moharram in music: the seraiki maaru

In some remote enclaves of the Seraiki belt, the venerable tradition of the 'Maaru' lives on; the use of the dirgelike melodies of the flute (sharnah, in seraiki) and the doleful beat of the war-drum (naghara) to gather together the mourners of Imam Hussain in the first ten days of Moharram. The particular subject of this post was recorded on the intervening night of the 8th and 9th of Moharram at Shujatpur, the ancestral village of the Langah Khans on the banks of the Sutlej at the southernmost tip of the district Multan. As is age-old convention in this exclusive hamlet of Azadars (mourners), the Maaru is played in the evenings of the 1st through to the 7th of Moharram to bring the community together for 'Maatam'. Maatam is organized chest-beating to the tune of a 'Nauha', elegiac poetry sung by a chorus of 5 to 6 Nauhakhwans, commemorating one episode or the other from the events of Karbala. On the nights of the 8th and 9th of Moharram, the Maaru announces the commencement of the 'Majlis', a gathering in which the 'Zakir' (speaker) employs the magic of words to bring alive the tragedy of Karbala in the imagination of the listeners. The final Maaru of Moharram is played in the deep afternoon of the 10th of Moharram, roughly corresponding with the time of the Asr prayer, the time of Hussain's martyrdom 14 centuries ago. This Maaru is different from all those played on the previous days. It has an eerie warlike rhythm to it as one would imagine playing in the background of medieval infantry going on the attack. The steady thud-thudding of the drum and the piercing defiance of the flute accompanies the 'Zanjeer-zani' (self-flagellation), the Azadars' tribute in blood to the fallen Imam.

The recording in question is the most elaborate specimen of the regular Maaru played in the first nine days of Moharram. The Maaru ensemble laid out beneath a tree at the Imambargah's gate includes the sharnah-maestro Ustad Ghulam Haider Mirzada at the primary flute, Bidani Mirasi with the supporting flute and Bachu at the drums. Through the length of the Maaru, Ghulam Haider plays the tunes of three different Seraiki Nauhas in the flute. He starts off with the theme of 'Aa Qasim tekoon mehndi laavan, tedi maut de sagan suhavan' (Let me henna your hands, O Qasim, for you must now wed death). An increasing volume of human voices can be discerned in the background. Azadars drawn to the music are beginning to gather around the trio of instrumentalists, chanting 'Haye Hussain, Shah Hussain' (O Hussain, our persecuted King) while doing symbolic Maatam. In the 6th minute, Ghulam Haider moves to 'Mekoon loago Hussain ahdin, maen laash Akber di chaee aandan' (I am Hussain, O people, and I bear my murdered Akber on my shoulders). Akber was the Imam's 18-year old son who is believed to be a spitting image of the Prophet of Islam. He was killed in the battle of Karbala by a javelin through the heart. Those who are familiar with the lyrics of this Nauha break into tears when the flute intones: 'Musafir han Madine da, maen te itni ghareebi hay, kafan bajhoon maen Akber koon, bunn de vich sumhai aandan' (I am a traveler, far from home; and so abject am I that I leave him unshrouded on the burning sand). In the 10th minute of play, the maestro picks up the tune of 'Zalim ve, mekoon Shaam di taraf na torr' (O cruel fate, do not take me in chains towards Shaam). The seamless transitions through the three Nauhas speaks volumes of the flutist's mastery. The lyrics of this third Nauha are even more moving, but in the 11th minute, a quick flick of the Langah Sardar's hand brings the Maaru to an abrupt end. The chant of 'Haye Hussain, Shah Hussain' builds to a crescendo as all those who had been silently relishing the beauty of the Maaru join in. At its peak, the chant ends as the crowd cries out in unison, 'Haq pak fazl e Panjtan, Ya Ali; Ya Allah, Ya Mohammad, Ya Ali!' The Azadars flock into the hall of the Imambargah for the Majlis to formally commence. The Maaru has served its purpose one more time. In 11 minutes, a sleepy hollow of scattered mud-houses, disparate clans and uneasy neighbors has been galvanized into a single-minded whole in the love of Hussain Al-Shaheed Al-Mazloom.

