Exploring the territory and influences on today’s modern artist

Your memory gets in the way of my memory
 Agha Shahid Ali/ Begum Akhtar
Woh jo hum mein tum mein qaraar tha 
Tumheyaad ho ke na yaad ho
(Whether you remember it or not,
Oh, the bliss that once was ours)

The territory of an artist’s influences is a beguiling one. 

At times, a benign presence in early years crystallizes as a lasting influence on the artist’s oeuvre. At other times, a muse comes crashing through the roof, causing a trail of destruction, only years later sublimating into a work of art. At times it is unrequited love, or a love that, for myriad reasons, cannot be reciprocated. Turning inwards, it sets into motion an alchemy of creativity. 

If one has to credit the Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali with a singular achievement, it would be the introduction of the ghazal form to the western audiences. Begum Akhtar was introduced to the boy by his mother, Sufia Nomani, herself a connoisseur of arts and an educationist. Ali’s exposure to this palette of diverse influences as a child, and a liberal ethos, can perhaps be seen as later engendering the confidence within him to combine seemingly unrelated forms, like ghazal and the English language. 

Amitav Ghosh, who befriended Ali while in Brooklyn in a personal obituary, “The Ghat of the Only World”, talks in detail about Begum Akhtar’s influence on the teenage poet. Ali had confessed to Ghosh the special quality of feeling he had for her as a young man:

“I loved Begum Akhtar, in other circumstances you could have said that it was a sexual kind of love but I don’t know what it was. I loved to listen to her, I loved to be with her, I couldn’t bear to be away from her. You can imagine what it was like. Here I was in my mid-teens – just sixteen – and I couldn’t bear to be away from her.” (Ali quoted by Ghosh)

Then it was her mannerism, the delicate feeling and behaviour so reminiscent of the  universe of ghazal gayiki. She was known to have slipped into a protracted mourning at the death of her mother and was seen leaning on her grave every other day, cutting a picture of acute birha, longing. Then known as Akhtari Bai Faizabadi (maiden name), she was engaged to the scion of a prominent family who laid down the condition that she would have to stop singing after marriage. But upon seeing her condition, the doctor advised that she return to singing immediately if she was to survive. Just this image of the wasted young woman crying inconsolably at her mother’s mazaar, grave, became a recurrent poetic trope for Agha Shahid Ali. The figure of the forlorn muezzin keeper amidst a ruined mosque, the post office officials against the desolate landscape of undelivered letters in “A Country without Post office”, the lover figure languishing in the rain, the pandit exiled from the valley- these recurring figures in Ali’s poetry seem to draw their melancholy from this one sterling image – Begum Akhtar in mourning. There was something splendid, something exaggerated about her ritual of mourning that transmutes in his poetry. 

“In Memory Of Begum Akhtar”, portrays mourning by none other than an embodiment of ghazal itself, swathed in the ritualistic white clothes, lamenting the loss of its finest practitioner. Like Kaifi Azmi is said to have famously remarked that, when in an audience with Begum Akhtar, you not only get to hear ghazals but also to see one.  

Ghazal, that death-sustaining widow,
 sobs in dingy archives, hooked to you.
 She wears her grief, a moon-soaked white, corners the sky into disbelief.

This ardour was to grow deeper. He became a proponent of the form amongst the uninitiated audience in America and became a practitioner of the ghazal in English language. When he moved to Brooklyn, he earmarked a little shrine in her memory in his apartment, reminiscent of his “un-Islamic” childhood temple.

Ghazal as a poetic form is very grueling. Once the structure of the opening sheir (couplet) in a matla is set, all the following she’irs have to use the identical rigid scheme. It is this tension that the form embodies, apart from the push and pull of infatuation he had for Begum Akhtar, which he knew eventually would have to succumb at the altar of reality, just like the play of passion for an unattainable love that was deeply invigorating.

Like the done-to-death ghazal trope, he was drawn like a firefly (parvana) to the flame (shama) and his utter surrender was his willing act of self destruction, as it was of love, and imbued with all the attendant play of nakhra, tension and delicate nuance. 

It wasn’t so much worldly love: there was no transaction, there were no treachery of a real relationship — instead it flowered as a larger abstract idea of love in an imaginary space, it was a love that was doomed in its very inception, it was an impossible love, but that did not deter it from being a great love. 

Great love, that’s a rare thing.

The author teaches English Literature in a college at Chandigarh and has been a Fulbright scholar. She writes on literature, aesthetics and culture and is working on her debut novel. Views are personal