philological encounters � (�0�5) �-34 brill.com/phen Bīdil’s Portrait Asceticism and Autobiography Prashant Keshavmurthy Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University prashant.keshavmurthy@mcgill.ca Abstract In 1704 the Indo-Persian Sufi and poet Mirzā ʿAbdul Qādir ʿBīdil’ completed an autobiography entitled The Four Elements (Chahār ʿUnṣur). Into the fourth “Element” of this text he set an account of a portrait of himself painted around 1677 by Anūp Chhatr, a painter famous for his portraits in the imperial Mughal ateliers of the time. Initially refusing his painter-acquaintance permission to paint him, Bīdil finally yields and is astonished at how the resulting portrait duplicates him like a mirror. After marveling at it for a decade, he falls ill. His friends visit him in his sickbed and one of them, leafing through his anthology of texts, comes upon the painting. He exclaims at how faded it is. Bīdil himself can barely make it out on the page. When he recovers his health, he opens the anthology to examine the faded portrait and is astonished and shocked, as his friends are, to see that it has recovered its brilliant colors. He tears the painting up. This essay reads this ekphrastic account of self-transformation as an autobiographical and iconoclastic interpretation, playing on philosophical, literary and painterly traditions of visuality, in particular Ibn ʿArabi’s (d. 1240, Andalusia) theory of the imagination. Among the questions that will be pursued are: what understandings of self and self-transformation did Bīdil renew by this interpretation? How is this episode a focusing of concerns that pervade all of The Four Elements? What kind of reader and reading practices did this autobiography assume? And, finally, does an understanding of Bīdil’s iconoclastic self-transformation—turning on this episode—prepare us to better understand his works in other genres? * The author dedicates this essay in friendship and gratitude to Navina Najat Haidar of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He is also in debt to Sonam Kachru, Mudasir Mufti, Satyanarayana Hegde, Lisa Marchi, Sajjad Rizvi, Jane Mikkelson, Leila el-Murr, Yuthika Sharma, Nauman Naqvi and Fabrizio Speziale for their guidance and constructive criticism at various points of this essay. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi �0.��63/�45�9�97-00000009 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 1 6/17/2015 3:38:48 PM 2 keshavmurthy Keywords Sufism – Bīdil/Bedil/Bidel – Persian literature – Mirabilia – Autobiography – Mughal India – Ekphrasis – Persian miniature painting Bīdil’s Portrait: Ekphrasis as Ascetic Self-Transformation be andāz-i taghāful nīm rukh ham ʿālamī dārad chirā mustaqbal-i mardum chu taṣvīr-i farang āyī A spectacle, too, is your turning heedlessly away into a picture in profile. Why face me like a European portrait?1 The legacy of the Indo-Persian Sufi poet Mirzā ʿAbdul Qādir Khān ‘Bīdil’ (16441720/1)2 is conspicuous in the ongoing scholarly rehabilitation of the literatures of Mughal India, Safavid Iran and Turkic Central Asia. Once discredited for his stylistic complexities in Iran by the Neo-Classicism of the late eighteenth century, again in Soviet Central Asia by early twentieth century “progressive” poetics, and increasingly unread in South Asia with the fading there of Persian itself, Bīdil’s prodigious oeuvre has attained a new legibility as a result of critiques of nationalist literary historiographies. However, interpretations of his works that engage them in their formal specificity remain a desideratum. This essay reads an episode of ascetic self-transformation in Bīdil’s autobiography, The Four Elements (Chahār ʿunṣur), as an account that focuses in miniature, a concern with self-fashioning that pervades all his works. In fact, the episode, as discussed in this essay, can serve as a possible introduction to his oeuvre3 and I intend here to offer the reader unfamiliar with Bīdil, Persian literature and Sufism, an introduction to Bīdil’s work and his central preoccupations. 1 ʿAbdul Qādir Khān Bīdil, Divan-i Bīdil: jild-i duvvum (Tehran: mu’assasa-yi intishārāt-i nigāh, 1384/2005), 1364. 2 For a general introduction to his life and oeuvre, see http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ bidel-bedil-mirza-abd-al-qader-b (last accessed on August 3, 2013). 3 For a brief and general encyclopedia entry on Chahār ʿunṣur, see: http://www.iranicaonline. org/articles/cahar-onsor-four-elements-an-autobiographical-work-in-prose-by-the-poetand-sufi-abul-maani-mirza-abd-al-qader-bi (last accessed on August 3, 2013). philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 2 6/17/2015 3:38:48 PM Bīdil ’ s Portrait 3 An Introduction to Bīdil’s Words and Worlds: The Portrait within the Frame of a Life In 1116/1704, in his home Lut̤f ʿAli Haveli, located outside the Dehli Darvāza or Delhi Gate, and on a landing by the river Jamunā called Guzar Ghāṭ in the neighborhood of Khiṛkīyāñ on the south east edge of Mughal Delhi or Shāhjahānābād, the Indo-Persian Sufi and prodigious poet Mirzā ʿAbdul Qādir Khān ‘Bīdil’ at the age of 62 completed an autobiography he had begun in 1094/1683 entitled The Four Elements.4 Into the fourth book or “Element” of this text he set an account of a portrait of himself painted around 1087/1677 by Anūp Chhatr, a painter famous for his portraits in the imperial Mughal ateliers of the time. Initially refusing this painter permission to paint him, Bīdil finally yielded, only to be astonished at how the resulting portrait duplicated him like a mirror. After marveling at it for a decade, he fell ill. His friends visited him in his sickbed and one of them, leafing through his anthology of texts, came upon the painting. He exclaimed at how faded it was. Bīdil himself could barely make it out on the page. When he recovered his health, he opened the anthology to examine the faded portrait and was astonished and shocked, as his friends were, to see that it had recovered its brilliant colors. He tore the painting up. This essay studies the meanings and functions of this ekphrastic section of Bīdil’s autobiography.5 In particular, this essay offers a reading of the episode as a particular autobiographical appropriation on Bīdil’s part of the semiotic values he inherited from the Perso-Arabic literary tradition, an appropriation by which he fashioned his authorial authority as a Sufi in his milieu. Though exemplifying a logic of appropriation that generally structures the majority of anecdotes making up The Four Elements, this anecdote is distinguished by its thematization of perception, the theory of which, partly adapted from 4 ʿAbdul Qādir Khān Bīdil, “Chahār ʿunṣur,” in Āvāz-hā-yi bīdil (Tehran: mu’assasa-yi intishārāt-i nigāh, 1386/2007), 335-676. I derive the information on his place of residence from Bindrāban Dās Khushgū, Safīna-i khushgu: daftar-i thālith (Patna: Idara-i tahqiqat-i ʿarabi va farsi, 1959), 109. Khushgū was Bīdil’s long-time student and most reliable biographer. He relates that Bīdil was buried in his home on a platform (chabutra) he had had built for himself around 1710. At some point over two decades later, sadly for us (though perhaps in keeping with the poet’s own poetic preoccupation with the world’s evanescence), his home and grave that would have been located in what is today Daryā Ganj in the heart of Delhi fell into ruin and are today traceless. 5 I gloss “ekphrasis” for the purposes of this essay with W.J.T. Mitchell’s initial and most general formulation of it: “the verbal representation of a visual representation.” See W.J.T. Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 151-181. philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 3 6/17/2015 3:38:48 PM 4 figure 1 keshavmurthy Portrait by Anūp Chhatr of the Emperor Aurangzeb, “Credit: Portrait of the Emperor Aurangzeb, India, 1658-59 (ink on paper) Chattar, Anup ( fl.c.1640-79) / Private Collection / Photo © Christie’s Images / The Bridgeman Art Library” philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 4 6/17/2015 3:38:49 PM Bīdil ’ s Portrait 5 the paradigmatic Andalusian Sufi thinker Muḥyiddīn Ibn ʿArabī (d. 637/1240), was central to Bīdil’s concept of the imagination. As the imagination, understood as a subjective ability always at work in the generation of mental images, forms the implicit subjective condition for the compound metaphors Bīdil was known for in his poetry, the reading offered here also aims to prepare the reader for future encounters with Bīdil’s poetry. But first, what does it mean to already label this text an “autobiography” as I have done? In what sense is it an autobiography that frames the ekphrastic representation of the author’s visual portrait? Classical Persian has no word that might be a ready equivalent of the English “autobiography”; thus, the reader not already informed of the topics of this text by its paratexts must await Bīdil’s justification of his title to recognize it as an autobiography of a certain kind and form her hermeneutic expectations accordingly. In the preface, Bīdil characterizes his text thus: A whiff in keeping with the fragrance and color of the garden of manifestations declares after traversing the stations of flower and thorn; and the veil-adorner of the countenance of diminutions and growths casts open the unveiled levels of his generosity—so it may not remain veiled what this un-drunken intoxication of the tavern of non-existence [ʿadam] drank from the cup of the potentialities [iʿtibār] of being and what this soundless melody from the party of Divine Oneness [vaḥdat] heard from the lute of the distinctions of multiplicity [kasrat] [my italics].6 Bīdil, speaking in his own name here, situates this text in time, speaking of its coming into being after a course of worldly experience (“after traversing the stations of flower and thorn”); he further characterizes himself as an item from the plenitude of the world’s garden—a “whiff.” He is also a “veil-adorner of the countenance of diminutions and growths.” That is, he presents himself as controlling the display of creation itself, captured metonymically here by its trait of “diminution and growth.” This aggrandizing self-characterization leads us to ask whether Bīdil thinks he is God. I will return to this possibility—the possibility of theosis—later in this essay. Confining ourselves to this passage for now, let us note that he characterizes his text as a generous disclosure to his reader. But what is being disclosed here? Bīdil invokes two senses here: taste and hearing. He does so to declare that the text to follow will disclose what he—“the undrunken intoxication from the tavern of non-existence”—“drank from the cup of the potentialities of 6 Bīdil, Chahār ʿunṣur, 341. philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 5 6/17/2015 3:38:50 PM 6 keshavmurthy being.” He presents himself as caught between non-being and being. By a shift from singular to plural he maps this distinction onto the one between the One and the Many. The subsequent clause replicates this double feature by speaking of a passage from “soundless melody from the party of divine Oneness” to “the lute of