Writing within the Occasions Literary Complement in October 1921, English poet and critic Thomas Stearns Eliot remembered John Donne thus: “Tennyson and Browning are poets, and so they suppose, however they don’t really feel their thought as instantly because the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an expertise; it modified his sensibility.”
Eliot’s evaluation of Donne was true of some others too whom Samuel Johnson had within the eighteenth century known as the the-extinct “race” of metaphysical poets. Not by the way, nonetheless, the crown of thinking-as-experience can be befitting for Indian poet, lyricist, writer, and filmmaker, the Sahitya, Oscar and Jnanpith awardee, Sampooran Singh Kalra, higher recognized by his takhallus (pen identify), ‘Gulzar‘.
Famend Indian poet and novelist Padma Sachdev as soon as known as Gulzar saab the Pablo Neruda of Urdu poetry. However it might be as exact to name him the John Donne of ‘Indian standard tradition’. And I exploit this composite phrase as a substitute of ‘Hindi cinema’ or ‘Bollywood’ as a result of a bulk of Gulzar saab’s unexplored philosophical insights far exceed his filmography, poetry, and writings. What is usually missed in his language and poetics are his metaphors from quantum mechanics.
A ‘Phenomenological’ Poet
Born in 1934 in Deena, now within the Jhelum district of present-day Pakistan, Gulzar saab’s youth and his harrowing journey to India earlier than the Partition of 1947 – recollections that discovered lauded expressions in Shyam Benegal’s 1994 traditional, Mammo – would make for a fertile backdrop for a lot of a biographer. However not many could take note of the cosmic and quantum-like figures of speech that beautify his perceptions of actuality. “NASA is my favorite web site,” Gulzar as soon as acknowledged. “The universe with its summary nature attracts me. The summary aspect in my poetry comes from there.”
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Had Gulzar saab’s modesty allowed him, as a substitute of calling his poetry “summary,” he may need known as it “phenomenological”. The phrase ‘phenomenology’ means the research of expertise, together with learning the nuances ‘qualia’, that’s, the best way elementary models of actuality are skilled. Gulzar saab’s poetry usually represents actuality in minuscule slices. “Qatra qatra milti hai” (“droplets and droplets seem to us”; Ijaazat, 1987), or “jale qatra qatra, gale qatra qatra” (“the kindling of slivers, the melting of slivers”; Saathiya, 2002).
In sure different cases-as in “predominant chaand nigal gayi, daiyya re” (“I swallowed the moon, my gosh!”; Omkara, 2006)-Gulzar saab seems to swap the microscopic actuality for the cosmic, the place swallowing the moon signifies the hunt of a legendary oscillatory physique, or, in worldly phrases, a lover in warmth who swallowed the moon to assuage herself. Nevertheless, his deeper aesthetic sense resurfaces in moon-related metaphors elsewhere, as in “dhaage tod laao chandni se noor ke” (“pluck slivers of moonlight from the cosmic ray”; Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, 2007). The metaphor reminds one in all that well-known ‘double slit’ science experiment, the place photons break up to disclose wave-particle duality. Gulzar saab’s phrases are nowhere ‘summary’. In a liminal method, they escort the listener right into a scientific world.
Actuality, Chew-Sized
This miniaturisation of actuality or spacetime has during the last century come to be recognized to physicists as ‘quantisation’. Neither poets nor quantum mechanics have a monopoly over the artwork of quantising. Nevertheless, each enchant us by deconstructing and experiencing actuality at a subatomic stage. Amongst physicists and mathematicians who did that with ease and panache, we recall James Maxwell, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, David Bohm, and even modern-day names like Sean Carroll and Jim Al-Khalili. Amongst psychologists and cultural thinkers, we discover Carl Jung and Jiddu Krishnamurti on the helm. And, amongst poets, Gulzaar saab qualifies as a pure citizen of a sphere that was as soon as dominated by Albert Einstein’s contemporaries, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound (to take a reference from Daniel Albright’s 1997 research, Quantum Poetics).
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It’s amusing and staggering without delay to witness how quantum entities-whether with aware will or unconscious genius-inform Gulzar saab’s figures of speech. “Ik baar waqt se lamha gira kahin/ wahan daastan mili, lamha kahin nahin” (“as soon as upon a fickle time, a second dropped someplace/ there a legend sprouted its wings, and blurred the second in air”; Gol Maal, 1979). Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle-that is, the bounds of human measurements in calculating the momentum and place of subatomic particles simultaneously-is writ giant upon this couplet.
