Speaker: Shad Naved
A passion “mediated” by physicality led poets to contemplate the “absolute” unity of passion with the unseen divine. This literary schema for passion (or ishq) was recorded in lyrical couplets across vast territories of Eurasia and Africa, wherever the ghazal came to be written in the last millennium. Modern hermeneuts argue that medieval mysticism (Sufism) can be recognized in the plurilingual ghazal. Other voices, such as Abul Kalam Azad in his early writings, recognized the historical reality of mystical passion through a primary, earthly queerness.
Professor Naved spoke about Azad’s celebrated essay on Sarmad, the seventeenth-century poet-martyr, who, when gazed upon by a “Hindu boy” in Mughal India, became a symbol for both the passion of renunciation and the renunciation of passion as recorded in the ghazal and popular memory in the subcontinent. While modern hermeneuts have read this as an event “internal” to mysticism, Azad, as a prescient reader of lyric queerness, recognized the fullest linguistic and earthly significance of passion.
Professor Naved’s book ‘The Ghazal Eros: Lyric Queerness in History’ forms the foundation of this exploration, placing queerness at the heart of the ghazal’s evolution.