Ranjit Hoskote: “Mir is very much our contemporary – a wounded sensibility”

What circumstances enabled the publication of this book now?

I began to read Mir’s poetry in the late 1990s. Over the last 10 years or so, I have been reading him with a more definite focus. Between 2018 and 2022, I shared a number of my translations of Mir’s asha’ar (the plural of she’r) via Twitter, as my ‘Mir Project’ – with each tweet comprising the Roman transliteration of a she‘r, my translation, and an image of a painting drawn from the Mughal, Rajput, Deccani or Safavid ateliers. The idea of a book grew out of the Mir Project. And yes, I was rather hoping to have it ready in time for Mir’s 300th birth anniversary in 2023 – but became quite immersed in my research towards the Introduction. Research, as you know, is a potentially infinite adventure! And I kept tinkering with my translations alongside. So here we are, celebrating the poet’s 301st birthday. The important thing is that his poetry is for the ages. It’s perennially glorious and doesn’t really need the pretext of an anniversary to prop it up.

What considerations moulded your curation of the work of Mir in terms of theme and the decision to translate couplets and not whole ghazals?

Mir has been terribly ill served by his conventional representation as a poet of thwarted love and chronic sorrow, a generator of tragic ghazals. This is a banal and dreary image of a poet whose work is dazzlingly versatile, ranging from the short ghazal to the epic masnavi, from panegyrics to quatrains, from poems in honour of kings and potentates to poems celebrating cats and monkeys. And there is Mir the biographical anthologist, the memoirist, the self-ironic poet, the connoisseur of dirty jokes and risqué anecdotes. This last aspect has largely been edited out of the record, until recent times, by puritan editors. My aim was to bear witness to a larger range of moods and tones in Mir’s poetry than has so far been the case. I chose poems in which he pokes fun at himself and his high literary vocation. I chose, also, a number of poems that seem simple but carry deep resonances of mystical insight and visionary experience. And I chose poems that convey Mir’s grief at the displacement, disorientation and exilic elsewhereness imposed by a violent history.

Now about the ghazal. For reasons that I have explained at length in the introduction, the Urdu ghazal cannot always be conveyed effectively into English as a totality. Its conventions are those of oral literature, based on an interplay of rhyme and surprise, pattern and suspense. All this gets thrown away on the printed English page. Also, the Urdu ghazal is not held together by an evolving logic, except for ghazals designed to work as a whole. Typically, each couplet flies off in a different direction, with the rhyme and refrain holding the whole together. In English, this can make for a baffling centrifugality. In any case, it is the she’r, the couplet, that is regarded as a complete poem in itself and the primary unit of verse in the Urdu tradition. My choice, therefore, has been to return to the she’r as the poem in itself. Traditionally, listeners at a mehfil would take down their favourite asha’ar in a notebook or bayāz – never the complete ghazal. The Homeland’s an Ocean is my bayāz, my notebook of my favourite Mir verses.

Can we see Mir as a poet for whom it was natural, as it is for many folks today, to conceive of Hindi and Urdu, or for that matter Persian, and the other related languages, as a continuum? How did the linguistic confluences of Mir’s poetry guide your translation? How did you strike the linguistic compromise possibly needed between what could be carried into the translation and what couldn’t?

In my introduction, I argue that Mir’s poetry – and indeed his language – was richly nourished by his multilingualism. Mir grew up among speakers of Brajbhasha, Awadhi and Persian. His influential relative and early mentor, Khan-i Arzu, was deeply versed in Persian as well as Sanskrit. Mir was thus at home in what I have described as the ‘Hindavi continuum’, the spectrum of languages that preceded the official standard modern Hindi that we know today, and which was distributed in a wide swathe from Rajasthan to the Ganga-Yamuna doab, and from the Shivalik foothills to Telangana. His poetry is vibrant with Khari Boli, Braj and Awadhi vocabulary and turns of phrase.

And on the other hand, Mir was proficient in Persian – which, in the 18th century, was not a foreign language but an Indian one, spoken, read and written by large numbers of Indians of varied religions and ethnicities. Today, we see Persian through the narrow lens of nation-state politics as Iran’s national language – but, historically, Persian was the language of what I have called the ‘Iranosphere’, a transregional ecumene far vaster than territorial Iran, embracing Central, West and South Asia, with India as a key part of it.

