Book notice: Literature, Gender, History...

Raziuddin Aquil 

Scott Kugle, When Sun Meets Moon: Gender, Eros, and Ecstasy in Urdu Poetry, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2016.

Har roz jo yun sitam ijaad karoge

Dil ashiqon ke saikron bar-baad karoge

- Urdu poet Mah Laqa Bai Chanda

Generally, historians work separately on body and sexuality or body and spirituality. Boundaries are especially marked in contexts where sexuality is taboo, and spirituality recommended. Prof. Scott Kugle has explicitly mixed it up for an interesting blend of gender, sexuality and spirituality. Some people will be embarrassed, and some will happily embrace it.

Working on the lives and works of Shah Siraj (1715 - 1763) of Aurangabad and Mah Laqa Bai Chanda (1768 - 1820/24) of Hyderabad, identified as Sun (Siraj) and Moon (Mah) respectively, Kugle has offered an interesting discussion of Urdu literary and cultural milieu of 18th- and early decades of 19th-century Deccan. Outgrowing homosexual love in youth, Siraj styled himself as a Sunni Sufi-like poet. Rising above the filth around the life of a courtesan, Mah Laqa (literally: moon-cheek) composed an elegant Urdu diwan of her own, once again anchoring herself in Sufi spirituality, revealing a disarming devotion (as a known Syed and Shi'i Muslim) for Imam Ali ibn abi Talib. Specialising in ghazal compositions, both the poets fused spiritual quest with erotic imagery for tantalising results.

Their Urdu diwans (collections comprising at least one ghazal rhyming in each of the thirty-two letters of Urdu alphabet) should be a veritable treat. Knowing Kugle as an accomplished scholar of bodily practices in Sufism and Deccani Urdu literature, it will be worth reading the book. First treating the two poets (Sun and Moon) separately as two orbits of the cultural planet, Kugle eventually brings them together in a literary Conjunction - When Sun Meets Moon.

The author has provided English translations of a number of verses, but I look for original Urdu for the sheer linguistic charm of it. Happily, some of the she'rs are quoted in the endnotes packed together at the end of the book. A couple of interesting lines may be mentioned here:

Siraj Aurangabadi points out:

Sharab-e shauq pi kar dow jahan ka jis ne gham bhula 

Khayal-e kham-e aflatun o fikr-e jaam-e jam bhula

Mah Laqa Bai Chanda sings:

Bahut makhmur hun saaqi sharab-e arghawani de

Na rakh tishna mujhe saaghar bi-raah-e meharbani de

Hyderabad must have been a truly cosmopolitan city with a vibrant cultural and intellectual environment in the 18th century, for another woman-poet with a well-known Urdu diwan to her credit, Lutfun Nisa "Imtiyaz", was a contemporary of Mah Laqa Bai Chanda. It is good to see historians are now increasingly reading the vast corpus of Urdu poetry to discover a whole cultural world that was previously outside their narrow frame. However, historians still cannot make sense of powerful poetic imagery and refined expression of overwhelming emotions:

Aina-ru ke shauq mein hairaan hua hun mayen

Zulfon kon uski dekh pareshan hua hun mayen

- Siraj Aurangabadi