Dil and jigar/the heart and the liver

 

Body parts in day-to-day idiomatic as well as street language? Yes, they are used in all languages, certainly in English, Hindi and Urdu. No expletive can be potent, or offensive, enough without liberal use of some body part or the other, as a noun, or even more trenchantly as a verb. While I leave a listing of these cuss words to your cogitation, let me reproduce what Merriam-Webster says about the employment of many parts of the body in either a physical or a metaphorical sense; editor Peter Sokolowski breaks down a number of body parts with metaphorical uses as verbs, from head to toe.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/video/body-parts-that-are-also-verbs-head-shoulder-muscle#:~:text=You%20can%20head%20a%20company,line%20you%20might%20get%20skinned.

You can head a company, but if things go wrong you'll have to shoulder the blame, or face your investors. A good leader backs their employees, but if you don't toe the line you might get skinned. Did you muscle your way into that job? You might eye someone suspiciously, or wait for the police to finger a suspect. But if you need to get out of town, try thumbing a ride. You can ride with me if you can stomach the thought. I don't always sing along to the radio, but you might see me mouthing the words.

 

I am more interested in use of certain parts in a metaphorical sense by poets. Poetry precedes science and cavemen too were poets, albeit their poetry emerged in grotto paintings; it is a moot point whether fire is a product merely of human enterprise towards sustenance or artistic outburst of questing men. Poetry would lose all its appeal if it started complying with banal scientific facts. Hence a broken heart or a liver in fragments are classic metaphors and who cares if Science looks askance at them.

Heart (or dil, jii, चित्त, मन, हृदय) is the king; perhaps perfectly universal in all civilizations, whichever be the language, with almost the same soft intervention in poetry. Next, to my mind would be the liver, the jigar (casting aside the diddly यकृत as an outlier). Not kaleja or कलेजा, which may mean the same anatomically, and may be used variously as a substitute for heart or chest, it lacks the same punch as jigar, and to a Lucknowite like me, the only thing poetic about it is that it is an important ingredient of our mouth-watering Qeemā-Kalejī (a dish of ground meat and liver). In English poetry the liver is present but in a much less prominent role. Which brings us to just the opposite, the spleen, a glandular organ, sitting opposite to the liver at the cardiac end of the stomach, serving as a reservoir for blood to form mature lymphocytes, recruited in English mainly to express negative emotions like ill humour, peevish temper or spite but disdainfully given a short shrift by Urdu and Hindi poets. Which dandy conscience-keeper of Gang-o-Jamuni Tehzeeb (culture of the Ganga-Yamuna delta) ever uttered the word tillee, or तिल्ली, in civilized company. Lung, which may have some acceptability in English, but phephraa or फेफड़ा? Kidney, gurda or गुर्दा? Spare me the torture, guys, to my sensibilities, these unspeakable words are rather coarse, bereft of any emotive appeal except that, God knows what seized Sakhi Lakhnavi while writing, “Dard ko gurdā taḌapne ko jigar, hijr meñ sab haiñ magar dil to nahīñ”,  but hazaar ḳhuun muaaf (pardoned of thousand killings) to a Lucknowite, so no skin off my nose here. Besides, in English, all this word conveys to a Wodehouse fan is Steak and Kidney Pie. 

Legs, hands and chest stand proudly as soldiers, dutifully reflecting or executing the desires of the superior organs like the heart or the brain. The brain? Well, the mind, the head, dimaaG, दिमाग़, sir, सर  or सिर and शीश  inevitably land us in the age-old wrangle between these namesakes and the heart. Well, how much does dimaaG arouse gut feelings in us? Both of them may be closely aligned for gastrointestinal functions as well as reflexes and intuitions through an extensive neural network and the gut may lend itself to powerful expressions in English.

I am not going to go wax eloquent on it. Vamoose, the aant or  आंत, lest my readers too scoot albeit in revulsion. Coming back to the head, do scientists not tell us that all these living human organs are just that, kicking and throbbing parts with no emotions except that all our sentiments are processed in the brain. DimaaG! But in poetry this fellow, dimaaG, is nothing but a spoiler, obliterating all fine emotions and thoughts by its worldly and calculative disposition. Knowing that all ye poetically-inclined readers always root for the heart, Mr. Head, go boil your head, you are jettisoned. Yet out of grudging courtesy for this part which sits on top, readers may take time out for a lovely perspective on this combat between the heart and the mind, in the poem ‘Head, Heart by Lydia Davis’:

https://academic-master.com/poetry-analysis-head-heart-by-lydia-davis/ 

It naturally follows that bhejā, or भेजा, maghaz, or मग़ज़, and बुद्धि are all banished except that the first one is OK if served fried on your plate. The face, the naak-naqsh, and what it is constituted of, aankh, zabān (eyes and tongue) and so on are also mere sensory outfits and expressive infantry for the superior internal organs. All these organs are vital to our well-being, but we are talking poetry today, friends, not a prosaic health bulletin. After this discourse on rejection and ejection, what have we got? For today, Dil and jigar.

Does jigar also sound jarring in poetry like some of its other cousins I talked of, vitiating the poetic fancy of a heart? Not really. Dil is the quintessential locus of tenderness and emotion in poetry. But dil has no monopoly over Urdu poetry. Think jigar, the rather uncouth liver. We commonly think that dil and jigar are often used interchangeably, as both of them are metaphors employed to symbolize similar emotions. This is, however, only a half-truth. Dil is mostly used as the reservoir and carrier of human emotions like love, passion, desire, rapture, agony, anger, etc. whereas jigar is, more often than not, used as a symbol of forbearance, perseverance, chutzpah and boldness and yes, fortitude and poise in the face of adversities and pain. 

