Balraj Sahni

Garm Hava was made in 1973 by M S Sathyu. The script by Kaifi Azmi and Shama Zaidi was based on an unpublished short story by Ismat Chugtai.

When scorching winds blow, those that are not uprooted, wither away. Salim Mirza discovers this the hard way when he refuses to go to the newly formed Pakistan even as his family and friends leave. Slowly, and devastatingly, his life is reduced to shambles as he suffers familial, social and economic alienation in a country that has been his own for generations. Will he survive? What is the way out for those like him across the world stuck between longings to stay rooted to their heritage and the winds of change scattering them around? Balraj Sahni gave his best performance in his last film as the angst ridden, but stoical and proud man who faces insurmountable odds in the quest for a dignified life as a Muslim in a post-partition India.

Click here to watch complete film on YouTube.

Gita Siddharth

Ghani and Roshan | Painting by Ghani Khan

Today, Malik Shiraz Khan kindly brought to my notice a scanned copy of Ghani Khan’s Kulliyaat shared on Scribd by a generous person.

I have uploaded the pdf file to our Ghani Khan website and you can access it on this page.

Best wishes,

Thanks to the good offices of Francesca Orsini, and the generosity of Alok Rai and his family, we now have access to a print of what was apparently the only photo ever made of Ghalib. This is such a moving and fascinating glimpse of him! We owe a real debt of gratitude to the owners of the photo for making this scan available. - Francis Pritchett, Jan. 2010

BY DURS GRÜNBEIN

Photo: Renate Brandt

“… So, why write?

“In the first place, I would say, you write to escape your dread of the sheer present. You fill page after page, as Nietzsche once put it, with angry yearning, not to cozy up to your nearest, but out of love of those farthest away from you, and because the contemporary and the day-to-day will be all the more precious to you when you return to them in a wide arc over unknown terrain. Hence many people’s habit of getting drunk in company: at close quarters only a maximum of inner distance can create moments of ease and relaxation. Hence the silent conversations everyone has with themselves, or locking yourself up in the bathroom to read undisturbed, or the distancing look in the mirror as soon as you know you’re unobserved. Hence too the recurring need of lovers to go to the cinema and stare together at the magic screen, which for a precious hour and a half will make them forget their bodies. In writing, it is one’s innermost being that tries to assert itself, paradoxically, by self-exposure. But publicity, as will soon become apparent, is nothing but a particularly tough protective shield.

“And the second reason is a dilemma that concerns each individual psyche. You write, I believe, because you can’t quite shake the suspicion that as a mere contemporary and biological cell mate, hopelessly trammeled up in your own limited lifespan, you would always remain incomplete, half a man, so to speak. Someone must have put you onto the idea that only your most individual expression gives you the least chance of one day being seen in any way other than in your mortal sheath—say, as a kind of ghost. Ever since that tormenting voice (whoever it may be) first challenged you in the name of metaphysics, you’ve been trying by all the laws of glass-blowing, aka poetry, to fix a little window in your own diminishing time, in the hope that tomorrow, or whenever, you may be seen through that little peephole. If you happen to succeed in making your sweetheart, or one or two of your friends, or yourself in your peculiarity visible—the way Vermeer, say, showed his pregnant letter-reader—then it will have been worth the effort. Writing, the voice whispers to you, is the least circumstantial method of breaking out of the given and the immediate. Its only requirement is a mastery of the alphabet, which, thanks to universal education, may generally be relied on, at least hereabouts. You don’t have to be able to draw or set down notes like Bach, and yet, once you’ve passed your spelling exam, you’ve mastered the only method by which consciousness can be recorded.

“From which it follows, thirdly and lastly: you write because the brain is an endless wilderness, whose roughest terrain can only be traveled with a pencil. As soon as we are in the innermost dreamy connections, all other art forms are dependent on verbal synthesis. The dream, as you discover when you write, is the fully authentic self. You will never have amounted to more. The world will not appear any more variegated. Which means the notion of what really exists can, with writing, be comfortably extended by a dimension or two.

