I. Coming to Mir by Indirections
I cannot remember a time when I had not heard of Mir Muhammad Taqi ‘Mir’ (1723-1810), one of the greatest poets in the Urdu canon. Known to posterity simply by his takhallus or pen name, “Mir,” he is revered as Khudā-e Sukhan, the “God of poetry.” The appellation may seem hyperbolic, but is intended to render homage to a versatile and voluminous practice. Multilingual, like most Indian intellectuals of the 18th and 19th centuries, Mir wrote both in Urdu and Persian.
In Urdu, he produced 1,916 ghazals or short lyrical poems, as well as enough qasidas or odes and masnavis or long narrative poems to fill the six vast volumes that constitute his collected works. In Persian, he wrote about 500 ghazals and one short masnavi. He also wrote three prose works in Persian: a biographical anthology of the prominent Urdu poets of Delhi of his epoch; a book of instruction in the Sufi path of mysticism, cast in the form of reminiscences; and a fragmentary memoir that, although composed in Persian, is regarded as the first autobiographical work by an Urdu poet.
In this context, it is important to remember that Persian was a language in which a large number of Indians expressed themselves, both in court and literary contexts and at large in the 18th century. Our relatively recent fixation with the politics of the modern nation-state misleads us into imagining Persian only as the national language of Iran; historically, it was a transregional language whose use defined what I have described elsewhere as the “Iranosphere,” a linguistic and cultural ecumene that extended far beyond Iran’s territorial boundaries into West, Central and South Asia.
Growing up, and well into my thirties, I knew of Mir by reputation, but had barely scratched the surface of his oeuvre. My attention was focused, instead, on the stellar Urdu poet of the generation that followed his: Ghalib (1797-1869). My mother was a votary of Ghalib’s poetry, and would recite his verses from memory. Ghalib’s Persianate vocabulary and sophisticated arabesques of imagery entered my consciousness during my childhood and teenage years; even when the meaning of his enigmatic metaphors eluded me, I was carried away by the musicality of his phrasing.
In the late 1990s, I spent a number of years working on a poem based on Ghalib’s experiences in Delhi—both as a poet and as a Mughal courtier—during the fall of that great Mughal imperial capital to the resurgent forces of the British East India Company, in the aftermath of the 1857 uprising against the Company’s misrule. Titled “Ghalib in the Winter of the Great Revolt,” this poem involved years of research into Ghalib’s texts and, just as crucially, into his historical context. From these years, too, came a number of translations of Ghalib’s ghazals—which, I thought, would achieve publication in due course; except that, in its usual capricious manner, kismet had other plans for me.
Ghalib, who recognised no equals, far less superiors, in the field of poetry, was a boy of 13 when Mir died. All his life, even as he treated most of his contemporaries with condescension at best and disdain at worst, he would hold up Mir as the measure of excellence. Of the older poet, Ghalib wrote:
mīr ke sheʿr kā aḥvāl kahūñ kyā ġhālib
jis kā dīvān kam az-gulshan-e kashmīr nahīñ
Ghalib, what account could I offer of Mir’s poetry?
His collected works rival a paradise garden in Kashmir.
And again, playfully and (self-)ironically, yet in an explicit spirit of homage:
reḳhte ke tumhīñ ustād nahīñ ho ġhālib
kehte haiñ agle zamāne meñ koī mīr bhī thā
Ghalib, tough luck, you’re not the only game in town.
They tell me there used to be some guy called Mir.
By Polonian—or Ghalibian—indirections, I found direction out. Ghalib opened the door to Mir for me, and I never looked back. Having begun to read Mir’s poetry in the late 1990s, I found myself amazed by the interplay of lucid, memorable expression and turbulent, potentially explosive emotion in his work. I was excited, too, by the freshness and linguistic richness of his language: an Urdu that had absorbed the earthily demotic as well as the elegantly cosmopolitan registers of speech; that could swerve from the stately to the comic, the bleak to the buoyant, melancholia to self-mockery, in the space of a line.
