Songs of Blood and Sword

Sohaib Arshad
visits Masud Sa'd Salmaan, a 12th century Lahori poet who was imprisoned for his ideas

Recent requiems by the nautch girls of Lahore for their lost soul are darkly inspiring. Gloom has cast its long shadow once again on what used to be the beating heart of all sorts of cultural activities. It reminds me of similarly difficult times in the 1980s.

I grew up in Pakistan in that seemingly never-ending darkness of a decade, when the shadow of a zealot was hovering over my imagination as a child, and his piercing claws were clenching, and clenching fast and hard, the soul of the society. The news of the Ghanshyams’ forced exile (they were the Bharata Natyam trio renowned for their peacock dance in Karachi), or of a ban on the Kathak dancer Nahid Siddiqui on the “one-and-only” PTV, was for me no less than a harrowing experience.

But, as I later learned, this troubled period was not the first of its kind in the cultural history of my land.

Let me tell you an abiding tale of how Lahore emerged from the harsh clutches of another puritanical regime almost nine centuries ago.

This is the story of Masud Sa’d Salmaan, son of Sa’d, a pillar of the Ghaznavid empire that then controlled much of India. Seduced by the songs of Lahori folk singers, Masud began to write poetry in his youth. (Baramasa was one of his most favourite folk genres; its flavour is reflected in Masud’s innovative contributions to Persian poetry.) But his elitist father, employed as he was by the Ghaznavid state, would have none of it. Masud was packed off to the royal court at Ghazni, where he received training in management, so that he could take care of his estates upon his return to Lahore.

And so Masud had to spend his early days in the Ghaznavid capital, reluctantly eulogizing members of the royal household. Upon his return to Lahor, he fell out with the rulers in Ghazni and was subjected to the king’s wrath, which resulted in the poet-prince’s decade-long imprisonment. The true nature of his crime is hotly disputed by scholars, but even a cursory look at his prison-poems make it abundantly clear that he was being punished for his outspoken criticism of the Ghaznavid monarch.

In the fin-de-siecle of the 11th century, Lahore was brimming with the passions of dissent and revolt against the tyranny of the Ghaznavids, and Masud was in the thick of it. He was imprisoned in Waziristan, where bajra or millet was offered to him for food. Bathing was allowed only once a year for this man who had built three public hot baths in Lahore. The anguish of solitary confinement resulted in abrupt weight-loss, and soon his hair turned grey. All the lamentations of Masud’s ill and old mother “whose eyes were like clouds and whose tears were like rain”, his homeless wife, a daughter blinded by weeping and a son dazed by ill-fortune, could not move the stone-hearted despot who had imprisoned him. Masud’s prison-poems are heart-wrenching:

The only grief, which clenches my heart from time to time is my longing for Lahore.

and

I want from my Lord, some velvet

from which emanates the fragrance of Lahore

From the longing of Lahore,

my heart and soul faint within me .

But the night of longing ended and, after a decade of imprisonment, Masud was released and allowed to return to his beloved city:

Longing for my daughter and craving for my son

drew my thoughts towards Lahore .

He was revered by his fellow citizens for his countless feats of courage, and they showered him with garlands and gifts of land. But Lahore was still languishing in an abyss of lawlessness and neglect. (Ghaznavid courts were centres of a splendid Persian culture because Persia had amicably accepted the Ghaznavid rule.)

Again in the early years of the 12th century, Masud was sent to prison. He could have made peace with the ruling Ghaznavids if he had blindly followed their orders. But it was something he intrinsically detested:

No one takes the pain of effectively running my province , [i.e. Lahore]

There is no end to mischief, corruption and violence these days

No one dares to support and strengthen [the institution of] justice

I am the only one telling you these tales

No other tongue would dare do that.

‘Amid Hasan, the Ghaznavid court poet, retorted with a poem that hailed the King as the sole defender of Islam, rebutting Masud’s claims and accusing him of vanity and lack of knowledge about the art of statecraft. (How little has changed in these parts!)

Even after Masud came out of prison he continued with his seditious poetry. It earned him yet another prison sentence. Steadily he bore witness to the horrors the Ghaznavids dreamt up for him. In one of his panegyrics he has recounted the punishments awarded the brave by the Ghaznavids: blood-crying eyes, a 6X6 prison attic, and the sighs of an ailing mother, the cries of starving children and the incessant wailing of a wife whose feet were frozen by the harsh winters of this rugged terrain. In prison, Masud was denied access to pen, paper and ink, so he wrote his prison-poems in his blood and they were soon sung far and wide in the nooks and corners of the Ghaznavid colonies. His starved body was freezing in the prison chill, but whenever a ray of sunlight radiated the stone floor, he would focus his gaze on that distant source of energy.

Calling himself the “luminous sun” without whom Lahore was no longer a bright city, he said:

Since your dear son

has parted from you,

how are you grieving for him,

with groaning and lamentation?

You were the thicket,

I was a lion of that thicket.

How were you with me,

how are you without me?

The King could imprison his body but not his poetic fancy. In that dark and dingy prison, he recounted his pangs of pain at being separated from his nautch girl on Eid day:

It is Eid and I am longing far away from the countenance of that enchanting houri

How would I exist, without the face of that houri of paradise?

Who would say to me, “O friend, Eid greetings to you!”

When my sweetheart is at Lahore, while I am imprisoned at Nishapur.

Why do I recall the city of Lahore and my friends?

No one can be indifferent to his friends and his native city.

After years of hard labour and countless days of dejection, Masud was finally released.

Back in Lahore, he wrote a poem about a musical concert. None from among that troupe of artistes knew that they were being given eternal life at the birth of a novel poetic achievement in Persian, what would later be described as a fantastic fusion of poetic intoxication and musical ecstasy. It is true that these poems of Masud Sa’d Salmaan are significant from a historical perspective, since they are the first ever to document the musical scene in Lahore, but they are also matchless in their cadence of Persian lyricism and the beauty of their images:

Ah, there were many nights,

when till dawn

the stars envied my fortune

There was a flow of the flood of joy,

on my left and right

for that pure jewel

The cheeks and tangled hair

of our beloved cup-bearers

would outshine tulip and narcissus

Gently melted in my ear

the sweet drink of the cup-bearer

and the song of my singer

With these colours and scents

the cup became wine,

eyes a candle and brain a censer [for incense]

Just a moment has passed

that we said to each other

“When would we see each other again?”

My body, in ecstasy,

won’t know where the foot is

and my heart is teeming with joy.

These Lahori parties often kept him awake from dusk till dawn, his ears attuned to the music and his feet tapping the wooden floor of his spacious haveli in a bout of intoxication, with the Ravi river flowing by, like the undying and inextricable pulse of poetry, beauty and truth.

Sohaib Arshad lives inLahore

April 29 - May 05, 2011 - Vol. XXIII, No. 11