The vast and variegated collection of ghazals by Mīrzā ⊂Abdol Qāder Bīdel (1644-1721) possesses a certain complement of qualities, which have been variously charactarised as “the apex of untoward image-creation, an overcrowding of the imagination” , and, with a bit more charity, as “a highly intricate cerebral formalism” . These observations indirectly address what this paper will refer to as the quintessential bleakness of Bīdel’s ghazals, an element not all that readily found in his other works.
How does this minor key of the ghazals harmonise with the rest of Bīdel’s corpus? What can we make of the contrast between these ghazals and the exuberant confidence of his autobiography, Chahār ⊂Onṣor (The Four Elements), or the steady Sufi-philosophical dispensation of Moḥīṭ-e A⊂z̧am (The Greatest Ocean), discussed by my co-panelists? What was it about Bīdel that made his ghazals turn sour? Or, to invert the question, what was it about the seventeenth-century Indo-Persian ghazal that caused one of the greatest Sufi poets of the time, known for spilling the banks of Persian, to run aground? Is it possible that Bīdel’s lyric bleakness ¬¬¬¬is not so much a wavering of his theological commitments as it is his aesthetic response to an aesthetic problem posed by the
Indo-Persian ghazal itself?
Relying on close readings of Bīdel’s ghazals that are especially representative of this bleakness, and paying particular attention to the unexpected use he makes of certain stock Sufi metaphors, this paper will attempt to present some possible answers to these questions, while also keeping in view a larger quarry: the elucidation of Bīdel’s role in the development of the increasingly complex Indo-Persian ghazal.
