Introduction
The arrival of Muslims in the landmass called South Asia, from the eleventh century onwards, set in motion a complex series of political and sociocultural transformations which continue to shape the terrain in our times. Muslims came as soldiers, plunderers, traders, and settlers, with a distinctive monotheistic religion imbued with a proselytising spirit, and they maintained contacts with places of pilgrimage and centres of culture in Arabia, Iran, and Iraq. These newly-arrived Muslims could not directly absorb or indwell the social systems of Hindus whom they regarded as infidels or slaves. Upper-caste Hindus, for their part, were generally prohibited by purity regulations from mingling with Muslims whom they regarded as outsiders (yavana, from the Greek “Ionian”). However, with the gradual decline of the fervour of conquest and the mitigation of xenological anxieties, certain patterns of mutuality began to emerge in the zones of contact and also beyond them across the hinterlands. For instance, Ras Khān (Syed Ibrahim Khān: 1548–1628) composes devotional poetry to the deity Kṛṣṇa (Krishna); Dārā Shukōh (1615–1659) declares boldly that explanations of the Qur’ān can be found in the Upaniṣads; and the Hindu Rajput prince Sāvant Singh (1699–1764) writes voluminous poetry in the indigenous Braj-bhāṣa and also poems with Persian words and imageries. These processes received a vital impetus under the Mughal emperor Akbar (1542–1605), who established alliances with Hindu kings, and appointed both Hindus and Muslims in his administration.
Across these centuries, Urdu appeared at the confluence of Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit linguistic streams; some Muslims translated into Persian Hindu scriptural texts such as the Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyaṇa, and the Yoga-vaśiṣṭha; and certain styles of architecture combined Saracenic and Indic forms. Thus, during the period of rule by various Muslim dynasties (c.1200–1858), a composite Indo-Persianate or Hindu-Muslim culture developed across South Asia in various aspects of individual and communitarian life such as marriage, dress, literature, music, and language.[1] However, these processes of socio-religious “indigenization” – that is, the recalibration of Meccan messages with Indic idioms – would be subject to distinctive types of stresses and strains with the entrenchment of British colonial forms of modernity (1858–1947). From around 1890 onwards, a Hindu civilizational critique that Muslims are not truly children of the soil because they are the inhabitants of an alien ethos disconnected from Vedic culture (saṃskṛti) would become entangled with, and be reflected by, a Muslim nationalist demand for a distinct homeland (watan) to house the community (qaum) rooted in an Islamic vision. Thus, during the long twentieth century, competing claims relating to indigeneity, alterity, and alienness became dialectically enmeshed on multiple sites across the nation-states of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh.
Inhabiting the In-Between: Patterns of Plurality in Nazrul Islam
Against this backdrop of contested patterns of indigenization in South Asia, we turn to Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899–1976), whose life was an embodiment of various types of cultural, linguistic, and religious hybridity. Even though he is today institutionalized as the national poet of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh (founded in 1971), he remains a significantly understudied figure in the project of articulating Islamic visions with Indic idioms. Indeed, the 194 songs collected under the rubric “Islamic” richly interweave the tropes of Sufi cosmology and the stock metaphors of Hindu devotionalism, and a recurring motif in them is that distinctive emblem of the Bengali countryside – the boatman who carries passengers to the safe shore.
Indeed, the 194 songs collected under the rubric “Islamic” richly interweave the tropes of Sufi cosmology and the stock metaphors of Hindu devotionalism, and a recurring motif in them is that distinctive emblem of the Bengali countryside – the boatman who carries passengers to the safe shore.
We may see Nazrul’s poetic style as a textual expression of his interstitial locations on the landscapes of rural Bengal. In his childhood years, he attended a maktab, where he would have acquired a basic education in Islam, and later he travelled for four years with a group of singers, during which time he developed a familiarity with Hindu mythic symbolisms. In his school days in Raniganj, his close friends were Shailendra Kumar Ghosh, a Christian and Shailajananda Mukhopadhyay, a Hindu Brahmin.[2] Sometime around 1917, when he joined the 49th Bengali Regiment and was posted at Karachi (in present-day Pakistan), he improved his Persian with the help of a Punjabi friend who was fluent in the language. A product of this collaboration was his translations into Bengali of the rubāiyāts of Omar Khayyām and the ghazals of Ḥāfeẓ. In 1924, he married – in the face of some family opposition – a Hindu woman, Pramila Sengupta, who would sign her name as “Pramila Nazrul Islam.” This style of dual affiliation was emblazoned in the names of their four children – Krishna Muhammad (d. 1923), Arindam Khaled (1926–30), Kazi Sabyasachi (1929–79), and Kazi Aniruddha (1930–74).
