Partition Volumes, ed by Alok Bhalla -- A Review

Stories about the Partition of India, Volumes I –III & IV, edited by Alok Bhalla, Manohar, 2012, Rs 1295+Rs995.

That there are multiple histories rather than a history of the partition is borne out by studying the literature produced in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Contrary to popular perception, there is no generalized or undifferentiated response to the partition among those who have chronicled it. Reactions vary from nostalgic lament for a lost age to attaching blame and apportioning responsibility for the terrible misfortunes that had befallen all those who had been affected, in some way or the other, by the events of 1947. While there is a general agreement that the murder and mayhem that accompanied the partition was a human tragedy of epic proportions, there is far more ambivalence in the ways of dealing or accepting the consequences of partition. While the majority of writers made a conscious effort to hold up the tattered fabric of secularism in the face of communalism, bitter and painful memories also find expression, especially in a range of first-person accounts, diaries, etc. It seems difficult to discern a commonality of concerns nor any coherence and unity of thought save the obvious assertion that countless innocent lives were lost due to the political decisions of a mere handful. 

In the wake of continuing interest in the partition, both among the students of history and the literary historians, not to mention the average reader, a spate of anthologies on the partition have appeared. And, anthologies, as a necessity, must have a peg, ideological or otherwise. Their editors have tried, in different ways and through different voices, to highlight different aspects of a single, traumatic, shared experience. In a sense, therefore, each anthology and its editor invariably has an ‘agenda’. Often, these ‘agendas’ appear to be at cross-purposes with each other.

Alok Bhalla, one of the ablest and most diligent chroniclers of the many partition narratives, points out the ‘real sorrow’ of the partition, namely that it ‘brought to an abrupt end a long and communally shared history.’ In his deeply insightful Introduction to the four volumes of stories, he shows a clear-eyed understanding of the tensions within the communities which occasionally burst into spurts of outrage yet did not, he believes, impair ‘the rich heterogeneity of the life of the two communities.’ That is, till the partition; at the ‘ordinary and local levels, even as late as 1946,’ Bhalla notes, the daily life of the Hindus and Muslim remained ‘so richly interwoven as to have formed a rich archive of customs and practices, that explains why there is a single, common note which informs nearly all the stories written about the partition and the horror it unleashed—a note of utter bewilderment.’ And it is this bewilderment that is common across barriers of ethnic, linguistic and cultural identities, not to say religious ones, that comes out in this selection of stories translated from Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Sindhi, and Bangla.

A necessary fall-out of partition was migration. The displacement, dislocation, uprootedness and alienation that came in the wake of the transfer of power are documented in stories such as Intizar Husain’s ‘An Unwritten Epic’. As in the depiction of partition-related violence, some writers catalogue the horrors witnessed on the way and the difficulties in finding safe refuges on the other side of newly-demarcated borders; others depict it as hijrat, an experience akin to the Prophet’s migration from Mecca to Medina and therefore an experience that transcends human sufferings. Still others view it as salutary experiences with the potential to draw lessons from past mistakes. Several stories are personal and cathartic, too. A compulsive scraping of wounds, a cataloguing of unimaginable horrors and a depiction of a sick, momentarily depraved society (as in several of Manto’s stories) is, often, the creative writer’s only way of exorcising the evil within. It served the needs of its times in a rough and ready sort of way but it was patchy, uneven, often incoherent in its pain or anger or bewilderment.  Also worrying is the lack of historical awareness among some of the writers.  References to political events, resolutions, statements, etc. are vague; the focus is on the ‘impact’ of partition on the common people rather than why the political leaders failed to resolve their disputes over power sharing and ended up carving the country along religious lines. By and large, the writers have been content to write of consequences rather than reasons, effects rather than causes, of partition.

