The Sharbat and the Glass

Sharbat is the sweet drink, rose or lemon or sandalwood, poured into the same glass as anything else and permitted to everyone. Wine, mai, is the drink that is not permitted. The ghazal is written in the glass between them. It never says which one is in it, and it keeps the glass moving so you cannot look too closely.

Persian and Urdu poetry stage this in one place, the tavern, with a small and very stable cast. The same characters walk on in Hafez in fourteenth-century Shiraz and in Ghalib in nineteenth-century Delhi. Learn them, and half the ghazals in either language open.

Dramatis personae#

The sāqī (ساقی), the cup-bearer. Usually young, usually beautiful, the one who pours. In the love poem, the sāqī is often the beloved, or stands so near the beloved that the two blur. In the Sufi reading, the sāqī is the one who dispenses grace, and may be the divine itself. Hafez opens his collected ghazals by calling to him, in Arabic, before the Persian begins (ganjoor):

اَلا یا اَیُّهَا السّاقی اَدِرْ کَأسَاً و ناوِلْها که عشق آسان نمود اوّل ولی افتاد مشکل‌ها

alā yā ayyuha-s-sāqī adir ka'san va nāvilhā ki ʿishq āsān namūd avval valī uftād mushkil-hā

O cup-bearer, send the cup around and hand it on; love looked easy at first, and then the difficulties fell.

The most famous book of Persian lyric opens with an order to a waiter. That is not an accident. It is a manifesto.

Mai (مے), also bāda, sharāb. The wine. In the tavern it is grape and fermentation, a real thing that real people drank, sold and were punished for. In the mystic's reading it is the love that dissolves the self, the drink after which the drinker is not who he was. The poems need both. Without the grape the wine is a pious abstraction; without the love it is a drinking song.

Jām, piyāla, sāġhar (جام، پیالہ، ساغر). The cup, in three words of slightly different weight. The cup is filled and emptied; so is the heart. And one cup in particular haunts the whole tradition: the jām-e-jam, the cup of Jamshid, the legendary king of Iran, in which he could see the entire world. Remember it. It returns below.

The maiḳhāna (مے خانہ), the tavern. A wine shop, a gathering place, a site of transgression with a door that opens onto a lane. Also, by the time the vocabulary is mature, the whole world, or the path, or the beloved's presence. The tavern is where the respectable are not, and therefore where honesty is.

The pīr-e muġhān (پیر مغان), the elder of the Magians. In the old stories the wine-sellers were Zoroastrians, outside the law of Islam; their elder kept the tavern. In the poems he becomes something startling: the real spiritual master, wiser than any mosque. Hafez again, the same ghazal:

به مِی سجّاده رنگین کُن گَرَت پیرِ مُغان گوید که سالِک بی‌خبر نَبْوَد ز راه و رسمِ منزل‌ها

ba may sajjāda rangīn kun garat pīr-i muġhān gūyad ki sālik bī-ḳhabar nabvad zi rāh u rasm-i manzil-hā

If the Magian elder tells you, stain your prayer rug with wine: the traveller is not ignorant of the road and the ways of its stations.

The prayer rug and the wine, in one hemistich. The sālik is the technical Sufi word for the traveller on the path. Read on the surface, the line tells a pious man to commit sacrilege. Read underneath, it says that obedience to a true guide outranks the outward form of piety. Both readings are in the line, and the line will not choose.

The zāhid and the vāʿiz (زاہد، واعظ), the ascetic and the preacher. The respectable men. They pray in public, fast loudly, and condemn the tavern. In the ghazal they are always slightly ridiculous, and usually hypocrites. Ghalib signs off one ghazal by noting that the preacher was seen going into the tavern just as the poet was coming out; that couplet has its own room elsewhere.

The muhtasib (محتسب), the inspector of public morals. A real office in the Islamic city, charged with checking weights in the market and punishing open drinking. In the ghazal he is the police, ears always open (ganjoor):

اگر چه باده فَرَح بخش و باد گُل‌بیز است به بانگِ چَنگ مخور مِی که مُحتَسِب تیز است

agarchi bāda farah-baḳhsh u bād gul-bīz ast ba bāng-i chang ma-ḳhur may ki muhtasib tīz ast

Though the wine brings joy and the wind is scattering roses, don't drink to the sound of the harp: the inspector is sharp.

Spring, wine, music, and a policeman down the lane. Whatever else the poem means, it begins with a real city.

The rind (رند), finally, the one who drinks. A libertine, a rogue, careless of reputation, and for that reason the only honest man in the play. The rind is the speaker of most of these poems.

One couplet, slowly#

Ghalib's ghazal on the radif nikle, as given on rekhta.org, contains this:

ہوئی اس دور میں منسوب مجھ سے بادہ آشامی پھر آیا وہ زمانہ جو جہاں میں جام جم نکلے

huī is daur meñ mansūb mujh se bāda-āshāmī phir aayā vo zamāna jo jahāñ meñ jām-e-jam nikle

In this age, wine-drinking has been laid at my name; the time has come again for Jamshid's cup to appear in the world.

Take it word by word.

Daur is "age, era." It is also the round of the wine cup as it passes from hand to hand, the word comes from the same Arabic root as the adir, "send around," that Hafez calls to his sāqī. So is daur meñ is "in this age" and "in this round of drinking" at once.

Mansūb is "attributed, ascribed," and often "falsely ascribed." The tone is half accusation and half boast. People say I drink. Let them.

Bāda-āshāmī is formal, almost ceremonial, "wine-imbibing." Not a word for a drunk in a lane.

Then the turn. If wine-drinking is laid at my name, then the age of Jamshid's cup has come round again. The cup in which a king could see the whole world has reappeared, because the poet is holding it.

So what is in the glass?

On the surface: wine, a boast, and a man's bad reputation turned into a royal title. Ghalib drank, and said so, and was not ashamed.

Underneath: the cup of vision. Jamshid's cup was not for getting drunk; it showed the world. To call the drinker's cup jām-e-jam is to claim that what he drinks lets him see. The same drink the preacher calls sin, the poet calls sight.

And it will not settle. Read it as pure mysticism and you lose the swagger, the gossip, the real Delhi of sellers and drinkers that gives the joke its edge. Read it as pure tavern and you lose Jamshid, who is not a drinking companion but a mythic king with a world in his hands.

Why the wine is, and is not, wine#

The tavern vocabulary is sometimes explained as code: wine "means" divine love, the tavern "means" the Sufi lodge, and the reader's job is decryption. That flattens it. A code has one key. These words have two, and the poems turn both at once.

Wine is wine because the tavern was a real place, its keepers real Zoroastrians and Christians and Jews, its inspector a real official with a real whip. Poems set there take pleasure, transgression and the social life of a city seriously. A great many ghazals are about exactly that and nothing else.

Wine is not wine because a tradition of mystics, for centuries before Hafez, took the most forbidden thing in the city and made it the image of the most sacred: the love that dissolves the self in God. The scandal is the point. Nothing respectable could carry that much.

What English does, almost always, is choose. A translation with a reverent preface tells the reader "this is a metaphor," then renders a metaphysics with no tavern in it. A translation with no preface turns Hafez into a jolly drinking song. Both are half the glass.

A good translation keeps the glass moving: wine in the line, love in the reader's ear, and no footnote that explains the poem away. The test is simple. Ask a reader what the poem is about. If they answer "a tavern," or "God," the translation has chosen. If they hesitate, it may have kept the poem.

The sharbat and the wine stand side by side in the same glass. The ghazal pours, and does not say which.