LIFE, TIMES AND POETRY OF MIR-TAQI-MIR
S R Sharma
Partridge
Rs 739 (Paperback); 219 pages
Let me be brutally honest at the outset: don't buy this book; it is a big, big disappointment.
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Urdu poetry has always fascinated us in South Asia. Though reduced nowadays to Bollywood caricatures and having suffered a crushing blow owing to Partition, the Urdu language and its poetry occupy a pride of place in the hearts of South Asians, especially in North India and Pakistan.
And the credit for the "experiment of Urdu" - of hammering together a whole new tongue from Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Khariboli, of developing distinct poetic and prosaic genres in it and making them available to patricians and plebians alike - goes to the masters of Urdu. Men like Khusro, Mir (the subject of the book under review), Sauda, Zauq, Momin, Daagh, Ghalib and Zafar used the best of the Urdu language to capture the human experience in words.
But what was the life of these veterans like? Under what conditions and circumstances did they write such wondrous verse? What was it that influenced the themes in their work?
These questions were in my mind when I saw the cover of S R Sharma's book in a Flipkart search. Thinking that the book would help me unravel the life of Mir, I placed an order - and have suffered since.
The very first problem, I noticed, was in the edition. What I had received was the paperback edition, priced at Rs 739. As I read through the text, I discovered that some parts (Appendix II and Appendix IV) to which the author alluded were missing. A search on Amazon's website revealed that, in addition to the paperback, there was a hardcover edition, which was much thicker and priced at Rs 1,285. I understood that the missing parts were in the hardcover edition. I felt cheated.
The literary quality of the book is another sad story. The most glaring aspect is the text. Mr Sharma seems to have completely forgotten to use the services of a proofreader. The text appears as though it has not been gone through or read even once by any person other than the author. Liberties have been taken in matters of language, punctuation, grammar, spelling and style.
Having said that, the book does have some redeeming features. The first part of the book consists of four chapters dealing with Mir's life, the times he lived in, the main themes in his poetry and its comparison with the works of other poetic greats. The second part is a translation of Mir's autobiography, Zikr-e-Mir, into English.
The book shines in bits and pieces. Take, for instance, the author's use of "Roman Urdu", in which he has written Mir's verses in the book before giving translations. Consider, also, his comparison of Mir's couplets and sonnets with Amir Khusro's and Kabir's dohas, and Baba Bulleh Shah's kafis, besides the poetry of his contemporary Sauda and successor, Ghalib, as well as the Sufi master Rumi.
Mr Sharma delves into the various themes of Mir's compositions in chapter 3, section A, and comes across an individual who was more inclined towards Sufi mysticism rather than towards orthodox Islam. Part of the reason for this was Mir's background. His father, Ali Muttaqi, and uncle, Amanullah, were dervishes, who impressed on him at a very early age the importance of living a life shorn of worldly pleasures. Thus, themes of divine love and opposition to clerical and organised religion figure prominently. Mir lived in an age of internecine battles and warfare. Thus, sorrow, suffering and the transience of human existence also appear in his compositions. Mir, Mr Sharma notes, is primarily known as the poet of "Ah" (pathos), in contrast to his contemporary Sauda, who is the poet of "Wah" (ebullience).
However, I failed to come across couplets that reveal Mir's bisexual preferences. Married, with a son and daughter, Mir was famous for his dalliances with young men, an accepted norm of the time. These, however, do not feature in Mr Sharma's book.
The translation of Zikr-e-Mir in the book's second part details Mir's entire life (1722-1810). This was an important time in medieval Indian history. The mighty Mughal Empire had begun to wane after Aurangzeb's death. Groups like the Sikhs, Marathas, Rajputs and Jats were rebelling against what was left of the empire. Foreign invaders like Nadir Shah of Iran and Ahmad Shah Abdali of Afghanistan devastated northern India. And amid all this, the East India Company was slowly advancing towards Delhi. All this figures in Zikr-e-Mir. Mr Sharma has also added footnotes from Sir Jadunath Sarkar's Fall of the Mughal Empire.
In summary, Mr Sharma's book falls painfully short of becoming a noteworthy addition to the canon on Mir. Perhaps the author himself never expected that. He admits in the preface: "The purpose of this study is not academic."
Readers who are more interested in Mir should instead read the works of earlier biographers such as C M Naim, Frances Pritchett, Anna Suvorova and Shamsur Rahman Faruqi. Mr Sharma's work, unfortunately, does not hold a lamp to any of these.
