Among influential genres in South Asia is a form of poetry called Ghazal, a genre that in its present form dates back to the eighth century and boasts of poets such as Rumi, Hafiz, Ghalib, and Mir Taqi Mir. I aim to translate Ghazals that have made their way into popular culture of South Asia using audio sources from sung-aloud performances of the genre coupled with imagery from film. I am interested in using these audio/visual sources as translational tools to map out the affective potential of the Ghazal for audiences unfamiliar with the genre. This project is an attempt at translating a Ghazal through the use of multimodal design. My definition of multimodal design is informed by the New London Group of literacy scholars who inform us that there are five modes of communication: visual, linguistic, spatial, aural, and gestural. While each of these modes have their own “functional grammar” of meaning making, “multimodal design” represents patterns of interconnection among the other modes (New London Group 13). Using multimodal design as a translational method allows me to recreate more the multiplicity of the Ghazal while making a visual argument for the Ghazal as a historically Queer genre.  

My choice to go beyond the linguistic mode stems from the difficulty of translating a Ghazal without also reducing it. The difficulty arises in part because the Ghazal thrives on creating a multiplicity of meanings by drawing upon the existing Ghazal universe (Pritchett 94). The Ghazal’s multiplicity makes it a genre of expression, contemplation, and deliberation at the same time. It is a genre that unifies philosophy, history, rhetoric, and literature as it is a kind of cosmological genre of poetry where poetry facilitates worldbuilding i.e. a way of seeing, interpreting, and relating with the world. The written archive cannot do justice to the Ghazal as a form, since it is not written but rather performed (Note 1). Diania Taylor’s thinking, while written about performance traditions in the Americas, holds for the Ghazal in recognizing the written archive as only a partial impression of the performance: “How can we think about performance in historical terms, when the archive cannot capture and store the live event?” (XVI). Same is true for the Ghazal as the poet is not the writer but rather one who ‘says’ and likewise the ‘reader’ is a listener. Additionally, the vast majority of audiences approach the Ghazal not through the poet but through the singer in the form of a sung aloud performance.  

Today, the transmodal Ghazal becoming a loosely recognizable genre mediated by video sharing platforms allows me to pose the following questions guiding this project (Note 2): What role can multimodal sources play in learning and teaching in the context of multicultural knowledge production? How can images, sounds, and captions be used to make affective experiences of reading Urdu poetry accessible to English speakers? Can multimodal translations be a bridge to introduce students to literary genres that are difficult to translate traditionally? How can multimodal translations facilitate cross-cultural communication? As a foreigner whose very being is spread across five different languages, these questions have deep personal relevance to me. I aim to  engage these questions by creating digital objects that can open up ways of experiencing the Indo-Persian genre of the Ghazal for English speaking audiences.

My method is inspired by one of the most successful translators of the Ghazal, Agha Shahid Ali. Shahid describes his task as a translator in terms of a question: “Could I make English behave outside its aesthetic habits?” (Ali 10). Shahid Ali’s comment doesn't just delve into Lawrence Venuti’s dichotomy of foreignizing versus domesticating translation but introduces another idea relevant to the translation of the Ghazal i.e. the idea of an aesthetic register that allows a literary tradition to be legible to its audience. As Frances Prichett details, the Ghazal as a tradition drew its strength from “wordplay, implication, and verbal complexity” which were “a widespread taste that pervaded the popular culture” (901). According to Prichett, it was the genre’s constant expansion of the language available that gave it its widespread appeal. Given that pushing on the frontier of available language was a core facet of composing a Ghazal makes me confident that making use of the new available language in the form of audio/visual sources is a natural extension of the tradition. 