Many of Nazrul’s poems breathe the fire of social protest – both against colonial expropriation of resources and against indigenous forms of social stratification. He was arrested after the publication of his poem Ānandamaẏīr Āgaman (“The Advent of the Bliss-filled Mother”) in the Dhumketu, a biweekly that he started – he invokes here the Hindu goddess Durgā to fight the tyrannical British empire. Although he was not formally connected to any Marxist party, from 1925, he began to pronounce socialist views relating to workers’ consciousness, poverty, political oppression, and internationalism. A key motif in these writings – many of which were proscribed by the British government – was the construction of a Bengali Muslim self that would overcome its social isolation and move towards free spaces shaped by love, justice, and liberation. Crucially, these spaces would denounce forms of religious insularity that seek to generate Muslim enclaves barricaded from the socioreligious milieus of their Hindu neighbours. Nazrul writes with deep pathos about the disunity, impoverishment, and lethargy that he perceives among Bengal’s Muslims – he exhorts them to vigorously bear witness to the truth of tauhīd and resolutely enact this unity on socio-political planes. Therefore, while his songs are replete with references to the Prophet himself, and to the Prophet’s companions, Fatima, Hassan, Hussein, Bilal, and other paradigmatic figures of “early Islam,” these invocations are aimed not at returning Muslims to an idealised Arabian template but at turning them towards enterprises of social regeneration, political emancipation, and economic uplift.
In short, Nazrul was a beautiful rebel – the dramatic intensity of his writings is expressed as eloquently in his sombre depictions of the widow stricken with starvation as in his ecstatic characterisations of the nightingale singing away in a rose garden. Thus, one of his biographers has written: “He was the voice of a protagonist raised in revolt against all that was evil.”[3] He wrote more than two thousand songs in Bengali about liberation, peasants, love, and heroism – and Perso-Arabic words extensively appear in many of them. Precisely for inhabiting and cultivating these styles of hybridity, he was denounced by some as a renegade Muslim. During the 1920s he was severely criticised by writers to Muslim journals such as Islām Darśan (“The Worldview of Islam”) and Mohāmmadī for using Hindu imageries in his poems.[4]
In short, Nazrul was a beautiful rebel – the dramatic intensity of his writings is expressed as eloquently in his sombre depictions of the widow stricken with starvation as in his ecstatic characterisations of the nightingale singing away in a rose garden.
The translated songs will indicate some of these liminalities that became contested ground in social milieus structured by the modular identities of “Hindu” and “Muslim.” The precarity of human existence in a transitory world, the bewitching gravitation of divine beauty which draws the human heart away from its immersion in worldly vanities, the divine reality as the true refuge, and the intimate presence of the divine beloved in the human heart – these tropes recur throughout the cosmological visions of both Sufis and Hindu devotees (bhaktas).
A distinctive inflection of this Hindu devotionalism (bhakti) is the ecstatic style of expressing one’s unbearable agony (biraha) in the state of separation from the beautiful God Krishna. As an infant, Krishna’s beauty enchants everyone around him and when he grows up, he grazes cows in the fields while playing on a flute whose mellifluent notes suffuse the whole world. Nazrul often sketches historical events in Arabia with Bengali idioms from the premodern traditions of bhakti – the inhabitants of Medina are struck with grief, the world is captivated by the beauty of the infant Muhammad nestled in his mother Amina’s lap, and the boy Muhammad is presented as a shepherd whose beauty inundates the world. The lush and verdant landscapes of riverine Bengal pervade these songs – frequently we encounter the figure of the boatman, symbolic of the Prophet Muhammad who guides sinners through the treacherous waters of this turbulent world; in another image, we meet the Prophet Muhammad as the merchant whose ship is laden with the priceless jewels of the Qur’ān; and we read that waves of love have rolled over the Arabian desert and transfigured it into a garden. The moon often appears in bhakti poetry as a signifier of Krishna’s supernal beauty and thus become a malleable motif across these Indo-Islamic devotional borderlines. The cowherd women – the exemplary devotees of Krishna – wither away in his absence and yearn to see his “moon-face,” while, of course, the purgative self-negation of Ramzan is crowned by the waxing plenitude of Eid’s moon.
