BENGALURU: Rarely does a book launch have the simplicity or design to create an atmosphere that captivates the audience with soulful lyrical performances and Urdu shayari. A confluence of artistes and intellectuals came together to honour one of the most celebrated Urdu poets, Mir Taqi Mir.
Mir’s comprehensive English translations, Selected Ghazals and Other Poems as well as Ghazals: Translations of Classic Urdu Poetry, published under the Murty Classical Library of India, were reintroduced at the event.
NR Narayana Murthy while unveiling the books and talking about the Library’s inception with an idea to bring back the classics of Ancient India saying, “Persian was such an important part of Indian culture in the bygone days.”
The event showcased the rendition of Mir’s couplets or ghazals by Malayali singer Gayatri Asokan, proficient in Hindustani classical and ghazal genres with extensive training in Carnatic music. “I wish there was a lot more patronage because the era of independent music has taken a backseat. This is such a precious art form. Normally, I do a mix of a lot of poets.
So for me, it was challenging to learn a whole new repertoire of Mir,” said Asokan while talking about the need for more concerts like this. Asokan’s performance was interspersed with the reading of the ghazals by Bengaluru-based poet and theatre artiste, Kafeel Jafri and an associate professor of Persian-Iranian Studies at McGill University Prashant Keshavmurthy, who recited the English translations of the ghazals to keep all the audiences engaged.
Introducing Mir as a proud poet, Keshavmurthy said, “He led an average 18th-century Indo-Muslim life in North India. For far too long, till Faruqi composed his scholarship on Mir, the latter was considered to have led a life of a broken-hearted lover because his ghazals are melancholic. One of Faruqi’s great accomplishments was to extricate Mir from this stereotype and recover a kind of indigenous literary vocabulary with which to speak of the ghazal.”
Rafia, an Urdu poet, who was attending the event, said, “While the Urdu poetry scene is not as vibrant as Delhi, Bengaluru is also seeing a growth of spaces that celebrate Urdu poetry and culture.”