jahāñ shatranj-bāzandah falak ham tum haiñ sab muhre ̤
basān-e shāt̤ir-e nau żauq use muhroñ kī zad se hai

When the sky plays chess, you, me, we’re all chessmen.
Like every beginner, it enjoys breaking the pieces.

Poets, like sovereigns, can suffer under the grandiloquent titles thrust upon them by their votaries. As we have seen, Mir has been assigned the laudatory title of Khudā-e Sukhan, the “God of poetry”. Like many such gestures of praise and applause in the Indian cultural context, this title expresses conventional admiration while deferring critical engagement. It permits free rein to those who would embroider a whimsical portrait of the poet from clichés, apocryphal tales and fanciful anecdotal evidence while ignoring the true import of his poetry.

SR Faruqi diagnoses the problem pithily:

Unfortunately, a fiction about Mir’s life led to a stereotypical assumption in Mir’s criticism. The fiction is that Mir’s life was an unrelieved tale of misery and sorrow. The assumption is that his poetry is the true and consistent expression of this misery. The fiction became possible because of the belief, promoted by colonial educators in the late nineteenth century, that poetry should be the expression of personal emotional states and should be “true” and “natural”. A very firm foundation of both beliefs was laid by Āb-e Hayāt (Water of Life, 1880), an account of Urdu “poets of renown” by Muhammad Husain Azad.

Faruqi offers a choice example of Azad’s florid commentary:

The blossom of delight, or the spring of luxury and pleasure, or the joy of success and union never fell to the lot of Mir sahib. He just went on narrating the sad story of calamity and the sorrow of his ill luck which had been the portion that he brought with him from the time of his birth.

Faruqi situates Azad’s views within the post-1857 literary pedagogy that was introduced into the subcontinent by British scholars, which combined Victorian social piety with Romantic notions of heartfelt sincerity as the motors of lyrical expression. He phrases a crisp verdict on the still-dominant edifice of Urdu criticism that Azad and his younger colleague Hali built: “This tone is symptomatic of the colonial comprador understanding of premodern Urdu poetry…Whatever partial accounts there have been revolve around the myth of Mir rather than the reality of Mir.”

The image of Mir as a man condemned to thwarted love and incurable sadness, promoted as part of this “myth of Mir”, is plainly nonsensical. As we have seen, he participated fully in the social life of Urdu poetry. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine Urdu poetry without a social life, given the centrality of the mushā‘ira and the mehfil to its production, dissemination, and continuity. These cherished gatherings established poets in their careers and their mutual relationships, and accommodated them within a shared lore of witty argument and sabre-sharp repartee. Here, they could relish affectionate camaraderie and seething rivalry, and be transported by heart-stopping recitations and join in ecstatic rounds of applause. What Mir missed in the years of invasion and exile were the joys and consolations of friendship enshrined in sohbat and bazm, the mehfils that he had attended or that he had hosted himself. He found himself diminished without the conviviality of the soulful samā‘ concerts of music and dance at Sufi ribāts or meeting houses, the carousing at one or another maikhānā or tavern, the recitation and discussion of poetry in the qahwa-khānās, the coffee houses of Chandni Chowk.

And while he surely drew on his private anguish in his poetry, it is utterly reductive to present him as absorbed only in his own agony. The testimony of his poems demonstrates that he stood alongside others like himself as well as those less favoured than himself. The critical tendency has been to distil his anxieties about public disorder, opportunistic political arrangements, a collapsing empire, and its system of social and cultural certitudes into proof of a personal crisis of radical uncertainty. I would suggest that Mir articulated, in his poetry, responses to these collective traumas. As Gopi Chand Narang writes, “Mir’s story is not just his own story; it is a testament to the miseries suffered by Delhi as a city and its residents.”

In his poetry, Mir comes across, not as a sovereign and isolated individual, but as a witness and sharer in suffering. Even if his temperament and sympathies were undoubtedly aristocratic, a current of solidarity with his fellow denizens of Delhi runs through his oeuvre. I picked the word “denizens” after a pause, asking myself, “What were they really?” Nominally, they were subjects of the Mughal Empire. As such, they were held hostage, like their Emperor of the moment, by whichever external power controlled him. Unlike him, though, they could voice their discontent and dissent in a number of ways, ranging from satire to street protest, and buffoonery to memoranda of remonstration, in a public sphere that was extending itself in the space vacated by declining imperial sovereignty. Mir’s poetry partakes of this transitional political consciousness, midway between that of the feudal subject and that of the democratic citizen.

My pattern of selection, in this volume, emphasizes Mir’s awareness of, and close engagement with, the political and social shifts of his time and place. While rendering homage to his achievement as a maestro of the ghazal form – with its fastidious conventions and filigreed tropes of a love that could be construed either as erotic or spiritual in impulse – I would also like to present a far more political dimension of Mir’s poetry than is usually represented. He was, in large measure, the poet of a shattered world. The pivotal experience of his life, and the lives of his contemporaries in Delhi, was the long nightmare of the Abdali raids. Or, in a phrase much used by the poet and musician Miyan Zia ud-Din “Zia”, the hañgāma-e Abdali, the chaos unleashed by Abdali.

Mir Taqi Mir’s poetry, translated by Ranjit Hoskote

shāʿir ho mat chupke raho ab chup meñ jāneñ jātī haiñ
bāt karo abyāt paṛho kuchh baiteñ ham ko batāte 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.

(Divān-e Panjum: V.1706.5)

darhamī ḥāl kī hai sāre mire dīvāñ meñ
sair kar tū bhī yih majmūʿah pareshānī kā

Pandemonium reigns across all my books.
Enjoy your tour through this montage of anxieties!

(Divān-e Avval: I.3.4)

kin ne sun sheʿr-e mīr yih nah kahā
kahyo phir hāʾe kyā kahā ṣāḥib

No one who’s heard a poem of Mir’s wouldn’t say:
Say it again, it’s to die for, say it again!

(Divān-e Duvvum: II.775.10)

dil kī vīrānī kā kyā mażkūr hai
yih nagar sau martabah lūṭā gayā

Of the heart’s desolation, what report?
This city’s been looted a hundred times over.

(Divān-e Avval: I.52.4)

ho ḳharābī aur ābādī kī ʿāqil ko tamīz
ham divāne haiñ hameñ vīrān kyā maʿmūr kyā

Let intellectuals tell ruins and peopled places apart.
I’m crazy – to me, what’s desolate, what’s teeming?

(Divān-e Duvvum: II.694.3)

Excerpted with permission from The Homeland’s an Ocean, Mir Taqi Mir, translated from the Urdu by Ranjit Hoskote, Penguin India.