Translations
1. When I reach the end of the road, and the dark night descends on me
Then, Khodā, hold my hand and be my companion on the path
There is so much that remains unsaid, do give me some time to speak,
My beloved (priya) –
Give me sight in these eyes that are blinded by the darkness
Set your throne (āraś) on my heart and manifest yourself there.
My friend –
All my life has passed away in this separation (biraha)
Give me the honey of union in my parched voice.
My beloved –
May I always go to where you dwell
Call out to me as your “friend” (sakhā), may I receive your vision (dīdār),
All my life I have lingered in sorrow, suffuse me now with joy.[5]
In this song, Nazrul plaintively and tenderly entreats God to both accompany him as he journeys across the tenebrous trails of the world, and alchemize his worldly faculties into loci of spiritual luminosity. When the dark night of the soul envelops our yearning traveller, he longs only for God’s hand to meet his own, not so that he might thereby succumb to a self-quiescent immobility, but instead so that he may remain serenely resolute on his path with God as his companion. There is a conjunction here of the modalities of vision and voice: Nazrul prays both for his sight to be illuminated by the shimmer of divine knowledge and for his speech to be sweetened by the honey of divine love. We may note the poetic paradox that attends this latter prayer: Nazrul employs exceedingly sweet language to pray for his speech to be made sweet, for the voice that he calls ‘parched’ brims over with a devotional delicacy and delight. One lyrical indicator of this devotional abundance is that our poet alternates between addressing God as friend and as beloved – indeed, in the poetic streams of Sufi milieus, the figure of the ‘friend’ often denotes the human or the divine beloved, and this idiom of friendship teasingly tinctures the relation with an intimate mutuality and affectionate spontaneity. This mutuality is gently limned in these verses – Nazrul both addresses God as ‘friend’ and longs to receive this response in kind (‘call out to me as your friend’). Turning to the imageries of vision, Nazrul prays both for God to transform his gaze (‘give me sight in these eyes that are blinded by the darkness’), and also for God to become the object of his gaze (‘may I receive your vision’). God as the yearned-for friend and beloved is the immovable resident in the inner chambers of one’s heart, and is the telos of one’s spiritual journey as well as the condition of its possibility.
God is, in other words, ever-present to the finite lover, as her creator who energizes all of her existential pursuits and her confidant who walks all her paths alongside her. Yet, as Nazrul versifies here, often the devotee feels not God’s unshakeable presence but a crippling absence. Nazrul employs a recurring topos of Hindu devotional lyrics, namely the agony of biraha, to articulate the oscillation between union and separation that structures the divine-human relation – much as the wife pines for her absent husband, our poet-lover is ardently longing for a glimpse of his beloved. Thus, our poet affirms that his life has withered away in this state of agonized separation; indeed, it is only because he feels distant from God that he can pray to ‘go to where you [God] dwell.’ This interplay of proximity and distance is perhaps most pithily, and powerfully, conveyed in the image of God’s throne descending on the heart of the lover – if the throne is typically imagined as a distant dwelling which symbolizes God’s transcendence to worldly finitude, the emplacement of this throne in the heart reveals the ineluctable divine proximity, and points to the intimate interiority of God who is closer to us than our jugular vein (Qur’ān 50:16).
2. Let a typhoon brew on the river of sinfulness –
Did you think I would be terrified?
My boat is built with the pukka planks of faith (pākkā imān-taktā).
Hoisting the sail of lā ʾilāha ʾillā llāhu
We will overcome a terrifying storm and reach the shore,
By holding on to the rope of the virtues of our Muhammad Mustāfā.