Here, to my delight, was a language that had created for itself a vibrant space between Persian and what I call the “Hindavi continuum,” a spectrum of languages including Khari Boli, Brajbhasha, and Awadhi (it has been the fashion, as a result of linguistic and religious polarisation since the 1850s, to regard Persian and the Hindavi continuum as being at odds, and to view Urdu as an alien imposition; in fact, it emerges organically from the contacts and exchanges among diverse languages in a subcontinent going through epic-scale processes of historical change).
II. Mir, Our Contemporary
Between 2018 and 2022, I shared a number of my translations of Mir’s asha‘ar (the plural of she‘r, the couplet that forms the basis of Urdu poetry and is treated as a complete poem in itself) via Twitter, while it was still a liberal platform hospitable to collegial discussions. Each tweet in what I came to call my “Mir Project” comprised the Roman transliteration of a she‘r, my translation, and an image of a painting drawn from the Mughal, Rajput, Deccani or Safavid ateliers. The Homeland’s an Ocean grew out of the Mir Project.
As I found my way deeper into his oeuvre, I realised that Mir has been terribly ill served by his conventional representation as a poet of thwarted love and chronic sorrow. I became committed to the objective of bearing witness to a larger range of moods and tones in Mir’s poetry than has so far been the case. For my translation, as it evolved towards book form, I chose poems in which he pokes fun at himself and his high literary vocation. I chose, also, a number of poems that seem simple but carry deep resonances of mystical insight and visionary experience. And I chose poems that convey Mir’s grief at the displacement, disorientation and exilic elsewhereness imposed by a violent history.
Above all, in my reading, Mir is a fiercely political poet, writing at a time of cataclysm, with the Mughal Empire collapsing around him, his home city of Delhi attacked eight times between 1747 and 1767 by the Afghan warlord Ahmed Shah Abdali, his way of life and his environment destroyed, forcing him repeatedly into exile. He first sought refuge in the Jat strongholds of Deeg and Kumher, and, later in life, reluctantly, in the newly emergent nawabate of Lucknow, a hub of power, prestige and patronage that offered him the security that Delhi no longer could. The Homeland’s an Ocean reflects my choice of what I interpret as the political dimension of Mir’s poetry, without sacrificing his playfulness, his humour, and what I read as his lifelong spiritual quest.
Mir is very much our contemporary—a wounded sensibility, a self continually being fashioned from fracture and trauma, the “poet of a shattered world,” as I describe him. I argue that he is a refugee who must cope with the condition of solastalgia, the pain of experiencing the violent transformation of one’s social and natural environment. In his poetry, judging by the recurrence of these terms, I sense the productive tension between the poles of ghurbat or exile and watan or homeland. I argue that many of his verses may be read through the lens of a doubling between the “ghazal universe,” as the scholars Shamsur Rahman Faruqi and Frances W. Pritchett term it, with its formal conventions, and the “ghurbat universe,” as I term the historical context, with its crises and afflictions, which I find Mir articulating. Mir is also our contemporary because he is a poet of confluence—he draws on diverse linguistic resources and cultural milieux. A contrarian and a dissenter, he positions himself at the meeting-point of religious systems, he ridicules orthodoxy and authority.
Mir’s voice speaks with clarity and urgency, with anguish and a timely critical resonance to our historical moment. His themes are our themes, his loss is our loss, his bewilderment is our bewilderment—the destroyed city, the devastated countryside, the scattering of friends, the exactions of exile. All these are features of our lives today, in a world marred by genocidal wars and forced migrations, invasions and insurrections, tanks and bulldozers, bombed cities and slaughtered populations.
III. Translation as Apprenticeship and as Activism
Translation has long been an integral part of my practice as a poet. As a poet who is also a translator of poets from other languages and other periods—Bhartrihari, the ancient Sanskrit poet of erotic passion, worldly wisdom and spiritual quest; Lal Ded, the 14th-century Kashmiri woman mystic; Mir, the 18th-century linguistic experimenter; Ghalib, the 19th-century courtier, wit and memoirist—I have always seen myself as an apprentice. In this role, I dedicate myself to coming to grips with the techniques, world-views and recurrent obsessions of these poets; I trace and map the negotiations that they conducted between a fragmented self and an unpredictable world in their quest for clarity of vision.
