The Doorless Doorway


The Doorless Doorway:
An Interview with Ahsan "Sharaar" Bilrami
- by Prof. Afroz Taj, NC State University

In early August of this year I had the opportunity to videotape an interview with Ahsan "Sharaar" Bilrami, a poet who I first met during my childhood, and who, after my mother, was the most important factor in my early interest in Urdu poetry. I went to see him not only because I personally happened to be his shaagird once, but also because I admire the depth and height of his works, which I would like to see studied and brought to a wider audience.

Sharaar Sahib lives in Bilram, a small village near Kasganj in U.P., India. I arrived in Bilram without knowing his address, but after asking directions multiple times, and squeezing the car through the endless maze of narrow village streets, I eventually found Sharaar at home. His ancestral house, centuries old, was practically in ruins, but he cheerfully invited me in for the interview. After so many years he was much frailer than I remembered, but he still had the same twinkle in his eye. We sat down in his courtyard in front of the camera. In his hands Sharaar held his treasure, his notebooks of Urdu poetry. As I interviewed him, I felt like an archeologist, digging in the hot sun, unearthing fragments of long-buried treasure, and brushing from them the dust of the ages.

Mohammad Ahsan Khan, pen name "Sharaar," has spent his whole life in Bilram. His ancestors, who were Rajput and close relatives of the Maharaja of Nepal, originally came from Ajmer in Rajasthan. As a result of a dispute with Prithvi Raj Chauhan, Sharaar's ancestor Raja Bhayankar Mal fled Ajmer, having first sought the blessing of Khwaja Muinuddin Chisti and being converted by the Saint to Islam. As they were fleeing, pursued by Prithvi Raj's army, they came to "Kali Nadi," a branch of the Ganges, and hid in the dhaak jungle on its banks for several days. When the army had passed, they came out and found a nearby basti (settlement), which was Bilram. Sharaar's ancestors have been living here generation after generation. Many of the havelis (mansions) look like they were never properly repaired. These ruined palaces, doorless arches, roofless halls, with grass growing out of the walls, are truly evocative remnants of a bygone era. Ever since I had known Sharaar in my childhood, I had always seen him busy with his poetry, but I wondered what his actual profession was. It appears that Sharaar had some residual income from his family land, and for 13 or 14 years he was the Urdu teacher at Azad Gandhi Higher Secondary School in Kasganj, but he didn't get along with the principal and was fired in 1965. Since then, he has been basically unemployed, and derives all of his meager income from tutoring the Kasganj children in Urdu. His interest in poetry started in 1945, when he wrote some couplets for a mushaira, based on the assigned model (tarah): Yoon khila ghuncha ki gul jaame se bahar ho gaya.

Based on this model, Sharaar wrote:

Woh chale arman chale hasrat chali ansoo chale,
Dekhte hi dekhte khali bhara ghar ho gaya.

Sharaar Sahib used to get frequent mushaira invitations. When I asked if he had ever traveled abroad, he mentioned that he had been to Sikrandabad, Aligarh, Moradabad, Mainpuri, Bulandshahr, and even Delhi. He recalled an episode that caused him to reduce his mushaira activity. One day he was with some of his fellow poets at a mushaira. When the mushaira ended and it was time for the payment, the host who had invited them turned out to be dishonest and tried to give the poets less money than had been decided. Some of the other poets started to swear at the host. Sharaar was frightened and felt very insulted. Then he decided that participating in mushairas for pay was not really a good thing.

From my childhood until today, every morning after the dawn prayers, Sharaar travels the 6 kilometers to Kasganj in an ikka (horse-carriage), where he goes door to door to tutor children in Urdu, and occasionally drops in on old friends and acquaintances. Many of his couplets were conceived in the ikka, on the road from Bilram to Kasganj or back again in the evening. He has written about two thousand ghazals in his life, maybe four or five hundred qata'at, and many geet and nazms.

Once, when returning from a brief trip to Bombay, oppressed by loneliness, as Sharaar lay in the train this couplet came to his mind:

Nahin jis per kiwaden phir woh dar wapas bulata hai,
Meri awargi ko mera ghar wapas bulata hai.

Toward the end of the interview, a gentle rain began to fall. Meanwhile, it was becoming more and more difficult to control the crowd of village people who were trickling into Sharaar Sahib's house, since there was no door to close his doorway, no lock that could be fastened. When I asked him why he didn't have a door at the entrance to his house, he smiled and said, "I haven't needed a door since my wife died. No one can steal my thoughts, my Urdu, or my poetry, and I don't like to stop anybody from coming in. But if you want to build a new door, I wouldn't stop you either."

The film of my interview with Sharaar is available in digital Quicktime streaming video format at the following website:

http://www2.ncsu.edu/tsac/hindi-test/sharaar.mov