I have entrusted my boat to the path of Khodā
This boat cannot capsize in the waters …
The oars of this boat are nāmāj, rojā, haj, and yākāt,
Let clouds loom on the horizon
Let danger befall us everywhere
Let lightning strike us at will
I will arrive at the harbour of heaven by sailing on this very boat.[6]
We encounter here the staple motif of Bengali Sufi lyrics: the boat of devotion which faithfully leads one across the turbulent seas of the world. Interestingly, here the Prophet is not cast as the boatman (as is typical of Sufi seafaring idioms) but instead as the one whose exemplary virtues are the robust rope one holds on to for survival. This subtle rhetorical shift points us to a deeper theological point – namely, that to follow the Prophet, or to take the Prophet as one’s boatman, is to seek to become like him, and thus to consciously model one’s ethical life on the pattern of his spiritual excellence. So, whether the Prophet is depicted as the spiritual sailor who navigates one across the stormy seas, or whether his virtues are presented as the life-saving rope, the theological force is the same: to entrust the Prophet as one’s guide on the seas of worldly precarity, it is not enough simply to display one’s devotion to him, for one must also actively cultivate the Prophetic way of inhabiting the world with truthfulness, gentleness, and compassion. The pillars of the faith (prayer, fasting, hajj, and charity), which the Prophet of course enacted to perfection, are thus limned as the oars with which one steadily arrives ashore, and the safe haven is none other than the fertile springs of heaven. Each element of the Prophetic path has its role to play in the boat of faith; when properly built and boarded, this boat constitutes the sturdy ark of salvation.
3. O muyājjin –
Offer your ājān in the minaret of my darkened mind.
Awaken me from my slumber of heedlessness
May this night pass away.
With the cry “Allah is great” stones are rent asunder and streams flow forth
May I too hear the sound of that great call and may my stony heart awaken …[7]
By thus interweaving Hindu mythological idioms into his poetic paean to the Prophet, Nazrul colourfully re-situates the imageries of Islam on distinctively Indic terrains.
This song delicately sets forth a spiritual synergy between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ – the poet exhorts the muezzin to deliver the call to prayer (a call which ordinarily resounds through the busy marketplaces and the crowded maidans of Muslim milieus) in the interior ‘minaret’ of his mind. We might thus imagine the outer mosque as an exteriorization of this inner sanctuary; indeed, according to the Sufi tradition, if the call to prayer mechanistically mobilizes the body but does not transform the inner heart, it is akin to an empty material husk shorn of its spiritual kernel. Drawing on the Quranic image of those who are blind to the divine light and whose hearts are hardened like stones (Qur’ān 2:74), Nazrul prays for his heart to melt into spiritual insight as the azān permeates both his outer and inner worlds.
4. O my Arabian cupbearer –
What sweet wine is this you have given me?
I have become intoxicated with love and my eyes are reddened.
With the wine of tauhīd they all declared, “Keep on drinking!”
The whole world came running to that place.
Your assembly (mahfil) gathered in distant Mecca and Medina
They sang gajals from the Qur’ān on the night of destiny.
Men and women, emperors and beggars –
Everyone was bewitched by your beauty
They offered their all to your red feet.
Your messengers streamed out in all directions
News of your victory reached every distant land …[8]
This song presents us with a rather enchanting instance of poetic ‘indigenization,’ wherein the Arabian backdrop of the Islamic universe is imbued with the colours of Indo-Persian symbolisms. Nazrul is recounting here an ecstatic assembly that is held in celebratory reverence of the Prophetic message; and he describes this festive meeting as a mahfil, which in Urdu signifies an intimate gathering featuring recitations of poetry and other forms of traditional entertainment (singing, classical music, dance). Nazrul thus renders the early community of the Prophet in terms that would be familiar to Indian audiences, and lends a distinctively ‘local’ flavour to the Prophetic narrative. One important flavour of this ‘local’ lyrical palate is that of wine – namely, the wine of divine love which trickles through the verses of Persian Sufi poets such as Rūmī (d.1273) and Ḥāfeẓ (d. 1390).[9] Nazrul steps faithfully into this thematic tavern, and celebrates the wine of divine oneness (tauhīd) which so intoxicated the early Muslims. Continuing this thread of indigenization, Nazrul describes the words of the Qur’ān as gajals (ghazals), a poetic form which originated in Arabia and attained prominence in mediaeval Persian, and later Urdu, literature. Yet, perhaps the most striking instance of indigenization in this poem is Nazrul’s reference to the Prophet’s ‘red feet.’ This image is absent from the physical descriptions of the Prophet in Islamic literature. It is present, however, in a scriptural verse from a paradigmatic Hindu text (Bhāgavata-purāṇa 10.16.26) which describes the hue of the deity Krishna’s feet following his valiant subdual of a malicious serpent. This serpent is said to possess red jewels on its numerous heads, and when Krishna crushes it underneath his blessed body, his feet are said to take on a deep red tone. By thus interweaving Hindu mythological idioms into his poetic paean to the Prophet, Nazrul colourfully re-situates the imageries of Islam on distinctively Indic terrains.
