchers were garlanded by another Central minister, - heroes of the ‘holy war’! Rapists and murderers of Indian citizens, and the little child of Bilkis Bano, smashed to death, were released from prison, given sweets, and facilitated publicly in BJP-ruled Gujarat. This went on and on, relentless, breathless, this grotesque narrative of ‘new India’.

Tufail Chaturvedi wrote: “Don’t let the shadow of hate fall on your mind… This darkness has gobbled up the light of so many…”

Amid this politics of hate, Rakhshanda Jalil started looking for the deeper and nuanced inheritance of an indigenous and pluralist language. It is so deeply, magically and incredibly sublime, and so lovely to hear, that between the saddest and soul-lifting songs, the sweetest would continue to linger for long.

And, yet, now we know how this beautiful language has been so diabolically banished from our shared spaces and public discourse.

Do we hear it on radio anymore, on the All India Urdu Service, fading into waves and resurrecting yet again in those dark, moonless, tide-less summer nights? Those seductive, romantic nights when the young lovers on a shared terrace of a small-town mohalla could easily steal a kiss and no one could see!

Surely, the language, the poetry, and the song, has been a “journey of discovery”, often solo, often bathed in the richness of its texture, fibre, fabric, silences and substance.

She argues that she instinctively felt that seldom do poets fall to bigotry, prejudice and shallow, sectarian dogmatism. A poet is not a Goebellsian propagandist, a post-truth medium of prejudice and fake news.

A poet is the messenger, the medium, the message. A poet is both catharsis and anti-catharsis. A cobweb of contradictions and a symphony of reconciliation.

“I found myself on a self-appointed crusade to excavate how diverse the concern of the Urdu poet has always been, and how Urdu poetry is ‘not’ poetry by Muslims for Muslims about Muslims, nor is it chiefly concerned with the travails of the ‘shama’ and ‘parvana’… or the ‘gul-o-bulbul’… as it is often erroneously assumed.”

Hence, she discovered that there is a huge treasure of Urdu poetry penned by Sikh and Hindu writers. In the same vein, several Muslim writers have written poems on Hindu festivals, Diwali, Holi, Janmashtami, Basant, and also, Guruparab and Christmas. Hence, there are poems on Ram, Krishna, Shiva,Guru Nanak, Buddha, Mahavir and Jesus Christ written by Muslim poets.

Indeed, as in the multiple histories of three hundred ‘Ramayanas’ (as written by A. K. Ramanujan, ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation’). She discovered that there are “several hundred versions” of the ‘Ramayana’ in Urdu; the best known are ‘Ulfat ki Ramayana’ and ‘Rahmat ki Ramayana’.

Hence this fabulous book of feeling: ‘Love in the Time of Hate -- in the Mirror of Urdu’. Smelling of ancient bark, fallen leaves, dry petals between teenage love-letters, these are 425 pages of rigorous and meticulous research, dedicated to a language which is as beautiful, and as permanent and ephemeral, as love.

“While you hold it in your hands, now is the result of many years of explorations; sometimes mindfully and purposefully, sometimes serendipitously discovering hidden facets. Over the years, I have marveled afresh at the love and tenacity of purpose of the Urdu poet: love for his/her motherland, its richness and diversity, and his/her relentless, almost missionary zeal to express that love.

“It seemed important and timely to pluck these scattered thoughts, especially at a crucial time in our history as a nation, and as a people… …What better way to counter fear than with inclusion? Or, hate with love?”

Her people are etched in our collective memory: Dilip Kumar, Lata Mangeshkar, Subhash Chandra Bose, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, Bhagat Singh, Rani Lakshmi Bai, Tipu Sultan, Majaz, Akbar Allahabadi, Hasrat Mohani, Ghalib.

Then there are the spiritual icons: Shiva, Buddha, Mahavir, Krishna, Husain. They are not the ‘other’. They are all us, in us, in our aesthetic and political subconscious, like a pristine and pure river without a shore. Even stones and trees are worshipped in this country.

Sarshar Sailani writes: “It is the intermingling of colours and fragrances that make a garden… If there’s only us, there can be no us and there be no you if there’s only you…”

“Like his colleague and childhood friend, Raj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar was born (on December 11, 1922) in the fabled Qissa Khwani Bazaar (the story-tellers’ marketplace) in Peshawar, and words were to remain his life-long riends. To be precise, words and silences.

“Like the storytellers of yore, he knew how to modulate his voice (‘lehje ka utaar-chadhaav’), how to drop to the lowest timbre, when to intersperse words with long pauses, how to use silences, as much as words as an artiste’s tool. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say that words, or dialogue-delivery, would be Dilip Kumar’s trademark as an actor in a career spanning over five decades.”

The actor was born Muhammad Yusuf Khan to a Pathan fruit merchant’s family. The author narrates an anecdote when the thespian, in a campaign meeting during elections in Badaun,UP, opened his immaculate speech with the following words: “[Hum aur haap aksar andhere mein milte hain; aaj pehli baar roshni mein aap se mulaqaat ho rahi hain’. ( You and I often meet in the dark, today, for the first time we are meeting in the light.)”