I wanted to translate, as much as possible, the multiplicity and intensity of a Ghazal. To do so, I experimented by deprioritizing the linguistic mode. I want to translate what Frances Pritchett has described as a spell that affects the listener to abandon rational objections. I am not the only translator to make this choice. Beyond me, Shahid Ali detailed how his way of staying true to Faiz in his translation was binding himself to the affective experience he felt and not restraining himself to the literary form: “I somehow felt the words, through their sounds, through my father’s rhythmic, dramatic voice.” (Ali 10). Shahid Ali’s translations rework the form in an attempt to preserve the musicality of Faiz. Shahid Ali deemed a traditional translation of the Ghazal beyond his powers because the Ghazal thrives on “endowing a word or sign with a number of concomitant referents explicable only in a particular textual or social context” (Ali 15). This rootedness within a cultural and social milieu that allows the form to thrive in Urdu hinders its translation. Part of the genre’s greatness emerges from intertextuality that is lost in translation and has to be (re)created in a new form. Shahid Ali’s infidelity to the form is ultimately faithful to the Ghazal and consistent with South Asian translational and rhetorical practices as the Ghazal is already multimodal. A Ghazal’s performance is inseparable from the written text. In the following quote, Shahid Ali, like most readers of the Ghazal, finds himself unable to separate the singer of Ghazal Begum Akhtar from the poet himself: “Was Begum Akhtar singing Faiz when the lights went out? He is always with me, often in her voice” (23). 

The Ghazal (Note 3) I translate or transcreate is attributed to the Sûfî mystic, Islamic scholar,  and perhaps the most famous poet in the world Muhammad bin Muhammad bin al-Husayn al-Khatibi al-Balkhi al-Bakri known around the world simply as Rumi (1207-1273) in Persian. I first approached this Ghazal in the form of a sung aloud performance by the Pakistani Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (1948-1997). In 2023, the Iranian singer Homayoun Shajarian sampled Fateh Ali Khan’s performance and added another layer to this Ghazal, inspiring my work here. This background information could go on since the Ghazal universe isn’t all that stable; how could a genre that's been alive since the 7th century be so? I can only wonder how many other beloved voices have sung this Ghazal in this span of nearly a millennium. The first time I heard this Ghazal, I could not stop listening to it for days. This Ghazal conjures an aesthetic universe where the lover is on the path to becoming the slave of the Beloved. Those familiar with the tradition will probably feel a desire to stop here and remind me that this lover-beloved relationship is a metaphor for the relationship between the Sufi and God. However, it is part of the Ghazal’s multiplicity to sustain both meanings, spiritual and the worldly love; afterall, in it, we do find a lover burning in the agony of separation from the Beloved and is addressed to a man—Muhammad bin Muhammad bin al-Husayn al-Khatibi al-Balkhi al-Bakri— known simply as Shams-i Tabrīzi. Rumi addresses this to Shams, likening his presence to intoxication by wine. Perhaps it is the divine presence that Rumi finds in Shams? However, why not take the poet at his word when he expresses longing to such a degree that he begs God for mercy for whirling around not God but the Beloved, as God is all forgiving but the Beloved isn’t. God can tolerate the sacrilege but to expect it of the beloved is futile. In the full version sung aloud by Nusrat the poet goes as far as to declare:

پاس اذاں کی من نه منم چکار خواهی آم۔    

Pas azan kay man na manam chkar khuwah-e-aamad) 

Your [the Beloved’s] presence is like the azan[Muslim call to prayer]. 

I don’t seek to contribute to the longstanding tradition of de-Islamization (Note 4) of Rumi’s poetry but rather to direct the conversation towards the less scripted conceptions of gender that premodern Persian and Urdu poetry carries within it. Scholars such as Scot Kugle and Afsaneh Najmabad, amongst others, have discussed how modernity was a palimpsest for gender in the Indo-Persian context. In Queering India, Scot Kugle reminds us of how the widespread tale of Sultan Mahmud (971-1030) and Malik Ayaz (993-1041) evolved in this time period. A commonly referenced and archetypal image within the Ghazal universe is that of Mahmud and Ayaz. One of the most well known couples in “Persianate lands (including India, Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia), Mahmud and Ayaz were always mentioned as a pair, on par with heterosexual romantic partners like Laila and Majnun, or Heer and Ranjha” (31) (Note 5). Kugle depicts this story amongst other ubiquitous love stories before modernity on par with Laila and Majnun, who are often mentioned as one of the origin stories of the Ghazal and are probably as well known as Romeo and Juliet in English. Kugle cites a verse from Iranian poet Zulali who died in 1615. I will include a few random verses to allow my readers to see the frankness with which Mahmud and Ayaz’s love is discussed in premodern Persian poetry: 

