Even if you have not read even one Sufi literature, you have heard the word Saqi – by a few popular Bollywood songs. You further would have been smart enough to guess, it somehow points to the lover, whatever it could have meant literally.
Saqi is a word, adopted in Urdu from the Persian vocabulary laterally translates into “one who serves wine” or loosely a bartender. And this is exactly where the power and finesse of a Sufi metaphor play the most fantastic role as they can.
Sufism probably is the path that gave maximum weightage to the emotion of “Love”, the philosophical initiation point for a Sufi would be the Koranic verse (5.54) translating to “He loves them, and they love him”. He here is the God and they refer to mankind – symbolically establishing a relationship of lover and beloved between the two.
Love probably is the strongest and most readily available force which liberates, it most easily gives you the feeling of pure bliss - you don’t have to believe me here, just think about how you felt when you fell in for the first time, as they say, that’s the feeling having a very close connection with the “pure bliss” so sought after and so overhyped by the spiritual seekers. Purer love is higher is bliss. When it is purest, bliss becomes an ecstasy – sounds like the effect of wine?
Saqi is the one, who serves us with this wine. The world there becomes a Tavern (Mai-khana), the beloved’s heart becomes the chalice (Shahghar), and who else than the lover who fills the chalice with the wine of love – to take the beloved to the ecstatic state. In the relationship between a Sufi and the God, Saqi is the eternal supplier of this wine of love to the chalice of the heart of the beloved, the Sufi.
19th Century saint Pir-O-Murshid Inayat Khan in his test “Bowl of Saqi” says,
“Thy smile has brought my dead heart to life again; my life and death depend upon the closing and disclosing of Thy magic glance.
O give me one more cup, O Sāqī, which I will value more than the whole life I have lived.”
Most of the Sufi writings would resemble a dialogue between the lover and the beloved, actually love in any form is always that supreme inspiration that gives life to all that is living, which becomes inspiration when a painter paints a beautiful picture, a musician creates a masterpiece.
This love in it’s purest and intense most form is ecstatic – to purify and intensify the emotion of love to the maximum possible extent, there is no better way than love for God. Where one only has love, nothing else not even a lover in corporal form. There is only faith, there are no complaints, there are no expectations, there is nothing that involves anyone else except the lover.
Further, love is not only the wine to ferry to the ecstasies, it has a magical power to dissolve “Ego” (the I –ness within oneself). That’s why when in love, one claims to become one with the beloved at the level of soul (Do Jism Ek Jaan). It is the way to the oneness from the duality of lover and beloved - this oneness becomes the concept of ultimate "Non-Duality" when between the Lover and Beloved one is the God. Realization of this very nonduality is said to be the ultimate goal of any mysticism.
So next time, your Saqi comes gracious enough to fill your chalice, it's up to you to decide on the way you utilize it.
~Avirup Chakraborty
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