The Sun that Rose from the Earth was written in 2001
in Urdu, with the English version translated by the author and published in 2014.
The book is a collection of five short stories about Urdu and Persian poets and
poetry in the age of the Mughals of India (1526-1857). The short stories are
long, with each being novellas in their own right, culminating in 610 pages of
text. Each story, with a different narrator, imagines the conversations of poets
at that time.
For example, in Bright
Star, Lone Splendour the narrator is Mian Beni Madho Singh, born in 1840 in
Nizamabad, and living in Cawnpore from 1860. He had escaped the conflict
against the British from 1856-1858 in which his entire family died. At the time
of writing, it is 1918 when the narrator is 78 years old. He reminisces about
his life, love of poetry, inspirations, and his travel in 1862 to Delhi to
visit the preeminent poet, Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869), known as the Nightingale
of India. Faruqi is the same age as the narrator, and this story
was originally written under the pen name of Beni Madho Ruswa in 1999. The
poetry in this section reflects the decimation of his village, and the loss of
life.
The narrator of the second story, Rider, is 50-year-old Khairuddin who
suffers years of poverty. He hears that a mighty horse rider will appear in the
bazaar the next day. The belief is that whoever stops the rider, even for a
second, and asks for something, will have everything granted to him. This
inspires Khairuddin’s first lines of poetry at the age of 20: The rider of everlasting prosperity appeared
on the highway / None held his reins to stop him. He rode away. He imagines
what he would ask of the rider. Perhaps he will ask for a husband for his
sister. He does see the rider and his “awe-inspiring face.” What does he do? He
can’t spend his life alone, roaming and wandering, seeing Sufi poet Budh Singh
Qalander, can he? Then he meets a woman called Ismat Jahan. This is my second
favourite story in the collection.
The third story, In
Such Meetings and Partings, Ultimately, is about Labiba Khanam, deaf at
birth and unable to talk, and her daughter Nurus Saadat, from Nakhjaran. Labiba
has mixed heritage: Iranian Jews of the Levant, the Iranians of Armenistan, and
the Jews and Christians of the Balkans. Her father was “an open opium wreck”
and died, with her mother, when she was five years old. She was sold to Zohra
the Egyptian. At 13 she heard her first lines of poetry, and at 22 she married
Bayazid Shauqi who sang Hafiz and Rumi verses. This, I think is the best story
in the collection, as they travel circuitously for three weeks to Tabriz in
Iran via Turkey, Armenia, and Georgia. Her husband dies when Nurus is three
days old, and Labiba moves to Isfahan, where she adopts the singing verses of
her late husband, which she knew by heart. She meets the great Hindu poet
Kishan Chand Ikhlas (died 1748). The great Urdu poet Muhammad Taqi Mir
(1723-1810) falls in love with Nurus. They have to choose between their lovers
and returning to Iran.
The Sun the Rose from the
Earth is about
businessman Darbari Mal Vafa, born in 1793, who moves to Lucknow in 1825 to
study under the legendary poet Shaikh Mushafi. His maid Bhoora – with him for
almost 30 years – also exchanges poetry with Vafa. He never knows her marital
status or her religion and beliefs, which she tells him is not important for
poets.
The last story, Timecompression,
brings women to the fore. Fair, Amazonian-type, strong women from the faraway
Caucasus or Uzbekistan are the attraction for the 50-year-old narrator Gul
Mohammad. He was told he’d never be a poet, so he became a soldier. The time
span in this tale is distorted, going from 1521 to 1707 instantaneously, and is
therefore more mystical and ambiguous (and somewhat confusing) than the other stories. In this story
the narrator meets many Urdu and Persian poets in Delhi, with one poet originating
from Kashmir.
This book is another magnum
opus from Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, the author of The Mirror of Beauty (2006). It is remarkable in
fusing poetry from a range of selected Hindu and Muslim Urdu poets with a imagined
story by different narrators that bring together their love and learning of
poetry with a master poet. The mentor-master relationship is explored, as well
as the search for the near-perfect word or phrase that expresses their feelings
and emotions.
In the first story Bright Star, Lone Splendour poet Ghalib says that poetry should
express “delightful wit and delicate wordplay” and that poetry “should have, at
its best, layers of meaning.” If the reader can overcome the
overwhelming history of the Mughals and the length of the short stories, here in this tome is a
multi-layered collection of wordplay. There is much ground covered in this
book, geographically, historically, and literally, with many nuances,
subtleties, surprises, and twists of fate and fortune. For me, it's a brilliant novel.
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MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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