the distinctions of multiplicity.” This rhetorical feature corresponds to a logical feature of his self-presentation, namely his simultaneous presence before his own creation and after it. This dual self-location in time allies him to a tradition of Persian-language poets, especially prominent from the sixteenth century onward, who authorized themselves by an Islamic-NeoPlatonic conception of creativity. According to this conception creation was an emanation from the super-sensory One into the sensory Many that yet left the One undiminished. Claiming proximity with the One allowed poets to present themselves as circling around the back, as it were, of poetic predecessors to the primordial source of poetic topoi. But to say this and no more is to read without an ear for the Persian original whose clauses of identical syllabic length rhyme in their final syllables. Almost all of the prose in The Four Elements is thus externally or internally rhymed and arranged in symmetrically measured clauses, making various uses of the Perso-Arabic tradition of such “rhymed and rhythmic prose” (sajʿ or nas̤r-i musajjaʿ). Here, the symmetry of these clauses in English, replicating the externally rhymed symmetry of Bīdil’s clauses in Persian, align his “undrunken” or undistracted focus on the nothingness from which he came into being with his preoccupation with the Divine Oneness that brought him into being and that is the most real: a preoccupation he terms “soundless” or undivided by representations. The sentence’s doubled and rhyming clauses therefore simultaneously introduce the ontological frame of reference within which Bīdil’s text becomes meaningful and the model reader who would interpret this text in terms of such ontological commitments. The above details of Bīdil’s style invite the following preliminary questions: what were the rhetorical antecedents for Bīdil’s prose? What were its social effects? Given that autobiographical discourses in pre-nineteenth century Perso-Arabic traditions possessed no generic unity, answering these two questions lets us better answer our opening question, namely what it means here to speak of an autobiography. Answering the former question will require a brief excursus on the specific genealogy Bīdil was invoking of the uses of “rhymed and rhythmic prose.” Answering the latter will require a differentiated account of the social world such prose assumed. The following section will undertake the following tasks: trace the theological antecedents for Bīdil’s style; recount the political crisis of his milieu and thus the political effects of his style on his three overlapping circles of readers; and speak of what the mimetic origins philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 6 6/17/2015 3:38:50 PM Bīdil ’ s Portrait 7 and aims of this style imply for the sense in which we may speak of autobiography here. Let us first turn to the question of the rhetorical antecedents of Bīdil’s style. Rhymed and rhythmic prose is as old as the Arabic language and thus older than the oldest Persian to have been cultivated after the earliest Islamic conquests of Iran. We will not recapitulate its history here in either language but recall a scene from its earliest appearance in the prophet Muḥammad’s own life. In the prophet’s early Meccan career, it was the kāhins (pl. kuhhān) or soothsayers who uttered their divinations in such prose. The gradual spread of Islam brought an end to the kuhhān not only because of its claim that revelation had ceased with Muḥammad, “the seal of the prophets,” but also because the Qur’an as well as Muḥammad’s own early appearances and rhymed and rhythmic proclamations closely resembled theirs.7 It was this magical precedent as well as its prophetological negation that, despite its long-standing moral ambivalence, Sufis had invoked by their rhetoric through the centuries to variously empower themselves before their disciple-readers.8 In Bīdil’s politically threatened Delhi, as I explain below, this prose style signaled the writer’s mastery over himself as well as the world of “generation and corruption,” the sublunary world that was naturally subject to agitations. His reader-disciples, in turn, would have discovered in such prose a rhetorical exemplum signaling ascetic power. I will say more on this function of his style below by considering the precise social identities of these readers. The various Persian and Urdu textual self-presentations of the social world of late Mughal Delhi of Bīdil’s time are all subject to the strains on the Mughal court that was undergoing a dispersal of its formerly centered authority. Political authority in Mughal India had come to be dispersed into provincial fiefdoms, increasingly displaced after Aurangzeb (d. 1707) and shifting from the person of the emperor onto the aristocracy and crystallizing around powerful noblemen.9 Exacerbating this erosion of royal authority were the periodic 7 “Kāhin” in M. Th. Houtsma, ed., E.J. Brill’s First Encyclopedia of Islam, 1913-1936, Vol. 4, 624-626. 8 A much-imitated early instance of such Sufi uses of rhymed and rhythmic prose in Persian is Khwāja Abdullāh Anṣāri (d. 1089, Herat), Munājāt va guftār-i pīr-i Herāt (Kabul: Thālith, 1390/1970). On the long-standing moral ambivalence of sajʿ in classical Arabic literary culture and the shifting evaluations of sajʿ in the Qur’an, all but two of whose 114 chapters contain rhyme, see Devin J. Stewart, “Sajʿ in the Qur’an: Prosody and Structure,” Journal of Arabic Literature 21, No. 2 (1990): 101-139. 9 Indeed, one of the prominent features of the satire composed in Persian and Urdu in Mughal India of this period was its desacralization of the king’s body and its attempts to capture in undignified fields of textual visibility the individual bodies of Mughal noblemen and women. The mixed Persian-Urdu oeuvre of Jaʿfar Zatalli, its macaronic quality itself a lexemic and philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 7 6/17/2015 3:38:50 PM 8 keshavmurthy Maratha raids from the Deccan into central Mughal territories, Jāt insurrections in the region of Delhi and Afghan insurrections in Rampur. The later invasion of Delhi by Nādir Shāh of Iran in 1739 was perhaps only the most conspicuous of such assaults on Mughal sovereignty. It was such a Delhi that formed Bīdil’s immediate readership and it was to this readership that his prose was immediately addressed. This readership may be said to have comprised three more or less overlapping circles of readers. In terms of what were their social identities, social powers, hermeneutic abilities and locations, the three circles were: disciples in training at a Sufi hospice; student-poets who were Mughal bureaucrats of various ranks and who frequented the poetry sessions at his home; and, finally, courtly readers. Some of these courtly readers—like the emperor Aurangzeb himself and his Sufi intimate ʿĀqil Khān ʿRāẓīʾ, who was pay-master (bakhshi) and then governor (ṣuba-dār) of Delhi, and the man who secured Bīdil’s career by mediating his access to the court—were littérateur grandees of the highest political status.10 Certain members of the second circle like Bindrāban Dās ‘Khushgū’ (d. 1756), Ānandrām ‘Mukhliṣ’ (d. 1751) and Sirājuddīn ʿAli Khān ʿĀrzūʾ (d. 1755) moved between the first and third circles, transmitting Bīdil’s poetry and authority across these social groups and urban spaces. This circulation of his writing depended on and contributed to in turn the broad Sufi ethos shared by individuals and groups across these circles. As in the case of some of his Indo-Islamic Sufi predecessors, the amenability of Bīdil’s poetry to diverse interpretations and adaptations—its “polyphony”—can be accounted for by 10 phonemic subversion of Persian rhetorical norms of “linguistic purity” ( faṣāḥat), was the most prominent textual locus of such desacralization of the bodies of the Mughal ruling classes from emperor to soldier. Ja‘far Zatalli, Zatal-nāma, Kulliyāt-i Jaʿfar Zatalli (Delhi: Anjuman-i taraqqi-i Urdu, 2011), especially his mock roster of the king’s daily activities, “Akhbārāt-i siyāha-i darbār-i muʿallā” on 53-78. Also in the emperor Aurangzeb’s employ was the satirist Niʿmat Khān ʿĀli whose Vaqāʿī mockingly described the emperor’s longdrawn Mughal siege of the Qutbshāhi fort of Golkonda in 1687. Niʿmat Khān ʿĀli, Vaqāʿī (Kanpur: Naval Kishor, 1873). For an account of factional formations centered on powerful nobles, see Satish Chandra, Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court: 1707-1740 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), 278-292. Khushgū, Safīna-i khushgū: daftar-i thālith, 13. Khushgū states that Bīdil was indebted for his mastery of Sufism (taṣavvuf ) to Rāẓī’s command of Sufi terminology and topics. ʿĀqil Khān ‘Rāẓī’ authored a number of works in verse and prose on Sufi topics, among them a prose exposition, entitled Samarāt al-hayāt, of the sayings and lessons of his teacher, a Shat̤tā̤ ri Sufi called Burhānuddīn Rāz-i Ilāhī. Nūr al-Ḥasan Anṣāri, Fārsi adab ba ʿahd-i Aurangzeb (Delhi: Indo-Persian Society, 1969), 523. philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 8 6/17/2015 3:38:50 PM Bīdil ’ s Portrait 9 reference to this social diversity of reception.11 Dargāh Qulī Khān who visited Mughal Delhi from Hyderabad in 1738, that is eighteen years after Bīdil died, described how Ārzū who had been Bīdil’s student in poetry annually organized a reading from Bīdil’s Divān at his death anniversary or ʿurs (an Indian Sufi term cognate with the word ʿarūs for ‘bride’ to signal the marriage of the saint’s soul at death to God). Over a hundred of the city’s foremost poets, including those who had been Bīdil’s students, gathered in a circle around his grave to read from a manuscript of his collected works (kulliyāt) copied in his own “auspicious hand.”12 The cult of his tomb suggests that Sufi disciple-readers with the hermeneutic attitudes and somatic dispositions characteristic of such a group were among the readers of his poetry. Such a tomb-setting also implies, by analogy with other such settings, a less trained outer circle of lay readers. At the opposite and highest end of this social spectrum was the pious emperor Aurangzeb who discovered ethico-spiritual import in Bīdil’s poetry, quoting it in his letters to his sons one of whom, Muḥammad A‘zam Shāh, employed Bīdil as superintendent (darogha) for twenty years.13 Also in this high-ranking circle were Shukrullāh Khān, magistrate ( fauj-dār) of Delhi and son-in-law to the aforementioned ʿĀqil Khān, and his sons Shākir Khān and Mīr Karamullāh, all of whom long patronized the poet, bought him the house he lived in for 36 years till he died, were tutored by him in their poetry and corresponded extensively with him.14 11 12 13 14 I derive this notion of “polyphony” from Thomas de Bruijn, Ruby in the Dust: Poetry and History in Padmāvat by the South Asian Sufi Poet Muḥammad Jāyasī (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2012), 20 and 205-75. Dargāh Qulī Khān, Muraqqaʿ-i dehlī, (Hyderabad: Taj Press, 1941), 44-45 and 10-11. In keeping with Sufi practice, Bīdil’s handwriting was considered a sanctified trace of his personhood. Bīdil, in