One singular difference is that, dil has a voice, it can lament, complain, moan, cheer, shout and exclaim. Jigar, on the other hand, is always silent. It bears the cross of human situations in muted determination. So, you would hear of dil ki awaaz but not jigar ki awaaz, jigar is mute. It must silently bear everything that its owner is made to undergo or inflicts upon himself and has hence become a symbol of courage. So, largely, while dil speaks in happiness and pain, moans and whispers, jigar is a silent catchment of grit and fortitude; so, while the former is emotive and ebullient, the latter embodies perseverance and sangfroid. That said, poetry has no thumb rules like science so we will not be hung up about this.

In poetry other than ours, is heart the only organ known to be a symbol of love? Not so. Metaphoric representations of liver can be found in classical times as a repository of life and a custodian of internal emotions. Plato talked of a ‘desiring soul’ and a ‘rational soul’, with the former residing in the liver and the latter in the head. Apart from the liver being the one which devoured all the wine, albeit to its detriment, Shakespeare also conceived the liver as the seat of bitter anger and other emotions, mentioning the organ several times in his plays. 

Where do I start? No use touching your heart as you would be spoilt for choice, both in Urdu and English literature. We will stick to Ghālib and Shakespeare, my chachā and the Bard, and mainly the nervy, disgracious liver. 

 

Kartā huuñ jam.a phir jigar-e-laḳht-laḳht ko

arsa  huā hai  dāvat-e-mizhgāñ kiye hue

(jigar-e-laḳht-laḳht: shredded liver, dāvat-e-mizhgāñ: feast of eyebrows. I once again collect pieces of my liver, It has been a long time since I held a feast of the eyelashes.

Many interpretations are possible, particularly by scholars but I go with this. The lover’s liver (or heart), in Urdu poetry, is depicted as an extremely fragile object which has the propensity to be broken up in a thousand pieces with the slightest of injury. Ghālib's liver is similarly broken up in thousands of pieces due to unrequited love. He offered these pieces earlier as a feast for beloved’s eyelashes; beautiful arched eyelashes resemble a weapon with their sharp edges and prong-like hair so the offer of pieces of liver flesh makes for refreshment. These eyelashes are also lethal because one flicker of them is enough to wound the liver of a lover. 

While it would be impossible to find a parallel of the liver and eyelashes, look at this dialogue of Gratiano, speaking to Antonio, in The Merchant of Venice, comparing the functions of two organs by saying that he would rather damage his liver with wine than starve his heart by denying himself fun: 

“Let me play the fool.

With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.

And let my liver rather heat with wine

Than my heart cool with mortifying groans…” 

We also have Orsino in Twelfth Night propounding what would make a preposterous theory about women not being capable of intense love like men and talking of heart and liver: 

“There is no woman’s sides

Can bide the beating of so strong a passion

As love doth give my heart. No woman’s heart

So big, to hold so much. They lack retention.

Alas, their love may be called appetite,

No motion of the liver, but the palate…” 

In Twelfth Night, we have Fabian trying to convince Sir Andrew that Olivia was in love with him, explaining her behaviour of flirting with the messenger boy as one which would, in one, fire up passion (heart) as well as anger and jealousy (liver). He says to him, “She did show favor to the youth in your sight only to exasperate you, to awake your dormouse valor, to put fire in your heart and brimstone in your liver.” 

Dil  se  tirī   nigāh   jigar   tak   utar    ga.ī

donoñ ko ik adā meñ razā-mand kar ga.ī

(adā: adā: graceful style, posture or gestures, imitation, to clear off the debts, settlement, razā-mand: willing, consenting, permitting) 

Her glance penetrated the jigar of the lover, through his heart and thanks to her graceful style, both are in agreement. Once again, although many times both dil and jigar appear to be similar in poetry, here, the thrust on both conveys that the styles of the beloved were so elegant and captivating that the lover’s fervent passion for her, with all the attendant happiness and the inevitable pain as well the spirit of forbearance and courage to endure the aftermath, accepted her as his goal, his quest in life, willingly. In any case, their individualities are not suppressed but accentuated here; both the organs are considered poetically to be centres of the sensitivities of the lover, affected in their own way by the positivity and negativity of love. 

Koī mere dil se  pūchhe tire tīr-e-nīm-kash ko

ye ḳhalish kahāñ se hotī jo jigar ke paar hotā

(tīr-e-nīm-kash: half-drawn arrow, ḳhalish; Unease) 

My heart alone knows the agony that your half-drawn arrow inflicts on me, would I still have this agony and edginess had it pierced through my jigar cleanly? A half-drawn arrow is one released from a bow which, at the time of release, is not fully stretched and therefore lacking in force to plough through the body. Both the words dil and jigar, heart and liver, appear here but are they interchangeable? No. Explore, dear readers. 

Enough for today, but I do have the heart to be back soon with more and we will see if you have the jigar to swallow it, and as chachā said: 

Khuuñ ho ke jigar aañkh se Tapkā nahīñ ai marg

rahne de mujhe yaañ ki abhī kaam bahut hai

(marg: death, yaañ: here, as used mainly in poetry)

 

…