===
1746,
1
===

 

{1746,1}

ʿahd-e junūñ hai mausam gul kā aur shigūfah lāyā hai
abr-e bahārī vādī se uṭh kar ābādī par āyā hai

1) it is the time/era of madness; the rose-season has brought about more/different fertility/creativeness
2) the spring (rain-)cloud, having arisen from the valley, has come upon the town/city

 

Notes:

shigūfah : 'A bud, blossom; flower; (colloq.) a fabrication'. (Platts p.732)

 

shigūfah lānā : 'To bud, blossom; to put forth young shoots; —to produce something new and wonderful'. (Platts p.732)

S. R. Faruqi:

One possible reading of the first line is that the prose will be, mausam-e gul ( yaʿnī bahār ) kā ʿahd junūñ hai - aur ( yih ʿahd-e junūñ ek , aur ) shigūfah lāyā hai . That is, the rose-season was somehow at such a height of turbulence that now the ebullience of madness has come upon it too. And one other new thing happened to it that will even further increase the madness. This reading is difficult to extract, but there's no doubt that it's possible. The other reading is straightforward: that the prose will be, ʿahd-e junūñ hai ( aur ) gul kā mausam ( ek ) aur shigūfah lāyā hai .

Mir has used shigūfah lānā elsewhere too; for example, in

{757,3}.

There I have [extensively explained its meaning]. [The phrase shigūfah lānā does not appear in some dictionaries, though it does appear in the nūr and the āṣifiyah .] I mistakenly did not declare it to be an idiom. For this reason the meaningfulness of the second line of {757,3} was not able to be fully elucidated.

In the present verse, shigūfah lānā is both an idiom and a zila with 'rose'. For the spring raincloud to arise from the vādī (=field, foothills, valley between two mountains, etc.) and come upon the town/city is the shigūfah of the rose-season in the sense that because of the rose-season madness is at full strength in any case; now, when there will be the tumult of the cloud and the rain, the madness will increase even further.

It's an enjoyable style of expression-- that the cloud of itself has arisen from the valley and come upon the town/city, but the poet has construed it as a disaster brought by the rose-season. (Why would it not be so-- the speaker is in any case absorbed in wildness/madness.) In the second line, the freshness of the movement of the clouds and the image of the rain pouring down are fine.

Mir has left it ambiguous exactly how, as the rose-season comes in madness, the springtime raincloud would 'show its colors/effects' [gul khilāʾegā]. He has left the doors of possibility open. A detailed exposition is also not particularly necessary; on the theme of shor-e bahārāñ see

{1219,6}.

The tajnis of vādī and ābādī is superb. When one heard about the cloud's having arisen from the vādī and come upon the ābādī , for a moment the suspicion occurs that there's some meaningful relationship between the two-- although it's clear that between vādī and ābādī the affinity is verbal, not one of meaning. Such a use of words, which creates freshness in the atmosphere of the verse, has the power of a metaphor.

In abr-e bahārī there's also the subtlety that the people of Iran use it to refer to a cloud that rains in the month of Rabi', while we take it to mean the cloud of the rainy season [barsāt]. But the intensity of madness is not in the rainy season; rather, it is in the real/true rose-season (= in India, February-March). Here, a mixture of two different geographical metaphors is 'causing a new bud to bloom' [nayā shigūfah khilā rahā hai].

FWP:

SETS
MOTIFS == MADNESS; SPRINGTIME
NAMES
TERMS == IDIOM; TAJNIS

At the end of his discussion SRF notes the stylized quality of the concept of 'springtime', which both is (poetically) and isn't (in actual fact) the same as the 'rose-season'. Similar flexibility apparently exists in the case of the lālah , which can be either the tulip in Iran or also the red poppy in India (Platts p.947). Another such case is that of the bulbul , which in Iran is the nightingale and in India is, ornithologically speaking, 'the fork-tailed shrike, Lanius boulboul' (Platts p.164). The zunnār , now unambiguously a Brahminical sacred thread, could once have referred to 'a cord worn round the middle by the Eastern Christians and Jews, and also by the Persian Magi' (Platts p.618). (Along the same lines, many Sanskritists think that soma , the Vedic psychedelic plant, probably referred to different species in different times and places.) For further discussion, see G{60,8}.

How much do such discrepancies matter? Unless you're a 'natural poetry' advocate, very little. The ghazal is a genre, after all, in which the dead lover can, and often does, go right on talking after his death. If we can accept that convention (which is only the most striking among many such), why should we boggle at such trivia as the exact chronology of springtime?

 

 
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