A number of the poems in my selection demonstrate Mir’s linguistic diversity – especially poems in which he deliberately sets up a collision between elegant Persian forms and robust Khari Boli phrases, where he mixes sophisticated ways of crafting language with direct, punchy demotic vocabulary.

I grew up in a multilingual family myself – one in which individuals spoke and read many languages, and in which several branches had separate sets of first, second and third languages. One branch of my cousins, the Delhi and the Air Force lot, grew up speaking a proper old-style Hindi as one of their languages – my father always called it ‘Hindustani’, although this is, in fact, a name given to the language by British scholar-administrators. Another branch of cousins, the Hyderabad lot, grew up with Dakhani as part of their repertoire. It would send me into gales of laughter as a child – but I have grown to appreciate and cherish this very expressive idiom. These formative personal experiences of language sustain my journey with Mir’s poetry and guide my navigation of his oeuvre.

Speaking of politics, would you say that in contrast to the conception of Mir as writing exclusively from his personal life, trauma, and love, you also want to show him as “a poet of a shattered world”, a poet who responded to the social upheavals happening around him from also his political sensibilities?

Above all, in my reading, Mir is an urgently political poet, writing at a time of cataclysm, with the Mughal Empire collapsing around him, his home city of Delhi attacked every year for a two-decade period by the Afghan warlord Ahmed Shah Abdali, his way of life and his environment destroyed, forcing him repeatedly into exile. He first sought refuge in the Jat strongholds of Deeg and Kumher, and, later in life, in the newly emergent nawabate of Lucknow. The Homeland’s an Ocean reflects my choice of what I interpret as the more political dimension of Mir’s poetry, but without sacrificing his playfulness, his humour, and what I read as his lifelong spiritual quest.

What does Mir as a poet and as a person evoke for you in the political context of today? Your translation explicitly shows Mir’s personae - the lover of the colloquial phrase, the crafter of the Persian, the thinker on love, the mystic, the funny self-deprecating wit, the vain artist, the devotee of compassion and sometimes apparently a misanthrope. What sense about Mir did you as a translator get when dealing with his various thoughts and moods?

Mir is very much our contemporary – a wounded sensibility, a self that is fashioned from fracture and trauma. I argue that he is a refugee who must cope with the condition of solastalgia, the pain of experiencing the profound and cataclysmic transformation of one’s own social and natural environment. At the same time, and more positively, Mir is also our contemporary because he is a poet of confluence – he draws on diverse linguistic resources and cultural milieux. A contrarian and a dissenter, he positions himself at the meeting point of religious systems, he ridicules orthodoxy and authority.

Were Mir writing today, do you feel he would have embraced colloquialism?

Absolutely! He played adroitly, in his poetry, between the cosmopolitan and the vernacular, the elegant and the earthy, always crafting his verses in relation to the forms and cadences of what he called guftagu or the conversational, and which his teacher Khan-i Arzu called rozmarrah, the everyday.

Another aspect of Mir’s poetry, which I saw for the first time in your translation, was his humour. How did you work with his sense of humour, which can be a bit brash, even ribald, which may not necessarily resonate with your own?

As a poet, as a reader, as a translator, I welcome voices and tonalities that are completely distinct from my own! How else can we expand the spectrum of our sensibilities? While this may not be evident from my own writing, for instance, I have a certain taste for satire and buffoonery, the illuminations of ribaldry and melodrama.

Perhaps you could share what parts of his work you left off translating, and why?

I have minimised the more formulaic, even if exquisite, poems in the Mir canon that revolve around the theme of love, complain of the lover’s cruelty, and so forth, in the classic ghazal manner. And when I do include love poems, I indicate how they could be interpreted, also, as political articulations, pivoting around tropes of cruelty, tyranny, dispossession and so forth.

A reader might notice gains in this translation into English. These gains are cosmopolitan, so to say. For instance, in the literary phrase “still centre” occurring in the titular couplet, The Homeland’s An Ocean, a reader might evoke WB Yeats’s wheeling falcon, or Chinua Achebe’s great debut or something else referring to tectonic change. I see these ‘gains’ as happy occurrences. Would you please share your thoughts?

My English draws, as it inevitably must, on its own resources of association and allusion. My only rule is that such allusiveness should not obtrude clumsily into Mir’s universe. You will find the Yeatsian ‘still centre’ here, in the title poem, which ties the homeland to the images of the ocean and the whirlpool. You will find the Chandlerian ‘big sleep’ in a poem that meditates on death, dream and waking life. Correspondingly, my English too is recast by interplay with Urdu, in places – ‘gham-dīdāh’ comes through into English as ‘grief-gazed’, for instance. Translation is a two-way process, an empirical truth that the moribund terminology of ‘source language’ and ‘target language’ can never convey. The ‘target language’ is not static and sovereign. It is a living organism, and responds to the currents surging into it from the ‘source language’.