Much of partition literature falls under what has been termed waqti adab, topical literature. Given the propensity of most writers to focus on violence and communal tensions, in Urdu these stories have been called fasadat ke afsane, or riot literature, again serving to deflect the attention from partition per se and turning the cause-and-effect equation upside down. Historians have argued for the need to view partition-related violence as distinct from the communal riots that preceded and followed it given the military precision with which they were planned. The riots, on the other hands, were largely spontaneous and sporadic, triggered often by something small and inconsequential though both had devastating effects such as the rape and abduction of women, desecration of holy places, loss of life and property and the generation of a mindless, ingenerate, primitive violence. This violence lies at the heart of much of partition literature and has been the cause of a great deal of debate among literary historians. Its value lies beyond literary voyeurism; it does, I believe, provide the historian with some sensitive insights into the impact of violence on ordinary people. And a collection such as this shows us how literature and history are intertwined and how the study of one can enrich the other. The answer lies not in forgetting or erasing the horrors of the past but in heeding and recalling right, for as Bhalla writes: ‘I have put together this anthology of stories about the partition not in order to exorcise the past, but in the hope of initiating an ethical inquiry into the history of my age and place.’

Romancing Tagore -- A Review

Romancing Tagore: A Collection of over 100 Tagore Poems in Urdu Nazm, Transcreated by Indira Varma and Rehman Musawwir, published by Visva Bharati and Basu Media, pp. 272.

For far too long the poetry of RabindranathTagore has been treated like a shibboleth, as a test to distinguish the true-blue Rabindra-sangeet-loving Bengali from the non-Bangla-speaking ‘other’. What is more, it is like a sacred space where non-Bengalis fear to tread. A new book corrects an old wrong. Appropriately enough, it is called Romancing Tagore; for, instead of the awe and veneration usually reserved for the Bard’s immortal verses, here we find a refreshing mix of pleasure and passion. Transcreated into Urdu by Indira Varma and Rehman Musawwir, this collection infuses a new zest into these ageless poems of love and longing.

Indira Varma, a connoisseur of the Urdu ghazal and an established poet with two published volumes of poetry behind her, has been in love with Tagore for decades. As she writes in her Preface: ‘...Tagore has left us with one of the best repositories of love to be found anywhere in any language. This love has multiple forms – it is divine, it is patriotic, and it is romantic ... Tagore sees romance exuding from the mundane, from the rites and rituals of everyday life.’ Varma has culled poems from Tagore’s vast repertory with painstaking exactitude, poems that speak of small joys and sorrows, of the Monsoon cloud heavy with rain, a glimmer of love in the beloved’s eye. And she has clothed them in the many-splendoured robes that only a language as seductively sweet as Urdu can provide. For instance, a poem such as Aami chini go chini tomare that is brimful with an aching love for a distant beloved has been translated as:

            Tum se shanasa dil hua, us paar ke sanam

            Sagar ke paar rehte ho us paar ke sanam

            (I know you, know you, O lady from foreign land

            You live across the ocean, O lady from foreign land)

And elsewhere,

            Apne qadmon tale

            Mujh ko bijh jaane do

            Ik mukammal khushi ke liye

            Apne paon ki dhool se

            Surkh ho jaane do

            Meri poshak ko.

And, my personal favourite:

            Agar mere gham ke ghanere andhere

            Teri rehmaton ke ujalon se chamkein

            Chamakne de unko,

            Chamakne de maula

            Tumhari muhabbat bhari ye nigahein

            Agar chashm-e-tar par meri tik rahi hain

            To ankhon mein aansu hi rehne de maula.

                       

Tagore has been translated into Urdu before, most notably by Firaq Gorakhpuri under the title Ek Sau ek Nazmein. Niaz Fatehpuri translated fragments from Gitanjali and Qamar Jalalabadi published a selection titled Tagore ki Nazmein. These, however, have been lost in the mists of time and only stray references to the translations survive. 

Being twice removed from the Bangla originals (the transcreations were done from English translations), Indira Varma and Rehman Musawwir’s efforts went through a rigorous scrutiny. Noted Tagore scholar, Supriya Roy, examined each version, explained the intricacies and subtleties of both the original and the English versions ensuring that meaning was not lost through the gaps in languages. A stamp of approval, as it were, was given by Visva Bharati, the university founded by the Bard, a university that has hitherto guarded Tagore’s works with zealous protectiveness. Once the world met at the unique melting pot that Tagore had created among the sylvan surroundings of Shanti Niketan; now, with this book, Visva Bharati is reaching out to the world.

Designed by Suneet Varma, the immensely talented fashion designer and son of Mrs Indira Varma, this handsomely produced book is a series of minutely etched cameos that combine to make it a collector’s edition. Exquisite Jaamdaani patterns from antique saris, fragments of Kantha embroidery, intricate motifs and borders make the reader linger over every page. Each set of facing pages carries an English translation, the transcreated Urdu version in Urdu script as well as Devnagari and in Roman English, thus making these translations available to a wider audience. Interspersed with the Urdu transcreations are Tagore’s paintings, opening yet another dimension to the immense creativity of our national poet.

