January 31, 2005

• One of My Other Worlds -

  I've just started working on a PhD dissertation, on the development of the political system in what is now the Pakistani province of Punjab, put away in 1979 with one chapter and part of another left to go when I needed a job to keep my sons in jeans and food and the Department of State came calling.  My children's health problems and my own implosion and years of poor health kept it and me and separated. 

  It's timely, though, addressing as it does the historical and structural reasons underlying Pakistan's inability to develop a stable political system outside military rule.  So it's time to bring it home.

  When I left it aside, the www was hardly a gleam in the eye and IBM gave grants to humanist scholars to teach them what a computer did and how do work with punch cards.

  Searching for old friends from Pakistan on the internet for the past two nights, I've uncovered a veritable garden of delights - pictures of my now-prominant old boyfriends, some loosing hair; lists of polticians, the names familiar, sons of the politicians I interviewed in the mid-70s, thereby arguing one of the underlying premises of my work as of 1979 was valid and still holds, that there is unusual continuity in the political structure of rural power.  I found a website put up by a young fellow from Dera Ghazi Khan district, on the Indus River, a long way from big city lights, where he laments the extraordinarly poor internet service available to him.   When I last visited Dera Ghazi Khan in 1977 I stayed in a house with a wooden chair-like "throne" for a toilet, a metal pan sliding out to empty.  Methinks he is young and impatient, and perhaps thereby an agent for change. 

  I speak Urdu, but have lost some of the higher vocabulary because I keep in practice by knocking the socks off Urdu-speaking taxi drivers who always respond either directly in Urdu, not comprehending that I'm American, or who answer for four sentences in English, then turn around, look astonished and say, "Do you speak Urdu?" in English, to which I always reply, in Urdu, "No, I am speaking French."   What did I find?  A website that emails two fancy Urdu words a week to subscribers, complete with Urdu couplets to illustrate the word's usage.  Imagine!  I'm loving this.

  My house in Delhi was only a block from Ghalib's tomb.  My teacher and I used to take his book of Urdu poems, the Divan-i-Ghalib, there and he would help me translate couplets, sitting at the feet of the master   Here's a rather poor picture of the modest tomb of this astonishingly gifted poet.  You can't see the pierced marble screen well in this photograph, but it was the only one I could locate.

  While poking about on a google search on Urdu poetry, I found a website created by a contemporary about the poetry of Ghalib (she who, if I remember correctly, once remarked that she could't see why anyone made such a big deal out of the way I spoke Urdu, since I made grammatical mistakes - and she's right about that, I do, but I'm a musician and one of the few Americans without South Asian roots to understand the flow, the musical rhythm, of the language, and therein lies the reason for peoples' wonderment at the way I speak.  So there.)

  I can't decide what's the home page, but this will get you started if you want to take a look at this part of the other world I love so much.  http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ghalib/

  If you brouse and read a bit, you'll come to a click-on for "Ghazl Index."  Do that, then click on her link to number 20 and you'll wind up at one of the ghazals I learned while sitting at Ghalib's tomb.  Once I found this at 4 this morning,  I've spoken it to myself several times an hour, as haunted by the flow of the language, the way it captures my life now as I was so many years ago.

  Ghalib was a disciple of the Sufi saint, Nizam-ud-din Auliya.  His tomb is right outside the compound of the saint.  On Thursday nights, when dervesh and devotees would come to dance and sing themselves into an ecstatic state, I could hear the music sitting on my veranda with my boys.  I didn't speak the language well then, nor did I know much about Islam, so I didn't go hang out on Thursday nights, didn't understand what I was missing, but only took in the music from afar. 

  For those of you who are wondering what it sounded like and feel daring, look on Amazon for a cd of qawaalis by the immensely gifted late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.  Peter Gabriel introduced Nusrat Ali to western audiences with his first world music festivals and worked with Nusrat Ali on the soundtrack to The Last Temptation of Christ.  The song "Mast Mast Qalandar" is a sort of signature for Nusrat Ali, and is about the ecstasy, or "mast," arrived at by the Sufi saint, Shahbaz Qalandar, if memory serves (It's been years since I had my own copy of this....). Google "Nasrat Fateh Ali" and you'll find a lot of mp3 downloads of his music.  Add Peter Gabriel to your search terms and you'll come up with free mp3's of his work done at Gabriel's studio, decidedly non-traditional.  This man truly died too young. 

  Here's a link  http://www.emusic.com/album/10601/10601819.html - to a download by Nusrat Ali's cousin, although it wouldn't crawl through the dialup connection  I'm using tonight.  And another one to a cd called "Qawwal: Essence of Desire." http://www.emusic.com/album/10607/10607234.html 

  Qawall are devotional songs, sometimes, but not always, with sufi texts.  I love this music, the pulse, the plain sound of it, even when I don't understand all the words, and, if it's sung in Arabic, which is sometimes the case, I don't know the words at all.   

  Nizam-ud-din Auliya's shrine pleased  my eyes.  Here's one picture of the interior, not mine, for my ex "lost" all my photographs of that stay in India.  While googling my little heart out, I discovered ArchNet's heartstopping collection of photographs which included those of many places dear to  me, and, like a surprize in the crackerjack, included buildings by the fellow whose daughters, then little girls, taught my son Urdu when he was four years old.  There are more extraordinary pictures of this shrine here - http://archnet.org/library/images/one-image.tcl?location_id=1404&image_id=5627

   

  Across the street from my house in Delhi was the tomb of the Mugul emperor, Hamayun.  It was a little ragged then, the grounds not well kept up, the first in a style of Mogul achitecture that would find it's most eloquent expression in the Taj Mahal. 

   

  I often took my baby, Tej, and his brother, Bruce, then 7, across the busy street, pushing an orange plastic baby buggy, which I called in Urdu, "Orange Juice." or "The Orange."  We roamed the grounds at all hours, but I found the place especially peaceful at twilight just before the bats began to fly and the red sandstone took on a glow in the evening sun, the stone finally cool on one's feet. 

  Now, the water channels of Hamayun's tomb, part of any Moghul enterprise, for they loved water gardens (more on that later, as I do too), have been restored, the gardens improved.  ArchNet came through here also.  http://archnet.org/library/sites/one-site.tcl?site_id=8.  This link shows the restored waterway and gardens. http://archnet.org/library/sites/one-site.tcl?site_id=7401.  You can see the waterway in the picture above, looking like a depressed drainage trench in the walkway.  

  I felt a strange and deep connection with the old buildings in Delhi, as if I had once lived in them.  They were neither foreign nor unfamiliar, but infinately pleasing to my eye, with the pierced sandstone and marble screens, the arches repeating themselves in a concatenation so wonderful that I felt I had wondered inside a place of visual magic. 

  pearlbamboo

  ©2005

  • 2:53 am
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