“Aaj Jaanay Ki Zidd Na Karo,” a timeless ghazal, explores love, separation, and emotions. Azam critiques it, exclusively for Different Truths.

The Urdu ghazal, Aaj Jaanay Ki Zidd Na Karo, was written by Fayyaz Hashmi, and first interpreted by Habib Wali Mohammed for the 1973 Pakistani movie Badal aur Bijli, to music composed by Sohail Rana, in Raag Yaaman Kalyan.

A ghazal is a love poem in which the metaphorical object of love may be carnal, platonic, or spiritual. It ranges from five to fifteen independent couplets linked by a refrain rich in overlapping polysemous meanings around central themes of love, proximity, separation, the fear of social ostracism and yearning.

Habib Wali Mohammed’s 1973 hit, Aaj Jaanay Ki Zidd Na Karo, was first reprised by Farida Khanum, in 1993, and further honoured by the likes of Asha Bhosle, Rohini Ravda, Arijiit Singh, Pritam, Neha Kakkar, Praveen Saran, Neha Bhasin, Tanya Wells, Shilpa Rao and others. The lyrics and composition crossed the Indo-Pakistan frontier, unnoticed by border guards self-absorbed in their public spectacle of grimaces and goose-steps to over-excited public applause.

A rendition of the Ghazal by Tanya Wells

The ghazal was chosen as background music in Mira Nair’s 2001 hit movie, Monsoon Wedding, and completes the soundtrack of the 2016 Indian movie Ai Dil Hai Mushkil, interpreted by Shilpa Rao, to Pritam Chakraborty’s reorchestration of Sohail Rana’s original composition.

The ghazal’s couplets are bound with polysemous layers of overlapping nuances, encapsulated in the title and refrain built around ‘zidd,’ — a composite of insistence, stubbornness, obstinacy, and childish willfulness, more as a character trait, than a reaction in time.

The composites of ‘jaan,’ or life: ‘jaan-e-jaan,’ ‘jaan-e-mann’ etc., two of a series that recur in Urdu poetry, express the core of the lover’s existence over which the object of love reigns and to which the lover willingly submits. This essence of life sustains the visible manifestation of the unseen, inner core of life that sustains it as its very soul.

Time is discerned as totalitarian, and to be able to suspend it, a triumph of love, rising above the panic attacks of reputations held hostage by wagging tongues!

The world recedes, leaving the proximity of both lovers as the only relevant space, enclosed in a bubble of kaleidoscopic light. This space, the realm of the beloved, neutralises the relevance of all other spatial dimensions to metamorphose into the center of existence. The lover beseeches the beloved to exercise that sovereign power, overpowering time and reducing it to irrelevancy, implicitly evoking the immortal status of love.

Whether or not the beloved responds to the lover’s supplication remains ambiguous. The reader or listener is, thus, empowered to decide whether love and beauty consummated their apex and liberated themselves from time to attain immortality. The ghazal skillfully invites readers to the board governing the ethos of an emotionally charged suspense.

The popular ghazal has inspired bilinguals to translate it into English, with several versions online. After all, since ‘the’ translation is only acclamation or claim by volume, each offer is ‘a’ translation with its weaknesses and strengths, oversights, and impositions, yet faithful to the core idea.

Not being a translator, and shirking from its tedious mechanics, the offer below cannot be postulated as a translation. It offers the nuances inspired by the poem, with a dash of the humanly subjective — a copout for insufficiency, it may be said (!) — that emerges as a tribute to the poet, the composer, the orchestra directors, and vocalists of the ghazal.

Here’s an apprehensively offered version for your critical appreciation—feel free to batter if the spirit so moves you.

Aaj Jaanay Ki Zidd Na Karo

Don’t insist on leaving today
Stay close as you are to me, I pray

Ooh-aah, I’ll die; I’ll be ruined
Just stop saying things like that
Just this once, stop the fuss and stay

Just think, why wouldn’t I stop you from leaving?
My life leaves my body when you rise to leave
Swear on your soul, the core of my life
Just grant me this much today
 
Just once, cast your apprehensions aside
Stay as you are, curled by my side
 
Time holds life hostage in its relentless grip
Only our fleeting moments together are free
Lose them and then, the essence of my life,
You might be imprisoned by lifelong regret
 
For once, cast aside imagined whispers, I pray
Stay snuggled by my side as you are today
 
We’re in a kaleidoscopic bubble of purity
As beauty and love attain their apex today,
Tomorrow is unknown; the substance of my life
Stay — liberate this night from time’s grip
 
And now, don't fidget; don’t insist today
Don’t leave me in a vacuum, I pray.

Picture design by Anumita Roy

Azam Gill

Azam Gill is a novelist, analyst and retired Lecturer from Toulouse University, France. He has authored eight books, including three thrillers — Blood Money, Flight to Pakistan and Blasphemy. He also writes for The Express Tribune, a New York Times affiliate, blogs on his website and is a Contributing Editor for The Big Thrill, a webzine of the International Association of Thriller Writers. He served in the French Foreign Legion, French Navy, and the Punjab Regiment.

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