Accompanying the book, is a cd containing ten of these Urdu nazms set to music by Debajyoti Misra. Just as the book has crossed the barriers of language chauvinism, the music attempts to do so with nationalities making this something of a pan-South Asian tribute to Gurudev, the bard of  Shanti Niketan. While four are recitations by Indira Varma, the rest are sung by the Pakistani singer Najam Sheraz and Shubha Mudgal and Kamalini Mukherji. Reminiscent of Tagore’s own compositions, Debajyoti Misra’s music shows how poetry travels across the barriers of language. In its Urdu version, it has all the sweet melodiousness that my Bengali friends swear by.

Coming at the close of the 150^th-year celebrations of Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, Romancing Tagore is a loving tribute and an apt one too; for, it tells its readers and listeners how and why Tagore’s songs have echoed the heartbeats of countless Bengalis.

Poetry Reading by Zehra Nigah, 29 March, 6.30 pm

Dear Readers,

I run a small organisation called Hindustani Awaaz. On Thursday, 29 March, I am organising a poetry reading in collaboration with The Attic. The poet is Zehra Nigah, an outstanding woman poet from Pakistan.

Do come. The Attic is located in the Regal Building in Connaught Place. The reading will begin at 6.30 pm.

 

best,

 

Rakhshanda Jalil

Review of Saeed Mirza's The Monk, the Moor and Moses Ben Jalloun

Saeed Mirza ko Gussa Kyon Aaata hai?

The Monk, the Moor and Moses Ben Jalloun, by Saeed Akhtar Mirza, Fourth Estate, New Delhi, 2012, pp. 247, Rs450.

There is a slow-burning anger in Saeed Mirza. We have seen sparks of it in films such as Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyon Aaata Hai and Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro and in television serials such as Nukkad. But the dark disquiet about the underbelly of cosmopolitan India and a weary sympathy for the flotsam and jetsam of humanity tossed out by an unfeeling society is now replaced by something sharper and stronger, something far more tensile. In his new book, we see this new anger: it is seething, simmering, unrelieved by the flashes of dark, sotto voce humour that lit up his cinematic ouvre.

The Monk, the Moor and Moses Ben Jalloun is stylistically and thematically linked to his maiden book Ammi: Letter to a Democratic Mother and shows how Mirza has creatively re-invented the genre of the novel itself. (Both books, incidentally, had stunning covers designed by the talented Moonis Ijlal.) If the first book was a mosaic of memoir, travelogue and script depicting the clash of civilizations, this seeks to expose past injustices and uncover hidden truths. Intersecting narratives, located in different times and places; a host of characters, both real and fictionalised; a fund of stories, some anecdotal others historical – come together to denounce the myth of European hegemony. But the denouement is secondary to Mirza’s real purpose. His primary aim is to expose the willful misreading of history, the deliberate demonizing of Islamic culture and civilization, and the consequent valorization of the west. His anger is directed at those who believe modern learning grew, fully formed, in the crucible of Europe. He invokes a miscellany of sources to demonstrate how, all through the ages, people have fought with each other, traded with each other and also learnt from each other. No learning, Mirza repeats, is possible without help from others. Successive civilizations are building blocks for the great edifice that is modern society. Yet, for 300-odd years the west has ‘set an agenda’ for the rest of the world; it has split the world into dichotomies of its own making: good guys vs. the bad, civilized vs. uncivilized nations, backward vs. modern peoples, colonizers vs. colonized, and so on.

