They are ‘containers of social processes.’ Once we have put the lid of nationalism over this container, any of the multiple identities that the container has finds it hard to assert or dominate the ‘normative horizon’ of the national identity.’Īlso Read: Rahat Indori’s Ghazals and Style Spoke to the People and For Them What was this challenge? How did he break the idiom? Ali Khan Mahmudabad in his brilliant book Poetry of Belonging: Muslim Imaginings of India 1850-1950 puts forth an exposition that nation-states being ‘normative horizons’ subsume all other identities within them. No wonder his PhD dissertation was ‘Urdu Mein Mushaira’, awarded to him in 1985 from Bhoj University, Madhya Pradesh. From early on, he understood the format of mushaira and figured out a way to challenge the standard practices in mushaira. Rahat Indori burst on to the poetry scene in the mid-1970s and soon he made a mark for himself on the Mushaira scene. The young, impressionable me asked him who is this poet? With much glee, he said, this is Rahat Indori. When my poet uncle and aunts, traditional and conservative in their form and style, saw the performance, they disapproved of it.īut my dad, himself a great performer who would often recite shers with even greater bluster and elan in private mehfils or Muharram majlises, seemed to be loving it. And his style, maverick like, was completely over the top. But his words had a great connect with the audience. As said in Urdu literary parlance “ Asaatza ne nahin baandha hai,” or the masters have not woven it into the poetic syntax. In one such recording, there was this new young poet, unconventional in his style and syntax, provocative, a complete performer, and challenging the grammar of mushaira etiquettes, yet the crowd seemed to be loving him. Now he could get video recordings of the mushairas and watch them for hours.
When VCRs became widespread in our living rooms, he was excited. He would procure audio cassettes of mushairas and listen to them on loop.
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