Spare the Ghazal – An Elitist Rant

I am not in the revisionist Azad-Hali camp that condemned the ghazal as a decadent and sick genre to be dumped for Wordsworthian naturalism. On the contrary, I love the ghazal and consider it the high point of Urdu literature that compares with the best of any other literature. What I am arguing for is that we stop ‘singing’ ghazals.

This runs into the criticism that if people enjoy listening to ghazals being sung who I am I to object. In this relativist frame, there is indeed nothing more to be said. But why should we subscribe to this frame? If we can have reservations about people memorising texts without understanding them, we could equally object to listening to ghazals being sung without having a clue to their meaning.

That is the crux of my argument. The unit of meaning in a ghazal, the sh’ir, conveys a thought or an idea that is nothing if not understood. Once the thought is grasped and appreciated, I can live with it being embellished with music. But to ‘enjoy’ the music without understanding the meaning or, worse still, even the words, I find terribly insulting to the poetry.

My objection to the defence that people enjoy the music is that they don’t really need the ghazal to do so. If the notes of jhinjhoti appeal to them, they would encounter exactly the same notes in a thumri in that raga. In addition, they would have far fewer and less complex words to contend with which would also be far more sensuous. To say that the thumri is classical or semi-classical and thus more difficult to understand makes no sense if the appeal is primarily in the music and not in the words. At least we would be spared hearing a Faiz ghazal being referred to as Mehdi Hasan’s or Farida Khanum’s which is something that really gets my goat.

I am sympathetic to the supply side of this dilemma. If the demand for classical or semi-classical music has disappeared in the country, classically trained artists like Mehdi Hasan, Farida Khanum, or Iqbal Begum had no option left but to express their talent is some other more popular genre like the ghazal. Without the Partition all of them would have been excellent khayal and thumri exponents and all credit to them to have found a creative way to channel their talents in a cultural wasteland.

It’s the demand side that upsets me. Why listen to a ghazal being sung and go wah-wah without understanding either the ideas being expressed or even the words in which they are embedded? I am told the singing of ghazals is an old tradition and the first recordings are those of Pyare Sahib from the transported court of Lucknow in Matiya Burj. That is no doubt correct but I doubt that there were even menial servants in Lucknow or Matiya Burj who didn’t get the meaning of the verses. I have it on the authority of Sharar that Wajid Ali Shah would have thrashed them black and blue had they been so ignorant.

I am also told that even illiterate people in villages enjoy the Heer being sung. Yes, they do but they know the entire story and the context and in any case the music is a very plain and plaintive recitation in bhairveen. That’s akin to ghazals being recited taht-ul lafz in mushairahs which is an enjoyable experience but where the premium is on understanding the import of the sh’ir and the wah-wah is a reaction to the innovation of thought not to the quality of the declamation. This new-fangled style of repeating a line endless times is quite pointless if the meaning is not clear even the first time around.   

I am even more upset by the fact that this new mode of introduction to ghazals by listening to them being sung has terribly perverse consequences. First, the most profound sh’irs are not amenable to being sung and, second, a huge number of trashy ghazals get written just because they sound nice when set to music. The tremendous amount of wisdom contained in the best of our ghazal poetry is driven out by a mountain of rubbish.

Just look at how other cultures propagate the most prized elements of their literary corpus. Every student in England leaves school having studied at least two of Shakespeare’s plays each for a whole year in addition to a fair bit of Milton and Keats and Shelley. No one can get away with just listening to the works of these authors being sung to music. Here we hardly bother to teach any poetry whether it is Ghalib or Kabir or Nanak or Bulleh Shah or Baba Farid. We prefer to teach in English and would rather have our school students do business studies or computer science in the time spared from being wasted on literature which can always be picked up from listening to Mehdi Hasan.    

It is unfair to blame the people for this mess. The onus is on those who put our school curriculum together. For them all the wisdom contained in our literature is either of no value or to be deliberately avoided because knowledge is dangerous. It is much safer to memorise texts without understanding them and enjoy poetry set to music without picking up what the words are conveying.

Ignorance is indeed bliss. But for whom?

Anjum Altaf is the co-author (with Amit Basole) of Thinking with Ghalib: Poetry for a New Generation and author of What We Get Wrong About Education in Pakistan.