Asr e Ashur

han woh Hussain, tishna o majrooh o natavan
saaqit khara hua thha jo laashon k darmian
sunta raha sakoon se woh pir e neem jan
Akber se naujawan ki jawani ki siskiyan
haye haye ki aa rahee thhi sada kainaat se
phir bhi qadam hataye na paye sabaat se

- Josh Malihabadi

birthday '12

You plunge down the road, from home to home, and all you want to do is have some sense of purpose, some small achievement to show, if only to beat the encroaching night. The sky is overcast, the horizons, starless and bleak. The ominous gray of the right and the shrinking pink of the left conspire to make sure every oncoming gaze reduces you to innumerable flights of terror. Your resolve is shaken; you veer off the path into doubts unspoken, dangers untold. But only momentarily. Mild westerly’s kick up a heady breeze, easing the stuffiness inside. With the wind comes the phantasmal dust, dancing across the spectrum of vision, concealing that which is near, accentuating that which is far away. Across the dust’s erratic screen, alien eyes project surreal images, living silhouettes of objects lifeless and bound. It gets in your eyes, the insidious dust. You rub and there is aggravation. You don’t and you are blind. Rain begins to pour; fuses with the dust. Your perceptions become a murky pool and you wade through them in fits and starts. Your mad dash is now a snail’s pace; your purpose is defeated; your achievements, flimsy. Inertia carries you forward; frailty slows you down. Passing familiarity becomes a ray of hope. You latch onto it like space-junk at the end of a comet’s tail. It takes you deep through the realms of scorched clay. Colossal mud cannon point mutedly at the sky, belching acrid black fumes, as though they just fired at god and now await reprisal. You deviate into abstruse inquiry and all familiarity is lost. The darkness you had set out to conquer overwhelms you. You are home perhaps, confined and suffocating; home, from where there is no going away. And resurrection, it feels like such a distant promise.

vehshat e shab

raat se raat ka yoon fasana kehna
jaise apne hee halaat ko begana kehna

rudad e wasl ki rahat moasar hai k yoon
pehlu e yaar, shab e purkhar ka tarana kehna

wajh e zuhd apni hee ghilazat ka wuzu
wajh e wuzu pevasta e zamana rehna

deen o dil k tasadum se barh ker hai kathin
aatish a nafs ka ausaan se yarana sehna

muztarib dil kahan thhera hai bina e tauqeer
nazr e darya karo ye farsooda, purana gehna

shab e zulmat bhi hai, hosh o havas ki mehfil bhi
fana ka kaisa haseen rung hai anjana rehna

hazaar ma'ani e dauran pe gawara hai mujhe
ishq e Hussain ibn e Ali mein deevana rehna

chamak raha hai qamar badosh e shams e zuha
ain e fitrat hai issi noor ko yagana kehna

despairing whispers

It speaks to me of a barren soul
of withered minds, rotten whole

of gravel red with worthless blood
and dignity writhing in the mud,

of ravenous hate worn on the sleeves
of eternal want, the joy of thieves

of darkness shrouding the desolate land,
night and day, harsh in its stand

of lies and truths, hawked on the street
of triumphant lust, of love’s defeat

but then it strays to faraway lands
to dancing waves and golden sands

where reaching out to the pure azure
spirits freely, merrily soar

sparkling red and glittering gold
seductive sirens from days of old

where love is easy and happiness right
time stops to serve the senses’ delight

the soul, unburdened, unhindered, set free
looks to nothing but that moment of glee

and yet, in the throes of temporary bliss
something’s vaguely but surely amiss

for in that haze, as life is blurred
firmly, sullenly, it says not a word

back in the darkness, the misery, the gloom
the season of whispers remains in bloom

for in this firmament, starless and bleak
the mystic heart deigns to speak.

Gilani: The Prodigal Son

So, Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani has bit the dust of the political arena, his four and a quarter years at the helm of this country coming to an abrupt, screeching, and apparently, ignominious end. His administration, according to popular discourse, was marred by endemic corruption, gross ineptitude and a seemingly vast chasm between the needs and aspirations of the people and the goals and mindsets of the leaders. Hence, a clearly audible breath of relief right across the country.  However, the Gilani phenomenon is far from over, least of all in the politics of Multan.

