Nind ati nahin, kambakht divani, acha!

Apni biti koi kah aaj kahani acha.

I can’t sleep – come here, you crazy wretch!

Come tell me about your troubles today, old nurse

(Sa’adat Yar Khan Rangin)

Teri faryad karun kis se zanakhi tu ne

Yih meri jan jalayi kih Ilahi taubah

To whom can I complain of you, my dear?

God, but hasn’t your harshness

Scorched my soul!

(Insha Allah Khan Insha)

Most of us think of the Urdu ghazal as the quintessential poetry of romance, and for nearly three hundred years it has figured among the most popular art forms of the subcontinent. Its highly conventionalized aesthetics can tend toward the complex, metaphysical and philosophical while also satisfying less arcane romantic impulses. As a result, this poetic genre simultaneously enjoys high prestige and great popularity. The ghazal’s aesthetics are derived from Perso-Arabic Islamicate literature and the genre was developed mostly by Muslim poets under the patronage of Muslim royalty in North India; but it is claimed and consumed by diverse audiences across the lines of class, community, international boundaries and the territory of south Asia. While its origins are pre-modern, an indication of the form’s tremendous vitality in our own times as its manifestation (some would say its egregious corruption) in the ubiquitous and extraordinarily popular modern film song. Many of the most successful songwriters in the film industry have been Urdu poets. Yet despite Urdu’s enduring prestige as a literary language, and despite how mainstream the ghazal is in contemporary South Asia, most of its audience has little formal knowledge of the genre’s conventions and history. In order to draw attention to the (perhaps otherwise invisible) gender politics of pre-modern ghazal, and to appreciate the issues inherent in comparing rekhta with rekhti, a brief introduction will be useful.

Stylistic Convention of the Urdu Ghazal

What the average enthusiast is likely to know about the ghazal is that it is a love lyric composed in two-line verses (she’rs); that its main subject is an idealized love (‘ishq) and its [anti-]hero-narrator a lover, or ‘ashiq. Ghazal she’rs tend to speak either to, or about, the beloved (mahbub or ma’shuq), who plays the role of the ‘ashiq’s antagonist, and who is generally elusive, aloof, even cruel. As one critic has observed, ‘the proverbial inaccessibility of the beloved [is] the cornerstone of the ghazal’ (Sadiq 34). ‘Ishq is thus essentially a love experienced in separation, characterized by pain and suffering, even unto death. The pain and suffering necessarily undergone by the ghazal’s ‘ashiq is understood to be ennobling, and the challenges of ‘ishq are thought to be at the core of the human condition. To strive toward negotiating them is what elevates the ‘ashiq to [anti-]hero status. Below are a few representative examples by the great Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869). In the first she’r the ‘ashiq speaks from beyond the grave, reporting on his thwarted quest while at the same time reaffirming its value:

Yih na thi hamari qismat kih visal-e yar hota

Agar aur jite rahte yahi intizar hota

It was not my fate to unite with the Beloved; yet

Had I gone on living, I’d have kept up this same waiting.

The ‘ashiq would have kept up ‘this same waiting’ because there is no more worthwhile pursuit for a human being than to seek union with the beloved. He would have kept up this same waiting also because it is not the beloved’s role in this literature to actually grant the ‘ashiq his heart’s desire – only to promise to do so and then withhold or renege on the promise. And if we understand the beloved to be divine – which is another conventional possibility – we know that humans ‘meet their maker’ only at or after death, so it would be logically impossible for the ‘ashiq to have united with the beloved during his life. The initiated audience would understand all these layers of meaning.

The second verse expresses what might be called a kind of masochism, also conventional in this poetry:

‘Ishq se tabi’at ne zist ka maza paya

Dard ki dava payi, dard-i be-dava paya

From love my being gleaned

Existence’s peculiar pleasure:

A remedy for pain and pain incurable.

Here, the pain is remedied (if only temporarily) by the joy of hope to which the beloved’s promises of a tryst give rise; while the incurable pain is love’s underlying status quo, the pain of living with the disappointment of all those unfulfilled promises. That status quo is elaborated upon a bit in the third verse below, wherein the ‘ashiq alludes to the ma’shuq’s cavalier distance, but uses ambiguity as a way of avoiding a direct accusation of blame. In this abject state the ghazal’s ‘ashiq still, ideally, refrains from expressing outright anger or frustration – not to invoke the ma’shuq’s fearsome wrath – (though there are she’rs in which he comes very close):

Ham ne mana kih taghafal na karoge lekin

Khak ho jayenge ham tum ko khabar hone tak

I’ve accepted [your assurance] that you won’t be neglectful

But I could turn to dust before news of it reached you!