Revelling In Uncertainty
This scheme of uncertainty turns into each ambivalent and but emboldened in “yaar misaal-e-os chale, paayon ke story firdaus chale/ kabhi daal daal, kabhi paat paat, predominant hawa pe dhundun uske nishaan/ sar-e-ishq ki chaaon chal/ chhaiyan chhaiyan” (“my beloved trails a dewy guise, as her toes sail aloft paradise/ from department to department, from leaf to leaf, I search the wind for her hint/stroll within the shade of heavenly love”; Dil Se, 1998). Undoubtedly, these phrases are addressed to a cosmic being personified because the beloved. The uncertainty in regards to the beloved’s shapeshifting types reminds one in all Biblical, Quranic and Upanishadic figures of speech. However in these phrases is once more embedded that poetical quantisation: the ransacking of woods and the wind to identify and accord a location to a formless beloved. If this have been science itself, it might nearly be akin to the despair of the observers of the double-slit experiment, struggling to measure quantum entities in waves, particles, or definable models of spacetime.
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Then there are these two couplets: “humne dekhi hai un aankhon ki mahakti khushbu” (“I’ve seen the wafting perfume of these eyes”; Khamoshi, 1969), and “apki aankhon me kuchh, mahke huye se raaz hain” (“your eyes are the house of aromatic mysteries”; Ghar, 1978). There are critics who may by no means perceive how “eyes” and “imaginative and prescient” might be in comparison with the senses of scent and odour. But, these strains include scintillating classes for these learning the philosophy of quantum mechanics. As Al-Khalili explains in his documentary Secrets and techniques of Quantum Physics (2015), the human notion of scent is processed via a “quantum nostril”, which interprets molecular oscillations as particles, not waves. Primarily, our “quantum nostril” is able to evoking sure recollections via sure odours, that are, in flip, produced by molecular configurations which are of a extremely visible nature.
Love, Longing, And The whole lot Else
The critics who fail to sense Gulzar saab’s brilliance are, in Eliot’s phrases, like “the abnormal” being whose “expertise is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary”, to whom studying nice philosophy and falling in love “don’t have anything to do with one another, or with the noise of the typewriter or the scent of cooking”; nonetheless, in “the thoughts of the poet these experiences are all the time forming new wholes”.
One other Indian poet, the legendary Rabindranath Tagore, took science very, very significantly. He had as soon as met Einstein to debate a scheme of galactic union between science and poetry; the West and the East; the human and the divine; the quantum and the cosmic. One such union additionally seems in Gulzar saab’s well-known ghazal, “ruke ruke se qadam, ruk ke baar baar chalen” (“these hesitant ft have once more hesitated, and so they have walked once more”; Mausam, 1975, and Mammo, 1994). There’s an unmistakable Upanishadic allegory within the strains that comply with: “uthaaye phirte hain ehsaan jism ka jaan par/ chalen jahaan se to ye pairahan utaar ke chalen” (“I’ve carried the burden of my flesh on my being/ after I depart the world, I am going to take off this garb”). In Mausam, this divide between the garb and the soul symbolises a everlasting reality in opposition to the backdrop of the separation of lovers. In Mammo, it symbolises the enduring pangs of the Partition. Like logic and love, like waves and particles, the strains distinguish between the ‘garb’, the fabric facet, and ‘soul’, the immaterial facet of human life. One can not exist with out the opposite.
Small Issues In A Massive World
This non-duality is dropped at life magnificently in these strains: “aadmi bulbula hai paani ka” (“humanity is a bubble in water”) … “na samundar nigal saka usko/ na tvareekh tod paayi hai/ waqt ki hatheli par behta/ aadmi bulbula hai” (“neither the ocean has engulfed it/ nor has historical past deconstructed it/ like strains that crisscross the palm of time/ humanity is a bubble in water”). Gulzaar saab refrains from ascribing primacy to the ocean, the origin of life, or to human life itself. As an alternative, Gulzar, the poet of cosmic and quantum consciousness, is just like the microscopists of thinker G.Okay. Chesterton, who “research small issues and stay in a big world”.
Feeling bedazzled, bemused, belittled earlier than Gulzar’s poetical expressions is an indication of us coming to phrases with our infinitesimal place within the universe, and understanding it in infinite metaphysical emotions.
(The writer is grateful to Harshita Mishra and Nitin Thakur for his or her precious insights.)
(Arup Okay. Chatterjee is Professor of English, O.P. Jindal International College)
Disclaimer: These are the non-public opinions of the writer
