“Poetry of other languages, on the other hand, has usually been a medium of one-on-one writer-reader connection.”

urdu poetry is not unique in being a poet-to-audience type of poetry. not only was all poetry in india like this but all poetry in the world. i mean can you get any more obvious than examples like chaucer and shakespeare? Japanese kabuki? Poetry of ancient Greece?? France had its troubadours about 800 years ago. i could go on and on.

obviously with capitalism more and more people became literate and capitalism kind of did away with the street performer. massed produced publishing also didnt help.

was this the classic urdu arorgance at work? urdu culture believes itself to be haughty, it fans its own hype. some of the poets went on about how great they were supposed ot be half the time (in their own poetry!). talk about the emptier vessel making the most noise!

I went through the net today and discovered that Amazon sells his book as do a company called Diggory. May be of interest to someone. I can’t read Punjabi but it would be great to hear the opinion of someone who can. Maybe Preston or Amarjeet can preview it?

Heard he’s been heavily marketed, like some kinda actor in Des Pardes, Sanjh Savera and Ajit…don’t know if that is true or false.

A couple of notes. Ghazal and its origin, urdu shairi, have always been a performing art in the sense that they call for a performer, stage and an audience. Poetry of other languages, on the other hand, has usually been a medium of one-on-one writer-reader connection. Neither has most poetry contributed to music. The recent attempts to revive poetry in America through the coffee house culture has had a very limited success. I guess some things cannot be forced.

I am trying to dig into my old Literature background to understand why urdu shairi has been so uniquely different in that respect. Perhaps the court and kotha culture that fostered it has a lot to do with turning what might have remained only a written medium into a shared, congregational and performing art. But without getting into a long explanation, we all know and enjoy the one uniqueness of urdu poetry that calls for a shared experience and that is its element of surprise, both in thought and expression. The craft, and I almost want to say craftiness in a positive sense, is paramount in urdu poetry, and the “wah, wah” is the natural response to the surprising turn of phrases and thoughts dealt out by the shayar.

On the subject of ghazals, of course the medium has evolved over the last fifty-plus years as any living art form should. I am still stuck on Talat Mahmood, though, because he was the first FILMI ghazal singer, and he sang the lyrics of almost every famous shair mentioned in the posts above.

Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa was based on an older Bengali novel that was fast forwarded in the screenplay to the India of the ’50s. The Nehruvian dream had already begun to unravel and nothing depicts it as dramatically as Pyaasa does.

Nice song – I’ve heard it before. My dad has good taste in music. Would be melodramatic in english, but it works perfectly in hindi. Reminds me of another “sad what the hell is wrong with our duniya?!” song, by one of the great lyricists mentioned in Amardeep’s post, the late, great Kaifi Azmi:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGwU__T5G70

Note: try to ignore Raj Kumar’s (Raj Kumar, right?) “drunk because all love is lost(noted by the lack of shaving and washing) yet stoic” look. He invented that look. It might ruin the song if you’re not a bollywood enthusiast. I can sometimes appreciate bollywood for what it is – just a warning to those who only watch indie films and/or can’t stand bollywood.

Oui, c’est moi. But what’s this “M” business about?? Maybe if you turn it upside down you’ll be on the right track!

Toba! Toba!

By the way, you can listen to full tracks of both Umrao Jaan and Nikaah, and probably others mentioned here on a website called dishant.com

Will do, metric! Thanks. Actually I’m surprised you listen to hindi songs at all. Here’s one song from ‘pyaasa’ that’s a total male fantasy but lovely lyrics. male fantasy in the sense of ‘me against the world’ – nothing racy. ohh.. love it love it.