Oh, shit!

Cleaning up my clothes cupboard today I came across a plastic bag hidden away under some winter-clothing, presumably as the first step to it's 'disappearance', by my wife. She does these things. Checks out to see if I have not remembered some stuff for months (I am a terrible hoarder, I admit!) and, once satisfied, zaps it with a raygun or something since i never see it again. Generally this last act takes place about two days before the time that I absolutely need the stuff, of course, and sets the scene for a 60-second replay of WWII, but I quickly take solace in the fact that there are other things strewn all over that she hasn't quite got to. Yet.

A quick look in the bag revealed a rather faded and stained photocopied document gifted to me by an Indian friend (a scholarly gentleman who has been an Ambassador in several countries and a Vice Chancellor in a well-known university. Name and other details will be revealed, unless he agrees to cough up money in unmarked bills). It's an edition of Deevaané Chirkeen.

For those of you unaware of this great poet, he was a grand-master of the Hazal - a term now loosely applied to all humorous verse forms. Originally the Real McCoy was poetry with 'unprintable' content. Often explicit and sexual in nature - but always satirical - every major poet has tried his hand at it. Allama Iqbal included. In recent years the greatest of all poets in that tradition was Rafi Ahmad Khan, friend and contemporary of Josh Malihabadi who, himself, had several verses of this nature to his credit - but, for once, accepted someone else as his superior (at least in this niche field).

Being unprintable, such poetry is generally passed - with obvious difficulty - to the next generation (hardly the kind that fathers share with sons) via stages of 'in-betweeners'. Young uncles to eldest nephews is how it seems to usually flow. The problem is that most people today can't tell between a correct or incorrect shayr. A quick run through even the best of Urdu poetry websites will reveal tons of couplets/poems, wrongly attributed, misquoted, without any sense of metre, qaafiah or even radeef ... Vazan to khaer door ki baat hae! (For this situation to have been reached, our Education system must bear part responsibility --- but that calls for another post.) Even the Al-Hamra Calendar that contains a ghazal for each day of the year, brought out with much love, contains scores of mistakes. And this is when there are printed deevaans and recordings and videos available to check many of them against. But in the case of Chirkeen and Rafi Ahmad this is an obvious impossibility.

While sexual explicitness is slowly losing some of its taboos, Allama Chirkeen's speciality seems to still be unacceptable. A poet from Lucknow, he rarely, if ever, used sexual content in his verses. His great love was excreta! Legend has it that, in earlier days, he wrote beautiful 'regular' ghazals, but his bayaaz was stolen by some people who had some of the poems published under their names in Hyderabad and elsewhere. At one mushaaerah in the Deccan capital, unaware of this fraud, he recited a ghazal and was booed by some people who assumed he had stolen the ghazal from one of the books. In anger, he swore never to write a line of verse that any persons would steal and be willing to call their own ... and went on to write hundreds of shayrs, each one containing some scatological term.

I do recall seeing a reference or two to him on Chowk a while ago ... and a few 'giggly' references among some internet groups which did not really appreciate the technical perfection of his shaaeree, despite the constraint he had placed on himself. I also realize that many will turn their noses away from this post (although smells are not yet easily embedded into eDocs, since the only ones seemingly ready to pay for it are Japanese aromatherapy enhusiasts) ... but the fact is that all languages have a great tradition of such humour. Mark Twain, Rabelais, and many Victorian writers revelled in it just as much those in our region. The difference is that the West has printed a lot of these works but - a pity - that such works of our classics in this genre will get lost.

One note before I close. Please do not add hazals/shayrs in the comments section. If you really think you have a good example - and only from from either of the above poets, checked for authenticity - email me and we can set up a website to honour them.

Oh ... and in case you are wonderiing what got me thinking about such an oddball topic today, get a load of this serious shit!