“Let me conclude this flight with an anecdote. I suspect it may be one of those grisly parables by means of which Oriental wisdom likes to offer instruction, often to the dismay of the Westerner. In it, all the issues we have treated thus far are settled, so to speak, by a stroke of the pen. The setting and atmosphere are familiar from Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, where the grisliness also has a strangely mild quality about it. In his diaries, Hugo von Hofmannsthal brings up the story of a German officer in China who, following the Boxer Rebellion, participated in a penal expedition:

The officer sees a line of men sentenced to death, standing in a field. With his sword the executioner goes from man to man. There is no need for his assistants to tie or even to hold down any of them; as soon as it’s the next man’s turn, he stands there with feet apart, his hands gripping his knees, his neck stretched out, offering it to the blade. One of the last in line, still some way from coming due, is completely immersed in a book. The officer rides up to him and asks: “What’s that you’re reading?” The man looks up, asks back: “Why are you bothering me?” The officer asks: “How can you read now?” The man says: “I know that every line I read is something gained.” The officer rides to the general who has ordered the execution, and begs him for the man’s life for so long that he gets him off, rides back with the written acquittal, shows it to the officer in charge, and is allowed to go and take the man out of line. Tells him: “You’ve been acquitted, you’re free to go.” The man shuts his book, looks the officer in the eye, and says: “You have done a good thing. Your soul will have profited greatly from this hour”—and he nods to him, and sets off across the field.

TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL HOFMANN

Read complete article at The Poetry Foundation
—
Griffin Poetry Prize 2006

Voksenåsen, Oslo | Music Workshop - Afternoon 18 February 2009

Strangely to the solace of sparrows
Planning their nests over a window
With a view of the neighbor’s yellow wall?
The world before it is a wall of the mind

Snowing in the books scattered on a bed –
A glimpse of the sky afloat with kites
Delays the smoke and speech of the night.

Like a cat immersed in a candle flame,
My arms shall cradle another departure,
My lips surrender another song.

3:58 am, Monday, 29 December 2009

the shape of night has changed
similitude is on the loose
ranging past its scope and will
quaintly ticking hands resolve as trees

spell out their shade with the leisure of leaving
the roots are deep and nestled in the dark
the sap is silence streaming in a gaze

unwinding around bobbins of revival
in charms and names from promise to patience
in the calyx of care pure images play

2:38 am 7 November 2009

Click image for larger view.

Ibn-e Insha said he never ‘joked’ in his poetry. He didn’t satirize for sure, but this lovely ghazal – like some of his other ones – is definitely amusing. I like the lyrics, the voice, the composition, and Inshaji’s modern invocation of the traditional muse.

aye matwaali badli kaali roop kaa ras barsaati jaa
man nagri ki ujri galiyaan soona dhaam basaati jaa

deewaanon kaa roop naa dhaarein yaa dhaarein batlaati jaa
maarein ya humein eent naa maarein logon say farmaati jaa

aur bohot say rishtay teray aur bohot say teray naam
aaj tu eik humaaray rishtay mehbooba kehlaati jaa

aur to kuch haasil nahin tujh say aye bay haasil aye bay meher
inshaji say nazmein ghazlein geet kabit likhwaati jaa

Mosque Lamp | Mamluk dynasty, about AD 1350-55 | From Cairo, Egypt To The British, Museum | Commissioned by Amir Sayf al-Din Shaykhu

Enamelled and gilded glass lamps were commissioned in large numbers for the many mosques built in Cairo by the Mamluk Sultans and their amirs. Many, including this example, are inscribed with verses from the Qur’an (24:35):

‘God is the Light of the heavens and the earth;
the likeness of His Light is as a niche wherein is a lamp
(the lamp in a glass,
the glass as it were a glittering star)
kindled from a Blessed Tree,
an olive that is neither of the East nor of the West
whose oil wellnigh would shine, even if no fire touched it.’

(Arberry, 1955, pp. 50-51)

Perhaps more than any other, this single ayat suggests only mystical interpretations, as the metaphor is completely coherent, but it does not surrender an obvious meaning. Hence it was and remains a key Qur’anic passage to many Sufis and Muslim Philosophers into the present day, who argue for esoteric readings of the Qur’an. Most noteworthy amongst the intellectual and spiritual genius who have puzzled over Ayat an-Nur is al-Ghazali (d. 1111), whose reflections on this verse, as well as the nature of divine Light is collected in his masterpiece Mishkat al-Anwar (the “Niche of Lights”).