Ishq par zor nahiin, hai yeh voh aatish Ghalib, keh lagaaye na lage aur bujhaa’e na bane. You have no power over passion; it’s the sort of flame, Ghalib, that can’t be kindled on a wish and refuses to be snuffed out even when you try. This is the maqtaa of Ghalib’s ghazal whose matlaa is the often sung sher that opens with nuktah chiin hai gham-e-dil. An utterly musical sher, its paradoxical simplicity and the ironies at play in it are the heart of its magic. And of course, since ghalib means victorious, jubilant, triumphant, the sher dances around the paradox of love’s exorbitant force, its playful, almost mischievous power. A person might reach for love, long their way towards it, but it comes as it pleases and once it sneaks in, love insistently stays alive like one of those skinny trick birthday candles which go out but suddenly reignite, and then refuse to go out again however much you try to put them out. A sher from Ghalib that slyly insinuated itself, or was tucked into the song “Satrangii re”; the song itself is the centerpiece, the fulcrum, of the movie Dil Se. “Satrangii re” embodies the movie, and one could say about the movie, as many have, that whether or not desire travels through all the objects that pull at it (nation, qaum, beloved), the movie is really about educating audiences in the seven travails of love.

I taught this song from Dil Se along with other lyrics written by Gulzar in a class on Bombay cinema I was teaching at WellesleyCollege. “Satrangii re” brought my students to Urdu poetry, and through poetry, to Ghalib. As with all such classes taught in the US, whether they are organised around South Asian culture, history or politics, or train students in South Asian languages, my students came to it armed with a motley bag of wishes and hopes. The Pakistani students were startled at coming upon Urdu again unexpectedly in the United States. Those from India were charmed by their introduction to Urdu through a familiar song, foot-tapping dance music reaching back for them into a lineage of mystical poetry. Some American students lived poetry as their genre, something young people like them performed at slams; they suddenly encountered forms that were sung here and now, in contemporary keys but with much older lyrics amalgamated into current practices. For others, this introduction to poetry was like being foisted into an arranged marriage with a dumpy partner they could not imagine they might even want to see, on par with being dragged reluctantly to a museum; poetry for them fell into the ‘I don’t do this’ category of activities. This class was typical for me, in that, as I and many other professors at universities in the United States often do, I tuck moments like this into many different syllabi, as a courtship to enchant my students, to seduce them to Urdu and poets such as Ghalib. And several students returned as they often do — to another class I taught on 19th-century aesthetics, and encountered Ghalib and love again, learned a bit more about Urdu, grew into the pleasure of Urdu.

I began this short rumination on teaching, researching and learning with this particular sher by Ghalib, because, for me, it offers a tasviir that portrays my practice as a student, teacher and researcher of Urdu in the United States. The double bind of love that Ghalib captures so subtly, complicitly furnished with the ghazal’s panoply of accoutrements — the lover, the beloved, the everyday world off kilter when love catches hold — ignites the ambience of the classroom. Love’s sly force is not merely an allegory for my encounter with Urdu; it is a graphic description of what happened to me. But the sher’s language also offers a tasavvur, a path of imagining the way in which learning itself ought to do its work. At its best, learning ought not to follow the routinised byways so beloved of educators worldwide and especially espoused in the United States at this moment when education is being re-envisioned, when checkpoints such as exams reveal what students have managed to hold onto. In this image of good education, their basket of answers is unpacked and the state finds out what it is students “really know”. At its best, learning, like love, is sneaky, something that sometimes, despite oneself, steals into the crevices of one’s being, and despite any and all attempts, resists leaving. Something that throws askew all the cherished beliefs which organise the familiar and dumps students into a universe for which they feel unprepared. Something that an exam cannot contain. Something that Gayatri Spivak in a recent book, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, might see as an aesthetic education, the aesthetic learning. The double bind that love ferries along with it, which Ghalib captured so completely, replete with irony and paradox. And in some ways that I will come to later, Urdu taught in the United States offers an ideal pathway for this kind of learning. One never knows when one teaches Urdu where the teacher or the student might land, somewhere you might not have been asking for, somewhere unfamiliar that grabs hold, never to let go.