Mirza takes the example of Dante’s The Divine Comedy to make a larger point. Most of us who have had the (dubious) distinction of an English-medium education in a half-way decent school, know of Dante’s iconic work that depicts a journey to Hell, Purgatory and Paradise and the people – real and mythical – that he meets. Yet how many of us would know, or even be willing to accept, that this great work was actually a plagiarized concept and the inspiration for Dante’s seminal work were actually pieces of literature that were written much earlier, literatures that not only did the great Dante Alighieri freely copy from but did not deign to even acknowledge? Mirza unearths ancient texts to prove that the Arabic version of the Prophet’s journey to heaven and hell was translated in the town of Toledo, which was fast emerging as a hub of frenetic translation activities, in the year 1264. Dante embarked upon his The Divine Comedy in 1305; by then King Alfonso of Spain had already had the Book of the Ascent translated into Castilian in 1264 by a Jewish scholar named Abraham of Toledo. A Signor Bonaventura translated it into French and Latin in the same year and it travelled further into Europe through Brunetto Latini, a travelling scholar who, in turn, knew Dante! What did, however, was use this concept – of a guided journey described as a vision or a dream -- but with small significant changes; in the Kitab al-Miraj or The Book of the Ascent, the guide is the angel Gabriel whereas in Dante’s poem, the guide is a poet. What is more, he had the audacity to slip in several derogatory references to the Prophet of Islam who incurred the especial ire of the crusaders.

 The role of translations in the spread of ideas is seldom acknowledged, especially in opening up the Arab world to the west. Mirza traces how Islam entered Europe through Spain at the beginning of the eighth century and how, within 150 years, Europe was privy to the vast knowledge that the Muslims had accumulated. While early European scholars acknowledged this debt, later generations merely appended their name to translated texts and passed them off as original:

‘By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the multicultural roots of the European sciences, mathematics, medicine, literature, poetry and music would begin to be severed. By the end of the nineteenth century, the unshackling and cutting away of the non-European past would be complete and European civilization would only acknowledge its Greek and Roman ancestry and it believed it owed nothing to anybody.’

Drawing upon a reservoir of eclectic and varied reading, Mirza lists the many contributions of Arab scholars, scientists and philosophers. In this complicated tale involving a monk, a moor and a Jewish scholar who met in Toledo to embark upon an ambitious translation project in the year 1265; Rehana and her teacher al-Beruni who lived in Ghazna in the eleventh century; and four American students in the run-up to Obama’s election, Mirza makes a compelling case for ending the conspiracy of silence and willful effacement. Written partly like a racy detective mystery in the whodunit mode and partly as an erudite dip into history, The Monk, the Moor and Moses Ben Jalloun ends with a tribute to all those who contributed to the vast body of knowledge that modern man can boast of: to al-Khwarizmi, al-Haytham, ibn Araby, al-Beruni, Ibn Rushd, Ibn Khaldun, al-Tusi, iIbn Shatir, Ibn Yunis and the countless scholars, poets and scientists from among the ancient Greets, Egyptians, Sumerians, Indians, Persian, and Chinese. He also raises a toast to all those scholars and amateurs who are engaged in scrutinizing the past.

On the UP elections: A sher by Waseem Barelvi

A sher by Waseem Barelvi which, by his own admission (see The Hindu, 22 March 2012), is about the recent elections in UP:
 

 Laga ke dekh lo jo bhi hisaab aata ho
Mujhe ghata ke woh ginti mein nahi reh sakta.

It's time the Muslims of India consolidated their strength.

Reviving Hindustani Awaaz -- A Platform for Promoting Hindustani

Dear Friends & Lovers of Literatures,

I am reviving Hindustani Awaaz -- an organisation devoted to the popularisation of Hindi-Urdu, that I had set up in 2002 and that was active till a few years ago. Its next programme, in collaboration with the The Attic, will be a reading by Zehra Nigah, a distinguished poet from Karachi.

Date: Thursday, 29 March 2012
Time: 6.30 pm
Venue: The Attic, Regal Building, Connaught Place, New Delhi

After her reading, Zehra Apa will be in conversation with blogger Mayank Austen Soofi.

All are invited. 

Readers of this blog are are also welcome to give suggestions for future programmes under the banner of Hindustani Awaaz. I am keen to use HA as a platform to promote the cause of Hindustani zubaan and tehzeeb. Some information about Hindustani Awaaz is given below.

HINDUSTANI AWAAZ:

A FORUM FOR URDU AND HINDI LITERATURES

Aims and Scope: Hindustani Awaaz is an organization for the promotion of Hindustani literature and its rich oral tradition. It seeks to publish, position and popularize various elements culled from the different genres of Urdu and Hindi language and literature. In the broadest sense, it endeavours to provide a platform for scholarly and non-scholarly views and voices in Hindustani on Hindustani.