turn, describes how Ḥażrat Shāh, one of his Sufi masters, had copied out Bīdil’s ghazal fragment in his own “auspicious hand” and sent it to another Sufi to seek his help in giving Bīdil further spiritual guidance. Bīdil, Chahār ʿunṣur, 481. Khushgū, Safīna-i khushgu: daftar-i thālith, 108 and 115. In Bīdil’s collection of letters, Ruqaʿāt, letter 200 is addressed to Qābil Khān Munshi, secretary to the emperor Aurangzeb. It recalls that seven years previously the emperor had expressed his interest in reading Bīdil’s work and conveys Bīdil’s gratitude to the emperor for having read the “text of prose” Bīdil had sent him by way of a gift. In general, the letters in this collection comprise an invaluable window on to Bīdil’s literary field. In particular, they let us infer the shifting interactions between his Akbarian (i.e. Ibn ʿArabi-informed) poetry, otherworldly postures and the implications of both in the political power and patronage networks of the tumultuous late Mughal milieu. ʿAbdul Qādir Khān Bīdil, Ruqaʿāt, in Āvāz-hā-yi bīdil (Tehran: muʾassasa-yi intishārāt-i nigāh, 1386/2007), 29-182. For letter 200 see 128-29. Bindrāban Dās Khushgū, Safīna-i khushgu: daftar-i thālith, 17. Besides the other features that recommend it, this volume of Khushgū’s Safīna contains such precious and mostly philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 9 6/17/2015 3:38:50 PM 10 keshavmurthy Moving in between these two circles was the circle of those who held relatively minor Mughal offices but were better known as scholars and poets whose oeuvres were variously informed by Bīdil’s teaching. This circle included individuals like his scholar-student Ārzū who invoked rhetorical disciplines traditionally authoritative in Arabic in his Persian treatises in order to defend and authorize the oft-criticized difficulties of Bīdil’s ghazal style.15 Besides Ārzū were Bīdil’s lesser known students, a significant number of them Hindus of the Brahmin, Kāyasth, Khatri and Vaishya castes. One of them, the Mughal bureaucrat littérateur Bindrāban Dās Khushgū, referred to Bīdil with the panoply of reverential formulations characteristic of a Sufi disciple.16 Another, Shiv Rām Dās ‘Ḥayā’, composed a Persian prose description that was stylistically indebted to Bīdil’s The Four Elements of the Braj region of Mathura and Vindravan whose geography was sacred to the popular Vaishnavite or Krishna-centered piety of the region. Of this work and its author Khushgū wrote: Having trained in his poetry under Mirzā Bīdil and received his penname from him, he speaks in his [i.e. Bīdil’s] language. He wrote a prose work in the style [t̤arz] of the late Mirzā’s Chahār ʿunṣur called Gulgasht-i bahār-i iram. It describes the peculiarities of the Braj region—that is, the area of Mathura and Vrindavan and all the special qualities of that land which is, in the religion of the Hindus [mashrab-i hunūd], the birthplace and the home of Krishna the avatar [krishn-i avatār], whom they consider the most perfect manifestation of the Infinite’s attributes. I was delighted to read it.17 15 16 17 reliable social and biographical information on the Persian literary culture of Khushgū’s Delhi, including anecdotes about the everyday lives and interactions of poets. Prashant Keshavmurthy, “The Local Universality of Poetic Pleasure: Sirājuddin ʿAli Khān Ārzū and the Speaking Subject,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 50 (2013): 27-45. Bindrāban Dās Khushgū, a long time student of Bīdil in poetry and other spiritual practices, refers to him in his verse marking Bīdil’s death as “that holy threshold”, a “guide” and “a prophet, an assistant, a leader” in “poetry” (sukhan). Khushgū’s other descriptions of Bīdil, especially the spectacles of his miraculous strength, conform on many points to Sufi hagiographical tropes. Khushgū, Safīna-i khushgu: daftar-i thālith, 103-125. Khushgū, Safīna-i khushgu: daftar-i thālith, 183-184. No manuscript of Ḥayā’s work has been traced. For a discussion of Bīdil’s central role in authorizing Hindu self-inscriptions into the Persian literary tradition, see Stefano Pello, “Persian as a Passe-partout: The Case of Mirzā ʿAbd al-Qādir Bīdil and his Hindu disciples,” in People in Motion, Ideas in Motion: Culture and Circulation in Pre-Modern South Asia, eds. A. Busch and T. de Bruijn (Leiden: Brill, 2013). Lālā Ḥakīm Chand ‘Nudrat’ (d. 1786?), yet another of Bīdil’s Hindu students, philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 10 6/17/2015 3:38:50 PM Bīdil ’ s Portrait 11 These three social circles comprise Bīdil’s implicit contemporaneous readerships. And yet, in keeping with Sufi precedent, Bīdil’s oeuvre explicitly assumes only the first kind of reader—that is, the disciple at the Sufi hospice. This is because Sufi convention assumed that it was only such a reader who could most radically achieve the ascetic aims of Sufi practice. The Sufi ethos shared by these identities also accounts for a trait of the rhetoric in the passage aforequoted from The Four Elements, namely the impossibility of distinguishing between the metaphoricity and literalness of his sensory self-characterizations as a “whiff,” an “un-drunken intoxication” and “soundless melody.” Bīdil, like all Sufis, seeks to experience the divine Real rather than only know it conceptually and discursively and so, in keeping with Sufi tradition, he formulates such experiences in somatic terms. Such somatic formulations refer not only to Bīdil’s own experiences but are also aimed pedagogically at inducing a self-transformation in his reader-disciple who was normatively assumed to belong to the first of the aforementioned circles, that of the Sufi hospice. This reader, assumed to be amenable to the most radical transformation, imitated Bīdil’s brief mastery of the world of the four elements by imitating his prose style.18 We must recall that the four elements—fire, air, water and earth—formed what Islamic cosmologies such as Ibn ʿArabi’s termed the world of “generation and corruption” (kawn o fasād). This was the world below the sphere of the moon—the sublunary world— that was constantly agitated by the mutually contrary motions of the spheres immediately around it, that of the seven planets which were observed to be moving (al-kawākib al-sayyāra) and that beyond it, the sphere of the planets 18 composed a Persian masnavi translation of the tenth book of the Bhāgvat Purānā which narrates the life of Krishna who was an incarnation of the god Vishnu. The rhetoric of this masnavi, too, suggests a debt to Bīdil’s adaptation of Ibn ʿArabi’s emanationist ontology in its conception of Krishna as a divine “manifestation” (mażhar). Lacchmi Nārāyan ‘Shafīq’, Tazkira-i gul-i raʿnā (Hyderabad: ʿAhd-āfarīn Press, 1967), 167. Bīdil’s Vaishnava students who composed Persian accounts of the sacred topography of the Braj region very likely took for a model Bīdil’s own admiring description of the locality. He describes Mathura and its varieties of Hindu ascetics and pilgrims in effusive rhythmic and rhyming prose as a land still traced by the melancholy of Krishna’s parting, universalizing Krishna by a verse that identifies him with the Sufi cosmogonic principle of Love. Bīdil, Chahār ʿunṣur, 482. A visual representation of such ecstatic Sufi reading may be seen in a British Library painting numbered 7573, folio 25r, completed around 1611 in Mughal imperial circles by Muḥammad Riẓā and inserted, significantly, into a copy of the Dīvān of Ḥāfiż. It depicts the poet-theologian Imād al-Dīn Faqīh (d. 1371) letting the Dīvān of Ḥāfiż drop from his hand as he and his pupils fall into an ecstasy. philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 11 6/17/2015 3:38:50 PM 12 keshavmurthy appearing stationary (al-kawākib al-thābitha).19 Humans, like other creatures, were subject to these agitations. Yet, certain humans could master this agitation by the tempered practice of their ascetically achieved hidden or occult knowledge of the mimetic order connecting the twenty-eight letters of the alphabet to the twenty-eight lunar mansions. This group of humans thus formed a spiritual elite. Across The Four Elements Bīdil describes his theurgic powers to cure illnesses by writing amulets and poetry that numerically encoded auspicious planetary conjunctions.20 In keeping with Bīdil’s balanced mastery of his own body through his knowledge of the Names of God, his disciple Khushgū lists the miraculous feats of strength his teacher was capable of at the height of his ascetic powers: wrestling a horse to the ground and rolling with it downhill; accidentally leaning on a wall and causing its collapse; beating a rider mounted on a thoroughbred in a race.21 Evidently, Bīdil imagined himself to be a member of such a spiritual elite. His reader, by his imitation of Bīdil’s practices, would come to enter the ranks of this elite and thus achieve, in turn, a brief mastery of the world of the four elements. This is the point at which the text’s title and my denomination of it as an autobiography receive its justification: Bīdil is composed of the same intrinsically defective and mortal mixture of the four elements as all creatures. Bīdil’s stated spiritual-pedagogical aims and his participation in Sufi rhetoric and practice—as evidenced in the afore-quoted passage—should also alert us to the peculiar sense in which this text constitutes an autobiography. Bīdil seeks to generously offer his Sufi reader an account of his own spiritual travails only insofar as these travails are imitative and imitable. It is because Bīdil sought to imitate the masters to whom he submitted himself that his disciplereader might now hope to imitate Bīdil in turn through his intoxicated reading. 