Latest revision as of 04:24, 30 April 2024

[edit] A brief biography

Mohammed.Wajihuddin, April 28, 2024: The Times of India

On his deathbed, Mir Mutaqqi, a practising sufi, summoned his two sons, Mir Taqi Mir (1723-1810), and Mir’s stepbrother Muhammad Hasan. He told the boys he had nothing for them but unpaid debts and 300 books which they could divide among themselves. Hasan, who never accepted Mir as his brother, cornered the collection, saying he alone had the right to inherit it, but ignored the other half of the directive. A dejected father asked Mir to pay off his debts. Mir managed to do it and restored his father’s dignity in death.
If fate was cruel to Mir at the tender age of 10 or 11, when he turned an orphan with an elder stepbrother refusing to share an inheritance or shoulder the family’s responsibility, three centuries later justice still eludes him. A major Urdu poet who is acknowledged universally — he’s known as ‘khuda-esukhan’ (god of poetry) — his tercentenary went by with barely a few in the Urdu literary world remembering it. Except Delhi-based centres Anjuman Taraqqi Urdu (Hind) and the Sahitya Akademi, which celebrated the event with seminars and symposia earlier this year, the wider academia largely ignored him. When compared with the treatment for Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869), whose birth and death anniversaries are marked with mushairas, talks and ghazal soirees, the contrast seems sharp.


Slamming the Urdu world’s amnesia about Mir, Anjuman general secretary Athar Farouqi, in the foreword to Zikr-E-Mir, an autobiography translated from Persian to Urdu, wrote: “His tercentenary passed in the Urdu world with so much silence as if this historic occasion was not worth remembering.” 


Farouqi credited Mir with unshackling Urdu from Persian influence and using “Urdu poetry as a medium to speak to the masses”.


Noted dastango (storyteller) Mahmood Farooqui, who brought Mir’s mastery to life with a spectacular performance of Dastan-E-Mir at the Anjuman’s festival held in Feb, said Mir was a prodigious writer who has left “a huge oeuvre in different genres, including ghazals (around 3,000), many elegies and satires”. 


Poet Who Fled Delhi


Ghalib had memorialised Mir in a couplet: “You are not the only master of Rekhta (another name for Urdu), Ghalib; in days gone by, there was a Mir too.” The significance of the poet lies in the demotic aspect of his work, which, as Pakistani critic Jamil Jalib (1929-2019) observed, “brought the Urdu language out of the royal court and made it stand on the staircases of Delhi’s Jama Masjid”. 
Thereby hangs a story. After Mir moved to Delhi from Agra around 1733-34, he witnessed the sacking of the city by Iranian invader Nadir Shah in 1739. Mir watched with horror as Delhi was plundered multiple times by Ahmed Shah Abdali, the Marathas and others. The poet who had painted his beloved city in evoc- ative verse — “the lanes of Delhi are pages of an artist’s album, every face you see is a portrait” — had to face up to its dreadful decline: “All, including Sikhs, Marathas, king and beggar are in need, in peace are those who own nothing but poverty.”


Having lost many patrons at different stages, the poet was eventually forced to fend for himself. Desperation drove him to the steps of the Jama Masjid where, sitting on the majestic mosque’s sweeping, stone steps, surrounded by kebab shops and sellers of merchandise, and amidst swarming groups of visitors, he continued to compose verses — in exchange for food, clothes, medicine and money. “So Mir had created a barter system of sorts and made poetry his currency,” writes lawyer-author Saif Mahmood in his critically acclaimed book ‘Beloved Delhi: A Mughal City and Her Greatest Poets’.


Unable to improve his prospects, Mir moved in 1782 to Lucknow, then a magnet-inthe-making for litterateurs, especially due to the huge patronage of Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula, one of the world’s richest men of his time. Bidding adieu to his beloved Delhi, Mir mourned: “Mir, I depart from this house of idols, will meet again if God brings me back.”
He would never return. He spent the next 28 years of his life in Lucknow, reiterating Delhi’s superiority over Lucknow, regretting his decision to leave and finally dying in 1810. The romantic poet carries the heavy burden of the Indian Railways on his chest as his grave was erased when the railway line connecting Lucknow station was laid.


Posthumously, most critics, except Shamsur Rahman Farooqui who rediscovered Mir in the 1990s, have dismissed him as a ‘poet of sorrow’ who wrote about ordinary things. Ghazal maestro Ghulam Ali did regale listeners with his verses and Bollywood occasionally picked up a few lines, including when lyricist Majrooh Sultanpuri used the opening of Mir’s famous ghazal ‘Patta patta buta buta…’, turning it into a romantic song picturised on Amitabh Bachchan and Jaya Bhaduri in Ek Nazar (1972). However, as Urdu professor Ahmad Mahfooz of Jamia Millia Islamia University says, “Ghalib, despite penning abstract and complex poetry, found favour in the film and television world, becoming a household name while Mir, a much bigger and simpler versifier, remains largely undiscovered by show business.” Literary historian Rakhshanda Jalil chooses to differ: “It is unfair to compare Mir with Ghalib. Mir is older by a century and frankly Mir doesn’t encompass every human emotion in the way Ghalib does.”


All said, Mir certainly deserves better than our collective amnesia.