5. O lord of Medina –
Why would you make me weep thus?
I am a young woman from the zenana ( abarodh-bāsinī ).
Signalling with the moon of Eid
You call out to me in the still night
O handsome Yusof!
How much longer will you make Zulekhā burn in agony.
What is this letter you have sent me, o Lord, in the verses of the Qur’ān?
When I set out to read them, my eyes are flooded with clouds of tears,
By playing the confession of faith on your flute
Why do you keep on calling out to me thus?
Do you not know that a thousand years ago
I already placed my garland (mālā) on you?[10]
In this remarkable song, Nazrul rather deftly places some of the revered pearls of the Hindu and Islamic traditions on a shared garland of devotion – the Prophet Muhammad, the Prophet Yusuf, Allah, and Krishna. We begin with an address to Muhammad (the ‘lord of Medina’), which Nazrul articulates through the voice of a young, abandoned woman yearning for her lost lover. Whereas the previous song regaled us with a communal celebration of the Prophet’s enchanting presence, extolling the delight that the Prophet incites in all, here the imagery is more intimate – the poet is relating to the Prophet as her sole beloved, who calls on her in the serene night by taking the moon as messenger. This lover-beloved trope is immediately redolent of the poetic topos of the birahiṇī, who pines away for just this kind of moonlit meeting with her absent lover. It is fitting, then, that this literary evocation of the agonized female lover opens out into the rhetorical pairing of Yusuf and Zulaikha, who are re-configured in Sufi lyrics as the earthly emblems of love’s transcendent sway. Indeed, across the Sufi poetic tradition, the longing for God is explicitly patterned on the model of Zulaikha’s abounding love for Yusuf; pointing to the nature of love as that which cannot be definitively circumscribed nor finally contained within the bounds of spatiotemporality, Rūmī affirms, ‘love is like an ocean upon which the heavens are mere foam, aroused, like Zulaikha in her love for Yusuf.’[11] The Persian poet Sanā’ī (d. 1131) emphatically presents the pining Zulaikha as the archetypal lover, whose anguished love embodies for the seeker the perfection of spiritual yearning: ‘if you are not Zulaikha and are not ground in the mill of love, do not waste time talking of Yusuf of Canaan.’[12] Adopting the persona of the female lover, Nazrul thus limns his devotional dalliance with the master of Medina and his passionate pursuit of the beauty of Yusuf.
This rhetoric of romance is developed in Nazrul’s elegant depiction of the Qur’ān as God’s love letter; if the Prophet’s messenger is the ‘moon of Eid’ which announces the Prophet’s tender call unto the lover, God’s emissary here is the scintillating scripture which invites fertile tears of remembrance on the devotee’s face. Braiding together the textual threads of devotional love, female longing, and the enchanting divine call, Nazrul ends by vividly gesturing towards the deity Krishna – whose flute famously entices the women of the village to abandon their domestic chores and unite with him in a dance of love. In a particularly rich literary rendering of ‘indigenization,’ here, the tunes that stream forth from the divine flute are not the dulcet melodies of the charming cowherd, namely, Krishna, but are none other than the sonorous words of the shahadah. Nazrul thus creatively marries Islamic archetypes with the ambient devotional imageries of Indic landscapes, and in so doing renders the symbolic universes of Hinduism and Islam abundantly fertile and malleable. This artistic ‘marriage’ of Islamic and Hindu motifs exquisitely befits this poem, where the reigning idiom is indeed the blissful union of the female and the male lover, crystallized finally in the poet’s emplacement of the mālā (garland) on his/her beloved.[13]
6. O nightingale –
You must have once intoned the name “Muhammad”
That is why your songs sound so sweet.