19 20 21 Titus Burckhardt, Mystical Astrology According to Ibn ʿArabi; trans. Bulent Rauf (Louisville: Fons Vitae, 2001), 16. For an exposition of this distinction between apparently moving and stationary planets as it is implicit in Abdurraḥmān Jāmī’s Yūsuf o zulaykhā, a masnavi interpreting Ibn ʿArabi’s theological monism and widely read and cited in Bīdil’s milieu, see Muḥammad bin Ghulām Muḥammad, Sharḥ-i yūsuf o zulaykhā (MS BW Ivanow 0064, Redpath Library, McGill University, Montreal), folios 10-11. The commentator was a member of the Chishtiyya Niżāmiyya Sufi lineage of Multan. He completed the commentary on 30 June 1819 and included glosses from three earlier commentaries as well as dictionaries of Persian and Arabic. For Bīdil’s explicit formulation of his ideal of moderate asceticism, see his widely studied compilation of his own “subtle teachings,” “Nikāt,” in Āvāz-hā-yi bīdil (Tehran: mu’assasayi intishārāt-i nigāh, 1386/2007), especially 194. Khushgū, Safīna-i khushgu: daftar-i thālith, 110-111. philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 12 6/17/2015 3:38:50 PM Bīdil ’ s Portrait 13 This mimetic origin and aim imparts an iterative quality to the anecdotes this text assembles, a quality that confronts most readers today with a particular stylistic difficulty. Dwelling on the reasons for this difficulty may furnish us with the hermeneutic expectations appropriate to Bīdil’s account of his portrait. This is not a difficulty resulting from abstruse vocabulary, since most of his lexicon derives from Persian literary and more particularly Sufi traditions of prose and verse. It thus assumes a reader conversant with this lexicon shared by several Sufi lineages.22 Rather, the stylistic difficulty in question arises from the tension between his commitment, on the one hand, to writing of the particular events, experiences and encounters he underwent and, on the other hand, his commitment to simultaneously interpreting them as bearing an archetypal or mythic significance transcending their dateable and nameable particularity. In this tension originates the difficulty Bīdil’s modern reader must first confront at the level of the smallest unit of his language-use, the semantic level of the sentence: the mythic or archetypal character of the compound metaphors with which he articulates his references to particular, indexically named and sometimes dated events and experiences. He seeks by this use of compound metaphors to assimilate any particular event or experience—narrated at the discursive level of the larger linguistic unit of the anecdote—to the generality of a myth. I will confine myself to one example: the simultaneously historical and mythical figure of “Anūp Chhatr” himself. This proper name referred to a historical person, several of whose paintings survive with his inscription. Som Prakash Verma thus notes in his entry on him in his Mughal Painters and their Work: a Biographical Survey and Comprehensive Catalogue: Anūp Chhatr seems to have begun his work at Shāh Jahān’s court. At some stage he joined Dārā Shukoh’s establishment, for min[iature] 6, a portrait of a lady in Dārā Shukoh’s harem, is ascribed to ‘Rāi Anūp Chhatr Dārā Shukohi’. He may well have received the title Rāi from his princely master. If so, its absence in later inscriptions is explained, for titles given by that Prince would not have been used after his fall. 22 Indeed, where Bīdil introduces a technical term—typically from Ibn ʿArabi whose theophany everywhere informs Bīdil’s thought—that he supposes this reader may not be familiar with or adequately comprehend, he glosses it at length. An example may be found in the sub-section given to an exposition of the technical terms for the “soul” considered in its positive aspect as rūḥ (the negative typically being denominated nafs). Bīdil, Chahār ʿunṣur, 598. philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 13 6/17/2015 3:38:51 PM 14 keshavmurthy It would seem from miniatures nos. 1, 3-9 that portraiture was the forte of this painter. Fine lines and thin shading are characteristic of his drawings. In portrait-painting he prefers a flat background and the central figure is executed in a contrasting pigment.23 This entry corresponds in name, the dates and description to the eponymous painter Bīdil describes as having painted his portrait around 1087/1677. And yet, Bīdil nowhere refers to the empirical particularity of the portrait or its painter. Rather, he opens his description of Anūp Chhatr by declaring that “Māni’s soul, dust-dark, turned the color of his quill’s dust and Bihzād’s nature, in honor’s veil, drew shame’s dust upon itself at his skill.”24 These clauses— their mythic generality and interchangeability signaled by their end-rhymes— underscore that Anūp Chhatr becomes worthy of such mention not because he departs from his own two familiar mythic archetypes but because he excels them: first, Māni (d. circa 277), the Babylonian founder of Manichaeism who was imagined in Firdūsi’s Shāhnāma (Book of Kings, circa 339-400/1009-10), Niẓāmi’s Iskandarnāma (Alexander-book, circa 586/1191) and by poets in the Persian tradition after them as a painter and false prophet famed for his illusionistic paintings;25 and next, the painter of Timurid Herat, Kamāluddīn Bihzād (d. 941-42/1535-6), whom the Mughals had exalted to the status of a paradigmatic painter by this period.26 Understanding the significations of this ekphrastic episode within its autobiographical frame therefore requires us to ask not what kind of portrait the historical Anūp Chhatr probably painted, but how—or in what terms—the fact that he painted Bīdil’s portrait at all comes to be formulated by Bīdil as autobiographically meaningful. To this question of the autobiographical significations of Bīdil’s portrait—this essay’s orienting question—we will return at length below. Myths for the Sufi Reader By such generalizing assimilations, Bīdil’s purported Sufi reader would read the episodes in Bīdil’s life mythically while also learning himself to apply such a 23 24 25 26 Som Prakash Verma, Mughal Painters and their Work: a Biographical Survey and Comprehensive Catalogue (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 61-2. Bīdil, Chahār ʿunṣur, 615. For a study of the Persian literary imagination of Māni, see Priscilla Soucek, “Nizami on Painters and Painting,” in Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ed. Richard Ettinghausen (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1972), 9-21. David J. Roxburgh, “Kamal al-Din Bihzad and Authorship in Persian Painting,” Muqarnas 17 (2000): 119-146. philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 14 6/17/2015 3:38:51 PM Bīdil ’ s Portrait 15 mythicizing hermeneutic to other texts and experiences. There is no first time in myth, as Mircea Eliade observed, and so, too, is there no first time in Bīdil’s life. None of his experiences unfold except as an iteration of the experiences of others famous in Islamic history or named by Bīdil as his teachers. Indeed, they are “his” experiences only in this provisional sense that his iterations of them are the latest. Recognizing this iterative quality leads the reader to experience a blurring of Bīdil’s identity with those of his teachers. These teachers include named men he meets face to face in geographical locations still extant on the North Indian map as well as those he encounters in dream-visions after their deaths or in their physical absence. Like Ibn ʿArabi and Abdurraḥmān Jāmī (d.897/1492, Herat), Ibn ʿArabi’s most widely diffused interpreter in Mughal North India, Bīdil becomes an author by ventriloquizing for teachers.27 If he is yet distinguishable by a proper name as his teachers were it is because he strives to become a worthy ventriloquist for their voices.28 We may distinguish three discursive levels on which Bīdil’s teachers lay down patterns for him (or perhaps, authoritatively reiterate previously laid down patterns for him): at the level of the sentence or the semantic level; at the level of the anecdote or the discursive level; and at the level of The Four Elements itself, or at the narratological level. On the semantic level, Bīdil’s conformity to patterns is already evident in the quote from his preface where he speaks of his autobiography as a generous “unveiling” of “the countenance of diminutions and growths.” This is a stock metaphor of the world as a bride unveiled. Elsewhere he submits apparently diverse experiences to a relatively small stock of compound metaphors drawn from semantic fields long familiar in Persian literature: drinking-parties; book-making and writing-equipment; physiology; horsemanship; painting; the 27 28 Ibn ʿArabi said: “I swear by God, I say nothing, I announce no judgment that does not proceed from an inbreathing of the divine spirit in my heart.” This is an internal quotation from Carl Ernst, “The Man without Attributes: Ibn ʿArabi’s Interpretation of Abu yazid al-Bistami,” accessed June 29, 2012, www.unc.edu/⁓cernst/articles.htm. Following upon Ibn ʿArabi, Jāmi declares in his preface to his The Gleams (Lawāʾih): “This is a treatise named The Gleams on the explanation of the gnostic sciences and the meanings. It has gleamed forth from the tablets of the secret hearts and spirits of the lords of gnosis and the masters of tasting and finding in appropriate expressions and lustrous allusions.” Sachiko Murata, Chinese Gleams of Sufi Light: Wang Tai-yu’s Great Learning of the pure and Real and Liu Chih’s Displaying the concealment of the Real Realm; with a new translation of Jami’s Lawā’ih from the Persian by William C. Chittick (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 134. For a study that approaches this iterative quality as a kind of ventriloquism, see Michael Frishkopf, “Authorship in Sufi Poetry,” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 23 (2003): 78-108. philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 15 6/17/2015 3:38:51 PM 16 keshavmurthy alphabet and so forth. On the discursive level, the ekphrastic anecdote under discussion partially conforms in its plot to a hagiographical account of the Sufi poet Rūmi’s (d. 1270) initial refusal to be painted, followed by his protean dissimilarity to any of the many portraits made of him.29 Further instances of patterns on this level might include an anecdote presenting a discussion of the ethical and ontological value of the opposed somatic states of sleep versus waking.30 In the positions its interlocutors adopt, the anecdote conforms to well-attested models in Islamic philosophical discourses on dreaming. There is, as well, an anecdote presenting disputations over doctrinal differences concerning the legal and moral validity of ghulluw or ecstatic Sufi practices versus sober self-control:31 this anecdote rehearses familiar debates internal to Sufi traditions. Other anecdotes presenting the thaumaturgical practices of traveling seated on water and curing the sick by breathing charms and poetry on them both have precedents in Sufi hagiographical literature on miracles.32 Finally, on the narratological level, the most conspicuous pattern is that of the four chapters or “Elements” into which all the anecdotes are gathered, the text as a whole microcosmically replicating the primordial and long-familiar macrocosmic constellation of fire, air, water and earth.33 29 30 31 32 33 Priscilla Soucek, “The Theory and Practice of Portraiture in the Persian Tradition,” Muqarnas 17 (2000): 103. Bīdil, Chahār ʿunṣur, 464-467. Falling asleep seems to have interested Sufis because it was a state of being the sleeper entered unintentionally and thus rehearsed the Sufi problematic of how to act without the vanity of willing the action. The earliest Persian-language precedent for this Sufi discussion of sleeping and waking is ʿAli bin Usmān al-Jullābi alHujwiri (d. 1072-1077, Lahore), Kashf al-mahjūb: the Oldest Persian Treatise in Sufism, trans. R.A. Nicholson (London: Luzac, 1936), 352-354. This discussion itself summarizes earlier Sufi views of the topic and was composed roughly contemporaneously with Shaykh Abdul Karim ibn Hawazin Qushayri’s (d. 1072, Nishapur) equally paradigmatic Arabiclanguage al-Risāla al-qushayriyya that also discusses the topic. Bīdil, Chahār ʿunṣur, 357-367. Bīdil, Chahār ʿunṣur, 374-375 and 353-354. A canonical earlier instance of such an autobiographical appropriation of the elemental schema for literary ends, in this case to order a lifetime’s output of ghazals into four Divāns corresponding in quality to the four elements, may be found in Amir Khusrow’s Dibācha-yi divān-i ghurrat al-kamāl (Preface to the Divan ‘Full Moon