Trained in English and Urdu vocabulary, he was extremely popular in the ‘mushaira’ (Urdupoet’s gathering), as a chief guest in India and abroad. The crowd loved his opening remarks, measured and refined. Sometimes, he would use rhetoric in florid Urdu, followed by the unanimous chorus of ‘wah wah’!

And who were his favourite poets? Faiz Ahmed Faiz, of course. Gulzar recalls his love for Nazeer Akbarabadi, and the actor could quote him from memory. A story, plot or film-script would inevitably have interesting interludes with Dilip Kumar reciting Urdu poetry. In one such session in Bangalore, he regaled Gulzar with the poetry of Akbarabadi, an 18 th Century Agra-born poet. Time would cease to move as many decades passed by, in this slow, melodic rendition of verse.

A poet is eclectic, almost hesitant and unsure, often vulnerable and fragile. She/he looks at culture with the kaleidoscopic of a post-rain evening rainbow. There is never anything black and white. There are many twilight-zones, in myriad hues, instincts, emotions: vermilion-vastness, brick-red maroon, saffron-exile, orange-fires (not hell-fires), peacock-pristine blue, silent-whites, light-eyes-brown, eyes twinkling like shooting stars.

Walt Whitman wrote: “Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself
I am large, I contain multitudes…”

There are places. Like a railway station tells about the cuisine and language of a region. Half-sleep, at midnight, you have heard the train cross the river. Now you must hear the language of the night, and taste the food of the place.

There are the ‘marsiyas’ of Lucknow, the ode to the deepest memories of sorrow, sacrifice and suffering. ‘There is ‘Bangaal ka Jaadu’ and ‘Jai Kali Kalkatte waali’.

There is Banaras, the ‘Kaaba of Hindostan’. There is slow intoxication of the ‘maikhana’; and, then, there is Taj Mahal, the monument of love, ‘a teardrop on the cheek of eternity’.

There are passions, and passions. Playful, illegitimate, secret passions. There is that early winter longing created by the haar-singhar, when the nip has just about arrived in the air. It’s the beginning of the festive season. The beginning of short days and long nights.

“Much has been made of the ‘Male Gaze’ in literature and the depiction of the woman in Urdu literature, and poetry in particular. But, what happens when the woman is not an object of desire, but a subject of the purest, most tender love? When the woman is not a wife or beloved, but a daughter, what then?” Rakhshanda Jalil writes about the phenomena of the ‘poet-mother’.

Fatima Hasan, for instance, reaffirms her daughter’s fundamental right to live her own life in her own terms, celebrating her self-identity, empowerment and liberation. She is destiny’s daughter, but she knows how to control her destiny: “‘Meri beti duniya ke naqshe mein Apni marzi ke Rangon ko bharna seekh gayi…’(In the map of the world, my daughter… has learnt… to fill out colours… according to her wishes…)”

Forugh Farrokhzad died so young, and so beautiful and brilliant, at 32. She died on February 14, 1967, in a car accident in Tehran. She was a natural rebel, a modernist, a non-conformist. She wrote in a poem called ‘Sin’, symbolic and transparent:

“It’s flowers’ bloodstained history that committed me to life
the flowers’ bloodstained history, do you hear?”

In another poem she wrote:
“In a room the size of loneliness
My heart’s the size of love…”

A Pakistani poet, Parveen Shakir, “known more for her feminine rather than overtly feminist poetry,” wrote a poem called ‘Forough Farrokhzad ke Naam’. The poem is basically a challenge to the power establishment.

“Tell the emperor’s favourite
That the religious scholars have today affirmed
That the crop of sinners is ripe for harvesting…”

Rakhshanda Jalil writes, “The poem then goes to say that all the executioners in the land are ready and waiting, for one signal, when and where are hands and tongues to be chopped off?

“Where are the doors to gainful employment to be closed? Where is the hunger for comforts to be killed? Where will men get a free license to wrongly accuse women of adultery? Where will they be stoned? Where will little girls be married off to men four times their age…?”

She writes, on a little, white flower with an orange stem, a flower which falls in the night and early morning, and spreads on earth like a canopy of living stars, a flower depicted in mythology; a flower which would become a fragrant bed of love for lovers of a lost age: “At a time when high-end uber-luxe companies selling indie beauty products, build on the evocative power of words, the parijat and the haar-singaar is being used as a ‘brand’ for body mists, after-bath oils, sickening body powders, et al, in a bid to bottle its elusive fragrance.

“Called by different names, this white and orange flower is inextricably intertwined with nostalgia, with memories of a distant childhood, with homes that once had a a haar-singhaar tree in their ‘sehn’ (backyard).

“For those living in concrete jungles in cities, this flower-laden tree is a symbol of a lost age. It is only appropriate, therefore, that the haar-singhaar tree is often planted beside the grave of a loved one. Begum Akhtar’s grave in Pasand Bagh, Lucknow, for instance, has a haar-singhaar tree that sheds its fragrant load over the Begum, sleeping the entire sleep.”

This wonderful book with a beautiful cover should be translated in all languages, in India and the world. It is a precious museum of forgotten memories. An authentic tribute to a great, Indian language. A must read. So that we still remember how to love. And listen. And read.

Love in the Time of Hate
Rakhshanda Jalil
Simon and Schuster
Pg: 427
Price: Rs 699