CHINAR SHADE : MIR TAQI MIR IS A UNIVERSAL POET

MIR TAQI MIR ( 1723-1810)

I consider Mir, Ghalib and Firaq three gems of Urdu poetry . Without doubt, I find them tallest amongst Urdu poets of India. They transformed the Urdu poetry into a profound vehicle for human emotion, philosophy, and modern consciousness.

Dr Gopi Chand Narang calls Mir "Urdu's first complete poet" and Khuda-e-Sukhan, and says his whole 40-year work was to correct the myth that Mir is just a simple, sad love poet. For Narang, Mir was a multidimensional "poet of countless delights" whose simplicity was deceptive, he was the first ustaad poet who took Rekhta, an imperfect evolving medium, and turned it into a gem-like, highly aesthetic language, and he was not just a love poet but a metaphysical poet par excellence who created a rainbow-like synthesis of Bhakti and Sufi thought.

Mir lived in Ganga-Jamuni Delhi where his friends, ustads, and neighbours were Hindu Khatris and Kayasths. He wrote like a Bhakta with words like , Kashka (tilak) , Deir ( temple ), Buut( idol) Shyam( Sri Krishna ). He celebrated Holi, Diwali and Basant in his verses, and his closest poetic circle was mixed, so for him Hindu was not other, it was his own city's other language of love.Mir's Urdu is full of pure Hindi-Braj words because Rekhta was still half-Hindi then : he uses Papiha, Chaat, Chapla-chapak, Jhula, Hooli, Deep, Diya, Sindoor, Tikka, Kajra, Bindiya, Bansuri, Jamuna, Ber, Phag, Patanga, Chah constantly, which is why his Ghazal feels more Hindustani than Persian.

Mir doesn't say Vedanta but his Wahdat-ul-Wujud is pure Advaita : that all is one, that God is not separate but manifested everywhere as beauty, as in "labrez jalwa us ka saara jahan mein" and "har zarra us ka jalwa", which is why Gopi Chand Narang calls him a Vedantic poet in Sufi dress where the lover, beloved and love become one reality.

Apart from metaphysics, Mir is called Khuda-e-Sukhan for his deceptive simplicity where rough Rekhta becomes pure, conversational Urdu with no Persian showmanship, for being the poet of Sheher-Ashob who made Delhi's looting by Nadir Shah and his own homeless life the same lament, for his Karuna where there is no complaint against God or beloved but only pure surrender and weeping, for his gender-fluid idea of love where the beloved is sometimes a boy, sometimes a but-e-Hindu, sometimes God itself, and for his music of sighs with short beher and words like aah and haaye that makes his Ghazal feel like a song you remember, not a verse you read.

Mir did not write in modern Urdu, he wrote in 18th century Dehlvi Rekhta, when Urdu was still being born. It was the raw dialect of old Delhi, half Hindi and half Persian, before Lucknow made it polished and formal, so his words like yaan, etna, and his mixing of Persian phrases with pure Hindi verbs sound strange today. His grammar and vocabulary belong to a Delhi that no longer exists. Mir brings a different feel of Urdu of his age .See this couplet :

"Aafaaq ki manzil se gaya kaun salamat

Asbaab luta raah mein yaan har safari ka"

Who has ever returned safe from the journey to the horizons?

On this very road, every traveller is robbed of all he carries."

This couplet is not about travel in any ordinary sense. It is about the fundamental condition of existence. Mir chooses the word Aafaaq with deliberate grandeur. Aafaaq means horizons, the outermost limits of what the eye can see and the mind can imagine. By calling it a manzil, a destination, he turns the whole of life into a journey towards an unreachable edge. Every human being is a safari, a traveller on this road, whether he wishes to be or not.

The question 'Gaya kaun salamat ' is rhetorical and absolute. The answer is no one. No traveller returns from that destination intact. This is not a complaint but a statement of law. To go towards the horizon is to be undone. The body ages, youth departs, certainties crumble. In Sufi thought this is the necessary loss called fana, the annihilation of the self. Mir does not dress it in piety. He states it as fact.

Then comes the second line which is more brutal. Asbaab luta. Asbaab means not only luggage but all the apparatus with which we arm ourselves for life. Our plans, our wealth, our learning, our loves, our pride, our very identity. Mir says these are looted on the road itself, yaan, right here, in plain sight. There is no bandit to blame. The road itself loots you.

Thus the couplet offers a terrible liberation. If loss is inevitable, then clinging is futile. The traveller who understands that his Asbaab will be taken travels lighter. He is not shocked when grief arrives. Mir does not offer consolation. He offers clarity. In British understanding we might call this a stoic realisation, but Mir makes it more intimate. You came with nothing, you will be stripped of everything, and only then will you have completed the journey. That is why this verse still wounds after centuries, because every heart knows it to be true.

Firaq Gorakhpuri holds Mir in high esteem because he saw in him the most Indian and the most human poet. Firaq felt Ghalib was a great thinker but Mir was a great sufferer, and Firaq himself lived a life of personal heartbreak, so he connected with Mir's real, lived pain over borrowed philosophy. He also believed Mir's simple Hindustani Rekhta was far harder to achieve than Persian complexity, and called him, 'the only poet whose wounded heart would be heard for centuries'.

Amongst many notable admirers of Mir, Nehru remains tallest because while others like Ghalib, Firaq and Gopi Chand Narang admired Mir as a poet, Nehru admired him as a civilization. For Nehru, Mir was not just Khuda-e-Sukhan but a living witness to the fall of Delhi, a poet who refused Persian courts and chose the language of the street, whose Ganga-Jamuni pain of Bhakti and Sufi mixed together became the perfect metaphor for the secular, wounded, composite India Nehru wanted to build.

Hindi poets came to Mir late through Firaq Gorakhpuri, the Allahabad professor who called Mir greater than Ghalib and taught him to Hindi writers; after him Chhayavadi poets like Sumitranandan Pant and Nirala loved Mir's Braj-like natural simplicity, Harivansh Rai Bachchan often quoted him in his autobiography, and modern Hindi poets like Kedarnath Singh and Ashok Vajpeyi admire him as India's first poet of the city and of Delhi's pain.

Mir is great because he did not decorate sorrow, he spoke it in its purest form. He took Rekhta, a common bazaar language that the elites looked down upon, and gave it a soul so deep that it could carry the weight of a ruined city, a lost love and an absent God all at once. He had seen Delhi burn, his home looted, his world end, so his poetry is not imagination, it is memory. He writes with such bare simplicity that you feel he is not writing a sher but confessing your own heart to you. And that is why even Ghalib, the most brilliant of all, had to bend his head before him and say:

"Rekhta ke tum hi ustaad nahi ho Ghalib

kehte hain agle zamane mein koi Mir bhi tha"

(You are not the only master of Rekhta, Ghalib,

They say there was a Mir too, in the times gone by.)

( Avtar Mota )

I like this portrait of Mir. Mir is shown in a burnt orange jama, alone in a bare grey room. He is seated on a white masnad, smoking a huqqa, but he is not looking at the smoke. His long pipe points out of the small wooden window to a garden outside ; lush, manicured, full of cypress and blossom, but completely out of reach.

The painters of Delhi and Lucknow in Mir's time painted this mood again and again , the man at the window. After Nadir Shah and Abdali sacked Delhi, the poets and nobles had nothing left but to sit in empty rooms and look at a paradise that was lost.