of Perfection’), his preface to his eponymous Divān of ghazals completed in 697/1298. Amir Khusrow, Dibācha-yi divān-i ghurrat al-kamāl (Lahore: Matbaʿ-i ʿaliya, 1975). The elemental schema was not only a rhetorical device but continuous with the science of the period. Classical Islamic pharmacology, for example, “had classified drugs into four degrees—more precisely, it had characterized some as temperate, and classified those that were not so into four degrees. These degrees signify the drug’s potency in terms of the four elemental philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 16 6/17/2015 3:38:51 PM Bīdil ’ s Portrait 17 On all three levels these patterns furnish Bīdil and his Sufi reader with myths for speech and action.34 Reading the ekphrastic episode under discussion— like reading The Four Elements as a whole—with an attention to signs of Bīdil’s 34 qualities: heat, cold, wetness, dryness.” Y. Tzvi Langermann, “Another Andalusian Revolt? Ibn Rushd’s Critique of Al-Kindi’s Pharmacological Computus,” The Enterprise of Science in Islam: New Perspectives, eds. Jan P. Hogendijk and Abdelhamid I. Sabra (London: MIT Press, 2003), 351-352. A medically aimed exposition of the possible mixture of the elements that was contemporaneous with Bīdil and underwritten by a Sufi metaphysics may be seen in ʿIlājāt-i dārā shukūhi, composed between 1052/1642-43 and 1056/1646-47 in his own courtly circles and the largest Persian medical encyclopedia of Islamic India. Nūruddīn Muḥammad Abdullāh Shirāzi, ʿIlājāt-i dārā shukūhi or Ṭibb-i dārā shukūhi, MS 6226, Kitab-khāna-yi majlis, Tehran, folios 47b–48b. See, also, Bīdil’s medical references to the elements in his letters praying for his patron’s good health. Bīdil, Ruqaʿāt, in Āvāz-hā-yi bīdil, 49, 50. It is the failure to grasp this mythicizing motivation that has led Nabi Hadi, the author of a major modern critical study of Bīdil, to despair of Bīdil’s style and condemn it for its obscurity, settling for mere plot summaries and thematic descriptions of his works as if these were solutions to such perceived obscurity. Nabi Hādi, Mirzā Bedil (Urdu) (Delhi: Educational Publishing House, 2009; first published in 1982), especially 70-75. Hadi’s negative evaluation of Bīdil’s style derives from his commitment to a conception of literary realism first canonized by the Reformist Urdu critic Muḥammad Ḥusain Āzād in the late nineteenth century and that anachronistically demands that written prose replicate the supposed verisimilitude of a spoken idiom. His frustration over Bīdil’s failure to conform to this referential ideal leads him to try and resolve this difficulty by offering a plotsummary of The Four Elements, an exercise antithetical to the mythicizing aims and recursive temporality of Bīdil’s text that begins and concludes by emphasizing its author’s failure to achieve intimacy with the Real and thus the circularity of spiritual arrest rather than the linearity of spiritual development. A possible incitement to this methodological error is that the first Element begins with an account of Bīdil’s birth, misleading him as well as the critic Salāḥuddīn Saljuqi into taking this for a sign of a chronologically linear emplotment of his life thereafter. Salāḥuddīn Saljuqi, Naqd-i bīdil (Persian) (Tehran: Muhammad Ibrahim Shariʿati Afghanistani, 1388/1968), 461-463. Abdul Ghani, by contrast, notes the anecdotally staggered character of Bīdil’s autobiography and the nonnarrative order of its four chapters. However, he does this only in the course of a summary of the text’s topics, abandoning analysis in favor of summarizing comprehensiveness. In doing so, he assigns the ekphrastic episode relating to Anūp Chhatr no more than a passing mention as one of the miracles characteristically included in a Persian prose work’s concluding chapter. But such short shrift not only pretends to conventionalize what was intended to be read as unconventional, it also misses an opportunity to understand Bīdil’s aesthetics and ethics in ways deeper than any summary listing of his oeuvre could achieve. This being said, Abdul Ghani’s book remains the most comprehensive bio-bibliographical introduction to Bīdil in English. Abdul Ghani, Life and Works of Abdul Qadir Bedil (Lahore: United Publishers, 1960). For a tabulation of and commentary on Bīdil’s codicological philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 17 6/17/2015 3:38:51 PM 18 keshavmurthy individuality and self-determination must thus confront the resistance posed by its conformity to these mythic paradigms that constrain such individuality and self-determination. The Portrait It is this mythicizing vector, then, that leads Bīdil to frame his ekphrastic anecdote with a distinction familiar from the Qur’an and earlier Persian literature: whereas God alone acts independently and creates the world without technology, humans depend on Him for their actions and create what they do only by laboring to achieve a mastery of technology. And such action and mastery, Bīdil argues, misleads humans into the vanity of taking themselves for autonomous actors although they are, in truth, only ever mediums for divine action. This primordial distinction in The Four Elements, probably inherited from Jāmī, which was first formulated in the preface to this Element35 and again in this episode’s opening passage, proleptically submits the subsequent account of Anūp Chhatr’s portrait of Bīdil to a certain interpretation of human action and technology. On this interpretation, cosmicized in a ghazal fragment (qitaʿ) of nine distiches, creatures fail to comprehend their ultimate cause, mistaking their proximate causes for the ultimate one: the gardener forgets that it is rain and not his watering that causes a plant to grow; the mother cannot account by her womb for the fetus’s miniscule transformations; the oyster dries out with astonishment at how a pearl knotted up within it without a thread; the ocean wonders why it sweats, and the sky why it cries.36 This mistake defines the operation of the intellect (ʿaql) as an entrapment in proximate or secondary causes (asbāb). And technology, on this interpretation, prosthetically extends 35 36 metaphors in his vast corpus of ghazals, see Ḥamidrezā Ghelīchkhāni, Iṣṭilahāt-i nuskhapardāzī dar divān-i bīdil-i dihlavī (New Delhi: Center for Persian Research, Office of the Cultural Counselor, Islamic Republic of Iran, 2011). This study has the merit of recognizing the import for modern criticism of what Bīdil’s student Khān-i Ārzū recognized as the focus of poetic creativity in his milieu, namely that poets sought, not to devise new “figures of speech” (ṣanāʿi-i badīʿi) like poets in the past, but “new comparisons and metaphors” (tashbīh va istiʿāra). Ghelīchkhāni argues that Bīdil’s metaphorical use of technical terms, such as from the art of book-making, accounts for the initial obscurity of Bīdil’s style. However, inasmuch as Bīdil submits such metaphorical novelty to the mythic logics of traditional topoi (mażāmīn) we must also put his initial obscurity down to what I have called his mythicizing motivations. For Ārzū’s formulation of this recognition, see Sirājuddīn ʿAli Khān Ārzū, “ ʿAṭiya-yi kubrā” (The Great Gift), in ʿAṭiya-yi kubrā va mauhibat-i ʿuẓmā (Tehran: Firdūs, 1381/2002), 51. Bīdil, Chahār ʿunṣur, 587-88. Bīdil, Chahār ʿunṣur, 614. philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 18 6/17/2015 3:38:51 PM Bīdil ’ s Portrait 19 the intellect’s entrapment in an exploration of secondary causality. To this Bīdil opposes an “absorption in a place of bewilderment” (mahv-i ḥayrat-khāna). To comprehend “a little of this mystery” of the ultimate cause anterior to all technology is to become human. I should add in passing here that one of the aims of this interpretation of Bīdil’s ekphrastic episode is to understand the sense in which, in Bīdil’s thought, becoming human entails a comprehension of what traverses but exceeds the human. Already judged thus by this critique of a rational investigation of causality, Bīdil’s subsequent account of Anūp Chhatr’s mastery of the skills of coloring (rang-āmīzī), drawing (siyāh-qalamī) and design (garda) implicitly assigns them a morally ambivalent significance. They are positive signs of his miraculous status as a confidant of divine mysteries since his skills, Bīdil notes, excel all other known miracles (muʿjizāt). But they are also negative ones of his entrapment in a technologically exacerbated intellectual dependence on secondary causality. However, the negative significations come to be borne out only at the episode’s end. At this point in the episode, Anūp Chhatr’s painted images are simply described in a ghazal fragment as supra-real: his candle lights lamps and his moth-wing burns till the Day of Judgment; his drawn trees burgeon and bend with spring fruit and the singing parrot of his magical theater never misses a note.37 That is, his visual representations excel their mortal and defective originals in longevity and perfection of form. This, too, has a mythic antecedent in the Persian literary ideal of fiction’s diegetic world as an inorganic and therefore immortal and superior simulation of organic and mortal beings.38 This genealogy of fiction as an immortally famous verbal perfection of defective and mortal models is hardly peculiar to Persian and may be generalized to several traditional literary cultures—Sanskrit and Latin among them—wherein literature relates to life as an idealization intended to immortalize both its maker and its model by fame. And it is in the form of such inorganic immortality that Anūp Chhatr, a long-time acquaintance of Bīdil, seeks to memorialize 37 38 Bīdil, Chahār ʿunṣur, 615. Saʿdi’s Gulistān (The Rose-Garden, 1258, Shiraz) famously describes its own genesis in the author’s response to a friend’s sense of the imminent seasonal death of a rose-garden, prompting Saʿdi to create a literary rose-garden immune to autumn. Abu ʿAbudullāh Musliḥ al-Saʿdi, Kitāb-i gulistān (Tehran: chap-khana-yi gulshan, 1360/1942), 2-16. This remained an ideal of fiction imbued with magic in the Persianate world at least as late as 1837 in Sikandarabad in North India when a student of the Persian-Urdu poet Ghālib (d.1869), Bālmukund Be-ṣabr, described the nature of his Urdu narrative poem. Bālmukund Be-ṣabr, Masnavi lakht-i jigar (New Delhi: Anjuman-i taraqqi-i urdu, 1999), esp. 103-05. philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 19 6/17/2015 3:38:51 PM 20 keshavmurthy him, seeking his permission to paint his portrait in order “to create a bewildering text as a memorial” (nuskha-yi ḥayrati be yādgār pardāzad). Bīdil would thus be perfected by being fictionalized in a portrait. That he denominates this painting a “text” (nuskha) anticipates its later significance when we learn that, of this painting, only Bīdil’s verbal description remains, this description thus assimilating the painting’s characteristics of a bewildering memorial.39 At this point, however, Bīdil resists such fictionalization by refusing the painter permission: “Since the frivolity of such preoccupations did no more than polish amusement’s mirror, the colorlessly traced self [t̤abīʿat-i