Ghazal & friendship

This piece must begin with a disclaimer: The poet who has written this book is a close friend, and I have been credited in the Acknowledgements as one of the “first readers for many poems here”. One of the poems in the book is also co-dedicated to me. In such circumstances, it might seem nepotistic to write about it. But the alternative — to miss out on one of the finest poetry books published this year — would have been worse. In any case, poetry was the catalyst for our friendship, which began four years back when both of us were young poets in Delhi, trying to get our work published in magazines and putting together our manuscripts.

Friendship is a major theme in the book, interwoven into the text and hypertext like a scarlet thread. (Maaz’s PhD thesis was on E M Forster and friendship.) He dedicates the book to “all my yaars”. Individual poems are dedicated to the vast community of Indian poets who write in English, such as Nabanita Kanungo, Dibyajyoti Sarma, Arunava Sinha, Sridala Swami, Aditi Rao, Anannya Dasgupta, and yours truly. There are other poets to whom poems are dedicated, such as E E Cummings and Seamus Heaney, as well as other friends of Maaz who are not poets. This elaborate process of dedications — instinctive or otherwise — reveals the desire of the poet to find a kindred community in a world growing undeniably intolerant.

The other great theme of this book is Delhi. It states the three sources for the poems, of which two — Delhi and Urdu — are inalienably intertwined with the city Maaz lives in and loves. One of the epigraphs of the book states: “Maaz thought he would live happily in Europe, / Did he know he had Delhi’s map in his heart?” The book is divided into four parts — the first and the last are “Delhi” and “Delhi Again”, and have 10 and 18 poems respectively. The Delhi in this city is not only the geographical or historical space; it is a product of an intricate cartography of the imagination.

Ghazalnama: Poems from Delhi, Belfast, and Urdu | Author: Maaz Bin Bilal | Publisher: Yoda Press | Pages: 126 | Price: Rs 350

The poems in the “Delhi Again” section reveal the poet’s deep political commitment without being unnecessarily agitprop. “Stardust” is a ghazal to Rohith Vemula (“It will be the aura of lady-killer Khans no more / Bhim’s descendants call for the whole tureen of stardust.”); “A Shriek About Kashmir, July 2016” addresses the bloody summer in the hill state that seems so much more poignant after recent developments: “Another bloody summer looms over the Dal, /Wani’s died and defied this week, about Kashmir.” In another poem, “Amaltas Monsoon”, Maaz writes: “Delhi’s very own harvest, for the soaked lover, what rest? / Crackdowns, protests; what’ll he take in this season of amaltas?” One of the two people to whom “Caravans of Love” is dedicated is activist and writer Harsh Mander who has been one of the most stringent critics of a rising wave of right-wing hatred in the country. In this poem, Maaz writes: “The faults of the moon, the heat of the stars, / Forget desire, dream to fly in love.” Indeed, what better antidote to hatred than friendship and love?

The decision to include an entire section of Urdu poems translated into English is also, in fact, a political move. This section includes both classics such as Ghalib, Zafar, Khusrau, and moderns such as Faiz and Ludhianvi. The original texts in Nastaliq and the translations in Roman script are juxtaposed in the pages of the book. The rise of Hindutva and right-wing nationalism in recent years has made the climate inclement for Urdu. “Linguistic landscape and city names in Urdu or connected with Islamic heritage have also come under attack from Hindi chauvinist politicians since 2014,” wrote Shahzaman Haque, in The Diplomat earlier this year. Maaz’s translations not only provide those who don’t read Nastaliq, such as me, a window into this culture but also breathe fresh life into these.

The writer’s novel, Ritual, will be published this year