A monitor reported to his guru; “the number of chelas (disciples) has increased. They are now so many. How are we going to feed them”? “Don’t worry. They will leave when they starve”, the guru nonchalantly replied.

Strangely, we have so many poets, innumerable in fact. Lot of them starve if we go by the stereotypical image of poet but they won’t leave the magnetic field poetry. Actually something opposite happens. The more miserable they are, the more they compose verses decrying the society that they portray as utterly uncaring and philistine. To have some measure of their number, you have just to announce that you plan to hold a Mushaira (public poetry recital). Within five days five thousand five hundred and fifty-five poets, head over heels in love with their verses, will mob you for attention.

This Mushaira thing was imported from Uttar Pradesh, from the Muslim royal courts of Delhi and Lucknow to be precise, in the aftermath of colonialism in the Punjab during the late 19th century. Isn’t it ironic that it wasn’t introduced by alien Muslim elite that shared a thing or two with the locals but rather by alien white colonialists who had absolutely nothing in common with people?

Imposition of Urdu was accompanied by literary accoutrements which appeared odd when transplanted in a totally different cultural milieu. Mushaira was as alien as the language in which poetry was recited in its early phase. It has had organic links with Muslim aristocracy of foreign extraction comprising mainly Central Asian Turks and Iranians that ruled India. Central Asian Turks were the dominant faction of the elite.

Amaury De Riencourt writes in his remarkable book The Soul of India on the rise of Turks which had its origins in the Mahmud’s capture of Punjab thus; “By now, the Hindus knew that they were dealing no longer with the relatively peaceful and cultured Arabs but with the dreaded, cruel Turksha or Turks, the Muslim ‘Romans’ who were in the process of taking over the Muslim world and were going to extend their dominions, in centuries to come, all over India…”.

Now it’s interesting to remember that the dominant Turks themselves had been under the sway of Iran’s culture which ruled Central Asia as an imperial power for centuries. Their royal courts aped Iranian imperial court and they adopted Persian as their official language at the expense of Turkish, their mother language. Subsequently they acted as cultural and literary proxies for Iran in India.

Urdu and Mushaira have been products of such a hybrid culture which is a pale imitation of Iranian high culture. That’s why most of Urdu poetry reflects court’s ethos. It neatly falls into two categories; panegyrics and lyrics (Ghazal), mostly saccharine. Poets either glorify royalty or beat their chests as forlorn lovers or do the both. The practice has been borrowed from Iranian poets. Social consciousness and a sense of dynamics of history from people’s perspective has never been its strong point. The recurrent pattern of poetic laments shows that the poet has been abandoned either by the court or by his lover/ beloved. Male gender is employed for beloved or desired female.

Poetic expression for being detached from the concrete experiences of everyday life usually tends to be futilely abstract. Such an alien tradition first patronised by colonial set-up and later owned and promoted by Pakistani state has dug roots and influenced the generations of lesser Punjabi language poets alienated from their literary culture spanning one thousand years.

Punjab’s literary tradition was altogether different; people and their life with all their conflicts and contradictions have been /still is its focal point. All classical poets sang of people’s sufferings, dreams and aspirations and fearlessly exposed and opposed elite’s historically conditioned predatory practices. They took side, the side of the oppressed. Thus their poetry is a ‘sigh of the oppressed’ and protest of the exploited. The vested interests which uphold status quo have been making concerted efforts to blunt this revolutionary edge of our classical poetry by labelling it as spiritual. And they have succeeded to an extent through institutionalising Mushaira as a countervailing force.

In the Punjab traditionally poetry in any genre was designed to be sung alone or in a gathering. Music was its integral part. So much so that a sizable segment of it was composed in the structures of classical Ragas, the apex of musical expression. In a nutshell, Punjab’s poetry was defined by its pro-people stance and its organic roots with music. Its musical rendition made it cause celebre.

But those who usually roar and thunder from the platform of Mushaira have little to do with this gloriously dynamic tradition. And they are found in an unusually large number. But does that explain the number phenomenon? We can see an interplay of myriad socio-cultural factors such as craze for popularity, egomania, desire to increase personal visibility in the social market and an urge to supplement one’s income. Popular or low quality poetry comes easily. It needs no organised effort and focused attention as it tails the remains of oral tradition in today’s complex society. All it takes is rehashing, more of the same. It’s in fact old wine in an old bottle, one may assert.

The most popular poet in a Mushaira is the one who appeals to the lowest common denominator. Remember loathing such poets Shakespeare created a grimly hilarious scene in his Julius Caesar? When the crowd goes out in search of Caesar’s assassins, it encounters a man called Cinna who it takes as one of the killers. “I am Cinna, the poet, I am Cinna, the poet’, he pleads. “Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses’, comes an angry shout. But let’s not kill our poets. State surely can tax them as it does everything else.

We in the East have a longstanding tradition of honouring poets, even the bad ones. They may be vain and foolish but they are harmless creatures. Just ignore them if their sentimental outpourings turn your stomach. But you can’t ignore them; they are too many.

— soofi01@hotmail.com