The Urdu ghazalth and its discontents

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was struck at reading Urdu Ghazal poetry by its incredibly sappy, self-debasing, and 'emo' tone. These supposedly eternal verses came off as not much more than portentious whining. Then my buddy özge did me a solid by giving me access to her friend Evrim's libary account at boğaziçi university and I've been spending all morning drooling over articles, one of which was Ralph Russel's "the pursuit of the Urdu Ghazal" which detailed his own initial disdain and disbelief with why Ghazal's are so revered when they don't seem much more than a random string of couplets about unrequited love. Russsel finds a key in a quote by C.S. Lewis "any idealization of sexual love, in a society where marriage is purely utilitarian, must begin by being an idealization of adultery". Lewis is referring to medieval European literature when he made this statement but russel sees no offense in describing Urdu literature as such since the mughal empire was entirely "medievel in spirit" as well as being itself the language of an elite and thereby being "markedly aristocratic in its values".
So when you take this historical background into account, and imagine some stubble-chinned poet in mughal India being a little bit dramatic because he can be counted among one of the more blue-balled of the civilizations unbehangen (Herbert Marcuse would be so proud of me now, historicizing the ontogenesis of Mir Taqi Mir ), you can be a little more sympathetic for our dear hyperbolic bards.

we can use this little passage from Russel to expand on the historical context

It is worth pointing out that all three of these situations (coveting another man's wife, homosexual love for a youth, courtesans) of love have one feature in common- the lover knows that his love must in the last resort be hopeless. A girl married or betrothed to another man can never be his; a boy grows up; and a courtesan by the very nature of her calling cannot giver herself to him alone. The desperation of the lover portrayed in the ghazal is, therefore, a desperation founded upon all the real-life experience of love

He goes on to discredit such a mechanical interpretation of the inspiration for these poets, and waxes on about the relative unimportance of wondering if in concrete reality these authors actually experienced such unrequited episodes of passion, even in the mystical sense, for if we know something for certain it is that most of the most famous urdu poets were not overly mystical. The important thing for Russell is the role these poems play as a sort of social pressure release valve in a society founded on feudal principles of divine decree, ordained caste, and fatalist social standing. Even the rulers can get in on the act of allowing a couple of homo-erotic love poems to become adored by society. He says
"the rulers of society felt no great difficulty in giving the seal of approval to the ghazal as a, so to speak, licensed, institutionalized form of passionate protest against a world in which the poet and his audience were likewise confined"
I of course live in an age of repressive desublimation and so sexual angst means almost nothing to me unless I work in a contrived aesetic way to engender it in myself (which I actually did once for a semester and even that in small doses drove me straight into the arms of mysticism and troubadordom) and so I guess I can imagine to what lengths I would be emo-ized under such conventionally repressive conditions (I no doubt buy into the notion that repression has merely been deffered into the performance principle but at least I can look at boobs before I get married) . If you take a look at any one of ghalib's macabre verses you can begin to appreciate a sense of meloncholy as "a pure culture of the death instinct".
I can imagine myself likewise repressed in an age where satisfaction wasn't so immediately accessible. not even in the erotic sense, hell take Jstor for example. before I had access to it it could be said of my heart
دل میں ذوق وصل ویاد جائ ستور تک باقی نہیں آگ اس گھر میں لگی ایی کہ جو تھا جل گیا

not even relish for union and memory of the beloved Jstor remained in the heart.
Fire so raged in this house that whatever remained, burned