BY AMIR SUHAIL WANI
“Ghani, Behold the darkened days
Of the old man of Canan
As the light of his eyes now
illumines those of Zuleikha”
No sooner had I finished reading these lines from “The Captured Gazelle”, the English rendering of Ghani Kashmir’s Persian Divan that I felt an entire universe of images, meanings and forms opening before my eyes. The fact remains that Ghani, Mulla Muhammad Tahir Ghani, to be precise, is a poet who never fails to surprise his readers by virtue of his poetic subtleties. Almost four centuries separate us from the milieu of Ghani, but time hasn’t made him redundant or irrelevant, but with each passing day, his poetry, as a literary masterpiece continues to conquer new horizons. The fame and the repute he enjoys in Central Asia and other Persian speaking countries requires no mention. He was perhaps conscious of the fact that his verses will travel across geographic contours and thus he said :
“My verses have travelled to Iran
No, not just to Iran, they have travelled the world”
Dr Mudasir Mufti, who has rendered Ghani into English has made a subtle observation about Ghani’s fame among his contemporaries. To quote him “Ghani’s fame during his lifetime is all the more remarkable because the Mughal period witnessed an unprecedented surge in literary activity in India, while Kashmir attracted some of the outstanding talent in Persian from India and Iran. At a time when India had become ‘garden of nightingales’, it required an exceptional poetic talent to gain distinction “. Ghani surely seems to have in possession of the metal that not only earned him a distinction amongst his contemporaries but also secured for him a permanent place in the global literary landscape. His influence has been so much so wide that even a poet like Mirza Abdul Qadir Bedil, remembered as khallakul ma’ana couldn’t resist but bow down to the poetic genius of Ghani. Ghani’s eminent contemporaries like Sa’ib Tabrizi, Kalim Kashani, Jan Muhammad Qudsi and others held him high esteem for his creativity and poetic genius.
Iqbal, in his magnum opus, Javid Nama, in which Iqbal has incorporated the figures of cosmopolitan importance has included a single Kashmiri character and that’s Ghani Kashmir and has remembered Ghani in the most beautiful terms. Elsewhere in his Payam I Mashriq, Iqbal has paid rich tributes to Ghani in the following words :
“Ghani,that melodious nightingale of verse
whose songs resonated in kashmir´s paradise
who kept the door shut while at home
and left it open while away from it
someone said, ‘O soul-stirring bard,
this act of yours leaves all puzzled.’
how well replied he who had no wealth.
no wealth ,except in the realm of meaning.
what friends see me doing is right .
My house guards nothing of value save me
As long as Ghani sits in his house
All his wealth abides in it”
This widespread influence that Ghani has casted upon his successive generations truly qualifies him as a subject of serious and unifocal study. The first impression that a reader gets while stepping into the poetic territory of Ghani is that his poetry is truly a climax of form and essence. He not only knows ‘how to say’, but exactly knows ‘what to say’. The themes that he touches upon and the poetic expressions he adopts to deliver his themes renders a reader baffled. The precarious balance that Ghani maintains between art and thought is not only appreciable and imitable but wondrous too. To quote Shams Ur Rehman Farooqi, a leading contemporary literary critique “Ghani Kashmir, a poet who commanded respect and admiration from Indians to Iranians alike, and about whom Ikhlaq says ‘To this day, there hasn’t been a Mazmoon composing poet like him from the heart-pleasing territory [Kashmir] and in fact none like him has come out of the whole of India’ “. To have a sense of this Mazmoon Composing capability of Ghani, take a look at these few couplets :
Fame eluded my verse till the soul was the body’s prisoner
The fragrant musk found release once the deer was slain)
Transmuted into a shrine’s threshold is every idol of the past
Infidel, come and bow before it
The furnace of sky was short of firewood.
To bake my bread, it stokes itself with my desire
These are canonical ensembles capturing the multivalence and sublimity of Ghani’s poetry. Each of these couplets, like the rest of his poetry don’t open up at once. The element of ambiguity infused in these couplets by virtue of similes, metaphors and pertinent usage of words makes them relevant to any reader. This ‘multiplicity of meaning’ and infinity of interpretations is essential to any work of poetry if it is to distinguish itself from straight prose and Ghani succeeds in warping his poetry with the linen of ambiguity. Dr Mudasir Mufti notes, quote appropriately that “In literary circles, Ghani is recognised as the most outstanding native poet and the representative of a specific style of Persian poetry of this period in Kashmir. He is essentially a Mazmun Afreen, a creator of novel poetic themes and meanings. The ability to create fresh metaphors is the hallmark of all good poetry and Gani possesses a remarkable gift for creating metaphors and similes which draw striking comparisons between apparently dissimilar and disparate situations or objects. His poetry testifies to his imaginative acumen by which he transforms the data of ordinary experience into rich poetic output “.
Ghani, as per researchers, was born in the first decade of seventeenth century in Old City of Srinagar. Ali Jawad Zaidi, while quoting Tareekh I Aazmi has approximated 1040 hijri as his year of birth. While as Muhammad Amin Darab kashmiri rounds off Ghani’s year of birth around 1020 hijri. But Zaidi, in conclusion, has declared both these dates as no more than speculations lacking any historical proof. Ghani was born to an Ashai family who had migrated from Bukhara to Kashmir and were famed for their piety and austerity, the traits that Ghani inherited by and large. Ghani took tutelage under Mulla Mohsin Fani, the poet and scholar par excellence of his era. Ghani gained expertise in the sciences of day, an expertise that would later earn him the epithet Mulla. Zaidi has noted that Ghani was highly proficient in philosophy and the science of medicine. Ghani, it is reported, spend the most of his life in kashmir itself and seems to have travelled outside Kashmir not more than once or twice, an experience that Ghani laments about in his couplets as :
“The scorching winds of India distress me
O Fate, take me to the garden of Kashmir
The heat of exile robs me of peace
Grant me a glimpse of my land’s milky dawn”
As mentioned above Ghani inherited austerity and piety from his ancestors and adopted an utterly simple life style. The chronicler of his Divan and his disciple Muslim notes that Ghani had nothing except paper and pen-case in his disposition. Despite the fact that he had an easy access to royal courts, he always maintained distance from elitism and never employed his poetry in the eulogy of Kings. He seems to have had many means to leave a peaceful and lavish life but as Dr Mudasir Mufti writes that “Almost all Tazkirah writers have reported that Ghani adopted an austere lifestyle, shunning the glamour of the world and embracing Sufi ideal of faqr or poverty”. But unfortunately, Professor Khursheed Ul Islam in his essay on Ghani has utterly miscalculated the attitude and temperament of Ghani and charged him with vices like cowardice, incapability and pessimism.
Ghani, as a “poet – thinker” has been quoted and continues to be quoted by scholars of authority. The references of Ghani that are found here and there in books published from and outside India time and again bears witness to perennial value of Ghani, his Ma’ani aafreeni, creativity and sublime nature. Being a poet from Kashmir, rather being a poet of Kashmir, we as kashmiris share an additional responsibility to understand, evaluate, conserve and propagate his poetry. It is true that our growing alienation towards Persian has blurred the image of Ghani in our collective conscious but that has in no way made Ghani alien to us . A number of institutions, playfields and educational hubs named after him repeatedly remind us of him and his stature. Before Ghani escapes our collective conscious and recedes into the darkness of our unconscious, it is imperative that efforts be made individually and collectively to revive the legacy of legend and in reviving him we shall be reviving our own identity and collective socio cultural heritage.
Amir Suhail Wani is an Engineer., Writer, Research Scholar, Freelance Writer and can be reached at amirkas2016@gmail.com
