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 first barahmasa
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 tazkira Makhzan 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’s Bikat Kahani is important because he
introduced three basic elements that would remain the hallmark of the barahmasa: a gharelu lehja (domestic tone), dramai
tarz (dramatic tone), and khud-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 barahmasa poets 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.
While Afzal’s Bikat
Kahani is mentioned in the tazkira
by Mir Hasan, most other barahmasas have
been kept beyond the pale. Little scholarly work has been done even in Urdu on
the barahmasa tradition save for
compilation of 12 barahmasas by
Tanveer Alvi. Had the thrust of
literary criticism and research been on exploring the oral tradition in Urdu
rather than discrediting its presence by casting doubts on its verifiable
antecedents, our literary canon would have been that much richer. Had the
literary historian not created this artificial distinction between high and low
literature, a great deal of folk-related literature whose roots go back to an
orally-transmitted cultural legacy would not have been marginalized. However,
it is still not too late. Even now, if we abandon the parameters of ‘high’
culture and ‘high’ literature and begin to study the small and the simple and
the natural we can avert some of the dangers of separatism
