The marsiya transformed

The tragedy of Karbala is rooted in the consciousness of Muslims. In the Subcontinent, this has found poetic expression in the classical tradition of the marsiya which eulogizes Imam Hussain and his companions for their their great sacrifice to uphold ‘the truth’. Truth here carries both religious and secular connotations and upholding it means fighting repression.

The symbol of Karbala has transcended the narrowly-defined domains of the sacred and the secular. Revolutionaries and progressive transformational movements have also used the battle of Karbala as a symbol of defiance against oppression and injustice.

This defiant spirit had kept the tragedy of Karbala from being reduced to optics of the religious establishment. Ironically, though, despotic and repressive regimes of Muslim societies thrive on devotional politics while the spirit to speak truth to power has been lacking.

Karbala imparts to us the spirit of speaking truth to power. But Muslims continue to suffer from narcissism that finds it sufficient to narrate the sacrifices at Karbala in religious texts and rituals that prove to us the glory of Islam. This glory, however, does not translate into a collective vision of fighting oppression and injustice that emanate from within and without.

This writer had the opportunity to discuss with the poet Akhtar Usman the evolution, spirit and significance of the marsiya in South Asia. Usman is probably the most refined contemporary Urdu poet of the classical marsiya in the Subcontinent.

According him, the marsiya should depict real characters, real historical events and the human spirit as it unfolded therein. Comparing the marsiya and the epic, Akhtar Usman says: “The marsiya is the artistic narration of the real personalities its characters whose fate cannot be changed by the writer, whereas an epic has the tendency to do just that, its characters being at the whims of the writer.”

To Akhtar Usman, epic writers tend to reincarnate their heroes as invincible characters with superhuman attributes. On the contrary Mir Anis, the most influential classical marsiya writer in the Subcontinent, could knit together the real events of Karbala in a sequential order of nine parts.

These nine constituent parts of his marsiya included the beginning, the narration of personal traits, the departure from Medina, the short stay in Mecca, the arrival at Karbala, the battle on the 10th of Moharram, the remembrance of the ancestors Karbala’s martyrs, the description of the horse and sword and the martyrdom, the wails and prayers.

In contrast with the orthodox approach, Akhtar Usman’s stress is on liberation – the marsiya as a transcendental experience of human existence beyond the narrow confines of orthodoxy. ‘Anis-e-Doraan’ – the Mir Anis of our times – is how our friend Waqar Sherazi describes Akhtar Usman. Apt indeed. But Akhtar Usman has sought to revolutionize the tradition by making it universal. He upholds the neo-classical tradition in Urdu poetry with continual focus on the transformation of meaning and being.

While reading Akhtar Usman one can sense the classical – the presence of Mir Taqi Mir, Abdul Qadir Baidil and Mir Anis. But the power of disruption in his poetry has no parallel. Unlike the classics, his words are driven by meaning rather than rhyme; and in doing so he can generate multiple rhythms with a diversity of meaning.

His ingenuity lies in his ability to innovate new forms out of the old. He is adept at using technical intricacies and idiosyncrasies of classical literature, animated by expressions of the contemporary. His real beauty lies in the delicate balance he creates between continuity and rupture, in his inherent urge to push the frontiers of the genre.

From this perspective, the poetry of Akhtar Usman transcends the spatial and temporal confines of expression and imagination. This is where one can easily place his poetry above classical literary techniques and syntax. His universality and innovation, his transformational aspiration, continue to renew and reform our sensibilities.

Unlike most popular contemporary poets, Akhtar Usman does not create poetic effects through bodily gestures and traditional rhyming. He creates a universe where imagination and reality become intertwined and lose their subjective distinctions.

To summarize the perspective of Akhtar Usman, the marsiya has imagined the battle of Karbala as the expression of the universal principle to rise against oppression. This tragedy is that of every society where the oppressor unleashes a reign of terror to establish his writ. Karbala then represents a permanent struggle between truth and hypocrisy; it demands sacrifice for establishing a just society.

Today, as Kashmir burns, Palestine is under siege and Yemen is being destroyed, this principle of Karbala must awaken our human sensibilities that appear to have gone into slumber. In this state, it is the ritual that continues to shape our memories of Karbala. That is tragic.

The writer is a social development and policy adviser, and a freelance columnist based in Islamabad.

Email: ahnihal@yahoo.com

Twitter: @AmirHussain76