Mahmud Gami

Mahmud Gami was born during the Afghan rule in Kashmir. He lived for about ninety years, seeing the whole of the Sikh rule and also the first few years of the Dogra regime. Though reliable records are not available, Mahmud Gami is believed to have been born in A.D. 1765 in village Aravaer in the Shahabad area of southern Kashmir. He was of a family of pir (priests), and recieved his early education in Arabic and Persian in accordance with the prevalent system of his time. Nothing is recorded of his personal life but tradition holds that he was an intelligent man of a genial temperament, who spent most of his life wandering from place to place throughout the length and breadth of the Valley.[4] In 1960’s, when Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad was Prime Minister of J&K State, the whole village got badly damaged due to massive fire. When Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad personally visited the village Aravaer he came to know that the village is the birthplace of legendary poet Mahmud Gami. He was surprised to see the awful condition of Gami’s village. He reconstructed the village and Aastaan-i-Aaliya of Mahmud Gami and changed its name from Aravaer to Mahmudabad.[5]

Mahmud Gami's field of activities was multifarious. He wrote love lyrics in the traditional Vastun form and brought the form to perfection. In these songs he sang of love creating a world of beauty which accomodates the carnal human cravings and spiritual longings with equal ease showing that a healthy integrated personality cannot be compartmentalised, and that the ephemeral is on the reflection of the real.

It is the magic of his expression that his songs are hummed by the toiling masses at work and discussed by serious lovers of mysticism and poetic tradition. He experimented with new forms of poetry which he had learned through his study of Persian literature and effected considerable expansion in respect of art forms in Kashmiri literature unknown to it before him. Apart from the variety of patterns which he adopted in the traditional form itself, he was the first to use the Persian forms of Ghazal, Mustazad and Mathnavi, etc.

His canvas captures the landscape and the 'culturescape' of Kashmir in a vivid and wholesome manner. He draws his similes, metaphors and symbols from natural beauty of the Valley, its flowers, it's fountains and rivers, it's warbing birds, it's changing seasons and all he sees of it in his immediate surroundings.

In his attempt at metrical variations, Mahmud Gami uses short lines to produce an emotional, jubilant or dancing effect and somewhat longer lines for pensive or mystical themes. In fact, writing verses in short-line metres is a speciality of Mahmud Gami which has not been sufficiently emulated by the later poets, but which, if adopted by a competent poet, can lead to valuable contribution. A queer varient used in a song where the end-rhymes of the first three lines of the same stanzas are the same word or syllable with three different meaning:

Rosha walo dilbaray

Bo sharab khaes baray

Posh zan gos baray

Baray in the first line, a part of the word dilbaray, means 'to snatch' (here the heart of the lover), in the second line it means 'I will fill' (here the cup of wine), and in the third line it means 'wiltering' (of the flower).[6]