Canonised as one of Urdu’s greatest poets, Mir Muhammad Taqi “Mir” of Delhi, who died in 1810, also authored a collection of verse in Persi...
Canonised as one of Urdu’s greatest poets, Mir Muhammad Taqi “Mir” of Delhi, who died in 1810, also authored a collection of verse in Persian. He composed verse in genres other than the ghazal, in which his accomplishments are rightly revered. Among these is the masnavi, a narrative poem of indeterminate length but in in a uniform meter and with rhymed couplets. In this genre he composed seven relatively short masnavis on animals.
These animal poems stand out in the corpus of Urdu and Persian literature because they do not quite correspond to either of the two literary attitudes towards animals we see in earlier Persian and Urdu literature: a typically Sufi allegorical attitude (such as we see in the 13th century Rumi) wherein animals symbolise human traits; and a wholly celebratory attitude (such as we see in Mir’s contemporary Nazeer Akbarabadi) wherein animals like dancing bears or squirrels are elements of a mosaic of urban spectacles.
By contrast, Mir’s animal poems are personal. Brimming with autobiographical affection and humour, they convey Mir’s own relationship to the dog, cats, baby monkey, rooster and goat with whom he shared his home at various times. In their non-allegorical and non-Sufi validation of the here-and-now, these...
