Anees – the creator of words

Maqbara of Mir Anees, Lucknow

Mir Babr Ali (pen name: Anees), the world renowned Urdu poet was born in 1803 in Faizabad, North India. His ancestors had arrived in India along with the swathes of Turkic and Mughal invaders from Iran and Afghanistan, from as early as the 12^th century, as was the case with many Seyyed families of North India.

Following his homeschooling Mir left for Lucknow, the greatest centre of Islamic learning in the Urdu speaking world. As was tradition amongst the bourgeois intellectual circles of Muslim India he received an education in both Arabic and Persian in his formative years. And typical of the military roots of the Muslims of North India, he was an expert horse rider and solider. Yet, it was in the tender field of poetry that he really found his footing.

Legend has it Mir Sahib composed his first rubbai (quatrain)  at the age of four, describing the death of his goat. As a fully fledged poet Anees began his career with the Ghazal (a poetic form consisting of rhyming couplets).

Yet, it was the Marsiya (elegy which describing the tragedy of Karbala)  that would be he is crowning glory. Anees composed powerful flowing historic-narrative, mass converting people and moving to tears the thousands that would regularly attend his recitals in the great Shia cities of Lucknow and Hyderabad. Nehru, the first prime minister of India, a Hindu by birth and an atheist later, described Anees as his “essential reading on the day of Ashura only to let [him] shed more of [his] insularity!”

One has but to witness the atmosphere of the Urdu Majlis now, where Anees has become an essential, to get a glimpse of what it may have been like in those Moharrum nights in Lucknow. Moreover according to  Abe-Hayat (the water of life), the widely quoted Urdu anthology, Anees composed nearly ten thousand elegies alone on this single historical event.

There are many reasons to argue that Anees was the most sublime poet of all time. One has to but glance at the sheer volume of his work, his popularity amongst the masses of the sub-continent, the  regularity with which he is quoted, and not least the lofty subjects of his poetic masterpieces.