News of the ‘ashiq’s demise – his turning to dust – might be the only thing that could melt the beloved’s heart, but by then what use would it be? Whereas neglect is absolutely central to the cruelty of the (human( beloved’s conventional persona, neglect on the part of the Divine Beloved would occur not through harsh cruelty so much as the indifference born of the profound separation between the human and the divine. In either case, the verse underlines the distance between the lover and the beloved. While it causes the ‘ashiq despair, the beloved may be only mildly aware of it, if at all. And since the ghazal is really a poetry focused on the ‘ashiq’s point of view, the reasons behind the neglect are ultimately irrelevant to his suffering.

The Issue of Gender

In each of the three verses just presented, the identity of the beloved could be human or divine, male or female, and the experience and sentiments expressed would still ring true. But note that it is conventional for both the ‘ashiq and the ma’shuq to bear grammatically masculine gender, though the emotions expressed in the ghazal are not thought to be exclusively male. On the contrary, they are understood to be universal, and this idea is jealously guarded, as the ensuing discussion will show.

The average ghazal or film song enthusiast may or may not know that in former times Urdu poetry was called rekhta (the ‘scattered’ idiom), because it was expressed in a combination of Persian and local vernacular languages of north India. Almost certainly s/he will not know about a sub-genre of poetry called rekhti, which is said to be rekhta’s counterpart, and which is the subject of this essay. Defined simply by Ralph Russel as ‘a rather curious genre of poetry in which the male poet speaks in the role of a woman’ (Russell 123), various other definitions of rekhti will be offered below as the discussion develops.

Rekhti is interesting because, manifesting a grammatically feminine narrator (and usually a female addressee) it serves to shed light on problematic gender politics within the world of Urdu culture, something of which both ghazal/film song aficionados and scholars remain largely unaware. Because so much of ‘Culture’ is so profoundly and ubiquitously gendered, hegemonic reading and reception conventions associated with the ghazal actually work to render its gender politics invisible to huge audiences. It is possible for lifelong devotees of this art form, unaware of the existence of rekhti, to never ask why the feminine gender is never used for either the ‘ashiq or the mahbub in rekhta. They would almost certainly not describe the ghazal as a poetry of male homosexual love, and the Bombay film genre through which so many of us are inducted into the ghazal’s aesthetic is hardly a genre focused on celebrations of homosexual love.

Yet we seem to find the absence of the feminine remarkable. Why? This kind of cultural and social invisibility, hardly exclusive to the subcontinent, has been challenged widely in feminist scholarship over the past few decades, and the result has been a sea change in standard critical thinking in many fields. Unhappily, scholars and amateur consumers of Urdu have not been moved to make such changes in their own ways of thinking about their subject. Indeed one distinguished critic has suggested that the relevance of gender to the Urdu ghazal is primarily a bothersome concern of foreigners; and further avers that the metaphorical force of ghazal convention precludes, or renders irrelevant, realities such as socio-cultural constructions, which give rise to literary conventions. He goes on to suggest that intellectual concerns with these constructions are driven by the desire to judge the ‘political correctness’ or ‘moral soundness’ of a culture’s literary output. But in sorting out the complex cultural history of Urdu love poetry, we ought not fail to distinguish between colonial discourses that have shaped discussions of Urdu poetry a hundred years ago and the intellectual discourses of our own time; nor should we equate critical reading (through the lens of gender or otherwise) with lack of appreciation for one’s subject or with the desire to denigrate rather than enhance our understanding of it. A look at even marginalized Urdu poetic genres illuminates the infrastructure of gender in the mainstream ghazal, and offers an opportunity to learn about the bygone world(s) to which we are heir.

(Extract from “Gender Politics and the Urdu Ghazal: Exploratory Observations on Rekhta vs. Rekhti”. Samyukta : A Journal of Women’s Studies, Vol III, No.1, Jan 2003)