Chandan Sinha’s ‘Abundant Sense: Rahim — Selected Dohas’ is a window into Rahim’s world and his every word’s worth

The career and poetry of Abdur ‘Rahim’ Khan-e-Khana startles, entertains and sometimes even alarms with his dispassionate analysis of the nature of political power and his earthy wisdom about human relationships laced with a subtle sense of humour. In the politically-volatile and socially-intricate India in the 21st century, he has become more and more relevant. The recent years have seen the rise of a genuine interest in making his writings available to a larger audience by translating them into English. So, we’ve begun to see our medieval Bhakha poets being handled by adroit translators.

Chandan Sinha, the translator of this anthology of Rahim’s pithy dohas (couplets), has tried to present this versatile poet and his times to a modern, and largely monolingual, audience. He deserves to be praised for his meticulous attention to the analysis of available facts about Rahim, and following it up with a sizeable bouquet of the poet’s favourite metric form, doha.

Going through this book, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s brilliant ‘Book of Rahim and Other Poems’ comes to mind. However, that book carried a mere section on the translations of select dohas; the other chapters dealt with the associative power of similar poems from great poets from other lands. Sinha’s scholarly work tries to carry the essence of Rahim’s poems, the form used by him and the times that produced it for the common poetry lover who may not know much about Bhakha poetry of the medieval period.

To slot the poems in certain contexts, Sinha has divided the selected couplets neatly into three: poetry of bhakti (devotion), reeti (principles of upright behaviour) and preeti (love). In this, he seems to adhere close to another great royal poet, and later sanyasi, Bhartrihari’s compilations of shlokas into three volumes: ‘Niti Shatak’, ‘Shringar Shatak’ and ‘Vairagya Shatak’. The translator, however, cautions the readers that to understand the depth of Rahim’s scholarship, his sharp insights into human nature and politics and his sensitive ear for languages, his works must be read in entirety.

He has taken care to add a special segment on dohas, the two-line couplets of 24 beats, a form beloved of poets, from Tulsidas to Rahim. Rahim describes the doha as a tightly-coiled rope in the hands of an acrobat; that, when unfurled, turns out to be packed with far greater meaning than expected.

The bones of Rahim’s life are those of a 16th century talented, blue-blooded aesthete of mixed parentage (father a Turk General and mother the daughter of a Mewati chief). His father Bairam Khan was killed in battle and Akbar brought him up with care and exposed him to scholars and Sufis early on. It was due to this patronage that Rahim could be both a witness and a participant in the turbulent history of his age.

As a war hero, a great bibliophile, a polyglot poet, a generous patron and mentor of writers, none can deny he was one of the most original minds among emperor Akbar’s celebrated courtiers. Rahim’s career took a dip after the death of Akbar. However, by the time Rahim passed away in his seventies, he was a national institution. The haunting quality of his poetry about the leavened political lives of courtiers and poets can be traced to this. He was a man who knew both the euphoria of winning wars as well as the suffocating spite of his later prosecutors.

Rahim wrote in several languages, experimenting with form and meter and linguistic combinations such as doha and barvai. Like his predecessor Amir Khusro, Rahim’s poetry braids together various northern dialects that go on to create the hybridised Hindvi, the spoken language. Sinha’s introduction acquaints the readers with the many-faceted Rahim, who was no tourist at the fringes of artistic activity in classical languages Farsi and Sanskrit, and the mellifluous Bhakhas or spoken dialects that fed into Hindvi.

He was a contemporary of another great Awadhi-Sanskrit scholar-poet, Tulsidas. A disciple of Tulsidas said that his guru received some poems composed in the barvai meter that encouraged him to later compose the ‘Barvai Ramayana’. However, Sinha reminds us that there are more myths surrounding Rahim’s interactions than the textual evidence. What is undeniable is that he had a flair for writing in many languages and maintained warm links with his contemporaries, even those like Tulsidas, who were averse to interacting with the royal durbar.

Some may question the translator trying to break away from free verse to retain the intricate rhyme and meter (two rhyming lines in the ratio of 13:11) of the original poems in a foreign tongue, with its own vast store of rhyme and rhythm that have also organically developed from public usage. The somewhat forced retention of the Bhakha meters and the urgency to rhyme words at the end of each couplet can often drown the subtle dual meanings tucked within shared public memories of great heroes, historic battles and daily lives of the people who created the vernaculars of North India.

The translator, to be fair, has taken care to place each translated couplet next to the original one in Nagari script. But reading the English version, one notices the easy flow of Braj Bhasha and the ‘in’ironical tales and jokes dialects carry as pithy metaphors and myths are intranslatable within the framework of foreign vocabularies.

Sinha’s translations are clear and neat, but English mostly lacks the power to tug and pull at the shared racial memory of Bhakha speakers. Even honest efforts at reordering the Hindvi rhymes in English translation can at best create rhyming couplets that sound banal if not almost comical in English:

Kaagaz ko so pootara sahajahi mein ghul jaye/Rahiman yeh achraj lakho, so oo khenchat jaye (The doll made of paper scraps, which easily dissolves/Rahim, isn’t it marvellous that it too swells up with pride?)

Those who are well-versed in Bhakha would get the drift.

Overall, this is a good book for beginners trying to acquaint themselves with the world of Hindvi, a syncretic culture born out of a spontaneous Hindu-Muslim intermingling that resulted in the poetry of Jayasi, Kabir, Nanak, Tulsi, Rahim, Raskhan, Ghananand and countless bandishes still sung on stage, in temples and dargahs.

The cover is attractive and the foreword by the Hindi scholar Purushottam Agarwal is informative. One must compliment the work put in by Sinha in dredging historical facts from all kinds of myths and racial misgivings that have since come to surround old poets, especially from the Mughal period.

Sinha has also provided the readers with excellent footnotes and meticulously recorded source material for further reading. It will hopefully make the non-Bhakha readers realise that Hindvi/Hindi or North Indian dialects are not crafted for political sabre rattling, but to carry the love, longing and creative thought of our ancestors, who were far superior to the modern-day religiosity of the kanwariyas or their political mentors.

— The reviewer is a veteran journalist