Sufi is flavour of season
Mohan K. Tikku

Around this time last year, Coleman Barks, American poet and celebrated translator of Persian poet Jalaluddin Rumi, sent me a mail saying that he was going to be in Afghanistan for the Afghan New Year and would like to squeeze in a day or two for a visit to New Delhi as well.

Incidentally, Barks is not a professor at the University of Georgia—as mentioned by Khuswant Singh in his column in Hindustan Times, earlier this month. He stopped teaching many years ago. Nor is Bawa Mohiyauddin, who Barks turned to for spiritual guidance way back in the 1970s, an Iranian mystic. He is Sri Lankan.

Barks’ visit to New Delhi last year could not come off. The US Embassy in New Delhi advised him against it. They told him that visiting India for a day or two, which is all that Coleman could spare at the time, did not make any sense. If he wanted to come, he should come for at least a week, preferably two.

Barks observes a tight schedule, and is usually booked for poetry reading sessions months in advance. So, he had to give New Delhi a miss.

Coleman Barks’ visit to Afghanistan last year had been organized by the US State Department. As someone whose translations of Rumi have sold more than half a million copies, he was invited to usher in the Afghan Navroz with readings of his translations. He ended up with readings in Kabul, Herat, Mazari-sharif and Rumi’s boyhood home in Balkh. The idea was to impress upon Afghan audiences how appreciative the United States was of their best-loved poet. They call it cultural diplomacy.

Coleman’s own affair with Rumi started way back in 1976 when poet Robert Bly handed him a copy of Rumi’s poems with the exhortation: "These poems need to be released from their cages."

He took up the task with such single-minded devotion that he had to cut on his own poetry writing. He spent nine years with Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. It is mainly through his translations that Rumi has become the most widely read poet in the United States—surpassing any American poet, Walt Whitman included.

"American ear was not only receptive to Rumi’s poetry," Coleman says by way of explaining his phenomenal success, "but also eager for it."

Sufism seems to have become the flavour of the season in these parts as well. Last month, Ajeet Cour of the Academy of Fine Arts and Literature hosted an international conference on Sufism in the Capital.

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