bī-rangī], barely sipped from favor’s cup.” And he adds in the course of a quatrain: “He to whom a deed is calamitous in origin [aṣl] / What pleasure might he derive from wandering a derivative’s [ farʿ] garden?” The technical references here to painting bear reflection. The “colorless tracing” (bī-rang) by which he metaphorizes his own self refers to the outline traced through perforated paper with charcoal pounce. It thus designated the ṭarḥ—a master artist’s design or foundational drawing to which, often, junior artists later added color. It was this foundational drawing that formed, if the painting was inscribed, the empirical locus of the painting’s authorship. As Gregory Minissale says: The composition of a picture in Mughal Indian art begins with ṭarḥ . . . The main lesson to draw from this excursus into ṭarḥ is that it was treated as the superior aspect of image-making, reserved for senior artists and valued highly, much like the art of calligraphy, which similarly placed emphasis on proportion, line, and the relationship of parts to the whole in an overall pattern. Ṭarḥ was clearly related to the arrangement or grouping of figures and it was at this stage that proportional relationships were also worked out. This is undoubtedly because ṭarḥ is related to the art of writing in terms of proportion, unity, geometric precision and visual beauty, as opposed to merely coloristic charms.40 39 40 In addition to Bīdil’s indication, internally marked by his own given dates, that he spent over twenty years composing The Four Elements, such pervasive signs of proleptically and analeptically motivated word-choices confirm that his plans for the logic of textual presentation minutely accounted for the semantic level of the sentence, the larger discursive level of anecdotes and then the grossest narratological one of books or Elements. Such evidence of long-term planning contrasts with the relative speed with which he composed his prodigious output of ghazals. Gregory Minissale, Images of Thought: Visuality in Islamic India: 1550-1750 (New Castle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006), 59-60. Also, on the foundational drawing as the empirical site of a painter’s authorship, see David J. Roxburgh, “Kamal al-Din Bihzad and Authorship in Persian Painting,” Muqarnas 17 (2000): 119-146. philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 20 6/17/2015 3:38:52 PM Bīdil ’ s Portrait 21 In formulating his refusal to grant the painter permission to paint his portrait, Bīdil calls himself a “colorless tracing,” reiterating his use of this image in his preface to The Four Elements: “Since the purpose of the writing of these levels of the elemental quill is to set in order the intoxication with the world of potentiality [tartīb-i nashʿa-yi imkānī], and the faintly traced outline [garda] of the picture of these truths of the page of egotism [man o mā] is to compose a corporeal text [tarkīb-i nuskha-i jismānī], wisdom . . . distinguished it by naming it The Four Elements.”41 The rhymed and balanced clauses of this sentence alert us to a semantic relation between “to set in order intoxication with the world of potentiality” and “to compose a corporeal text.” This text constitutes the potentiality of a body that is a colorless tracing of Bīdil’s nature. So, when Bīdil eventually yields to Anūp Chhatr’s repeated requests and lets himself be painted, the resulting portrait is not merely a picture within a picture, an instance of the mise en abyme so frequent in Mughal painting.42 It is also a deterioration from “the superior aspect of image-making”—the ideality and higher reality of a colorless geometric tracing when he was yet only a “potentiality”—into the second-order reality of attributes or “coloristic charms.” Models of Visuality The valuation of the linear geometry determining the relative positions of bodies in the field of vision as superior to the bodies themselves—subordinating the explanation of seen bodies to a theory of perception—aligns with a much older Islamic optical tradition, studied by Hans Belting and discussed with reference to Bīdil later in this essay.43 For now, it should suffice to note that the creation in the Islamic world of a theory of perception to the exclusion of what Belting calls “a theory of pictorialization” accords with Bīdil’s particular appropriation of Ibn ʿArabi’s concept of theistic monism, called the “unity of being” (waḥdat al-wujūd) by his commentators. As Minissale notes, this concept has frequently been misunderstood to designate a kind of pantheism. But whereas pantheism entails the thesis that God inheres in all things and that all things are thus equally real, Ibn ʿArabi’s “unity of being” signified the unreality of all things except God.44 The “unity” in question thus implies an equal unreality of all things with respect to the originating, limitless and divine Real that 41 42 43 44 Bīdil, Chahār ʿunṣur, 342. Minissale, Images of Thought, 230-242. Hans Belting, Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). Minissale, Images of Thought, 231-233. philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 21 6/17/2015 3:38:52 PM 22 keshavmurthy discloses itself in the forms of all things but, by this very self-limitation in form, conceals itself from our perception. Things, as Bīdil recurrently and variously formulates it across his voluminous corpus of ghazals, are united in the simultaneous self-disclosure and self-concealment of the Real.45 The blind, by this rationale that plays on verse fifty of chapter six of the Qur’an (Surat al-An‘am), are equivalent to the seeing.46 It is the optical logic governing his perception of the divine Real as a possibly delimited and therefore defective appearance of this Real that mainly concerns him rather than the nature of appearances themselves. This explains the recurrence and significance of what Minissale calls the technique of the mise en abyme—literally “put into the abyss”—by which Mughal painting suggests the abyssal quality of the visible world. Replicating the literary technique of the mise en abyme found in Persian masnavis, a Mughal painting often duplicated itself within its pictorial world to induce a sense of the unreality of the visible universe through an infinite regress from frame to frame. Replicating such paintings, in turn, by his use of metaphors of painting, Bīdil imputes a defective reality to his brilliantly detailed portrait by Anūp Chhatr even as he sets it within his autobiography’s “faintly traced outline.” As Minissale has it: “Simply put, the clue to the logic of the mise en abyme here may be found as long ago as Porphyry who reports that Plotinus was supposed to have refused to have a portrait painted of himself, objecting to the notion that he must consent to leave, as a desirable spectacle for posterity, ‘an image of an image.’ Plato’s concept of an image ‘three times removed from reality’ was certainly one that both Western and Islamic traditions are familiar with.”47 This is why the theologically motivated iconoclasm of Persian visual culture took the form, not so much of a proscription on images as such, but of an anti-illusionism inscribed into the very aesthetics of image-making.48 45 46 47 48 In this originates Bīdil’s evident attachment in his ghazals to the topos (mażmūn) of blinking as alternating between states of divine self-disclosure and self-concealment. The relevant sentence from verse fifty of chapter six of the Qur’an reads “Is the blind equivalent to the seeing?” Bīdil is drawing here on Ibn ʿArabi who, in his Futuḥāt al-makkiyya (Meccan Revelations), said that with respect to true knowledge of God “The blind and the truly seeing are alike.” http://www.ibnarabisociety.org/articles/mr_introduction. html#_ftn24, accessed on August 3, 2013. Minissale, Images of Thought, 234. For an antecedent to Bidil’s iconoclasm-as-anti-illusionism in a hagiography of Rūmi, see Priscilla Soucek, “The Theory and Practice of Portraiture in the Persian Tradition,” Muqarnas 17 (2000): 103. philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 22 6/17/2015 3:38:52 PM Bīdil ’ s Portrait 23 The Portrait’s Correspondence to Bīdil’s Illness and Recovery At the end of that decade, in 1099/1688, “in keeping with human infirmity, an illness overcame [my] helpless powers and, for seven months, laid me as low as the dust like a shadow.”49 Here, with light and later amplified commentary, is what follows: Bīdil’s friends visit him in his sickbed and one of them looks through his personal anthology of texts for a cure, presumably since he elsewhere describes such medicinal and apotropaic applications of his poetry. In leafing through this book he comes upon the portrait and exclaims in dismay at its faded colors. Bīdil, gazing at it in his illness, can barely make out its colors or image. The pupil of the eye in the painting has leaked into the surrounding blackness, its eyelashes have fallen away and its lips and mouth have all but vanished.50 When he recovers his health, he returns to the painting to see why it had faded. This is what then occurs: “All at once, like a lantern they uncover in a dark house from beneath a skirt or a lid lifted from a heated censer, the witness of the tent of the Hidden [ghayb] rent complacency’s veil and, with a thousand rays, beauty’s lightning beamed out. It was as if Bīdil, without a speaking tongue, was ardently speaking and a departed spring, unveiling itself anew, was a smiling dawn.”51 ‫به یک بار مانند چراغی که در خانه‬ ‫ یا سر پوش‬,‫تاریک از زیر دامن بر آرند‬ ‫از روی مجمر تافته بر دارند شاهد‬ ‫سرادق غیب نقاب تغافل شکافت؛ و به‬ ‫هزار لمعه برق جمال از پرده بیرون‬ 49 50 51 Bīdil, Chahār ʿunṣur, 616. The fluidity of distinction between prose and verse in classical Persian literary culture, a fluidity lost through English colonialism, may be judged by Bīdil’s ghazal adaptation of this episode in the following distich: “One must await the fled colors / The painter’s brush spilled its eyelashes in my portrait.” Although I translate the first person pronoun conventionally by “I”, Bīdil literally says “we” (mā). That this first person plurality is no mere convention across his oeuvre becomes apparent when we recognize the transpersonal quality of the self who speaks. Bīdil, Divan-i Bīdil: jild-i avval (Tehran: intishārāt-i ilhām, 1376/1997), 413. Bīdil thematizes the mutual convertibility of prose and verse in letter 35, addressed to his main patron Shukrullāh Khān, of his Ruqaʿāt. Bīdil, Ruqaʿāt, in Āvāz-hā-yi bīdil, 48. Bīdil, Chahār ʿunṣur, 617 –618. philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 23 6/17/2015 3:38:52 PM 24 keshavmurthy ‫ گویا بیدل بی زبان گرم آهنگ نوا‬.