As in the past, it will continue to organise poetry recitations, book readings, plays, dramatic re-enactments, book launches, seminars, discussions, talks, etc.

Future Activities: Hindustani Awaaz hopes to publish an annual journal of Hindustani studies. Its aim would be to publish articles, translations, interviews and views on Urdu and Hindi literature. Called “Hindustani”, the journal would also include book reviews from both languages, an inventory of significant Indian and Western publications in the field, research, notices and information on events of interest common to readers from both languages.

Review of Two Books on Delhi: Asar-us Sanadid & Dilli ki Akhri Shama

Asar-us-Sanadid by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, New Delhi, Urdu Akademi, 2006 (reprint), Rs. 230, ISBN: 81-7121-128-3

Dehli ki Akhri Shama by Mirza Farhatullah beg, edited by Salahuddin, New Delhi, Urdu Akademi, 2009 (reprint), Rs. 45, ISBN: 81-7121-060-0

For the middle of the nineteenth century, it could be well said: ‘Those were the best of times; those were the worst of times.’ One way of life was coming to an inexorable end; the other was still waiting to be born. The Rebellion of 1857, considered by many as the First War of Independence, did not merely mark the end of a way of life; it also, in a sense, marked a departure in a way of seeing things. While the Muslim response(s) to the events of 1857, the effect on Muslims in general and Muslim intelligentsia in particular and the changes ushered in their life and literature as a direct result of this cataclysmic event have been studied by scholars and historians, perhaps no one can fully enunciate the effect of these changes than those who lived who through these trying times and were directly affected by these events. Also, given the close relationship between social reality and literary texts, it is important to re-visit and re-examine the literature(s) produced during times of great social upheaval. Doing so can provide a far more nuanced understanding of historical events than official records and documents. The two books under review are, therefore, important and useful.

The first, Asar-us Sanadid (meaning ‘remains of the past’) was originally written in 1847 and subsequently revised and published by the Asiatic Society in 1862. In its first edition, the six hundred pages of text were illustrated with over a hundred lithographic illustrations. It listed not just the monuments that lay scattered across the many ‘Delhis’, but also described the city’s fairs, festivals, and included a lengthy account of the city’s vibrant cultural life. Compiled at real physical risk to life and limb (for its compilation required the venerable and lugubriously well-built Sir Syed to be dexterously raised and lowered by an ingenious pulley), the four-volume work can be regarded as a lasting monument not only to the author’s industry but also to his sense of culture and history and his realization, well ahead of his times, of the need to record and preserve the monuments of Delhi and their inscriptions. The first edition also contained a large section on the sufis, men of learning, and poets and artists of contemporary Delhi. Divided under ten headings, it also included a listing of 118 eminent citizens of Delhi. Its French translation by Garcin de Tassy was brought out in 1861. Its second edition in 1854 deleted the cultural references and retained only the descriptions of the historical monuments, translations of the epitaphs and plaques as well as measurements and architectural details of the actual building and some pen portraits. Scholars such as David Lelyveld and Shamsur Rahman Faruqi have remarked upon this curious deletion from the second edition and attributed it to Syed Ahmad’s pragmatic re-assessment of the significance of ‘culture’ in the life of Indian Muslims. It is noteworthy that Syed Ahmad undertook this ‘reassessment’ well before the Uprising. C. M. Naim, in ‘Syed Ahmad and His Two Books called Asar-al-Sanadid’ published in Modern Asian Studies, views the two versions as two separate books.

What we have with us is the revised second edition: its first chapter contains brief descriptions of the monuments of Delhi; the second has descriptions of the construction of forts and palaces in the various cities of Delhi; the third about the different kinds of building activity undertaken by the various emperors and nobility of Delhi; the last is about the people of Shahjahanabad – noblemen, poets, writers, scholars, hakims. To my mind, it is the last chapter that is the most evocative, brimful as it is with delightful pen portraits of real people. It brings to life a city and a whole way of life that is gone forever.

