Looking Backward: How Urdu Poetry Makes Queerness Historical

For three centuries, the ghazal has been the most prestigious and popular genre of Urdu poetry.

This is Out of Time, a bimonthly column by Rajat Singh, that explores how South Asia’s artistic traditions have shaped his understanding of queerness.

“everytime the line
breaks I ache”
—Wayne Koestenbaum, The Pink Trance Notebooks

On the cusp of graduating from college, my friends and I used to squander our weekends wandering the narrow streets of Boston. Thronged together, the queer men and straight women in our circle inhabited lounges, sipping cocktails, and danced and danced until we couldn’t stand. We groped in the dark for the edges of our desires to take shape. My friends and I, drowning in reverie, spilled joy across one another, joy as limitless as the drinks we ordered. Those nights, as I remember, our skin glistened in the light and our bodies became more beautiful to one another. All of this was so typical that it became something of a ritual. I used to give those nights no thought, which is to say, I didn’t know how dull, how drained they left me feeling.

One lounge, Gypsy Bar, beckoned to the vagrants, the restless souls who hollered for no reason at all and found comfort in the dark recesses of dissolute company. It catered to straight people; we went for the sake of the women in our cohort. I suspect, for my queer friends who just wanted to dance, it didn’t matter that we weren’t at a gay bar. We’d been going to gay bars for years—but everything inside those assemblies of bodies wracked me with fear, teaching me that queerness was exclusionary. Men who cruised one another seemed either to practice or invite, with their eyes, a veiled form of bodily aggression. But at straight bars, my friends and I gave in to the unmemorable spectacle that played out before us week after week. Inside Gypsy, fascination and disgust filled me, my eyes roving across the playground of women in body-conscious dresses and men who hung on them. Tastelessness surrounded me, along with the unwelcoming gaze of strangers. I pretended not to notice the distance I’d placed between my own body and rest of the world.

One night, I broke away from the clumsy bodies, teetering as they ground against each other. To leave the horde felt like an adventure. Stumbling through the crowded hallways, pressing my way through sweating bodies, inhaling the scents of those I’d know only in that moment, I came upon a mirror the full height and width of the wall. A dim figure appeared before me. As if I’d lost my senses entirely, I found myself stranded here, stunned, for several minutes. I seemed to myself both familiar and strange. The illusion I beheld had my aquiline nose, my proud brow ridge, my dark hair, swept gracefully across the forehead. And yet this figure replaced the person I’d seen in the mirror earlier that evening, getting ready in my apartment. Bewildered, I began mumbling fragments to the person before me, not quite substantial enough to be a conversation.

I had to know I was looking at myself in the mirror, didn’t I? And if I knew this, what, then, was I unable to see? Blathering into the pool of my own longing, I kept this up as long as I could, standing at the edge of insanity and waiting for someone to see me in my fazed state. I suppose part of me thought this was funny, this performance designed to demonstrate the effects of intoxication. But at another level, it wasn’t only that I’d tried to fool everyone into believing I could play these antics, too. More than that, I had startled myself—and I’d become obsessed with a self I couldn’t touch or reach. I can’t remember now whether one of my friends rescued me or whether I eventually grew tired of my act and went in search of them. But if it was the latter, I’m sure I told them where I’d just been, what sort of adventure I’d had. What I couldn’t say—for I didn’t know it then—was that estrangement let me see the world in more shimmering detail.

*

The Urdu poet Siraj, writing in Aurangabad in 1747, tells how he fell for a soldier who wounded him. In his poem, Siraj recounts his heartbreak to another lover, a kind and generous nobleman, who tells Siraj, “I will make you forget the past.” But Siraj is so hurt by the betrayal of his first love that he professes, “The ways of the beautiful are fake and their words untrustworthy.” Ultimately, Siraj goes mad at the thought that he’s let himself become so overwhelmed with desire. It’s only after he finds refuge with a group of pirs, disciples of Sufism, that Siraj finds strength in his own vulnerability. Sufism, which privileged personal experience and devotion, appealed to outcasts like Siraj. Among this community of mystics, Siraj engaged in the practice of sama’. Through the ritual listening of ghazal, or Urdu poetry, poets became bound to one another as a community of men who remembered their suffering together.