O rose –
You must have secretly touched the feet of the Prophet
That is why the fragrance of his feet
Awakens even today in attar …[14]
We end our translations with an exquisitely sweet song in praise of the Prophet. Drawing on a standard poetic pairing of the Persian Sufi tradition, the nightingale and the rose,[15] Nazrul rhetorically separates these lyrical lovers and addresses them independently as infused with Prophetic traces. If the nightingale’s melodies effuse a sweet serenity, it is only because this gentle songbird redolently recites the name of Muhammad; and if the rose comes abloom with a paradisical perfume, it is only because the Prophet’s touch has sanctified the gardens of the world with the fragrance of eternity.
Conclusion
Through this exegetical excursion across the literary heartscape of Nazrul Islam, we have endeavored to delineate some of the vibrant patterns of Hindu-Muslim interchange that characterize the devotional milieus of South Asia. Nazrul’s verses represent a particularly rich ‘focalization’ of these intricate inter-religious synergies – as we have seen, both the Hindu and the Islamic cosmologies furnish Nazrul’s lyrical symbolism with modes that attest to the poet’s profoundly ‘local’ appeal. By taking Hindu ‘forms’ and infusing them with an Islamic ‘spirit’ (such as the form of the Hindu deity Krishna whose flutes now resound with the words of the shahada), or re-clothing a Hindu ‘spirit’ with an Islamic ‘form’ (such as endowing the form of the Prophet Muhammad with Krishna’s red feet), Nazrul steers his listeners along a fertile deltaic confluence of the Indic and the Islamic, which resonantly ripples with a call unto the eternal divine beauty.
Dr. Ankur Barua is University Senior Lecturer in Hindu Studies at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. He researches the conceptual constellations and the social structures of the Hindu traditions. In recent years, his research focus has moved to Indo-Islamic theology and, in particular, to an exploration of the dynamic intersections as well as the contested negotiations between the idioms of bhakti, yoga, tawḥīd, and taṣawwuf on the multiply-stratified postcolonial landscapes of South Asia.
Hina Khalid is a PhD student at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. She is working on a comparative study of the theology and poetry of Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938) and Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). She is particularly interested in the possibilities of comparative theology across Islamic and Indic traditions, and in the ways that shared devotional idioms have formed in and across the Indian subcontinent.
[1] Richard Eaton, The Lotus & The Lion: Essays on India’s Sanskritic & Persianate Worlds (Delhi: Primus Books, 2022).
[2] Muzaffar Ahmed, Kājī Najrul Islām: Smṛtikathā (Calcutta: National Book Agency, 1965), p.38.
[3] Serajul Islam Choudhury, Introducing Nazrul Islam (Dhaka: Muktadhara, 1955), p.32.
[4] Neilesh Bose, Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), p.74.
[5] A. A. Al-Aman, Najrul Racanā-Sambhār, Volume 1 (Calcutta: Haraf Publishers, 1978), p. 201.
[6] Al-Aman, Najrul Racanā-Sambhār, p. 211.
[7] Al-Aman, Najrul Racanā-Sambhār, p. 209.
[8] Al-Aman, Najrul Racanā-Sambhār, p. 212.
[9] Annemarie Schimmel, A Two-Colored Brocade: The Imagery of Persian Poetry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), p. 12.
[10] Al-Aman, Najrul Racanā-Sambhār, p. 218.
[11] Annemarie Schimmel, My Soul Is A Woman: The Feminine in Islam (New York: Continuum, 1997), p. 60.
[12] Schimmel, My Soul Is A Woman, p.65.
[13] In traditional Hindu wedding ceremonies, both the husband and the wife place an ornate garland around each other’s necks to attest to their enduring loyalty to one another.
[14] Al-Aman, Najrul Racanā-Sambhār, p. 240.
[15] Schimmel, A Two-Colored Brocade, p. 179.