Yousaf Raza Gilani is a scion of the grand old Gilani family of Pak Gate, Multan, and the singular individual who has taken his clan to the greatest heights since their illustrious progenitor, Syed Musa Pak Shaheed, rode into the city in 1592 AD, as myth would have it, holding aloft his own severed head and escorting his harem to safety. Thus began the infamous Qureshi-Gilani spiritual rivalry that continues to shape the flavor of Multani politics to this day. Yousaf Raza, despite having been born into the elite Makhdoom family of the Gilanis, had relatively humble beginnings in terms of wealth and landed property. He did inherit a political legacy, however, and the way he wrested political leadership from his father’s aristocratic cousin, Hamid Raza Gilani, is the stuff of legend. He defeated the formidable Hamid Saeen in the 1988 national elections through a sheer groundswell of popular support rendering obsolete the latter’s patrician methods of politicking, and breathed new life into tottering Gilani political fortunes. But, like any man starting from the absolute grassroots, Yousaf Raza had his sights set high.

Cut to March 2008: Yousaf Raza Gilani is not really a national statesman at this point. He is, however, a prime mover and shaker in Multan, and a trusted member of the PPP old guard. BB is no more. Zardari needs a Prime Minister who is both loyal and pliant and least capable of hijacking the party from under him. The egoistic Shah Mahmood and that wily old insider, Amin Fahim, just wouldn’t do. The placid Yousaf Raza is the man of the hour, slated from the very beginning to play second fiddle to Zardari’s main theme. Multan’s pride takes center-stage.

Now politics in our land of the pure is hardly a pure business. Merit and/or fair-play have little to do with it. Political power is ultimately the control on the distribution of state patronage and resources. In Pakistan, that power has traditionally been exercised by democrats, bureaucrats or the boys in khaki, to enrich themselves and a select few. It is a vicious pattern of circular favors and not one of the numerous actors on our political stage can claim to be free of it. Stories of overnight rags-to-riches abound in the Pakistani political dream. In this paradigm, I cannot even think of attempting to refute the claims that Gilani and his ilk have made illegal billions. They may very well have, and in that typically clumsy, undisguised manner of the parvenu that has left them open to such public vilification.

However, as a politician with a fundamentally local predisposition, Gilani does not seem to have dealt his constituency a bad hand. Multan district’s gleaming new roads and flyovers are testament to that. In fact, development projects at such a wide scale have been undertaken for the first time across the Seraiki belt, galvanizing the region’s recognition of its historic deprivation. Unlike many of the erstwhile political luminaries from the region, Gilani has operated as somewhat of a Seraiki icon, strengthening and promoting the identity. For the first time in two decades, cotton farmers have gotten good prices. Many a hapless youth has been given employment, perhaps violating the precept of merit, but deeply appreciated on the home-turf. Furthermore, the Gilanis have done well to shield their voters from the oppression of the Patwari and the SHO, a factor that matters more in rural politics than any power crises or corruption. And soon, Multan will begin to miss the exceptional treatment it received in power outages throughout the Gilani tenure.

Come July 19, one of Gilani’s own will easily rise on his vacated seat. A by-election in rural Pakistan, however, is seldom any measure of political popularity as the people are generally canny enough to see their advantage in voting for the party in power. Elections-2013 will prove what the home-boy really means to Multan, brutally interrupted as his ascendancy has been, winning him martyr status with the sentimental rural voter. With two sons and one brother still in assemblies, and an unparalleled standing in the PPP, the party closest to the Seraiki soul, Gilani remains a force to be reckoned with. Bets are off on whether even Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi can win back his ancestral seat from Gilani’s PPP in Multan.

phoenix rising!

in this moment
there is nothing

the moon
nor the sun
the dark of night
nor the glow of dawn

no veiled beauty behind the drapes of the eyes
no muted pain in the folds of the heart

on the boughs of fantasy's luscious tree
no dreams may now make nest

was it an illusion? or perhaps, too real
that fading sound of familiar footsteps

no hate, no affection
no bond, no relation

no one yours to have
and no one mine to lose

this is a cruel moment, a desolate one
yet, my timid heart
'tis but a moment
take courage
a lifetime awaits.

