It was always ‘addressing a woman who is normally unreachable and forbidden to long for’ that necessitated and inspired the creation of ghazals. We know, seldom will a poet write poems addressing his wife, for their intimacy would have waned considerably through years.
Their origin was in Arabia and the word literally means ‘addressing a woman or speaking to a woman’. Ghazals evolved the same way the quatrains were. Whichever emotions could not be shared with a woman who is forbidden to be longed for was expressed in ghazals in more intimate terms. ‘They began to fill the pages of English poetry books with the sweet sound of bulbuls and the scent of roses.’ Translations by some of these early British officers like such luminaries as Edward Fitzgerald and A. When translated into English, they reached the main stream of world literature and became singularly famous. Thus these exotic quatrains, from Arabic through Persian, reached English literature. Many British scholars who never reached India but remained inside native universities also continued undertaking this translation, once initiated into this flair by earlier translations. First it was a hobby, then exhilaration and finally a career. To escape from the isolation, loneliness and boredom they felt in India, they took it as their hobby to translate famous Persian poems into English. Many of them were real scholars who learned Persian well. Not all of these officers were boorish illiterates. Every British officer posted to the English East India Company to serve in this region was required to learn Persian to converse well with the courtiers and the Emperors of this Empire.
In the courts of Persian Emperors, it gained importance and momentum and, as Persian rule expanded through the continent, it reached Afghanistan, Pakistan and India- then a common land under Persian rule. It has an Arabic origin wherefrom it moved to Persian. We know about the poetic form quatrain as used in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in which a quartet of four independent lines when joined together one after another like flowers in a garland obtain a unique form and develop into exotic themes.
0 kommentar(er)