That night, Mahmud himself became wine, burgundy as spilled blood 

He was the glass In the cupbearer's hand like a trained royal falcon

The cupbearer came in, circling with amorous flirtation

The sting of his playful glance cut the vein of Mahmud's glass

The Sultan of Ghazna approached as if to rapture him

When with a wink of abandon, Ayaz slew him on the spot

(Kugle 31 & 32).

The story would change completely during British colonial rule. Today, most readers remember the story as one of equality of how the master and slave stand together when they pray to God. The cause of the change was British Victorian officials who desired the extermination of “special oriental vices” i.e. the love between men which they saw as “unnatural.” Interestingly, the critique that these same officials would make of Indo-Muslim poetry revolved around the same word “unnatural.” I seek to emphasize how  the critique of the Ghazal as ‘unnatural’ was more than anything a critique of same-sex love which was naturalized within the Ghazal universe.

Inside British set up educational institutions, the Ghazal faced harsh critiques from British officials like Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859). The focal word of this critique was and still remains ‘unnatural.’ According to Macaulay, The Ghazal was deemed artificial, ‘unnatural’. These Victorians administrators were fascinated by ‘natural’ poetry, which refers to the idea that the aim of poetry is to paint a picture. They deemed the Ghazal as an unnatural game of words that failed to bring people closer to nature. Working within British institutions, Urdu’s first literary critics Maulana Azad and Altaf Husain Hali regurgitated the critiques of their heritage made by Macaulay who famously claimed “A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” Macaulay’s influence was deep. Altaf Husain Hali for example borrowed his overall philosophy of poetry from his image of the magic lantern of poetry. Macaulay believed in an inverse relationship between poetry and civilization. For him, as civilization ascended, poetry declined. The excellence of Urdu poetry was evidence for the decadence of the culture that had produced it. While Hali and Azad draw for other thinkers such as Milton and while they argue for more didactic forms of poetry, Frances Pritchett reminds us that “It is above all Macaulay on whom Hali chooses to Rely.”  And so, the defining critics of Urdu literature relied on an epistemology presented to them by a colonial administrator whose aim was to create Indians in the image of the Europeans (Pritchett 153).

South Asian racialization worked through gender and sex, and I aim for my translation to challenge the continuing legacy of this racialization. According to Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Officials imagined Bengali masculinity as effeminate in comparison to the ‘manly’ Englishman. It’s no surprise that ‘manly’ Englishman would go on to mold South Asian society according to his conception of ‘naturalness.’ Macaulay attempted this by drafting the section 377 of Indian Penal code that forbids intercourse “against the order of nature” thus criminalizing homosexuality, a law that for the most part is still with us in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh to put a stop to “special oriental vices” (Bhaskaran 17). In light of this context, I don’t think it’s possible to disagree with the idea that the critique of the Ghazal as unnatural was to no small extent a critique of gender and sexuality. I decided to select scenes from Portrait de la jeune fille en feu Portrait of a Lady of Fire (2019) because I felt there was an aesthetic and affective intensity that reminded me of the longing Rumi expresses in this Ghazal for Shams. My aim in doing so was to pose questions and think about how while the coloniality of gender arrived at our doorstep through the Englishman, we Urdu-wallahs have had no small role in continuing its legacies. Even eminent scholars of Urdu poetry Ralph Russel and Khursheed-ul-Islam in their collaborative reading of Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir affix the female sex to the Beloved when Urdu poetry has firm convention of male pronouns for the Beloved. So much so, that despite the fact that the 20th century poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz used the feminine pronouns in one of his most famous nazm “Mujh Se Pehli Si Mohabbat Mere Mehboob Na Maang,” sung-aloud versions revert to the male pronoun for the beloved.