- a translation of Faiz's 'Iss Waqt Toh Yoon Lagta Hai...'

ten years

Ten years to this day, Chacha fell prey to the greatest depravity human villainy is capable of. The murder, blind as they call it, devastated the family, powerless rage and agony manifest in the heartrending wails of the women and the deathly silence of the men. For me, it provoked some sort of a revolution within the self. It caused me to begin questioning many givens, both in life and beyond, and to unconsciously start forming my own, independent frames of thought. I got my first actual taste of depression as bitterness crept in, and I shunned company for the solitude of my own imaginary world, which increasingly resembled some bizarre Stanley Kubrick direction. Much of what I am today, greatly different from what I was all those years ago, owes to that single soul-crushing tragedy. But what was once raging, all-consuming pain is now just a dull pang in some corner of the heart. Some solace comes from the strapping young men both his sons have grown into; upbeat, eager for life, independent to the extent that even us older ones often find ourselves looking up to them in life’s tougher situations. They are those unyielding saplings that have weathered nature’s every caprice to become tall, sturdy trees. That, however, is a bigger reflection on the character of the gardener, their caretaker, that blind old man, bent with age, grief and worries, tenaciously protecting them from the scorching sun of the summers and the icy gale of the winters. It is his courage from which they have partaken, and it is his spirit which makes them reach for the sky.

And ten years on, grief, valid as it still is, gives in to awe, to sheer wonderment at the immense reserves of courage and forbearance my grandfather has, to be able not only to deal with the unnatural loss of a son, but to be able to pick up the pieces and give some measure of a new life to his orphaned grandsons, even as their mother left them to find herself a ‘mard’. Dada Jan was 76 in 2002. He is 86 now. This is no age for responsibility. And yet, he somehow managed. If his isn’t a tale of overcoming immeasurable suffering in a mammoth effort to reclaim life, whose could ever be? Fatima, cousin, childhood friend, miscarried in the seventh month of pregnancy last year. One can’t even begin to fathom what a blow that would have been to a mother’s heart. And yet, she defeated the pain to give life another chance. Take a look around. You will see that as Michael Stipe proclaims in his rather doleful monotone, “Everybody Hurts”, even the ones who are ostensibly happy, or in the perpetual pursuit of happiness. Everybody suffers. Real suffering! Not the shallow id and libido related melodrama that I have so shamelessly reeked of till quite recently. Since a spoilt brat like myself, born with a silver spoon up his arse, has never really known actual, personal suffering, he creates a web of lies around himself just so to pretend to be cool in his own head. And here, I must apologize to this blog as well. What started seven years ago purely as a medium for conversations with the self, was whored out as a petty means for pandering to false egos and miserably projecting self-delusions and half-truths. No more.

This blinking cursor, it still dares me, challenges me, to write like the olden days, in flowery metaphor and euphemism, to create images through words in attempts to blow my wife’s very-visual mind away. And I think to myself, later perhaps. Right now, she must be content with the sonorous melodies of my all-too-frequent burping. As it is, this blinker is a lot like the current state of my memory: there one moment, gone the next. Even as my air-headedness constantly amuses my wife, one thing I have learned of late is never to trust fleeting things again.

In 2007, I put up a blog-post on the anniversary of Chacha’s passing, and it has become something of an annual tradition since. This year, however, a very unusual feeling pervades me; as though everything in the world is at peace, that it is time to erase the soreness of gloom and regret with hope and determination. I realize this must sound a tad out-of-tune with the times since 2011 was supposedly one of the most turbulent years ever in human history, and a whole lot corny. But what is a conversation with the self if it can’t get just a little corny and selfish? So, I can’t really say if I will be blogging this time 2013. Let 2012 set the mood for 2013. And what with that Mayan Apocalypse hanging over our heads in the last week of ’12, who is to say that this time next year, we won’t all be ingloriously deceased? Or, better still, suffering a fate worse than death?

salut!

Rakht-e-dil by RrJ

Faiz Ahmed Faiz in a progressive rock rendition: A tribute to Salmaan Taseer