Since translation engages my energies both as poet and scholar, I am committed to offering my readers as richly detailed and compelling an account as I can of the times in which my protagonists lived—the intimate and the public histories in which they participated, the cultural lineages on which they drew, the political or philosophical horizons that attracted them.
If I may be forgiven for adopting Sufi usage here—and while not wishing to swaddle translation in mysticism —I believe that Language is the murshid or guide, the translator is the murid or disciple. I say Language because I do not mean only a particular language, with all its idiosyncrasies of syntax and archives of vocabulary, but the phenomenon of Language in all its complex and radical alterity, commanding in its presence and inviting in its texture, proposing a sociality of speech and exchange while demanding, more than simple attention, a nuanced attentiveness to nuance and tonality, the gear shifts of sound, sense and allusion.
This brings me to the question: Why do I translate?
First, I am a monolingual writer who happens to be a multilingual reader. While I write only in English, my writerly practice is informed by my reading in several other languages, including Sanskrit, Urdu, German, Hindi, and Kashmiri. My artisanal aim has been to enrich my Anglophone poetic sensibility through engagement with these other literatures. My apprenticeship to Ghalib and Mir, for instance, has led me to appreciate what I call the “diaphaneity” of Urdu, with its flexible syntax and subtle qualifiers of sensation, duration, presence and comparison (take the seemingly simple suffix “-sa,” which is superbly polysemous, pluritonal, multifunctional: it can connote “like,” “offering a glimpse of,” “a passing resemblance,” “enough of a similarity to induce delight or shock,” and so forth).
Second, as a beneficiary of the largesse of several languages and their literary traditions, I am impelled by the desire to share this abundance with readers in my writing language. To share a language is to share in its lifeworld. We are somewhat different personalities when we operate in different languages, are we not? Each language endows us with its own temperament, its cultural ethos and history, its particular pleasures and predicaments. In transiting from one language to another, we become aware of and empathetic towards the situation inhabited by the speakers of that language.
Third, I reject the dominant model of “source language” and “target language,” I detest the unsubtle subtexts of control, extraction, colonial confrontation and warfare that it carries. I do not see the “target language” as static and sovereign—it is a living organism, it must be drawn into new shapes in response to the currents surging into it from the “source language.”
In The Homeland’s an Ocean, to offer concrete examples, my English draws, as it inevitably must, on its own resources of association and allusion. My only rule is that such allusiveness should not obtrude clumsily into Mir’s universe. You will find the somewhat Yeatsian or Eliotesque “still centre” here, in the title poem, which ties the homeland to the images of the ocean and the whirlpool. You will find the Chandlerian “big sleep” in a poem that meditates on death, dream and waking life. And yet, my English is also recast by interplay with Urdu, in places “gham-dīdāh” comes through into English as “grief-gazed,” for instance. Translation is a two-way process, an empirical truth that the moribund terminology of “source language” and “target language” can never convey.
Fourth, and crucially, translation is a political act for me, in addition to everything else that it can be as a literary, aesthetic or academic practice. One cannot translate neutrally. There are many scenarios today, across the world, in which the translator must assume the role of a cultural activist. I bear a responsibility not only towards the text, but also towards the cultural and political contexts in which it is cradled.
When I translate from the Urdu, I do so with a sharp awareness of the cultural politics of divisiveness that has plagued South Asia since the late 1850s and the cruelly communalised and polarised present. Today, the forces of bigotry seek to divide Hindus from Muslims, narrowly identifying Hindi with Hinduism and Urdu with Islam, ignoring the centuries of confluence, mutuality and syncretism that have woven them together into a tapestry.
The Homeland’s an Ocean is my way of bearing witness to South Asia’s cultural and religious diversity, and its multilingual abundance, all of which are under threat from parochialism and illiberalism today. This book embodies my rejection of the falsehood that Urdu is a language foreign to India, and my insistence on the common ground that brings religious communities and literary lineages together. It is an argument against the ideology of polarisation that dominates India’s public sphere today and has divided us against ourselves as a society.
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