SO how did Miraji compose? What was his andaaz-e bayaan, his khaas tarz-e tahrir? Miraji’s most unpredictable forays into lyric pass through nazm, and though he wrote ghazal and geet as well, he was often accused of being nazm parast. Responding to the charge of his excessive fondness for the form, Miraji said that nazm’s capriciousness gave it the capaciousness, a vasii’, to accept idiosyncrasy. So it was an amenable vehicle for a poet such as him whose heart dallied like a yearning lover waiting awkwardly along the lineages of earlier aesthetic even as his gaze was glued adamantly to his present circumstances.

Be that as it may, Miraji’s nazms sweep across many dispositions — musing on a timbre, on the compass of khyaal, a thought, on the crinkle of ambience — playing metaphors out until they stall. Though nazms that seem close to one another may almost show through each other as palimpsest, they never fuse into consistency. So Miraji’s corpus always feels slightly unfinished, a play that was on-going, as though another image might be waiting in the wings, another poem about to come onstage. This is particularly true of the voyages he made through gender, and it is here that seminal differences from the Progressive Writers’ Association lie.

By the 1940s, gender had become the surrogate for political loquaciousness, a noisy compulsion to represent ventriloquised women in story and poetry. Miraji too, succumbed. But unlike many of his writerly compatriots, he did not route his aesthetic pathways via the usual failsafe props along journeys whose outcome was predestined — through makaan-o-samaan, through gharelu kaam-kaaj, through the everyday errands that stalked domesticity and silhouetted women in the quotidian and often careless cruelties which fissured their lives to wrench their bodies towards gruesome outcomes. Instead, his political lyricism wended its way through the philosophical nazm — its orientation not just towards the content, the meat and matter in the verse, but something else. Epistemology, questions of knowledge, the weird slants that seeing itself might assume if they were channeled through gender. Gender is not where you land up but a passageway into other questions, but only if it abandons domesticity, runs away from home, turns uncanny. Gender, then, in Miraji’s lyric, was never an alibi for representational politics but the domicile through which representation became murky, queer, foundations awry, angled unforeseen along lyrical forbearers. It was a dissonance from the rhetoric of the time that sealed its covenants through translation.

Guided through sringara, kavya, the terse poignancy of Sappho or Japanese haiku, Miraji’s lyric could wax rhapsodic or torque into facsimiles on poetics, hunker down to love slipping away into anguish, could seed itself where gender faded away, and desire obeyed the covenants of commonplace expectation or eluded them altogether.

Into ‘Ras ki anokhi lehren,’ Miraji, as a woman, siphons masurat, savouring the plump tang of elation, happiness, delight. The nazm, a monologue, commences with a woman’s voice longing for herself: “main ye chahati hun kay duniya ki ankhen mujhe dekhti jaa’en,” (I want the world’s eyes to keep looking at me; I want the world’s gaze on me). The poem closes with the almost uncertain circle of joy (masurat) into which she resolves. The refrain, “main ye chahati hun” — I desire this; I want this — orchestrates every verse.

The second stanza clothes the speaker in a flurry of lively images: “main ye chahati hun ki jhonke havaa kay lipatte chalay jayen mujh say / macalte huay, ched karte huay, hanstay, hanstay koi baat kahte huay, laaj ke bojh se rukte rukte, sambhalte huay, ras ki rangin sargoshiyon mein” (I want gusts of wind to wrap themselves around me, pout, tease, laughingly say something, pause shyly, collect themselves in playful, juicy, passionate whispers). A woman’s desire — what she wants from it for herself — welling in each segment out of an image palate awash in wind, tree, river, words soaked in tender sorcery. Never morphing completely into human substance or avatar, the lyric’s playful, whimsical voice thwarts and forestalls, confounding readers who might come to it expecting their gaze to sample and savour a beguiling fetish or an impoverished figure whose will has been dissipated by the violence of her circumstances. Written in 1942, the poem beckons instead to the fleshy iconography of nature from some of the Hindi lyric composed by Mahadevi Varma, the Chhayavad poet who was occasionally called a modern Mirabai.

In ‘Tahriik’ Miraji douses the nazm in the tonal shades of sringara rasa from Sanskrit kavya and Braj geet, to service a voice bereft, denuded, emptied of gender. From your eyes to my heart, both are in possessive oblique, desire in disguise, gender withheld. In other words, unlike ‘Ras ki,’ readers of this nazm are never cued in by the poem’s grammar to the gender of the speaker or to whom the voice directs itself; anyone can live in its ambience, feed off its music.

The title which means movement, motion, impelling, agitation, syncopates against tariik, darkness, death, desire, and tariikh, history, time, chronicles: registers which shove the poem backwards through sultry scenes that echo bhajan, and forward, into the present, the season of this lyric’s poetic anguish. When time makes its appearances in the poem, it lingers in the tense of the perfect, the temporality of hagiography, of narrative, of myth, of suspension. The poem closes with the word caal or movement, strategy, cunning, the registers of Krishna’s governmentality — but the word also brings with it a whiff of charitra’s wilful, perverse reach — roaming, wandering and forsaking propriety.