‫تافت‬ ‫ی تکلم است؛ و بهار رفته به تجدید چهره‬ ‫گشایی صبح تبسم‬ That is, the portrait has recovered its colors, disclosing this like a sudden stimulus to the eye or nose. The intensity of this stimulus seems to duplicate Bīdil in his portrait since he likens it to the negation of the conventional dumbness of pictures by a speaking image of himself. By this, he, the “witness of the tent of the Hidden” had come to a sudden realization about his origins in a now hidden world; he had “rent complacency’s veil.” The familiar and mythicizing metaphor is that of a mystic-lover spying on or “witnessing” his divine Beloved, catching a blinding glimpse of Him in a state in which He is hidden from the senses. Bīdil’s word for this witness—shāhid—is cognate with the word for ‘martyr’—shahīd—just as the word ‘martyr’ itself also means ‘witness’ in Greek. Witnessing, or looking, and martyrdom, or blinding, coincide in Bīdil’s rediscovery of his portrait as they do in several of his ghazal verses. The imagery and epistemic signification of a sudden sensory stimulus also recalls an earlier moment from the second chapter, or Element, when he describes the sudden advent of intuitive knowledge of the Real as a “helpless sneeze” that comes to him after a long period of smelling flowers which, in this metaphor, formulates his attention to the bodies of the ambient world.52 Awareness of what is most real comes rarely and briefly as a shock to the body. The hairs stand on end on the bodies of Bīdil’s friends. Never having experienced anything similar in the created or painted world, they find themselves unable to look further at the picture or hear anything more of it and collectively exclaim: “What calamity is this?” and “From where did this storm arise?” On recovering from his illness, he cannot bear to contemplate the painting again and tears it to bits, burying the bits in the ground. The formulaic phrase by which he formulates this iconoclastic action—“I reduced it to a rending of the collar” (be chāk-i garībān rasānīdam)—cites the ecstatic Sufi practice of tearing one’s own shirt, or those of fellow practitioners open during a collective mystical transport.53 Specifically, the phrase cites Rūmi’s formulation of the same 52 53 Bīdil, Chahār ʿunṣur, 463. Among the earliest authoritative references to this Sufi practice is al-Ghazāli’s (d. 1111): “In ecstatic audition [samāʿ] there are bodily contortions, rhythmic movement and the tearing of clothes. Whatever of this arises from being overcome and is unintentional— no objection can be made to it. Whatever of it is intentional on the parts of those who want to show people they are ‘adepts’ when they are not—this is forbidden.” Abū Ḥāmid philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 24 6/17/2015 3:38:52 PM Bīdil ’ s Portrait 25 spiritual practice: “If you seek the soul [rūḥ], rend your shirt, O boy / So you may swiftly attain purity. / A Sufi is he who seeks purity / Not by woolen clothes, tailoring and fine patterning.”54 By his careful phrasing, Bīdil thus solicits an interpretation of his rending of his portrait as an action that is simultaneously iconoclastic and self-purifying, ridding him of his superficial attributes so that he may become a Sufi. He and his friends then find themselves compelled by this “miracle of the world of the singular” ( jahān-i bī-chunī) to admit to weakness as a condition traversing all creations, sentient and insentient. Bīdil concludes this episode with a simultaneously self-effacing and selfaggrandizing set of statements that replicate his actions at the end of a subsequent episode in the same Element. There, he unintentionally and by his God-given powers brings a maid in his household back to life after she dies of an incurable illness. When witnesses praise him for this miracle (khāriq, karāmat) he briefly grows proud of his powers but then, admonishing himself, explains the event away with ostentatious modesty as no more than a fantasy (tavahhum).55 Here, he argues: “The degrees of ability [istiʿdād] are the manifestation of the mirror of the subtleties of the Hidden” (āyina-yi lat̤āyif-i ghaybīʾst). “Ability” must be innate or given to be cultivated; otherwise not even the best cultivation will improve a creature. The instances of such “ability” he cites, suggest that he deploys the word in line with Ibn ʿArabi to signify the soul’s ability to generate forms from oneself by which, or in which the Real discloses itself: the natural generativity of even cut-plants, the persistent natural barrenness of even watered salt-fields or the uncoerced natural lushness of fertile land. His conclusion to the ekphrastic episode thus adds an item to this list of naturally generative creations: “Thus the truth of that portrait [taṣvīr] is among the distinctions of the Bīdilian nature [az khavāṣ-i t̤īnat-i bīdilīst] even as Bīdil, in the manner of a painted person, is bereft of the essence of awareness like the gleam of the eye’s lights that is a ray of the pupil’s traces, even as the pupil remains bewildered in a veil of blackness.”56 The portrait was an unconscious effect of Bīdil’s inner disposition (t̤īnat) just as the eye’s pupil is unaware of the luminous rays it emits towards the selected object. But who, 54 55 56 Muḥammad al-Ghazāli, Kīmīyā-yi saʿādat: jild-i avval (Tehran: Shirkat-i intishārāt-i ʿilmī va farhangī, 1370/1991), 490. This statement and others like it implicitly cite a famous report that the prophet Muḥammad, after his cloak slipped from his shoulders when listening to a singer, cut up his cloak into four hundred pieces and divided it amongst onlookers. Jalāluddīn Rūmī, Masnavī-i maʿnavī: daftar-i panjum (Tehran: Pizhman, 1373/1994-95), 362-3. Bīdil, Chahār ʿunṣur, 623. Bīdil, Chahār ʿunṣur, 619. philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 25 6/17/2015 3:38:52 PM 26 keshavmurthy we should ask, selects the object? The answer, not formulated by Bīdil, must be: the Real. If the portrait shared an iconic relation with Bīdil’s nature, to fade or flare in keeping with his health, it was not through Bīdil’s active intention but by virtue of his God-given and unconsciously active “ability.” Hence the curiously transpersonal formulation: “the Bīdilian nature.” But this also implies that it was God who, after limiting and thus concealing Himself in the form of Bīdil, gave His own delimited form the unconscious ability to decide to participate iconically in the nature of a painted image of itself. That is, if the appearances of the Real are at least partly constituted by the human imagination and if humans themselves are constituted by the Real, then it must follow that the Real discloses and conceals itself to itself in the effects of the human imagination. In fact, by this view God’s cosmos constitutes a gigantic mise en abyme, as Minissale has suggested.57 This is the sense in which we may understand the importance to Ibn ʿArabi and his tradition of the following statement of Allah’s as Muḥammad transmits it in the famous Tradition (ḥadīth): “I was a hidden treasure and loved to be known.” Ibn ʿArabi has this to say: “For how a thing sees itself through itself is not the same as how it sees itself in something else which acts as a mirror for it. So He manifests Himself to Himself in a form which is provided by the place in which He is seen. He would not appear thus without the existence of this place and His manifestation (tajalli) to Himself in it.”58 Visuality in Bīdil’s Oeuvre What is the nature of visuality in Bīdil’s oeuvre? The use of optics in the following ghazal distich—one of several by Bīdil on the “topos” (mażmūn) of “the Beloved’s hierophany” ( jalva-i maḥbūb) or the divine Beloved’s self-disclosure as radiance—leads us to an answer: be andāz-i taghāful nīm rukh ham ʿālamī dārad chirā mustaqbal-i mardum chu taṣvīr-i farang āyī A spectacle, too, is your turning heedlessly away into a picture in profile. Why face me like a European portrait? 57 58 Minissale, Images of Thought, 231-233. Ibn ʿArabi, The Seals of Wisdom (Fusus al-hikam), translated by Ayesha Bewley at http:// bewley.virtualave.net/fusus.html, accessed on August 3, 2013. philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 26 6/17/2015 3:38:52 PM Bīdil ’ s Portrait 27 The logic of the topos determines the following situation: the Beloved, who is given to conventionally treat the ardent and abjectly supplicating speaker in the persona of the lover with cruel disdain, here turns His gaze towards the lover and blinds him by His luminous self-disclosure. This is an idea central to Sufi authors in the Persian tradition from at least as early as Ḥakīm Sanā’ī (d. circa 1130, Ghazni). The lover’s desired vision thus blinds him even as he is granted it.59 Negating this logic of seeing as blinding, the speaker in Bīdil’s distich asks his divine addressee to turn away in the manner of a Mughal portraitin-profile, using the technical term nīm-rukh for this format of portrait. This, it is implied, would spare him the blinding glare of a frontal portrait—here given its technical name of mustaqbal—a style Europeans were associated with since Mughal artists were exposed to European portrait painting in the late 1580s.60 Although I have translated the second hemistich as if it were only directly addressing the speaker, Bīdil in fact puns on the word mardum to signify the “eye’s pupil” and “people” at once. Equally plausible here is a sense of mardum as “person” rather than “people.” This is a signification that by this period would have been taken to be intentionally archaic, and it is one that befits the singular rather than plural number of the speaker. But even taken simultaneously in its singular and plural senses as “person” and “people,” mardum also 59 60 Of Bīdil’s several ghazal distiches on this topos, the following one articulates the identity of blindness and sight in desire for the Beloved’s hierophany with perhaps the most condensed compound metaphor: “The lightning of longing for a vision charred my eyes’ veils. / Waiting peeled my almonds at last” (parda-yi chishmam be barq-i ḥasrat-i dīdār sūkht / intizār ākhir muqashhar kard bādām-i marā). Almonds, by a conventional topos (maẓmūn), were metaphors for the beloved’s eyes. Peeled almonds are white and so, in Bīdil’s “topos-elaboration” (maẓmūn-āfrīni), resemble blind eyes. However, the phrase “white-eyed” (sapīd-chishm) also means “to stare brazenly.” Brazen staring and blindness thus coincide in longing to behold God. Topos-elaborations on this metaphor of the eyes as almonds occur across Bīdil’s Divān, signaling the importance of visuality to his oeuvre. Bīdil, Divān-i Bīdil: jild-i avval, 417. Gregory Minissale, “Seeing Eye-to-Eye with Mughal Miniatures: Some Observations on the Outward Gazing Figure in Mughal Art,” Marg 58, No. 3 (2007): 40-49. The characters imperial Mughal painters sometimes located just outside the margins of paintings looking into the frame or out of it sideways or at us, the viewers, are visual instances of the penetrative power of the gaze. Their eye-rays pierce the frames separating pictorial and non-pictorial reality, sometimes, as Minissale remarks, making us wonder who is watching who: “In Shah Jahan period-painting, the use of the outward gazing figure is a clever way to pique the interest of the viewer and to play a game of illusion versus reality.” Gregory Minissale, “The Dynamics of the Gaze in Mughal Painting,” Marg 58, No. 2 (2006): 57. philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 27 6/17/2015 3:38:52 PM 28 keshavmurthy functions as a bi-lingual pun across Persian and Arabic in the context of translating the afore-mentioned Arabic synonym used by Ibn ʿArabi: insān, meaning “human” or a