===
1459,
9
===

 

{1459,9}

kyā sar-e jang-o-jadal ho be-dimāġh-e ʿishq ko
ṣulḥ kī hai mīr ne haftād-o-do millat se yāñ

1) what desire/intention to fight and quarrel would there be, for the one made arrogant/impatient by passion?!
2) Mir has made a truce/peace with the seventy-two sects, here

 

Notes:

be-dimāġh : 'Ill-tempered, irritable, impatient, easily provoked'. (Platts p.202)

 

ṣulḥ : 'Peace, reconciliation, truce, agreement, concord; compromise; treaty'. (Platts p.746)

S. R. Faruqi:

sar-e jang-o-jadal = an intention or wish to fight and quarrel

In this verse, the implications are very fine:

(1) In the second line, 'Mir' is mentioned; in the first line, 'the one made arrogant by passion'. Thus by implication he has established that by 'the one made arrogant by passion' Mir is meant.

(2) Here, the characteristic, or the activity, of the seventy-two sects is fighting and quarreling. He has created this implication by mentioning 'fighting and quarreling' in the first line, and 'the seventy-two sects' in the second line.

(3) For 'here' he has created two implications. The first is that by 'here' is meant this world, in which seventy-two groups/sects live. The second implication is that in his own life Mir has come to a point when he has been 'made arrogant by passion', so that he has made a truce/peace. That is, a way for a person to escape the attacks of seventy-two groups/sects is for him to be made arrogant by passion.

(4) 'The seventy-two sects' apparently refers to the many groups/sects of Muslims. (It's widely believed that a time will come when the people of Islam will be divided into seventy-two sects, but out of them all, only one sect will be on the right road. Janab Hanif Najmi has declared it to be a hadith, but I haven't used his finding, because it's outside the scope of my subject.) But the seventy-two sects can also be a metaphor for all the people of the world.

Additional excellences in this verse are noted below. By mentioning 'Mir' in the third person singular, he has created an ambiguity about the speaker-- that the speaker is one person, and 'Mir' is some other person. Then, because he's been mentioned in the third person singular, 'Mir' comes to have a special dignity and self-possession. For example, if the line were like this: ṣulḥ kī hai ham ne to haftād-o-do millat se yāñ , then it wouldn't have the weight that it now has.

If the speaker is assumed to be 'Mir' himself, even then this weight and dignity remain. Then, the meaning of the truce/peace with the seventy-two sects comes to be that 'Mir' doesn't particularly care which one of them is on the right road. He's in such a state of impatience that he considers them all to be equal, he doesn't consider it worthwhile to form a friendship, or an enmity, with any one of them.

Now from this point a new direction has emerged-- that in the people whom passion has made arrogant, there no longer remains any concern with the people of the world and with their sects and disagreements. To such people, all groups/sects are concerned with superficialities, or not worth worrying about. Reality is only there where passion is; all the rest is, as Iqbal has said, a conjuring trick.

By be-dimāġh-e ʿishq is meant that person whom passion has caressed/soothed and made arrogant-- that is, the person who is so proud of his passion that he has become arrogant. Or again, that person whom passion has filled with haughtiness, or has made brusque (brusque in the sense that he has become disaffected with people). For be-dimāġhī is used for the kind of brusqueness, or haughtiness, that includes elements of aloofness, uninterestedness, and lack of concern for anyone. Thus Bedil has an extremely superb [Persian] verse:

'The door of Paradise was open today,
Out of arrogance I said, 'Tomorrow'.'

In this context, the making of a truce/peace with the seventy-two sects becomes very meaningful as well. That is, if he made a truce/peace, it wasn't because he had no courage for fighting or wanted to avoid war. He made a truce/peace because he didn't consider anybody worthy to confront him, as in the view of Walter Savage Landor:

'I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.'

The theme of the seventy-two sects, Zauq has well versified in one verse, and has brought out another aspect as well. But in his verse, as compared to Mir's, there's a paucity of meaning:

haftād-o-do farīq ḥasad ke ʿadū se haiñ
apnā hai yih t̤arīq kih bāhar ḥasad se haiñ

[the seventy-two groups/sects of envy are like enemies
our own method is this: that we are outside of envy]

Zauq keeps himself outside envy, and thus outside the seventy-two groups/sects. But Mir doesn't consider these groups/sects to be worthy of attention at all. Thus Mir's verse is a verse of be-dimāġhī in the true sense, and this be-dimāġhī is valuable because it is nourished/supported by passion. In Zauq's verse, it's in any case enjoyable that there are seventy-two kinds of envy/jealousy; that is, if there were no envy, then there wouldn't be so much opposition among the sects.

FWP:

SETS
MOTIFS
NAMES
TERMS == IMPLICATION

The first line, in isolation, could easily be read as exclamatory: 'What a desire/intention to fight and quarrel there would be, for the one made arrogant/impatient by passion!'. The arrogance and impatience and ill-temper of a be-dimāġh person (see the definition above) sound like the classic symptoms of someone who is spoiling for a fight. And of course, under mushairah performance conditions we do indeed hear the first line in isolation, with a delay as prolonged as conveniently possible before we are allowed to hear the first line followed by the second line; only then do we discover that an interrogative reading of the kyā is more satisfactory and provides more 'connection'.

But it would also be possible to construct a reading based on the exclamatory sense of kyā . The first line would then exclaim at what (kind of) a desire to fight there would be, for the be-dimāġh-e ʿishq person! On this reading, the second line would tell us how seriously the lover takes his new, special battle of passion, and how carefully he prepares for it. He battens the hatches by making peace with all the seventy-two sects, so that he can be free to focus his attention on the real battle. And he makes this seventy-two-fold peace 'here'-- in this world. The key position of yāñ as the refrain-word gives it a special emphasis. The lover makes peace with everybody 'here'-- because he expects to fight his battles elsewhere. Against the beloved? Against the Rivals? Within himself?

 

 
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