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The gift to create form, from the mist of imagination, is pure magic!


Monday, February 27, 2012

The Sun and the Moon


Each portrait:13.5x20.5 inches; Pen drawing on handmade paper with watercolour wash (Click on image to enlarge)
SOLD. In private collection

Imaginary symbolic portraits of Mah Laqa Bai Chanda (the Moon), an influential and powerful courtesan of Hyderabad who was also a well known Sufi Poetess, the first woman to have compiled a complete book of her poems/Ghazals and Sayyid Shah Siraj al-Din Hussayni better known by his nom de plume Siraj (the Sun), another young and gifted Sufi poet whose poems are still sung as Qawwalis all over India.

Hear news of love’s bewilderment

Hear news of love’s bewilderment: no beauty remains, no feverish madness
No you remains, no I remains – all that remains is unselfconsciousness

A wind blew in from the unseen world, scorching the garden of appearances
On pain’s bare branch, just one bud – call it the heart – remains in greenness

Just now, the king of oblivion has bestowed upon me nakedness’s royal robe
No stitch of discernment’s propriety remains, no veil-rending insanity’s lewdness

With what tongue can I express complaint against my beloved’s negligent gaze?
Take from my heart’s wine-vat a hundred cups – it remains brimming in fullness

Your beauty’s power stirs up bewildering tumult here to such extent that
The mirror reflects no charred devotee, no idol – its face remains imageless

An amazing moment it was, when I first learned from passion’s pages
Ever since, reason’s tome stood on the shelf and remains right there, readerless

Passion’s flames reduced to ash Siraj’s uncomplaining, speechless heart
No caution remains, no second thought – all that remains is fearlessness

- Sayyid Shah Siraj al-Din Hussayni (d.1763), mystic Sufi poet, better known as Siraj ‘the sun’. Translated by Dr. Scott Kugle

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