short-form for the all-encompassing “Perfect Man” as well as “eye-pupil.” The divine Beloved would blind the speaker-lover by flooding his pupil, paronomastically identified with his own person, with light. Such light would radiate from His face and, particularly, from His eyes, thus cancelling the effect of the lover’s own luminous sight-rays. The lover’s plea is thus a plea to be allowed to witness, or to direct his sight-rays towards the Beloved addressee without being blinded by an unbearably greater counter-light. In citing for his purposes the Mughal painting technique of the figure gazing outward, a technique originally appropriated by Mughal imperial painters from European paintings and prints, Bīdil was appropriating one of its major functions. In Mughal painting, the outward gazing figure arrests our eye, interrupting what would otherwise be brief or “snapshot” viewing, to make us, instead, take time, viewing details within the picture consecutively.61 This arresting function of the outward gazing figure draws the viewer into the picture’s action, inducing self-consciousness in him as also something seen, rather than being only the agent of seeing. Bīdil solicits our involvement in the picture-frame of his autobiography, arresting our attention by looking out at us as we look at him. We—the structural equivalents of his Sufi reader-viewer— are fixed by his gaze, a gaze that when he tears his painting up is refined into luminous rays stripped of bodily anchor. The Iconoclastic Hypotext Beneath Bīdil’s Ekphrastic Hypertext62 But why, if it was God who disclosed and concealed Himself to Himself in Bīdil’s body and portrait, did Bīdil tear up the portrait? I will argue in this concluding sub-section that by this iconoclastic action, Bīdil modifies a certain canonical earlier scene of ekphrasis known to him from the Persian literary-mystical tradition, namely Rūmi’s famous account of the painting contest between the Greeks and the Chinese. Bīdil’s account of his portrait is in this sense a 61 62 Minissale, “Seeing Eye-to-Eye,” 42. Minissale writes of the outward gazing figure in Mughal painting: “no written description of its use is extant in Mughal historical documents.” Insofar as Bīdil’s The Four Elements and his ghazals constitute “Mughal historical documents,” this essay calls attention to evidence to the contrary. “Hypotext” and “hypertext” are terms coined in Gerard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). A hypotext is a later text that transforms an anterior text it depends on—a hypertext—by citing it in any of many possible ways. The densely allusive quality of traditional Persian literature makes it especially amenable to the use of Genette’s terminology. philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 28 6/17/2015 3:38:53 PM Bīdil ’ s Portrait 29 hypertext dependent on, yet transforming the hypotext of Rūmi’s famous episode from the end of the first book of his Masnavī-i maʿnavī.63 Towards the end of the first book of his Masnavī, Rūmi calls for an overcoming of the mere intellectual hoarding of scholarship in favor of the intuitive knowledge of the Real that comes from spiritual poverty. To illustrate this, he relates a story about a competition between the Greeks and the Chinese in the art of the painting.64 Each claims to be superior in the art of painting. It is worth pausing here. Rūmi’s word for “painting” is naqqāshī, a word cognate with naqsh, a polysemic noun meaning ‘image’ and ‘imprint’ and thus related by a self-conscious etymology to the arts of writing.65 (Across Bīdil’s autobiography, naqsh also signifies ‘creature,’ thus implicitly characterizing the Creator as writer and painter). To return to the story, the Chinese ask the Emperor, who arbitrates the competition, for “a hundred colors,” daily receiving the colors they ask for. By contrast, “The Greeks said neither image [naqsh] nor color [rang] / befits this task, but only a removal of verdigris [zang].” Rūmi’s rhyme phonemically identifies “color” (rang) with “verdigris” (zang). The heart was conventionally symbolized by the mirror and the heart’s attachments by the rust-like verdigris that forms on polished surfaces like mirrors. Polishing color away thus symbolized detaching the heart from its attachments and improving its power to reflect what shone into it: “Color is like a cloud and colorlessness a moon.” When the painting is complete, the Chinese confound the emperor’s intellect (ʿaql) and understanding ( fahm) with their painted image while the Greeks 63 64 65 We may note in passing the prominence of Rūmi’s Masnavī in Bīdil’s milieu: his mentor ʿĀqil Khān ‘Rāẓi’ composed a commentary on it as did his student, Shukrullāh Khān, at Rāẓi’s urging. Nūr al-Ḥasan Anṣāri, Fārsi adab ba ʿahd-i Aurangzeb, 317. Khushgū notes that “several matters that the Maulavi of Rūm had expounded in his Masnavī and Shaykh Ibn ʿArabi in his Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam he [i.e. Bīdil] deployed [basta] fully with commentary, elaboration, novel comparisons and immeasurable vividness in his own poetry.” Khushgū, Safīna-i khushgū: daftar-i thālith, 115. Khushgū’s use of the verb bastan for “deployed” in this passage discloses his perception of his teacher’s ghazals as a commentary on Ibn ʿArabi and Rūmi since the complete form of the verb at work is maẓmūn bastan or “the deployment of a ghazal topos.” Jalāluddīn Rūmī, Masnavi-i maʿnavi: daftar-i avval (Tehran: Pizhman, 1373/1994-95). Naqqāshi also means ‘sculpting’ and ‘engraving,’ a sense possibly at play here in the Greek activity of paring away color from the wall. Edward William Lane, Arabic-English Lexicon (London, Williams and Norgate, 1863), 2840. It is worth noting a similar semantic effect in the Sanskrit word “likhitā,” for something drawn or painted, as well as something written, or more literally, inscribed on a surface. For this comparison with Sanskrit I thank Sonam Kachru of the University of Chicago and Zukunftsphilologie, Berlin. philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 29 6/17/2015 3:38:53 PM 30 keshavmurthy who have only polished their wall on the opposite side of the same room to reflect the Chinese painting “steal the [Emperor’s] eyes from their sockets.” Rūmi here interprets his own anecdote by identifying the Greeks with “those Sufis” who are “without rote-learning, books and unskilled [bī-hunar].” The Chinese, by implied contrast, command such exoteric knowledge of which the Sufi Greeks are bereft. Whereas color and form symbolize the limits with which knowledge is articulated, a heart polished so as to be free of all color is able to reflect the limitless. The skills of the Chinese appeal only to limited faculties in the Emperor (his intellect, and understanding) while the reflection of their images in the Greek mirror—signifying Gnostic intuition of the Real— strain the Emperor’s sensory limits, stealing his eyes from their sockets. Rūmi even suggests that such a perfectly reflective heart is “He Himself.” Rather than disparaging book-learning, this anecdote calls for its interiorization through the cultivation of a perfect receptivity. Such cultivation would culminate in a superior miniaturization in the heart of “the images [nuqūsh] of the seven heavens,” that is, a perfect integration of macrocosm with microcosm. Also among the significations of color in Rūmi’s anecdote is technology. In asking for paints, the Chinese demand technology to prove their skills, thus furnishing the mythic prototype for Anūp Chhatr’s technical mastery of the skills of painted illusion. By contrast, the Greek method of polishing color off the wall pares away the effects of the technological exacerbation of what I earlier noted was an entrapment in the secondary causality with which scholarship and exoteric knowledge concerns itself. In this sense, the Greek method stands for the spiritual poverty of the Sufis and the Chinese method for the amassing of scholarship. In tearing up and burying his own painted portrait even as he verbalizes it in his autobiography, Bīdil models his action on the iconoclastic erasure of color by the Greeks. Earlier in this essay, we had noted the citation of another of Rūmi’s spiritual teachings in Bīdil’s use of the formulaic phrase “a rending of the collar” in his description of his tearing up of his portrait, amplifying this citation as a paring away of the superficiality of Sufi clothing in favor of the spirit. Here, he implicitly cites Greek iconoclasm as canonized by Rūmi, stripping himself of the density of attributes gathered in the course of a lifetime ever since his soul “shone like the sun from the emanation of Pre-Eternity” and took on a body in “the land of appearances.”66 66 This is a quotation from Bīdil’s chronogram commemorating the date of his own birth: 1054/1644. The chronogram, as indeed all of the rest of his oeuvre, bespeaks one of his overriding aims, which was to fashion his authorial authority as kenotic recovery of his divine origin. Bīdil, Divān-i Bīdil: jild-i avval (Tehran: Intisharat-i Ilham, 1376/1998), 285. philological encounters 1 (2015) 1-34 PHEN 001_01-02_F9_Keshavmurthy_1-34.indd 30 6/17/2015 3:38:53 PM Bīdil ’ s Portrait 31 Conclusion Mirzā ʿAbdul Qādir ‘Bīdil’, entitled the “father of meanings” (ʿabul maʿānī), inaugurated a rupture and new model in the ghazal stylistics that called itself “Speaking Anew” (tāza-gūyʾī). These stylistics originated across the Persian world in the early 1500s and by Bīdil’s lifetime had attained a semantic complexity and polysemic density sometimes compared to the contemporaneous European aesthetic of the Baroque.67 It has long been noted that this deepening stylistic density was an effect of its practitioners’ attempts to reflect in a variety of ways on the cumulative literary heritage of Persian in their own poetry.68 Bīdil’s masnavis, quatrains, stanzaic poems and ghazals comprise canonical instances of this reflexive stylistic thematization of the poetic past of Persian. However, the extant scholarship on his oeuvre does not specify how his poems constitute his own singular, dense and imaginative re-formulations of certain Islamic philosophical, theological and visual traditions. Inasmuch as these interpretations appear for the most part—in the course of what he characterizes in the opening lines of the first Element—as an autobiographical clarification of the divinely authored and pre-written text of his own embodied soul—his poems are, in this transpersonal sense, also autobiographical formulations.69 The iconoclastic anti-illusionism Bīdil inscribes into his verbal portrait of his painted portrait presents us, as it would have its Sufi reader, with the gift of a new iteration of the myth of Islamic iconoclasm. Receiving this gift, we may turn or return to his poems to read them—as we read his ghazal distich that forms this essay’s epigraph—as so many self-erasures of images beamed from Bīdil’s eye. Bibliography ʿĀli, Niʿmat Khān. Vaqāʿī. Kanpur: Naval Kishor, 1873. Anṣāri, Khwāja Abdullāh. Munājāt va guftār-i pīr-i Herāt. Kabul: Thālith, 1390/1970. Anṣāri, Nūr al-Ḥasan. Fārsi adab ba ʿahd-i Aurangzeb. 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