Far off In the tall indigo jungleBlack, blue-black clouds crowded.In the forest, a black koel callsBlack shadows on the groundBlack, liquid eyesBlack, blue-black hair.

Close byIn the centre of my heart. SlowlySlowly sighs roseSorrow poisons the nectarSorrow’s fierce, fiery glancesSorrow’s yellow-black eyesSorrow’s soft, whisper step.

These two brief verses are chock full of allusions for readers cozily familiar with mystical devotionalism. But its images are so spare it’s as though most of the stock characters have been scrubbed away to leave swathes of colour behind traced through with tantalising lines. Black couples with yellow, far off and close in: verse one to two. Verdant jungled monsoon, clouds crowding, night’s darkness, the blue-black, subterranean indigo of Krishna’s skin into yellow, spring, light, heartbreak, fire, death held at bay, sorrow’s walk whispering into sallow, fierce brilliance. ‘Tahriik’s’ lyric contours render their allegiances through Mira’s colours; take the rhythmic consistency of the song genres associated with Mira, gathering them into the now, the barer, naked incantations of 20th century nazm composed by Miraji: nectar to poison. The poem’s script, Urdu, pulls the Nagari or Gurmukhi in which Mira had been recorded, towards a translation, which bears in it the history of travel. And the eyes in the poem, rasile, liquid, poised between longing and grief, promise an immersion into the aesthetics of pleasure and pain so that love can never consummate itself, and desire reaching across language for any body, queers the registers of lyric.

‘Devadasi aur Pujari’ and ‘Ba’ad ka udav’ venture into slightly different terrains than either ‘Tahriik’ or ‘Rasa ki.’ Flitting between the pillars of a temple, a dancer’s body in ‘Devadasi aur Pujari’ summons a clandestine, furtive covetousness. Skimmed sar-e paa, top to bottom, perhaps by the pujari in the title, the devadasi’s skin metastasises slowly, sensuously rippling through an inventory of jungle dwellers. The second poem in his collection Miraji ki Nazmain, ‘Devadasi aur Pujari’ was written between 1932-1934. Miraji was just about 20 when he composed it. ‘Ba’ad ka udav,’ written later, in 1941, offers its provocations through stories left strewn with clothes in the wake of a night’s pleasure, bringing into the poem’s bedroom landscape an old testament lineage: the crow who glimpses land at the far reaches of the flood which sent Noah fleeing into the ark.

Despite their obviously dissimilar locales, the two poems share something crucial — both hint at the salacious scrutiny of a woman by a woman. A reader, passing into the poems’ custody, which enmeshes them in desire, is dragged willy-nilly into becoming, for even a small space, a small opening in the poem’s time scape, a woman looking — at odds with the putative gender of each poem’s protagonist. This, as I have intimated in Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings, upends the implicit proprieties of readerly assumptions, makes readers so uncomfortable with Miraji’s lyrical practice that they are willing to repudiate his entire oeuvre; they are willing to toss his entire corpus into the dustbin of literary history.

‘Ba’ad ka udav’ rollicks with unanticipated scenes. As Mehr Farooqi pointed out, “bikhere hu’e hain gesu / bindii dumdar sitarah hai / magar sakin hai / chalte, chalte ko’i ruk ja’e achanak jaise / Ghusal khane mein nazar a’ya tha, ungli pe mujhe surkh nishan / vahi dumdar sitare ki numa’ish ka patah deta tha” conjures a woman looking at a woman. (Hair disheveled / bindi a shooting star / at rest / as though someone paused unexpectedly while walking / in the bathroom I saw / a finger stained red / that foretold the star’s arrival / It passed by but left in its wake / like a faint footprint on night’s path.) Unlike in the first stanza of the poem — whose final line establishes masculinity through the direct pronoun in the phrase “main hota to yeh kahta tujh se” while leaving open what the gender of “tujh” might be — the oblique pronoun “mujhe” of the second verse does something else. The stained finger, “mujhe surkh nishan,” the faint smear a bindi rubbed inadvertently while making love, leaves behind the residue of a woman looking at a woman.

‘Devadasi aur Pujari’ hailing a reader, “Lo, nach ye dekho,” come see this dance, summons them to contemplation. “Nach, pavitra nach ik devadasi ka / dhire, dhire dur hu’a hai, sayah mere dil se dil ki udasi ka.” Despondency slips away in these opening lines when they turn to possessive oblique pronoun we also see in ‘Tahriik’; and in doing so they stymie the assumption that the priest of the title carries along with him, that seduction can only be funneled through male eyes. The oblique “mere,” solicits anyone to come, occupy the “I.” And the shadows of gloom slide off a reader’s heart slowly, slowly as the metaphors buoy. Looking turns into caressing an inventory of images that flash by. The poem courses through them. The philosophical question that surfaces as a reader vanishes into the poem’s skin is, what does poetry do?

