Beef
RAP BATTLE!
My girlfriend and I are planning a visit to India next month, so I’ve put myself on a crash course in Indian political and cultural history. A number of people directed me to the writings of William Dalrymple, a Scottish historian who has spent most of his adult life in India. I’m reading The Last Mughal, his account of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, during which Emperor Bahadur Zafar Shah II reluctantly supported an unsuccessful insurgent rebellion against the British; its failure led to Zafar’s exile and solidified the British Empire’s position in India. It’s a fascinating read, not least for its depiction of the decline of India’s last Islamic dynasty, which, at its height, ruled virtually all of subcontinental India, including modern-day Bengal, Pakistan, Kashmir, and part of Afghanistan; by the 1850s, the empire was essentially broke and restricted to the city of Delhi. The Mughals brought Persian culture to India; during the empire, Hinduism and Islam coexisted across India and influenced each other. Zafar, himself a poet and Sufist, was a supporter of the arts and friendly towards Delhi’s Hindus, and is portrayed to be wary of hard-line ‘ulamas in his court. (Later, fundamentalist British missionaries would themselves find the orthodox Muslim clerics to be a useful foil.)
Zauq
Early in the book, Dalrymple writes of a feud between the court poets Mirza Asadullah Khan (“Ghalib”), an aristocratic-descended drinker, gambler, and “rake,” known (and satirized) for writing complex verse, and Mohammad Ibrahim Zauq, the Mughal Poet Laureate. The rivalry flared up during the 1852 wedding of Jawan Bakht, age 11, Zafar’s fifteenth son and heir apparent:
The squabble at the wedding was over a single verse in Ghalib’s sehra (or wedding oration) where he appeared–characteristically–to suggest that no one in the gathering could write a couplet as well as he…. Zafar also encouraged Zauq to reply to Ghalib’s unprovoked sally. The fine sehra that the Poet Laureate came up with ended with a couplet tossing the challenge back to Ghalib:
The person who claims poetic skills,
Recite this to him and say,
“Look–this is how a poet
Weaves a real wedding veil.”
The verse was published in the following morning’s newspaper, and Zauq was subsequently shot in the leg outside the studios of Hot 97. Anyone know of any more good feuds between poets of yore?
See also: http://achewood.com/index.php?date=05082003
Where in India are you going? Any other good reads about that incredible and complex country? I didn’t even know that poets feuded.