Miraji and South Asian aesthetics, poetics, and politics

ABSTRACT

Muhammad Sana Ullah Dar ‘Miraji’ (1912–1949) remains one of the most controversial figures in Urdu letters. An extraordinarily prolific poet and critic during his short lifetime, Miraji’s work has drawn renewed interest from contemporary critics. This special journal section uses contemporary critical frameworks to re-examine Miraji’s writings and legacy and to present them to a broad audience.

KEYWORDS:

• Miraji
• aesthetics
• modernism
• Urdu
• poetry

The prolific poet, critic, and translator Muhammad Sana Ullah Dar ‘Miraji’ (1912–1949) is among the most prominent and controversial literary figures in Urdu literary communities, yet his work remains largely unknown outside of a specialized readership. Urdu critical writing describes the poet in genres popular in Urdu letters, including discussions of his persona, his relationship to contemporary genealogies of poetry and thought, and the political significance of his work. This special journal section uses more contemporary critical frameworks to re-examine his writings and present them to a broader audience, capturing renewed scholarly interest in Miraji’s life and works.

Miraji’s lifestyle, beliefs, and poetry have been titillating and controversial. Miraji took his takhallus (pen name) not from a poetic image or attribute, as was common practice for Urdu poets, but rather from the name of a young Bengali girl named Mira Sen, adding to it the respectful suffix ‘ji.’ Extraordinarily prolific over his short lifetime, Miraji penned numerous collections of poetry across several genres, extensive translations from South Asian and world literature, and a vast number of critical essays and editorials. And yet, after achieving prominence as an editor and tastemaker, he was censured by ideologues of the Progressive Writers Association, the foremost literary movement of his time, as an ‘art for art’s sake’ retrograde and sexual pervert.¹

Another controversial figure to the Progressives, short story and screenwriter Saadat Hasan Manto provided the most memorable sketch of Miraji.² In his 1952 collection of character sketches Ganje Farishte (Bald Angels), Manto recalls meeting Miraji in 1940, specifically in ‘Apartment 1 of Hassan Buildings’ on ‘Nicholson Road’ (near Kashmere Gate) in Delhi, where Manto himself stayed while working for All-India Radio. In his ‘Tīn Gole’ (Three Orbs), Manto describes Miraji as a dervish figure, who was always jiggling three balls of metallic cigarette wrapping in his hand. Manto names them ‘beauty, love and death’ (‘husn, ishq aur maut’), adding that ‘these three were the solace of Miraji’s existence and were mixed into his life’ (‘Yeh tinon pichkar miraji ke wajood main gul ho gaye thee’).³

The contemporary Urdu and Punjabi poet Sarmad Sehbai echoes Manto’s eyewitness account, describing a photograph of Miraji as proof of his eccentricity:

[His] attire is forbidding, he is an early-day hippie, a modern punk, a walking theatre who appears among straight people with a pointed moustache, long hair and an opera-length string of beads. In his hands roll the triplets of tiny globes, totems of beauty, love and death.⁴

The ‘string of beads’ is, in fact, part of costume he wore to play a pujari (Hindu priest) in a Bombay film. This film still continues to circulate as a portrait.

In the 1960s, some critics valued Miraji’s poetry for bringing – or, for some, bringing back – to Urdu literature an attention to the earthly body and its possibilities, while also focusing on ‘inner life’ (batin) instead of just ‘manifest’ or ‘external’ (zahir) life. Poet, editor, and critic Vazir Agha (1922–2010) describes Miraji in relation to three poets – Akhtar Shirani (1905–48), Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), and Faiz Ahmad Faiz (1911–84) – who stand respectively as the culmination of Romantic, Islamist, and Progressivist movements in Urdu literature. In a striking image, Vazir Agha considers each of these three literary figures to be, both in their thought and poetic style, a particular endpoint, like a ‘terminus’ at the end of a railway line. Miraji, by contrast, is a ‘giant railway junction,’ with lines joining, crossing, and parting. To Vazir Agha, while Miraji expanded the canvas of Urdu poetry, his poetry was also difficult for many of his readers, in part because it was impossible to place within the dominant movements of his time.⁵

In the introduction to Mīrājī kī nazmeñ (Miraji’s 1944), Miraji expresses his artistic position through a description of his ancestry. Born a Muslim, he identifies his ancestors as of the Aryan race, who left Central Asia to head South to the Indian Subcontinent. He writes,

And today, in order to lessen [my] mental bitterness and to free myself from my feeling of defeat, my mind in its literary creations brings me repeatedly to ancient India. Showing me flashes of the gopis of Krishna and of Vrindavan, it makes me a devotee of the Flute Player. Ancient India in my psychic life is that age of time in which my elders always found victory in the South and East, but I am a living individual of my country’s contemporary society. My wishes are subordinate to this social environment. My heart breathes in the ancient atmosphere, but my eyes look around and in front of me, and an image of this contemplation is present everywhere in my poems.⁶

While his ‘heart’ focuses on a Hindu Indian past, and his poetry involves frequent mentions of figures from Hindu mythology, especially from various bhakti traditions, his ‘eyes’ see the manifest world around him and are therefore not restricted to or by tradition.

A number of prominent Urdu critics later condemned his poetry’s embrace of Indic elements, ‘Hindi’ rhythms, and sexual themes as un-Islamic. For others, his hybrid poetry and personality have been inspirational. His life and work are the subject of numerous Urdu-language studies and recent novels, and many contemporary Urdu poets still trace their artistic and intellectual lineage back to Miraji.

Despite Miraji’s stature in Urdu letters – built upon his radical innovations in literary form; his hybrid use of Urdu, Hindi, Braj, and Awadhi language; and the deep and complex subjects of his poetry – very little scholarship in English has assessed the historical and literary significance of his work. Geeta Patel’s trailblazing study, Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings: On Gender, Colonialism, and Desire in Miraji’s Urdu Poetry (2002), remains the only English-language book dedicated to the oeuvre of Miraji.

However, there has recently been a resurgence of scholarly interest in Miraji’s poetry. This special section introduces a new body of emergent scholarship on Miraji’s aesthetics, poetics, and politics, as well as interviews and new translations of his poetry. The two scholarly articles in this section consider Miraji’s aesthetics in the context of modernism. Through a close reading and translation of ‘Caves of Ajanta,’ Meghan Hartman explores how Miraji gives shape to a geography of the imagination that is largely impersonal, suggesting a conception of permeable personhood in this poem that is affirmed in his other critical writings from this period. Judhajit Sarkar’s essay describes Miraji’s poetry as an exploration of feelings of bewilderment, which he argues is not about the individual self but rather symptomatic of the era. In an interview with Geeta Patel, the foremost English-language scholar on Miraji, Krupa Shandilya and other Miraji scholars discuss how Patel discovered archival sources and the lengths to which she went to reach out to scholars and readers who had preserved Miraji’s work in their collections. In a second interview, Mehr Afshan Farooqi addresses Miraji’s legacy with contemporary Urdu writer Julien Columeau, who recently wrote an Urdu novella about Miraji. Together, these contributions reintroduce the Miraji phenomenon to a multidisciplinary and English readership.

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Notes

1. Patel, Lyrical Movements, 83–131.

2. On the censorship of Manto and other progressive ‘Urduphone intellectuals’ during this period, see Waheed, Hidden Histories of Pakistan, 94–151.

3. Manto, “Tin Gole,” 88.

4. Sehbai, “Miraji: The Return of Anima,” 120.

5. Vazir, “Miraji ki ahamiyyat,” 355–6.

6. Miraji, Miraji ki nazmen, 12.