‘Devadasi aur Pujari’ provokes another genre of recognition, where ontology fleshes epistemology, one that Miraji himself alluded to when picking out poems he considered good enough to parse for his collection Is Nazm Mein. Good enough poetry had one obligation — that it flaunt khayalat. In Is Nazm Mein he writes: “When I picked nazms I was attracted by those that were intellectual. Because, I believe that their real foundations lie in intellectual concerns. If a nazm did not address something new, did not take a few steps forward, then analysing it was pointless, was a waste.” A command to modernism in the ways I have suggested for S.R. Faruqi’s poetry, which takes its cue from Sabk-e Hindi. A command that images, metaphors, allegories double up on themselves so that they flesh out ideas. So that poems such as ‘Devadasi aur Pujari’ are not merely about jinsiyaat, about the nakedly carnal. Instead, they are reflections on what happens when a poem seduces a reader to submit to its world, to enter its skin and live with it, in it, fleetingly. To estrange the habits of reading. They give us, as readers, a chance at sorcery, a mirage of what reading without completing a story might look like. We enter the saahir khana, the queer world of Miraji; ‘Devadasi and Pujari’ shows us how to read anew.

Who was Miraji as an adakar, performer, an actor, an artist? One might well go to the beginning of a nazm he wrote, titled ‘Adakar’. It is the culminating lyric in his collection, Miraji ki Nazmain. Earthy and ethereal, philosophical because it is embroiled in a corporeal repertoire, it draws from both his more Perso-Arabic and Braj-Hindi lyrical lexicons. Like some of the others I have spoken of here, it fuses the straightforward colloquialisms from everyday Urdu with the complex rhythms of literary Hindustani Farsi, Arabic prose and medieval mystic verse. Its phrases slide from the smooth ease of conversation to the thickly layered synesthesia of multiple literary languages. Deceptively lucid, the poem’s rich imagistic universe seems to lend itself to easy comprehension, even as it travels a convoluted journey into a poet’s psyche.

Meri zabân chipkali ki manind phul se chu rahi hai goyaGudaz patti ke ras ko ik pal mein chus legi. Magar usae yeh khabar nahin hai har ek phul ek — ek bhanvare ke dhyanmen kho ke jhumta haiKhile huae phul ko jo dekheyahi samajhti hai uski nakhat mere fasurdah masham-e jaan ke liye bani haimagar khila phul kis ka sathi?

Main ik musafir — chaton pe, divar-o-dar pe, dahliz par basira raha hai meraAur aaj, raste mein a gayi (tu) Yeh tera pardah ki jis ke us par mujh ko divar-o-dar bhi, dahliz bhi, chatein bhi Dikha’i deti hai khak aludah agahi seKabhi to uthtaa hai, uth ke girta hai, gir ke uthta hai — is ki larzishKabhi tabasum kabhi sukun ki pukar ban karMujhe bulati hai phir ye kahti hai chup — Thahar jaa’o dekho, shayad koi yahinDekhta hai, lekinKhilta hua phul kis ka sathi? Us chaman se nahin hai nisbat voh us jahan mein Har ek ke hathonn se hote hote, kabhi kis sej pe, kabhi kis sej se chitaa tak Pahunchta, rahata hai aulu zamanaPukarta hai — khila hua phul kis ka sathi?

My tongue tastes flowers like a shy gecko, as thoughIt might suck a plump petal’s sap in an absent, hurried momentBut it doesn’t know that each flower, one by one — sways in the dream of a beeAnyone who looks at a flower budding open Believes that its intense perfume blooms only for their faded melancholic, numb life — reaching for a sense of smell, reaching out to scentBut for whom did this flower come to life, whose companion is it, who does it accompany?

I am a traveller, an itinerant, a nomad. On roofs, along walls and at doors, at the threshold, I nest or roost, find reposeIf you come by this path today, then This is your curtain, your screen, on the far side of which I glimpseWalls and doors, thresholds, and even roofs, dust tarnished insight, stained by ashes bequeathed from a fire. I get up sometimes only to fall, and when I fall, pull myself up again — its tremble, tremorAn occasional smile, a sudden callHails me, and says “quiet, stay silent” — wait a bit, perhaps someone Is gazing out here — butWhose companion is a flower that once bloomed? They don’t have a rapport with the garden, with that universe from whichPassed from hand to hand, sometimes supine on a bed, sometimes from bed to funeral pyreA strange perturbed age arrives, to call out and askWhose companion is a flower that once bloomed?

