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Like most hymns of this kind,
Farid’s shalokas were uttered to match the mood and the
milieu. These songs, on the whole, centre round the themes of
transience and mortality, sin and suffering, illusion and
reality, pity and love, longing and nostalgia, alienation and
redemption. In shaloka after shaloka, one finds
evidence of an awakened and aching soul in deep torment over the
creature state of man, pondering the path of self-realisation in
a world designed to defeat such a quest. The paradox of
redemption stipulated an agonising awareness of the limits of
human understanding, on the one hand, and of boundless divine
grace, on the other. In the final analysis, a mystic
breakthrough was more an act of providence and the inscrutable
will of God than of cognition or merit or endeavour. However,
"the doors of perception", as William Blake said, had
to be "cleansed" before a vision of the Godhead would
be vouchsafed. Beatitude was indeed a gift of God, but the
receiving vessel had to be whole and ready.
Though there are
several strands in Farid’s tapestry of thought, one persistent
or unfailing idea which informs his songs is the idea of the
proximity, inevitability and universality of death. Several shalokas
are directly inspired by the thought of human transience. This
appears to constitute the bedrock of his worldview. A little
consideration will, however, show that Farid’s haunting
concern with mortality does not really stem from the terror of
the void. The existential ache in his verses is not conditioned
by death-qua-death. Since the world, in his view, is essentially
a vanity of vanities, a theatre of illusions, death is but a
cessation of the void, and the ache, if only because it opens
the way to the abiding life of the spirit. The obsessive imagery
of dust and ashes, of bone and skeleton, of worms and maggots
does suggest a strong streak of Thanatos or death-wish in his
utterances. On one occasion, when his turban slipped from his
head, and fell to the ground, he sang:
Farid, I fear that
my turban will be soiled,
My thoughtless
soul knoweth not that dust will rot my head also.
(Macauliffe)
The sepulchral
theme of these and other such couplets does not, however,
suggest mere negation or void, chaos or horror. In fact, at
times, death suggests mystical overtones. One is reminded of the
American poet, Emily Dickinson’s enigmatic lyrics wherein too
death is seen as a keen ravisher, sought after and longed for.
In one of these Thanatos-oriented poems, she talks of death as
"a dialogue, between the spirit and that dust." Farid’s
vision too, encompasses a similar passage from here to eternity.
Indeed, the theme
of death is often related in Farid’s shalokas to the
theme of life’s vanities. Power and pelf, forts and mansions,
fleshly beauty and charm hold men captive in endless illusions.
Few, indeed, can break the stranglehold of sense, habits and
indulgence. The grime of greed makes the spirit opaque to
heavenly splendours.
Listen, O Man,
thou didst not look to the tackle of the boat,
When it was yet
time;
In the lake
swollen with tempests, how shalt it float?
Fugitive are
pleasures like kusumbha, burning away at a touch.
Touch it not, my
beloved, lest it wither away.
(G.S.Talib)
Farid’s
other-worldly vision has often people led to believe that he
preached a life of hard asceticism. But this is not really his
way of suggesting abstinence and negation. He advocated, on the
contrary, a cultivated sensibility of discipline amidst pain and
suffering. The yearnings, for instance, of the bridal soul are
given a lyrical grace.
I slept not with
my husband last night, my body is pining away.
Go, ask the wife
whom her husband has put away,
How she passeth
the night.
(Macauliffe)
Farid’s utter
humility comes out clearly again and again in his shalokas:
Farid, revile, not
dust there is nothing like it;
When we are alive,
it’s beneath our feet,
When we are dead,
it’s above us.
(Macauliffe)
Composed in one of
the Punjabi dialects, Farid’s verse has the immediacy, warmth
and authenticity of experience associated with Punjabi
sensibility. There is, in its inflectional beauty, endless
richness and intensity. The sinewy, muscular idiom subsumes
suppleness and opulence.
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