For the Urdu poet Abdul Manan Bhat, choosing a poetic form is choosing a world of possibilities. As a native of Kashmir living in Philadelphia, he writes poetry about exile, loss, and love—and most of the time, he does so using one of the oldest poetic forms alive today: the ghazal.
The ghazal emerged as a form of love poetry in the Umayyad Caliphate in the seventh century. Well over a millennium later, it has spread around the world, finding its way into various cultures and literary traditions—adapting but never becoming obsolete. And for some poets, including Bhat, this ancient form remains one of the most fitting for their work.
“Poetry doesn’t change the world,” Bhat says. “It doesn’t end occupation. But it imagines a time that such a thing could happen.”
“Poetry doesn’t change the world,” Bhat says. “It doesn’t end occupation. But it imagines a time that such a thing could happen.”
Traditional ghazals are laments about lost love, poems of unfulfilled longing, written by a lover to an absent beloved. They take the form of a series of couplets that sit like beads on a string: each one standing alone, complete in itself, without necessarily connecting logically to the next. Yet the ghazal is a rhythmic, sometimes musical, poem in which each couplet ends with the same rhyme, so where logic may not hold it together, form does.
After its rise among Arab poets, the ghazal took root in the Persian world and evolved into a major literary form. Over the course of centuries, it continued to spread across the globe, across languages, and across time—east into South Asia, west into Al-Andalus, and by the 20th century, into the U.S. Today, poets keep the ghazal alive around the world—preserving the form as a vessel for self-expression, a tool for activism, and as a bridge to each other and the places they come from.
Today, poets keep the ghazal alive around the world—preserving the form as a vessel for self-expression, a tool for activism, and as a bridge to each other and the places they come from.
An Ancient Vessel for Modern Ideas
Bhat finds himself drawn to the ghazal for its character, the way it centers around the “haunting pleasure of recalling what is lost.” He says, “It’s this combination of pleasure and remembrance and absence.”
But the loss and absence in his poems have nothing to do with mourning a beloved, as they do in traditional ghazals. Since leaving Kashmir indefinitely at the age of 14, Bhat finds a haunting pleasure in reflecting on the idea of “home” and in making something beautiful out of an experience as devastating as exile. It’s a feeling that, in a way, is native to the ghazal, which is why Bhat writes so many poems that inhabit this world.
Bhat finds a haunting pleasure in reflecting on the idea of “home” and in making something beautiful out of an experience as devastating as exile.
His poetry illustrates something important about the ghazal, though, which is that it has not survived through strict preservation. Different poets preserve and adapt the elements that speak to them.
For instance, at a virtual celebration of the ghazal hosted by the Philadelphia nonprofit Twelve Gates Arts in February, the Iranian poet Fatemeh Ekhtesari explained, “For me, ghazal is just an external form. . . . I do not limit myself to any subject or form or even vocabulary.”
Ekhtesari, along with Bhat, was among four poets who shared their own ghazals at the event. Her poetry falls into a literary movement born in Iran, known as the postmodern ghazal movement, in which poets use the form of the ghazal as a vehicle for activism and resistance.
In postmodern ghazals, social and political issues often take the place of the traditional subject. But the form, which runs through the literary bloodlines in Iran, is familiar to people, and has lent itself to political activism, attracting attention—as well as censorship. Ekhtesari, for example, now lives in exile in Norway after being charged with “insulting sanctities” and sentenced to prison in Iran for her work.
The Ghazal as a Bridge
But the message and the meaning of ghazals aren’t the only thing at the heart of this literary practice. Today, the ghazal is also about connection.
The Twelve Gates Arts event could easily have had an academic bent—there was more than enough expertise in the virtual room for that—but instead, it loosely took the form of a mushaira, the Urdu word for a social gathering of poets.
The poet Fatemeh Shams, who was among those presenting at the event, says that this sense of community has been especially important to her while she lives in exile from her home in Iran: “One of the things that I think is the most challenging part of living away from home, for me, has been the loss of those communities with which you would gather on a weekly or monthly basis to just read poetry.”
But for ghazal writers living away from home—even from entirely different homes—the shared literary tradition connects them with one another.
And in some cases, it can also be a bridge to the past. The poet Mehrin (Mir) Masud-Elias, born in Bangladesh but now living in Philadelphia, says that reading or listening to a ghazal can be nostalgic for her.
While the ghazal has a strong tradition in Southeast Asia, Masud-Elias, who was born after her country’s war with Pakistan, was not taught Urdu, which separated her from both a literary tradition and aspects of her past that she might have connected with through language. In an email, she wrote that the ghazal is “a reminder of a past that I’m cut off from, or perhaps, wasn’t very strongly attached to in the first place.” Today, Masud-Elias finds company among fellow poets as well as many books of poems.
Bhat, too, has found community through the ghazal.
He says that the “I” in his poems is not just him. It’s anyone who has known the feeling of exile, political or not, and has yearned for a feeling of home. And through his writing, he’s reached people who connect with that feeling.
The “I” in his poems is not just him. It’s anyone who has known the feeling of exile, political or not, and has yearned for a feeling of home.
In recent years, several Kashmiri singers have put Bhat’s ghazals to music—something he generally finds out about only after they premiere on YouTube. But far from seeing that as an affront, Bhat sees it as an honor that these singers felt like his poetry belonged to them, that his “I” spoke for them, and that, through their songs, his words have reached his homeland.
“For someone who’s very far away,” he says, “I couldn’t have asked for anything more.”
In Bhat’s eyes, poetry is just “borrowed light.” “It’s lighting candles with candles,” he says. “And as I look around . . . we may all be in our separate deserts, but I feel like we’re all walking around with candles and borrowing light from each other and going on.”
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The following is an Urdu poem by Abdul Manan Bhat, the English translation below is by Partha Chakrabarty.
چاند تیرے نام کا
چاند نِکلیگا ہر اک بام پر تِرے ہی نام کا
اِن رات کے سایئوں سے بہت دور بہت دور
رنگ بدلیگا اے جان بے رنگ شام کا
اور رات کے سُرمے کو سنواریگا ابد تک
ٹھہرا ہوا وہ اشک ِوفا تیرے نام کا
پِھر کیوں مِرے ہم دم جُدای سے ڈریں ہم
اس رات چلو رات بھر کو بات کریں ہم
اُن پُرکشِش یادوں کو چلو یاد کریں ہم
اِک شوق کی آتِش تو فروزاں ہی کر چليں
اِک خواب سا سينے ميں منوّر تو کريں ہم
پِھر نور سے پھوٹیگا اُس فردا کا اُجالا
جس کے لبوں پہ نام ہے تیرے ہی نام کا
رنگ بدلیگا کبھی بے رنگ شام کا
چاند نِکلیگا اے جان تِرے ہی نام کا
A Moon in Your Name
A moon will peep over every parapet
And moonlight everywhere will speak your name:
Far from the reach of night’s long shadows
An infusion of color will swell our darkling world
The tears I have shed in your name
Will kindle night’s black kohl for eons:
Memories will tease us into quiet intimacies;
Why, then, beloved, should we fear separation?
Tonight is the night we will talk all night long.
Look, the glow of hope becomes a conflagration:
Our dream lights up the corners of our hearts
That dawn which cannot stop whispering your name
Turns incandescent in the blaze of our hearts.
An infusion of color will swell our darkling world.
A moon will peep over every parapet,
And moonlight everywhere will speak your name.
—
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