You have previously brought Lal Ded’s vākhs into English, among other works. There was a personal resonance about the subject for you, wasn’t there? If so, what did you address with this translation of Mir?

My Lal Ded translation originated in a quest to retrieve my ancestral homeland and language, lost through the process of diaspora. It soon grew far beyond this, and embraced a responsibility to a region, a language and a people embattled by multiple histories of tyranny and oppression. In the course of working on Lal Ded’s vākhs, I also developed a theoretical model to explain what I saw, from the evidence, to be the linguistic complexity and multiple, collaborative, transgenerational authorship of this corpus of wisdom poetry.

My fascination with Mir grew out of my long-term commitment to translating Ghalib’s poetry, work that is yet to be published. Remember that Ghalib, who recognised no equals, held only Mir to be greater than himself! In turn, I came to Ghalib through my mother, who recited his poems to me when I was a child and adolescent. As I’ve indicated, my Mir translation emerges from my own connections with the Hindavi continuum. Its introduction is, at some deep level, my extended homage to Delhi, a city that has always had great importance to me, as a child visiting family there and as an adult with personal and institutional connections there.

Beyond these individual circumstances, I believe strongly that Mir’s voice speaks with clarity and urgency, with anguish and a timely critical resonance to our historical moment. His themes are our themes, his loss is our loss, his bewilderment is our bewilderment – the destroyed city, the devastated countryside, the scattering of friends, the exactions of exile. All these are features of our lives today, in a world marred by genocidal wars and forced migrations, invasions and insurrections, tanks and bulldozers, bombed cities and slaughtered populations.

Translation, to me, is a political act in addition to everything else that it can be as a literary, aesthetic or academic practice. The Mir book is my way of bearing witness to South Asia’s multilingual and cultural diversity. It embodies my rejection of the falsehood that Urdu is a foreign language, my insistence on the common ground that brings religious communities and literary lineages together. It is an argument against the ideology of polarisation that dominates our public sphere today and has divided us against ourselves as a society.

The poet and professor Mustansir Dalvi said recently, in a Facebook post, that it took a village to make a translation. What primary and secondary sources, readers and allies did you rely on?

I thank my village – which is a global village; irrelevantly, I’m struck by the thought that Mir, in Russian, means both village and world – in the acknowledgements section of the book! And the nearly 50 footnotes that accompany the introduction are a testament to the colleagues to whom I owe deep thanks. The finest of guides into Mir’s world was the magisterial scholar Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, whose exegesis has been foundational. The work of CM Naim, Frances W Pritchett, Katherine Schofield, David Lunn, William Dalrymple, Abhishek Kaicker, Allison Busch, Francesca Orsini, Ulrike Stark, Arthur Dudney, Sheldon Pollock, Richard Eaton, Mehr Afshan Farooqi and many other scholars across disciplines has been absolutely invaluable in developing my account of Mir’s life and work, his linguistic, literary and political contexts. Other scholars who are not directly connected to this book have been key presences in my thinking about language, translation, technology, community and politics over the years – among them, AK Ramanujan, Linda Hess, Benedict Anderson, Finbarr Flood, and Christian Novetzke.

Around my four-year-long Mir Project on Twitter, there congregated a shifting group of friends and colleagues whose responses ranged from occasional comments to sustained engagement. They include Rana Safvi, Danish Husain, Mustansir Dalvi, Bilal Tanweer, Katherine Schofield, David Lunn, Natalia Cukiereczki, Arvind Mayaram, Maaz Bin Bilal, Daisy Rockwell, Dev Panikkar, Amber Darr, Rakhshanda Jalil, David Raphael Israel, and Tabeenah Anjum.

And I would like to thank the editors of the journals where some of these translations first appeared, for their collegial hospitality – Priya Sarukkai Chabria and Mrinalini Harchandrai of Poetry at Sangam; Madeline Gilmore, Daniel Hardisty and Lauren Peat at Volume; and Joanna Yas and Devi Sastry at Washington Square Review.

Suhit Bombaywala’s factual and fictive writing and photography are @suhitbombaywala on X, Facebook and Instagram.