Ghazal Cosmopolitan: Ghazals and Essays on the Culture and Craft of the Ghazal
By Shadab Zeest Hashmi
Folio Books
ISBN: 978-969-7834-44-0
96pp.

Shadab Zeest Hashmi’s Ghazal Cosmopolitan is, in her own words, “part love letter to Urdu… and part manual for the craft of ghazal.”

Writing in English, the author feels that the ghazal has the capacity of adaptability. It can “fuse the old with the new, the friend with a stranger.” Her extensive research on ghazal writing has enabled her to realise that the ghazal has its origin in Arabic and is an extraction of the longer qaseeda poem.

Ghazal Cosmopolitan captures the attention of the readers as part memoir and part deeply researched book. It deals with the love of the Urdu language, developed during a childhood growing up in a foreign land, where English was the mother tongue of the locals. The beauty of Urdu, introduced to the author by her mother and grandparents, influenced her deeply, and she was drawn towards the manifold wonders of Urdu poetry, provided by the “ink bearing the musk of many lands.”

The pen, the tablet and ink invited her to the land of Rumi, Attar, Hafiz and Khusro. She learned to pay attention to “lines and curves, symmetry and alignment”, as well as to metre, rhyme and refrain.

Shadab Zeest Hashmi’s journey to capture the essence of the Urdu ghazal in the English language began when she was a college student. According to her, it was while visiting the Qissa Khwani Bazaar in Peshawar, the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, or the Urdu Bazaar in Delhi that she came across the “hybridity leading to the synesthesia underlying languages.”

She realised that different languages symphonise history with the music of everyday names, “evoking the times of the Silk Roads — centuries of commerce and civilisational confluence, clash and eventual commingling.”

As a student, Zeest questioned whether it was right to write ghazal in the English language, the language of the colonist, and whether she had taken English language on loan for writing poetry. But she soon realised that language, in general, can be taken as “luggage”, a historical personal luggage, both a burden as well as “reason for being.”

Zeest agrees with scholars of the Urdu language that it is made up of loanwords from other languages, and is a language of the empire. But it also nestles in divergent cultures and is capable of taking spectacular flights in poetry. She feels that both Urdu and English are languages with rich textures and tensions, and from these textures and tensions one can hear “the beautiful song of the human spirit, its struggle and celebration, memory and articulation, the grit and grandeur of history cutting windows of perspective in an unknown future.”

Leaving memories behind, Zeest embarks on her research on the culture and craft of ghazal writing. Her understanding of Urdu language as well as Urdu poetry is appreciable. Describing language as a “wick in the space between hands, burning with the desire for precision, joining past and present”, she goes on to write that, if ever there were a language “that hangs like pollen, it is Urdu.”

As a “hybrid”, it hangs between many “parent” languages. Not only does it exist between divergent cultures, it also hangs between the educated and the unlettered, between regional culture and the ruling culture.

As a student, Zeest questioned whether it was right to write ghazal in the English language, the language of the colonist, and whether she had taken English language on loan for writing poetry. But she soon realised that language, in general, can be taken as “luggage”, a historical personal luggage, both a burden as well as “reason for being.”

Citing Amir Khusro as the pioneer in contributing to the birth of a new language, combining the refinement of the Persian court with the “visceral charm of the locally spoken Hindvi”, she goes on to state that Khusro can be complimented for leaving an imprint on the minds of lovers of the Urdu ghazal.

As a teacher, Zeest distilled her experience of reading and hearing Urdu ghazals and reading poets who wrote both in Urdu and English, by composing ghazals in English. In her book, she has put forward the main ingredients of writing the ghazal.

She has also dealt in detail with how different forms contribute to different methodologies, citing elegies written in the classical elegiac metre: a couplet with the first line being a classical hexameter and the second a classical pentameter.

Zeest has cited examples from Agha Shahid Ali and Grace Schulman, both widely read American English ghazal writers, to point out how these poets took immense care of ‘qaafia’ [penultimate rhyming word in the second line of a couplet], ‘radeef’ [the last word in a couplet, typically repeated across couplets] and ‘maqtaa’[the last couplet], the essential ingredients of the Urdu ghazal.

According to Zeest, the ghazal has “effectively transcended and transferred the culture of its origin”, and made itself at home in vastly different cultures and times. She appreciates the work of American ghazal poets, and how they have fused East and West. American poets such as Adrienne Rich, S. Mervin and William Stafford show with their appreciation of Ghalib that language is no barrier, and that the universality of a poet can be appreciated by all and sundry.

Shadab Zeest Hashmi has successfully advocated her ideas of ghazal writing in English, and to prove it can be accomplished, has added her own poetic works in the book.

It is indeed a very well-researched book that delves deeply into the origins of and the methodology of writing the ghazal, and how it spread to other languages.

The reviewer is a teacher of English literature and the author of Ruttie-Jinnah: Life and Love

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, May 5th, 2024