Project

In the Halo of a Moment

Meghan Hartman

Meghan Hartman: Alone in a hospital room, with only a book as his witness, he finally got his wish: he died. As he had lay deteriorating, his body slowly turning in on itself, he would say to Akhtar ul-Imān, his dear friend, “ilāhi! Agar Mīrā jī ko sahat nahin ho sakti to unhen maut de de. Kam az kam isī taklīf se to nijāt ho jayegi.” “God, if Mira ji can’t have health, then give him death. At least he will be free from this suffering.” So God listened to him. He died in the evening on November 3rd 1949 in the King Edward Memorial Hospital of Mumbai. He was 37. But, it is hard to be sure which suffering exactly Mira ji was referring to. Was it the crippling loneliness after nearly all of his friends had abandoned him? Or was it his fellow poets kicking him out of the literary circles which Mira ji had considered family, unlike the conniptive kinship tie of his brother who had long ago sold some of Miraji’s work to serve as packaging for veggies? Or was it the tumors enflaming his body? Or was it the doctors threatening to “correct” him with electro-shock therapy, straightening out a “seemingly” بھٹکا ہوا شاعر, a wayward poet as one biographer later dubbed him, rather unceremoniously? Or was it amorphous frustrations that to be different, to be queer, to write startlingly new poetry in a new genre, would just land you in the pits of ridicule? Maybe all those painful questions pulsated as intensely as the tumors engulfing his body. But isī taklīf, this suffering. His emphasis on particularity, this, isī, a demonstrative so sure of a “here” and “now.” So completely confident in space-time, in the halo of a moment seemingly demarcating the past from the future, as if a moment were a forge between two mountains. This suffering. This. Mira ji had spent a life time of writing Urdu poetry, crafting a new genre of long narrative poems called nazms, which would unmoor our faith in a clean definition of time and space, mixing up the chain of past-present-future, unsettling any reliance on chronology really. His nazms would always measure our measurements of time and remind us: what is a millisecond from a cosmic perspective? What is a second to a god? What does that look like? So maybe, as he withered on the hospital bed with his book and shouted out to God to be free of this suffering, this actually referred to a moment which had accumulated other fossil-moments buried deep with memories not only belonging to him – but memories of other epochs, like the time of a pre-colonial India without British oppression, without British technologies of cruelty in the forms of outright massacres, or more subtly suffused in the syllabi of schools…or the time of Prince Siddhartha, poised to become the Buddha, which then wound up painted on the walls of the Ajanta Caves, which then trickled from the open veins of those living rocks into the eyes of Miraji standing before them, who then wrote a poem about it. Ajanta ke ghār, “The Caves of Ajanta.” Fossilized space-time enchanted Mira ji. But all of this is not to say that Mira ji was an escapist or apolitical, though many of his contemporaries and biographers lobbed such insults. Mira ji was much more brilliant than he received credit for…he understood that he was a creature of his social environment as much as he was an accretion of multiple time streams coalescing in his body. So as anti-colonial efforts gathered more and more steam, but began to ring in monochromatic colors, Mira ji meanwhile was crafting his non-identity politics, his slippery dance between inter-temporal dimensions, first darting to the time of gods in Krishna’s Brindavan, then taking a pit-stop at the beginning of time. His resistance came in these subtler ways, etched into the scaffolding and themes of poems, or the resistance to succumb to simple definitions of identity…he was always pluralizing and specifying. Perhaps that is why Miraji liked small words like (isī meaning ‘this’) or magar (meaning but). He liked small words because he saw worlds in them. Proliferating worlds saved from the brink of extinction, always a kaleidoscopic fervor. He once wrote this about a tiny little conjunction we call “but:” “مگر۔۔۔ یہ مگر بھی عجیب لفظ ہے۔ میں سمجھتا ہوں کہ یہ لفظ بڑھتی ہوئی زندگی کی علامت ہے جہاں ایک فقرے کی ہستی معدوم ہونے لگے۔ یہ مختصر سا لفظ اسے موت سے بچا کر آگے بڑھا دیتا ہے۔” “But – this is a wondrous word too. I understand that this word [but] is a symbol of ever-expanding life where the existence of a phrase would begin to slip into extinction. This somewhat brief word saves the phrase from death and amplifies it.” His jagged ending of a life cut short is – or at least I’d like to think so – is his version of a “but.” Though he died alone with only four people attending his funeral, his death has left him hanging in a wide open space, not exactly a void or an abyss, but a large expanse – the types of expanse he would write about in his poems, where you feel like the ecstasies of dissolving into a vital space, where breath and air start to merge. Though Mira ji lies buried somewhere in Marine Line Cemetery, he still speaks through his poems and essays. I would like to think that I can still hear your voice whenever one encounters the worlds you created in your poetry. One of your fellow writers once described your voice like this: آواز بہت عمدہ اور بھاری پائی تھی۔ ریڈیو پر اکثر ڈراموں میں بولتے تھے۔” “His voice had been rich and full of gravitas. On the radio he often used to perform plays.” And another writer-friend wrote this: میراجی گراموفون کی طرح بولتے رہے۔ یوں تو میرا جی کو گفتگو کا بڑا سلیقہ تھا۔ ” “Miraji would speak like a gramophone. That was his flare in conversation.” Mira ji, your voice still echoes in every present moment. We hear you.

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 7^th century Sanskrit love lyricist Amaru, the 1^st century Latin poet Catullus, the 8^th 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.

Project Contributors

Meghan Hartman

PhD Candidate, Religious Studies

Deep in the thicket of words, Meghan Hartman emerges. She can be found translating various Urdu, Farsi, and Sanskrit poems, studying furiously in the Teaching Assistant cubicles (aka the cubes) with her friends, and absorbing the various worlds of sound in and outside of her headphones. She also is pursuing a PhD in the Religious Studies department at the University of Virginia. Her dissertation will delve into the Urdu poetry and literary criticism of Mīrā jī, a luminous poet-philosopher of the twentieth century. When she does leave campus, Meghan can be found playing with her favorite four-legged friend Missy, performing sarcastic bits and sketches with her roommates, writing her own poems, or napping.

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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