Imagine dissolving your own self and the identity encrusted in it. What would happen? How would you accomplish this feat of becoming a person without a self? Would you be an automaton? Why would you want to dissolve a self in the first place? How would your life change if you lived as a person without a perennial substratum dubbed “the self?” What would happen if you were just purely flux? How would your own politics and legal status change? What would that life look like? Such questions permeated and cultivated the life, poetry, and literary criticism of the Urdu modernist poet Mira ji (1912-1949). As a poet-philosopher constantly wondering about how time functions, what our place in the world means, and how a tender membrane webs humans together, Mira ji read across a plethora of traditions.
He was a time-traveler and a translator. Or more precisely, the act of translating enabled Mira ji to time-travel. By translating the likes of Sappho, Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, the 7th century Sanskrit love lyricist Amaru, the 1st century Latin poet Catullus, the 8th century Chinese poet Li Po, and many others, Mira ji enacted the ultimate labor of love: translation allowed him to mingle his voices with the voices of other poets in different time streams and places. The pangs of a new language birthed between the nexus of two languages crashing into each other created liminal spaces for Mira ji. He could live betwixt and between, changing his language, voice, and identity through the act of translating poetry.
But allow me to reintroduce our poet-friend again: Mira ji was not his first name. The name Mira ji emerged at first as a pen-name. At the end of his ghazals, a particular genre of poem forged from a series of rhyming couplets, the poet’s pen-name would mark the end of the poem. Somewhat like a mic-drop, an insignia, and a way to release the poet from the poem all at once, the pen-name, or takhallus, for our poet-friend was Mira ji. Though many stories float around this pen-name, the most popular tale is an unsung love-story between two teenagers. Cue Mira Sen, the unreachable beloved of our poet. She was a Bengali woman whom Mira ji loved, but alas it was an unrequited love. Boy loves girl, girl doesn’t love boy. The end. The burn of unfulfilled love seared our poet, and thus the pen-name Mira ji emerged. Though bearing the name of a Hindu woman, Mira ji began his stint in our world as a Muslim man named Muhammad Sanaullah Dar.
Dar grew up along the veins of railroads spindling across South Asia. His father was an assistant railroad engineer whose work created an itinerant lifestyle for the family. From the Pavagadh mountain in Champaner, to the Sufi shrines studding Multan, all the way to the Kathiawar peninsula of Gujarat, the variegated landscapes of South Asia imprinted themselves upon Mira ji, In a short autobiographical sketch “A Bit About Me,” Mira ji describes the power of his childhood memories in Champaner and the dizzying hold it exercised over him:
“On the peak of Pavagadh mountain, there was a mandir for the goddess Kali. From beyond the lawn of our bungalow, the mountain loomed. I have a verse that goes: ‘Who made the mountain a blue mystery? Distance did.’ But while the vista of the mountain was close, it still remained a secret to me. It was such a mystery whose allure must have left an impression on my mind…for quite some time during those years, amidst the haze of the monsoon rain, the scene of that mountain exercised a special enchantment over me.” (trans. Meghan Hartman)
Years later, mountains would populate the poems of Mira ji. Take this snippet from one of Mira ji’s most famous prose poems Samundar Ka Bulawa, “Summoning of the Sea:”
“…
This is a mountain – silent, serene:
a brimming stream asks what spans beyond the mountain crag
but the fringe of the mountain is enough for me
within the mountain-folds lie valleys
in valleys the river
a river-run boat is merely a mirror
in this mirror each figure gleams but in a moment almost dissolved
it no longer beams
…”
(trans. Meghan Hartman)
Though just a taste of the poem’s lyric-landscape, the entire poem vacillates between concrete and ephemeral images, in typical Mira ji fashion. Different voices team within the poem’s ether, harmonizing and diverging like the hiss of the sea’s crashing waves.
Famous for the depth and complexity of his prose poems, Mira ji also took to the air waves of All India Radio, first in Lahore, and later on in Delhi during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Not only did he write radio plays, but it is said that Mira ji occasionally sang some of the Urdu songs he composed. Working in radio stations, as well as editing various Urdu literary periodicals such as Adabi Dunya, Mira ji was always dwelling in the sound-waves of words. He was a prodigious poet, a meticulous editor, and a voracious reader. Though his life flashed all too briefly upon this earth, his voice and works still resonate far beyond the grave and into a perpetual present tense.
Here is my translation of Mira ji translating Sappho’s famous fragment #31:
He seems to me like the gods,
he who,
sitting opposite you,
gazes intently upon your face
listens to your sweet voice and
the dizzying grace of your laughter
my heart too quakes in my chest
O – the hectic roiling of a slaughter shakes
as I shoot a furtive glance at you,
my voice lingers, trapped in my chest
as if no tongue were in my mouth
my body ablaze, trembling
nothing reaches my eyes and
drumming floods my ears
And yet – devastation. Fate has inscribed “no.”
I sit here destined to endure agony.
life does not grant freedom from it.
death hovers far off from me.
Additional Reading
Askari, Muhammad Hasan. “Mira ji.” In Ik Mutāla’h, edited by Jameel Jalibi, 77-86. Lahore: Sang-e Meel Publications, 2009.
Dihlavi, Shahid Ahmad. “Mīrājī.” In Ik Mutāla’h, edited by Jameel Jalibi, 45-60. Lahore: Sang-e Meel Publications, 2009.
Jalibi, Jameel, ed. Kulliyāt-e Mīrājī. Lahore: Sang-e Meel Publications, 2014.
Hanafi, Shameem. Meera ji Aur Un Ka Nigar Khana. Delhi: Delhi Kitab Ghar, 2013.
Patel, Geeta. Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings: On Gender, Colonialism, and Desire in Miraji’s Urdu Poetry. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Patel, Geeta. “Renaming Oneself: Miraji and the Politics of Gender.” Annual of Urdu Studies 8, no. 1 (1993): 100-109.
Patel, Geeta. “Vernacular Missing: Miraji on Sappho, Gender, and Governance.” Comparative Literature 70, no.2 (2018): 132-144.
Miraji. “Apne Bāre Men.” In Ik Mutāla’h, edited by Jameel Jalibi, 465-72. Lahore: Sang-e Meel Publications, 2009.
Miraji. “Gīt Kaise Bante Hain.” In Ik Mutāla’h, edited by Jameel Jalibi, 479-82. Lahore: Sang-e Meel Publications, 2009.
Miraji. Mashriq o Maghreb ke Naghme. Lahore: Sang-e Meel Publications, 2009.
Miraji. Seh Atisha. Edited by Akhtar ul-Iman. Bombay: Rakshanda Kitab Ghar, 1992.
Additional Credits
Special thanks to faculty mentor, Mehr Farooqi, Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages & Culture at the University of Virginia.
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