New Delhi: While reading the poetry of one of the greatest Urdu poets, Mirza Ghalib, art historian Ranjit Hoskote stumbled upon a verse — “Reḳhte ke tumhi ustad nahi ho Ghalib, kehte hain agle zamane mein koi Mir bhi tha. Ghalib, tough luck, you’re not the only game in town. They say there used to be some guy called Mir.” This opened the world of Mir Taqi Mir’s poetry to Hoskote, leading him on a journey of translating the poet’s work.
Hoskote, a 55-year-old art historian and translator, said he realised that unlike Ghalib, Mir was not “present to us”. While everyone has always been familiar with, Ghalib’s work, majorly through movies, theatre, and music, the historian said Mir could not achieve that level of prominence until today. Suddenly, Hoskote was “struck by the fact that Ghalib, who didn’t think highly of any other poet, thought highly of Mir”.
For years, the art historian read Mir’s poetry and slowly found out that he was misunderstood as a poet of heartbreaks and longing for love. During his research, Hoskote discovered Mir’s versatility, from epic ghazals to masnavi consisting of a variety of topics based on societal issues and even politics. This initially led him to share translations of Mir’s verses on social media, as part of ‘Project Mir’, and later, it took the shape of his recently released book, ‘The Homeland’s an Ocean’.
“So I decided to go in search of some guy called Mir,” Hoskote told the audience during a conversation about his book on the evening of 29 September at New Delhi’s India Habitat Centre (IHC). For Hoskote, translating Mir’s poetry has been nothing short of feeling “mystical”.
“I feel that translation is always an act of learning, of apprenticeship. But there’s something within the language that is actually the murshid (guide) and you are its murid (apprentice),” he said.
Smitten by his poetry, Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar had made Ghalib his court poet. But Ghalib’s fame did not end there. Long after the decline of the Mughal Empire, his poetry remained alive through cinema, music, theatre, and books.
Ghalib has ruled the Delhi poetry scene for four decades now. From Gulzar’s 1988 television drama series ‘Mirza Ghalib’ starring Naseeruddin Shah and Pavan K Varma’s seminal book ‘Ghalib: The Man, The Times’ in 1989, the poet’s life and poetry inspired numerous works over the years.
But of late, a cultural quest is prompting people to look beyond Ghalib. Books, events, and performances are now increasingly celebrating Mir, indicating that he has emerged from the long shadow of Ghalib walas. His poetry is understudied and his legacy still unexplored.
Mir’s work stands out for its use of Braj Bhasha, Awadhi and even Khari Boli, said Hoskote.
“His language was so incredibly different from Ghalib’s language. Ghalib’s language was highly Persian but Mir did not use complex isafat (a Persian grammatical structure), for one thing, which was a bit of a relief. In fact, he even mocks Persian in some verses,” he added.
Why Mir?
According to Hoskote, the simple act of reading Mir’s poetry brings people in a “space of resistance”. It unites people against the forces that compel them to remain in linguistic and cultural silos. “I think it’s one way in which a polarised present can really be resisted or questioned, in any case,” he said.
From Mir’s Urdu Calendar to Deewan-e-Mir, Hoskote immediately fell in love with the liveliness and simplicity of the poet’s work, which came as “a bit of a relief’.
After years of reading and translating Mir’s work, Hoskote used several adjectives to describe the poet’s writing style. “He’s not always in a stately, melancholic kind of an attitude to the world. He mocks himself. He’s self-ironic. He’s grim. He’s pensive. He can be joyous. He can be obscene,” he said.
Born in Agra, Mir later moved to Delhi and became a part of a different kind of culture. He was forced into exile on multiple occasions during the invasions of Delhi. Then after moving to several places, Mir ended his days in Lucknow. “So here was someone who’s clearly attentive to a whole range of different languages,” said Hoskote.
He further explained how Mir wrote about different things at different stages in his life. The third part of the poet’s ‘Zikr-e-Mir’, an autobiographical narrative, was actually a series of ribald anecdotes and risque jokes, said Hoskote. It was astounding for a lot of people, especially those who have read Mir’s writing on the collapse of the Mughal Empire.
During Mir’s lifetime, Hoskote said, Delhi went through volatile periods including periodic raids and eventually the fall of the Mughal Empire. Yet, he said, yet there was a cultural liveliness, evident in mehfils, Sufi gatherings and advances in music and dance. “He’s fundamentally a refugee. He’s a displaced person. He undergoes the experience of diaspora,” Hoskote said, adding that Mir’s experiences were somewhat in sync with the experiences of people existing today.
“I began to see why he’s such a contemporary to us. The world is full of people who have been pushed out of their homelands and are being bombarded in what used to be their own country and no longer is,” he said.
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Ghalib vs Mir
Before the conversation led to a question-answer segment between the author and Senior Congress leader Salman Khurshid, Hoskote narrated some of the verses by Mir from his book.
“Shair ho mat chupke raho ab chup mein jaaney jaati hain, baat karo abyat padho kuch baaten humko batate raho (You’re a poet. Don’t be silent. Lives are lost under cover of silence. Speak up. Read a couple of lines. Read us verses. Keep talking to us).”
Soon, the conversation went back to where it started – Ghalib’s verses about Mir. Khurshid asked Hoskote how Ghalib eclipsed Mir and what made Ghalib more accessible than him. Ghalib lived in the age of print modernity, Hoskote replied. “He was able to edit and publish. He exercised editorial control on what was put out, how it was seen,” he said.
Moreover, the author said that “he (Mir) may have been killed with praise of the wrong kind”, often presented as the poet of unrequited love, the poet of sorrow. This, he added, is usually based on how a certain image of a poet and his poetry get perpetuated and is taken to be gospel until read against the grain. “It was the sheer presence of Ghalib in popular culture as a poet in India. And in the Hindi movies and their music,” he said.
One thing that was common between the poets was their predatory nature and the fact that both took great pride in their ancestral roots, noted Hoskote. They would go to impossible and sometimes self-defeating extremes to uphold their status — even when they lacked patronage, he added.
“So in a way, it was also, for me, a journey into looking at the political economy that these poets inherited. We prize them for their aesthetic gifts, but they also lived in times of uncertainty and stress and were participants in these larger collective struggles”.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)