The miraculous still happens
on the global stage. One day you fall asleep concerned about yet another skirmish
threatening to engulf the political borders between India and Pakistan, but you
wake up to the news- Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi, children’s rights activists
from the two countries have received the Nobel Peace Prize. Suddenly you hear a sort of Pythagorean music of the spheres,
and you want to dance to an old song written by a Pakistani shayar (poet) sung by an Indian.
There have
always been people who ignore all the cynical testaments about human
depravities and imminent disasters and go on doing the right thing. We often do not hear about them unless they
are recognized by big names. Discovering
Kailash Satyarthi and his Bachpan Bachao
Andolan (Save Childhood Movement) has been one such joyous moment for me. Malala we know and have come to love in spite
of the many usual nay-sayers. She represents the innocence of childhood
shattered by violence in many parts of the world. Her hijab covered, bullet scarred
head with a smiling hopeful face has since become a symbol of Muslim womanhood
in search of justice.
Malala and Satyarthi together capture a remarkable image in
their names, a grief stricken quest for truth. How fitting for an ancient
civilization full of contradictions! Although the accolade highlights what is
wrong with the subcontinent, it gives me an opportunity to sing of love songs.
The joint prize reminds me of the great affection between neighbors that share
a culture far older than recently carved national borders by benighted
political entities of yore.
As a Bengali woman who grew up in UP, I had the good fortune
to know Hindi which connected me to the greater country. Bollywood songs have
tinged my soul with enough Urdu color to recognize how a particular kind of Sufi
Islam has helped create the modern Indic world.
On the other hand, as my April blog testifies, having grown up with the
tales of partition and a broken land, I have no illusions about the fault
lines.
Hindu Muslim camaraderie has created the magic of Bollywood.
You can pick any popular Hindi film song, and you will find the collective
creative genius at work, not to speak of many beloved Khans who dominate the silver
screen. Having been married into a UP
family, I relished my late father in law’s most refined Urdu inflected Hindi. He
could read and write in Urdu and also knew Farsi (Persian). Although I missed
the opportunity to learn Urdu from him, we shared a love of the language and
film songs that his children, raised in the US, could not always appreciate.
Human soul’s longing for the infinite was reflected in
countless songs that we enjoyed. He used to love a song “Aaj jane ki zid na karo” (do not insist on leaving today) and would
often ask me to sing it; a difficult and haunting ghazal, it is sung by both Farida
Khanum and Asha Bhosle. Explaining the words that I did not grasp, he had
reminded me that the song was written by Fayyaz Hashmi and originally sung by
Habib Wali Muhammad, both Pakistanis. Papa also personally knew Naushad Ali, a
great composer from Lucknow. After his passing, I discovered among his
belongings a couple of old tapes of songs written by the immortal poet, Faiz Ahmad
Faiz.
His younger brother, our Suresh Chacha, is the most
sophisticated connoisseur of music in the family. I will always cherish the
memory of a day in Lucknow when the two brothers had regaled me with
extraordinary Urdu shayari. Their
daughter in law was mainly a shaukeen
listener that day. Suresh Chacha first introduced
me to a Pakistani original ghazal by Qateel Shifai, “Shayarana si hai zindagi ki faza” sung to perfection by Alka Yagnik
for a Bollywood film. Life itself is poetry as music pervades all shades of
existence for this poet who exhorts us to taste the flavor of life. The voice
of the woman invites her beloved to sing her as she turns herself into the
ghazal.
The beauty of Urdu poetry has been popularized by many lyricists
like Gulzar whose origin was in Pakistan.
Although born into a Sikh family, he is known by his Urdu pen name. His song
Jai Ho is better known thanks to the movie Slumdog
Millionaire. He shared an Academy
Award with the composer A. R. Rahman. However, it is his striking Urdu poetry
that continues to fill the hearts of Indian and Pakistani audiences. As his
name hints, the flourishing of both cultures is the source of great
creativity. He wrote the lyrics of a
favorite song of mine from an old film called Khamoshi. The word captures the intense silence of the depths. The
song sings of the fragrance of the eyes and love as the eternally flowing drop
of light.
Speaking of this younger and another international celebrity,
I find Rahman’s “Khwaja Mere Khwaja”
song in the film Jodha Akbar profoundly
beautiful. The film powerfully and
poignantly captures the love between a Muslim emperor and his Hindu queen. The scene with Emperor Akbar whirling with
the dervishes in a deep trance points to the Sufi tradition’s depth dimensions.
With insight, one can see the Sufi image of the bird Simurgh singing on a distant
mountain and recognize what’s always been within.
I had explored the Sufi path of love in the chapter on Islam
in my 2004 book. I was greatly privileged to meet a preeminent Sufi scholar Seyyed
Hossein Nasr whose book Knowledge and the
Sacred is the most brilliant exposition of the tradition. Annemarie
Schimmel’s book on Tasawwuf (Sufism)
called Mystical Dimension of Islam
has a curious reference. She speaks of
Adam (Adam is the root of the Hindi/Urdu word aadmi/human) as the first Sufi
who was endowed with the spirit and the lamp of reason after 40 days of
seclusion. Citing Sura 3:25, she says that God elected him as pure (safa) and declared
him a true Sufi when Adam performed acts of penitence for 300 years in India!
Myths and legends abound about this ancient land. Songs,
songs, and many more songs reverberate through the subcontinent as generations
of singers, lyricists, composers continue to delight thirsty humans who do not
care for the thrills of conflict but desire the rhythm of our collective
humanity. Turning toward the other side
of the subcontinent to what is now Bangladesh, where my family is from, I connect
with the music of Bengal. My mother’s
Sylheti language is full of sounds and metaphors from the Islamic world. Although Bengal is almost notoriously
musical, the form of music that most connects with the Sufi path are the songs
of Baul singers.
I experienced the profound meaning of tariqa (the Sufi way) from my guru whose Baul poetry sings of
heartbreak as the only path to love, the ultimate haqiqah (truth); it is a kind of love that flows objectless with
piercing intensity that “drunken” Sufis like Rumi and Khayyam have
immortalized. Such love tears the veil (hijab) of separation over human eyes. Khyapababa (mad father) personifies the
borderless world of spiritual unity; he traverses many paths from Vajrayana
Buddhism, Shakta and Shaiva tantras, to gnostic Christianity and the way of the
Sufi fakir, all of them point to the human heart as the source of liberation
from our delusions.
Bengal also has a history where the Sufi martyr Al Hallaj’s legend
has mingled with the story of Satya Pir who is worshipped by Hindus as Satya Narayan,
a form of Vishnu. A Pakistani friend and I recently spoke about how this
self-realized Sufi master had run out with the cry of Anal Haq (I am the truth). Salman reminded me that after the saint
was tortured and killed, every atom in his body kept singing Anal Haq, Anal Haq, Anal Haq. When each particle in our being dances to the
tune of the music of the spheres, we discover a profound inner Khamoshi (quiescence). Then we truly recognize
that life is the dancing partner of this silence.
The Swedish academy’s decision to gift the subcontinent with this global recognition flew in as music to the soul weary of all the tiresome conflict mongering that provides puerile pleasure to the chronically immature amongst us. May there be a music therapy for the wounds of the sub-continent so that we can all hear that unheard sound of life. Our prize winning “grief stricken questers of truth” duo, who at once capture youth and age, Pakistan and India, Islam and Hinduism, will keep Aman ki Asha (Hope of Peace – an Indo Pak peace effort) alive. They sing to us together - each of us is the truth.