For three centuries, the ghazal has been the most prestigious and popular genre of Urdu poetry. Ghazal, which in Persian means “a conversation with a woman,” addresses an absent object of the poet’s affection, while the pain of separation (firāq) pulls at every couplet. Through couched longings, the poet muses on what cannot be requited, fulfilled, or possessed. Ghazal is therefore concerned with the theme of idealized, yet unattainable beauty. The sense of loss or estrangement that the poet experiences also acts as a metonym for a number of other frustrations: For instance, the distance between poet and work; between world and language; or even between the human and the divine. Each poem evokes desire for union between these dualities. More than that, melancholy sits at the heart of the literary tradition of ghazal—and the redemptive value of vulnerability.

A series of linked couplets, lyrics loosely connected to one another by theme, ghazal obeys a strict meter and rhyme-scheme. Taken in pieces, however, each couplet also stands on its own. Each expresses a complete, contained thought. Each is terse and yet highly allusive. Take, for example, these crudely translated verses by the twentieth-century poet Jigar Moradabadi, a ghazal that one might call a “song of the self”:

My sorrows have become strange to me these days
As if each joy is only a part of me, they’ve all become scarce

It’s about the time of morning, the dew awakens
Happiness is about to become the occasion for mourning

What’s judgment day but the beauty of both worlds
The gathering is the same, yet it’s become less interesting

That bar, that wine, even that glass is the same,
But the ring of cheers has become spare

That there is my beloved cupbearer, but the heart is emptied
And that’s the same flame, yet the light has diminished

It’s the same confusion, and yet it’s like a wave beneath the surface
My heart is as it was, even though its beat has softened

My life is still the same, but Jigar, this is the state of things
As if out of life, life is diminishing

For Adrienne Rich, who tried her hand in 1968 at composing ghazal, the beauty of such a “closed couplet” is that it results in a stunning prism of “fragments, glimmers, exclamations.”

Despite the perfection of these little verses, so pleasing to the ear, ghazal is committed to failure. For one, the depth that each couplet packs into its concise architecture makes it almost impossible to translate into English with any semblance of beauty or poetic effect. Meaning slips away. The translation withers, becoming clunky—or worse, affected and exaggerated. What’s more, ghazal operates as an asymptote—as in math when a function bends toward a line, but never reaches it. Finally, ghazal is actually most opaque when it seems to us clearest, most limpid, most accessible. It’s us who are deceived.

But more than the failure of language, Urdu ghazal stresses the impossibility of love as an openly celebrated fact. At the height of ghazal’s prominence, Muslim and Hindu society segregated the sexes; to address a woman as a beloved would be to ruin her reputation. Men, therefore, became the object of a poet’s affection. And yet, this ambiguity further complicated the moral injunction to conceal one’s love, keep it a secret. Through coded metaphorical tropes—a face resembling the moon, a pair of eyes resembling a narcissus blossom—a younger male drives the poet who loves him toward all-consuming passion. He is the handsome cupbearer, the witness of love, seducing the poet inside an ocean of wine and confusion.

Without the opportunity to manifest his love, however, a poet becomes consumed from within, suffering in isolation. In the Sufi tradition, burning becomes the ultimate ecstasy, where longing eventually transforms into pleasure, into a path toward union with the divine. Thus, it is the lover who is ennobled. His failure, then, isn’t in vain. Rather, desire is decoupled from a system of possession or ownership. Beauty arrives at a kind of idealized beauty, for its ability to pull at the heart, to evoke melancholy.

Ghazal’s origins lay in a land I could only claim to know or belong to. Growing up, I didn’t visit India the way other immigrant families did. With so many of my relatives in America, in my father’s eyes, we weren’t missing anything in India. And, following years of complicated legal action to extricate their home in Delhi from the hands of unscrupulous locals, my mother finally admitted to me, last month, “There’s no pleasure in visiting a place where you don’t have a home.” How, then, can I miss something I’ve never had?