* * *

Like the candle that burns brightest at dawn before being snuffed out, so did the city of Delhi just before it was ravaged by the Mutiny. And it is this city poised on the brink of disaster, its culture, its poets and above all its language, the zaban-e-Dehli, threatened by extinction that Farhatullah Beg captures in his book, Dehli Ki Aakhri Shama. Born in 1883 Farhatullah Beg felt sufficiently close in time to attempt a fictional-historical account of what might have been the last mushaira of its kind held in Delhi. Rather ingeniously he makes the narrator a certain Maulvi Karimuddin Maghfoor who wrote a florid account of a mushaira that is said to have taken place in 1841.  “My name is Karimuddin. I am a native of Panipat,” begins Farhatullah Beg’s narrative. “As the mullah heads for the masjid, so scholars flocked to Delhi,” he says. Like so many others, Maulvi Karimuddin too came to Delhi with stars in his eyes, set up a printing press but when that floundered decided to organize a mushaira, publish its proceedings and make some money. What follows is entirely conjecture on the part of a man who has the gift of a brilliant imagination but certainly no proof that a mushaira, said to be the last of its kind, was held at a particular place on a particular date where a certain number of poets were present who recited a particular set of ghazals.

Fact and fiction blend seamlessly in a narrative that is not only a highly entertaining account of historical personages and their distinctive literary styles but is also a valuable document of a society, its morals and manners. Farhatullah Beg’s book transports us to an age when everyone – from the Mughal emperor Bahadurshah Zafar to the poorest beggar – cherished and adored Urdu. Polished and perfected by Delhi Ustads such as Mir, Sauda and Dard, it shone like burnished gold by the time of Karimuddin’s (fictional) mushaira. And like gold it could be fashioned into exquisitely delicate qhazals that could be light as gossamer yet fulsome with metaphysical import. The Mughal emperors and salatin, many of whom fancied themselves as the arbiters of good taste, often wrote tolerably good poetry themselves and organized mushairas in the Diwan-e-Aam. Later, as they became steadily more impoverished mushairas and mehfils came to be organized in different parts of the city such as Ghaziuddin Khan’s madarssa and the homes of the nobility.

Farhatullah Beg’s book has a vivid account of the development of not just the Urdu ghazal but the Urdu language itself. His narrative is studded with lively pen portraits of the ustads Zauq, Ghalib, Momin, Dagh, Sheftah, Azurdah as well as their shagirds who were popular figures on the mushaira circuit, such as: the French army captain Alexander Heatherley Azad who always came to Delhi whenever he heard of a mushaira being organized; hakim Sakhanand Raqam who was an ardent devotee of Momin; and the colourful Nazneen who wrote in the women’s dialect rekhti, using women’s idiom and slang and recited with great coquetry and coy playfulness wearing an odhni. The masters of rekhta would listen in stony silence as the crowd went into raptures over Nazneen’s histrionics. Then there was the mystical Tashnah who arrived at mushairas not only drunk but also completely undressed. In Beg’s account, he absent-mindedly snuffs out the shama placed before him before reading a ghazal that carries the only portent of disaster in its refrain of the nothingness that awaits.  Tashnah and Zauq sound the only note of sadness in this assembly of greats that is otherwise complacent in its sense of wellbeing.

A mushaira such as the one described by Beg (comprising 59 poets) usually began after the Isha prayer, say about nine or ten and went on till dawn. The patron, in this case Mirza Arif, welcomed the poets and tactfully handled the ticklish issues of  seating the poets and the order in which they would be invited to recite according to a complicated system governed by etiquette, seniority and affiliation. Touchy and temperamental, the poets could take offense at the smallest misdemeanour; it could well be the daad or ovation given sparingly or too well!  The readings would be interspersed with wit and repartee, both personal and poetic. Ordinarily, the patron would announce the Tarah or rhyme pattern at the time of extending the invitation. Beg’s mushaira is be-tarah and thus free from the vexing issue that caused many squabbles to break out among rival literary camps. A lit shama would be placed before each poet, beginning with the younger and less-known ones and ending with Zauq, the emperor’s ustad. The ustads lavished generous praise on their own shagird as well as genuinely talented younger poets such as Dagh but remained silent when they wished to show either disapproval or disappointment. Mirza Fakhru, the presiding poet in Beg’s mushaira, was not just the emperor’s son and representative but a fine poet himself. As the last poet, Ustad Zauq, begins reading his qata, the call for Fajir prayer is heard, and the mushaira ends with the assembly once again raising its hand in prayer. Thus ends Beg’s account of what has come to be called the last mushaira of Delhi for never has the city witnessed such a coming together of great poets.