The barahmasa are songs of separation -- both
mystic and secular – expressing love and longing for the beloved. Literally
meaning ‘twelve months’, they are so called so because they contain one song
for each month of the Indian lunar calendar. While the state of
separation remains a constant, the singer’s mood changes with the seasons thus
allowing the poet to dwell at length on the anguish and yearning for union but
also bring in local, seasonal and natural elements that vary in a country and
climate as diverse as ours. Drawing upon its ancient roots in Prakrit,
Sanskrit, Hindi and regional dialects, the barahmasa is almost entirely rural.
It still survives in the form of lok geet or folk songs. Or,
looked at another way, one can say that the barahmasa drew upon lok geet and
the existing oral tradition and gave it a more seasonal colour.
The past and the present
fuse in the barahmasa as the poet draws upon the popular Hindavi tradition
of virah or separation and creates a landscape in which there
is no reality save the pain-filled longing of the virahini, or a
woman who lives in a state of perpetual separation from her beloved. It is this
anguish that gets recorded month after month in plaintive, plentiful detail.
One might well ask: Why should a woman’s longing for her absent lover hold any
especial interest? What merit is to be found in these works – all on the same
theme, all using the same stock of images, metaphors and conceits, almost all
being little other than variations on a theme? Especially, since many are by
lesser-known poets and some by virtually unknown composers? However, despite
its limitations and singular lack of refinements, I do believe the barahmasa
deserves to be studied for several reasons that I shall enumerate in this
paper. I shall focus on a particular barahmasa, the Bikat Kahani by
Afzal Jhinjhanvi which, in later centuries, became a template of sorts for
generations of composers of barahmasa.
Sometime in the early 17th century,
Afzal Jhinjhanvi compiled the firstbarahmasa in Urdu, and called
it Bikat Kahani (bikat meaning ‘immense’ or
‘terrible’). The frontispiece of the version I have used for this paper
describes it as ‘Shumali Hind mein Urdu shairi ka pahla mustanad
namoona’), and attributes the date as AH 1035 or AD 1625. Its editors,
Noorul Hasan Hashmi and Masood Husain Khan, draw our attention to the description
of Bikat Kahani in the tazkiras of the eighteenth century where Afzal is put at
par with poets such as Shaikh Saadi, Amir Khusro and Ahmad Gujrati. The verses
quoted by Shaikh Muhammad Qayamuddin Qayam in his tazkiraMakhzan Nikaat (1755)
and Mir Hasan in his Nikaat-as Shuara(1752) are, oddly enough, two
similar verses, both from Bayaan Mah Chait, or the description of
the month of chait:
Padi hai mere gal mein paim phansi
Maran apna hain aur logon ko hansi
And
Musafir
se jinon ne dil lagaya
Unhonon
ne sab janam rote ganwaya
Hashmi and Khan draw the
conclusion that while the barahmasa was fairly well known and many people,
especially the bards had consigned it to memory, its written version was
possibly read by few in its entirety, including the learned men who wrote these
tazkiras.
Here’s a sampler of what
Afzal’s Bikat Kahani contains:
Ari
jab kook koel ne sunayi
Tamami
tan badan mein aag lahi
Andher
rain, jugnu jagmagata
Oo
ka jalti upar tais ka jalata?
Ah, when the cuckoo sounds her cooing
It
sets my body aflame
The
glow worm glows in the darkness of the night
Why
does it burn one already on fire?
And, elsewhere:
Gayi
barsaat rut nikhara falak sab
Nami
danam ke sajan ghar phire kab
Piya
bin aikal kaise rahoo ri
Sitam
upar sitam kaise sahoon ri
The rains are gone, the skies are clear
But
I don’t know when my beloved will return
How
will I live alone without my beloved?
How
will I bear affliction upon affliction?
Close to Surdas’s
Braj-bhasha and Kabir’s Sudakhahni, Afzal’s Khari-boli had crossed the Jamuna
and entered the Doaba region to drink deeply from both Braj-bhasha and Khari-boli.
In fact, linguists such as Masood Husain Khan have studied the barahmasas as
a barometer of the advance of Braj and Khari-boli into Urdu, the changing tone
and tenor of rekhta and the extent of this intermingling over a period of
roughly 350 years. In literary terms, too, Afzal’sBikat Kahani is
important because he introduced three basic elements that would remain the
hallmark of the barahmasa: agharelu lehja (domestic
tone), dramai tarz (dramatic tone), andkhud-kalami (use
of first person).
Sometimes taking the
colour of a lok geet, sometimes adopting the tone of a qissa-kahani,
the barahmasa drew inspiration from a variety of sources: the
Jain narrative poems describing Neminath’s desertion of his wife Rajmati on
their wedding day; a swathe of devotional poetry that dwelt on Radha’s longing
for Krishna; the description of the seasons in Kalidas’s epic poem Ritu
Samhar(literally meaning ‘a compilation of seasons’, in this case six
season) that, in turn, spawned a tradition of rituvarnan (poetic
description of the seasons); elements of singhar rasa (the rasa or
‘flavour’ of erotica, one of the nine rasas) that have influenced
the depiction of the nayika (the ‘heroine’ or female
protagonist) both in verse and painting; an accumulated stock of similes and
metaphors that had gained currency largely through word of mouth. Drawing upon
these diverse sources, appropriating easily-understood stock images, speaking
in a woman’s voice, the barahmasa allowed the fullest possible
exploration of the link between memory and desire. It used the set format of
the seasons -- and the fairs, festivals, rites, customs, flora and fauna
associated with the 12 months of the year that are constant and therefore
predictable – to reinforce the near-universal experience of love and its
conjoined twin, separation.
A product of qasbahs and
suburbs, the barahmasas were remarkably free of the courtly
influences that characterized the rest of Urdu poetry, most notably the ghazal.
Moreover, the barahmasapoets made a conscious effort to move away
from the crippling influence of Persian that held sway over the court poets and
displayed a remarkable readiness to experiment with other forms of poetic
expression. Evidently, they reveled in the liberating air of dialects such as
Braj-bhasha, Khari-boli, Awadhi, Rajasthani, and the occasional smattering of
Dakhani just as much as they did in re-inventing or re-appropriating a literary
space that had existed in the shade of the high form, be it the riti poetry
in Hindi (traditionally written by court poets) or the ghazal and masnavi in
Urdu. The barahmasas then appears before us as a valuable
testament of multiculturalism, multilingualism and multifariousness. They tell
us that voices other than the male voice existed, genres other than the classical
were popular and the Urdu poet showed a willingness to accommodate different
poetic traditions. More importantly, the barahmasa points to a
time when Urdu had not established itself as a hegemonic force -- in a literary
and linguistic sense -- nor acquired the purely urban consciousness it now
displays.
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