So what does this poem tell us? In translating Miraji I follow his own protocols for tarjumah, take liberties with the rhythmic conventions of recitation in Urdu, repeating phrases so versions tug and jostle. And this poem, which is deliberately mubham, ibhaam, it’s meaning elusive, calls out for such a translation, one that is quite deliberately not literal, a style he used on elliptical poets such as Stephane Mallarme. Queer translation.

Mubham is one in a roster of available ways of thinking about what a particular poem does, and Miraji used the word, as a concept-metaphor to speak about the poems that he wrote as well as those by other poets did. Mubham suggests the paradox of straightforward words whose meaning, like a chipkali, plays hide and seek with the reader. In this difference resides queerness, something you can’t get to in the usual fashion.

The poem begins with zabân, tongue but also voice, lyrical voice, absently tentative, flicking out like a gecko’s, to taste the essence of a flower, sample the sensations that make words come to life and bloom into lyric. The sinews in these opening phrases lie in ‘manind’ and ‘goya’ — ‘like’ and ‘as though’. Neither settles easily: a bee’s dream, its tantalising fragrance fading away, desiccated petals, the only tools a poet possesses to animate his corpse. The poet might be nirala or Mahadevi; both pluck flowers from Braj, bloom them, dry them out.

The poet who skirts the edges of domesticity, a sojourner in a world passed along between bed and pyre, but never entering a home. Insights from the ashes of melancholia, living between occasions, ephemeral responses, falling and picking oneself up again, smile, someone who calls out, a person who may or may not come. This repertoire appears again in other nazms such as ‘Jaatri’ or ‘Samundar ka Bulaava’ where Miraji dissects the lineaments of poetry attuned to mysticism, taps into the reveries and hallucinations, the detritus from the obliteration of poetic possibility after 1857. A mash-up that pulls and tugs, stretches and strains and petitions for a helpless, brutal attentiveness from a reader: the ambigously political labour of modernism. Demands that the reader look again and again, pass from hand to hand what the poet says in many places, on the doors, running along the walls, filling the rooftops of their work. A reader has to get up, and fall again, pull himself up and ask the question: for whom did the lyric bloom?

In a chart which Akhtarul Iman found in Miraji’s papers and gave me, Miraji uses mubham for himself, as a holding place where his own poems might mislay their transparency, misplace their faith in biographical, political, social, biological realisms and their crust soften up. Perhaps this is where — in mubham, in the ellipsis between mubham and realisms, in the ellipsis between genres of realism — Miraji finds the possibilities for his own khayalat or might find khayalat for himself. Khayal as soma — to arraign modernism as a queer practice.

Oyster pearls lace the water’s hem like fluted shadows.Suddenly clouds gather in folds,The sun briefly curtained Boats secluded without a traceAnd lingering along the water’s curve, oysters cupped open nakedly.

This allure of essence, offered up in ‘Juhu ke kinare,’ “cupped open nakedly,” manifests the act of reading. Many readers enticed by the palpably erotic, find themselves “lingering” on the frisson in the flesh of the words, find themselves trying to draw out, like poison or like nectar, the real “real” kernel of Miraji’s phrasing.

So that reading occurs, as in ‘Devadasi and Pujari,’ through seduction, where seduction is the modulation through which a reader comes to understand something about reading as such. Consuming the oyster flesh of this poem, erotica, erotics, eroticness, sex if you will — jinsiyaat — becomes the fetish through which such readers assign poems their value, through which such readers sieve their own desire. Jinsiyaat beguiles a reader into believing in the core of universal value, the pearl, through which Miraji’s poems are to be given their measure.

One is always tempted, and I have been too, when one writes on a single poet to secure a place for oneself as a special kind of reader, a reader in the know. And despite all the caveats of theoretical positions one ostensibly holds, to secure a special place for oneself by ferreting out in its “essence” the ‘real’ gist of the poet’s work. Michel Foucault in ‘The Care of the Self’ — volume one of the History of Sexuality — explores this allure of sexuality as the secret we endlessly track down. And certainly, Miraji’s invocations of sexualities, which were held taut between his own time and multiple pasts, drew me to the temptations of seduction, the lure of the secret.

And yet, like many of his avid readers, I am constantly thwarted because Miraji’s poems range so widely, are tweaked through so many registers of versification. Miraji’s poems live, like all good lyric does, not because one easily recognises its mauzu, its supposed theme, but instead, in the lingering rhythms of lines building, twisting and flowing away from easy access to their meaning. The pearl in them lies supine in the place where reading itself can turn into a strange, ajib, paagal-saa, elliptical supplement, and a not quite complete, queer modernist habit.

Geeta Patel is Visiting Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, and Associate Professor, Department of Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages & Cultures and Program in Women & Gender Studies, University of Virginia. She has authored Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings: Gender, Colonialism and Desire in Miraji’s Urdu Poetry.