jahāñ shatranj-bāzandah falak ham tum haiñ sab muhre ̤ basān-e shāt̤ir-e nau żauq use muhroñ kī zad se hai When the sky plays chess, you, me, we’re all chessmen. Like every beginner, it enjoys breaking the pieces. Poets, like sovereigns, can suffer under the grandiloquent titles thrust upon them by their votaries.
As we have seen, Mir has been assigned the laudatory title of Khudā-e Sukhan, the “God of poetry”. Like many such gestures of praise and applause in the Indian cultural context, this title expresses conventional admiration while deferring critical engagement. It permits free rein to those who would embroider a whimsical portrait of the poet from clichés, apocryphal tales and fanciful anecdotal evidence while ignoring the true import of his poetry.
SR Faruqi diagnoses the problem pithily: Unfortunately, a fiction about Mir’s life led to a stereotypical assumption in Mir’s criticism. The fiction is that Mir’s life was an unrelieved tale of misery and sorrow. The assumption is that his poetry is the true and consistent expression of this misery.
The fiction became possible because of the belief, promoted by colonial educators in the late nineteenth century, that poetry should be the expression of personal emotional states and should be “true” and “natural”. A very firm foundation of both beliefs was laid by Āb-e Hayāt (Water of Life, 1880), an account of Urdu “poets of renown” by Muhammad Husain Azad. Faruqi offers a .