Category: art

Allama Iqbal

Muhammad Iqbal, 1877-1938, was a poet of Urdu and Farsi, philosopher, sufi, and revolutionary, who combined in his works the traditions of Al-Ghazzali, Rumi, Ibn-e-Khaldun, Ahmad Sirhindi and Shah Walilullah. While he understood the power of the West, had read the Western philosophers, and was familiar with the advances in physics, unlike Syed Ahmad Khan, he remained firmly rooted in Islamic tradition, and refused to re-examine the Islamicate through Orientalist texts. He was criticial of the West’s excessive emphasis on reason, its materialism, and the depredations of capitalism. Many decades before Frantz Fanon and Aime Cezaire, he was the deep thinker and stirring poet of self-discovery, urging peoples of color to regain their dignity, to dig deep into their own traditions in order to overcome, and transcend, the materialism, racism, excessive rationalism, and the West’s abuse of power and its own principles.

This ghazal is a translation from Wings of Gabriel, the best collection of Iqbal’s Urdu poetry. From time to time, I will be presenting translations from this collection.

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translation by M. Shahid Alam

If the stars are topsy-turvy: is the sky yours or mine?
Should this fret me? Is the world yours or mine?

If Heaven lacks the tug, the heat of love’s adventure,
Dear Lord, this cosmic enigma is yours: not mine.

On that first dawn of creation, how dared he to defy
Your decree. Was he your emissary: or was he mine?

Muhammad is yours, Gabriel and the Qur’an too.
But these melodic words: are they yours or mine?

It’s this star, scintillating, that lights your creation.
Whose loss is it – the fall of Man? Is it yours or mine?

– M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University, Boston.

If you think that you have seen ’emptiness’ as that hole at the heart of the material’s mass, surrounded by a planished facade, then think again. To see the void as a contained negative space indented in the material is only to apprehend its physicality. To figure the depth of the void as providing a perspectival absence within the frame or the genre is to linger too long with the pedagogy of manufacture or the technology of taste. The practice of ‘true making’ occurs only when the material and the non-material tangentially touch. The truly made thing pushes us decisively beyond the illustrational, the ‘look of the void’; the sign of emptiness expands the limits of available space.

Gallery here.

J’ai ainsi eu, au cours de ma vie, des tas de contacts avec des tas de gens sérieux. J’ai beaucoup vécu chez les grandes personnes. Je les ai vues de très près. Ça n’a pas trop amélioré mon opinion. Complete book..

UMRAO JAAN ADA is an Urdu novel by Mirza Hadi Ruswa first published in 1899. It is considered the first Urdu novel by many and tells the story of a real life courtesan and poetess by the same name from 19th century Lucknow. As the novel suggests, the story of Umrao Jaan was recounted by her to the author, when he happe…ned to meet her during a mushairah (poetry gathering) in Lucknow. On listening to her couplets, the author along with Munshi Ahmad, a novel and poetry enthusiast present at the gathering, convinces Umrao Jaan to share her life story with them. In the course of time, Mirza starts noting down her story and shares the text with her. She agrees to correct it. Thus the novel is written in first person as a memoir.

The book was first published by Munshi Gulab Singh and Sons Press in Lucknow in 1899. Incidentally, Umrao Jaan Ada herself also published a novel titled ‘Fasan-e-Ruswa’, which describes the love story of Mirza Hadi Ruswa with a French woman Sophia Augustan. Umrao Jaan Ada became popular in the courts of the Nawab of Awadh for its Urdu poetry and composition. It is known for its elaborate and insightful portrayal of mid-19th Century Lucknow – its decadent society, and the moral hypocrisy of a patriarchal system where Umrao Jaan becomes the symbol of a nation, attracts many suitors but everyone is only looking to exploit her.

“guide” – one of my favorite films of all time. dev anand, waheeda rehman and perfect music by s.d. burman. here’s the theme song…

the story of a baluchi french musician – check it out here.

Funny the way it is

Lying in the park on a beautiful day,
Sunshine in the grass, and the children play.
Siren’s passing, fire engine red, … See More
Someone’s house is burning down on a day like this?

The evening comes and we’re hanging out,
On the front step, and a car rolls by with the windows rolled down,
And that war song is playing, “why can’t we be friends?”
Someone iss screaming and crying in the apartment upstairs

Funny the way it is, if you think about it
Somebody’s going hungry and someone else is eating out
Funny the way it is, not right or wrong
Somebody’s heart is broken and it becomes your favorite song

(watch the video)

To gaze at a river made of time and water
and remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.

To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there’s a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.

Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.