Hungamah hai kyun barpa, sung in Ghulam Ali’s deep, dulcet voice, is a very popular ghazal. Ali seductively croons “thodi si jo pi li hai (I have only drunk a little)” over and over, and the audience is ecstatic. Not many people know that Akbar Illahabadi composed this ghazal. Nor do the other verses of this nine-verse ghazal resonate with audiences as much as the opening one does.
Ghulam Ali, like most singers, chose to sing five verses out of the nine. He changed the order of verses as well, perhaps according to his personal preference, or to create an evocative mood. I wasn’t surprised when I came across this ghazal being discussed in blogs and other online platforms as a poem about masti, the euphoria that drunkenness can produce. What I didn’t expect was a Wikipedia page on this ghazal with some hard-to-believe stories about why Akbar composed it:
“Akbar Allahabadi’s song is clearly about the pleasures of imbibing alcohol. It is claimed that its genesis is in the social context of the British Raj in India, at a time when the Muslim League had begun to exert its independent approach to interacting with the British, against the wishes of the Congress. Some Muslims, including Akbar Allahabadi, hoped for Hindu-Muslim unity. This caused others to suggest that he had been given alcohol by the Hindus (Muslims are forbidden to drink alcohol). His ghazal
— source thewire.in | Mehr Afshan Farooqi | 06/Jan/2022