In turn, I filled this loss with as much beauty as I could hold onto. Ghazal is one of India’s aestheticized exports that had reached America and that I grasped at. Its strength lay, for me, in its unexpectedly comforting sounds: Poetry became the stuff of imagination, a language through which I could conjure an India beyond the reality of others’ experiences and retellings. These weren’t just words uttered or whispered to myself. Rather, within these poems’ syllables were the breaths of those who ached. Knowing they had to conceal their love, I’m relieved there was a tradition to hold their longing.

More than a place, though, ghazal immortalized a past I never grew up in. The genre has also flourished for centuries as an artistic commodity that received heaping patronage from India’s royal courts. And even though, at its cultural height in the nineteenth century, Urdu ghazal was favored by nobility and connoisseurs, with the expansion of the recording industry, the warm embrace of a harmonium entered the everyday lives of my parents, who in turn filled the silence of my childhood in America. Ghazal has long been obsessed with the literary and stylistic activity of its own production, a fact that I learned when I heard the sighs of my relatives gathered around a kitchen table as they recalled from memory couplets amongst themselves—or better yet, invented new ones. After each couplet, sighs of lament doubled as both praise and what I know now as nostalgia, a longing for a world they lost to unrelenting progress, their own desires left unfulfilled.

*

“Can you believe I just spent five minutes talking to myself in the mirror? How did I not know it wasn’t me?”

I saw on my friends’ faces that no one believed what I’d uttered. Nor would they let me get away with my performance. And yet, weren’t we all hiding behind a crude charade? It was entirely convincing that I’d put on this show, if that’s indeed what this was. But what emerged at the edge of possibility, then, was the truth of my own desperation. How silly I must have seemed. Still, I wondered whether I would be afforded the privilege of sentimentality. The intensity of my emotional condition, as yet unarticulated, competed with the surfeit of shimmering, vapid, unavailable things at Gypsy Bar. That is to say, we hadn’t gathered here to muse on all the things inside us that we couldn’t say. And yet, every time we leaned into another’s ear to say something, we had to shout. It was as if we were telling each other secrets we wanted the world to know. And thus, I thought and thought endlessly. As my mind blurred, I came into focus at the precise moment that my friends saw my own need for attention. I’d told them I didn’t know I was talking to myself in the mirror. It was a lie that became real before my very eyes.

Melancholy sits at the heart of a long literary tradition in Urdu letters. But is melancholy contagious? Can melancholy be transferred through art forms like ghazal, thereby collapsing the distance between poet and audience? Brimming with bubbly optimism, the lyrics of top-forty songs imbued in my friends an alluring confidence. I saw how words by popular hip-hop artists gave these women and queer men power in a world that wanted to render their bodies invisible or disposable. For me, the distance between verse and the self I sought to cultivate was something I wanted to see dissolve. Put another way, I turned to ghazal to render my queerness as not only beautiful but historical. I was already the man who felt too much—itself an antiquated trope, out of touch with reality.

It’s possible I became transfixed with myself in the mirror because I was obsessed with my own appearance, or those brown boys who looked like me and whom I found desirable. Or perhaps I sensed something just past my reflection that I wanted to see bent back on me. As the music fell away, I heard only my heartbeat in between the pulsing bass. Can I say I fell into a trance? Here I was, repeating fragments to myself in a sustained effort at conversation: “fragment,” from the Latin frangere (“to break”). I thought of the distance between what I saw and what I sought. Beneath the surface of the mirror glimmered the possibility of a future.

I was, of course, afraid that people might ask me, “What does it all matter?” In Urdu, we might say, “Kya faraq padta hai?” Literally, “what’s the difference?” What’s there to care? Faraq, however, is intimately connected with firāq, meaning not only “separation,” but more intensely, “anxiety”—and most meaningfully, “desire.” One only longs for what is far away. If the past seems as distant as some untenable future matters, then what we imagine will come is strengthened by revision. In Adrienne Rich’s understanding of the term, revision is “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction.” I knew at the time of my wandering that my estrangement had enacted a sort of adventure. What I didn’t know was that, for the briefest instant, I had peered into an ocean more beautiful for its power to drown me.