The use of literary terms is inevitable in literary criticism. However, a critic’s language must, at all times, be accessible and unpretentious. Criticism takes the help of science but it is not a science; it is a branch of literature. It need not be the professional pursuit of university dons, nor an industry that caters to a limited group. Nor is its purpose solely to provide mental stimulation to a distinct circle of individuals. At its best, it ought to nurture the mind and inculcate a respect for human values.
Tanquidii Ishare, his first collection of critical writings published in 1942, was followed in quick succession by Nai Aur Purane Chiragh (1946), Tanquid Kya Hai (1947), Adab aur Nazariya (1954), Jadidiyat aur Adab (1967), Nazar aur Nazariya (1973) and Masarrat se Basirat Tak (1974), thus earning him a formidable reputation as one of the most well-regarded voices to emerge from the Urdu-speaking world. Some of his other significant writings include: Iqbal aur Unka Falsafa, Iqbal: Nazar aur Shairi, Urdu aur Hindustani Tehzeeb, Urdu Mein Danishvari ki Riwayat, Iqbal, Faiz aur Hum, Iqbal ki Ma‘naviyat, Kuchh Khutbe Kuchh Maqale, Danishvar Iqbal, Fikr-e-Roshan, Pehchan aur Parakh, Urdu Tehrik, and Afkar ke Diye.
His most fruitful years were as professor and head of the Urdu department at Aligarh Muslim University. He loved to teach, to give freely of all that he himself knew and cherished. Apart from a brief stint as visiting professor at the University of Chicago, he worked untiringly for the Anjuman Taraqqui-e Urdu, the Sahitya Akademi and the government-sponsored Board for the Promotion of Urdu. This was followed by a fellowship at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, and his last office as Director, Iqbal Institute at the University of Kashmir. His most valued contribution remains in the field of Iqbaliyat. At a time when Iqbal was reviled in India as the anti-national, pro-Pakistan poet, Suroor sahab brought the focus back on Iqbal the poet through several revisionist studies on him, the poet revered by many as a visionary touched by the celestial muse.
Awards and encomiums followed in abundant measure: the Uttar Pradesh Urdu Akademi Award, the Delhi Urdu Akademi Award, the Sahitya Akademi Award, a gold medal by the president of Pakistan for services to Urdu literature, the Ghalib Modi Award, topped by the Padam Bhushan and the Iqbal Samman. Never one to rest on his laurels, Suroor sahab wrote and read and reflected. On his seventy-fifth birthday, he wrote:
Sitare maand hote hain to suraj bhi to ugte hain
Yeh saaye mera kya lenge, qaba hi to chura lenge
If the stars fade, the suns too are known to rise
What will these shadows do to me, what else save steal my bodily garb?
6
SHAKEEL BADAYUNI: THE RESOLUTE ROMANTIC
THE HISTORIC CITY OF BADAYUN, in the Rohilkhand region, is known for three things: pirs, poets and peras in no particular order. The thirteenth-century Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya was born here and the dargahs known as Chhoti Ziyarat and Badi Ziyarat draw thousands from far and wide. The peras made here, from sweetened milk that has been boiled until its golden brown residue can be compressed into discs and dusted with powdery sugar, draw their fair share of admirers in a ‘pera belt’ girding the breadth of western Uttar Pradesh. But it is the poets and men and women of letters, really, who have put this otherwise nondescript, dusty little town on the map. There was something about this little town beside the river Sot, a tributary of the Ganga that flows nearby, that sprouted adab from its nooks and crannies.
Ismat Chughtai, Jeelani Bano, Dilawar Figar, Ale Ahmad Suroor, Bekhud Badayuni, Ada Jafri, Fani Badayuni, Shakeel Badayuni – the list of writers born here is long and illustrious. But of all these, Shakeel Badayuni (1936–1970) is of especial interest because his poetic career, both his film and non-film ouvre, defies easy categorization. Abruptly felled by complications arising from diabetes at the age of fifty-three, his poetic output over a period of three decades was marked by one singular quality: consistency. At a time when the best and brightest of Urdu poets vacillated between shabab and inquilab, that is romance and revolution – the two poles around which much of Urdu poetry has always gravitated – Shakeel Badayuni spoke up steadfastly for shabab.
Sent down to Aligarh in 1936, the Oxford of the East, as most young men from sharif families were, he began writing poetry in an organic, almost instinctive way. From college-level mushairas, it was but a leap to inter-city ones as his fame spread as a ghazal-go, a writer of ghazals in the old-fashioned high register. Like scores of young Urdu writers from distant towns and qasbahs who flocked to the film industry in Bombay, Shakeel too came looking for the pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow. But unlike many others he found it, and that too almost instantaneously. Save for a short stint of working with the Government’s Supply Department (1942–1946) in Delhi, Shakeel had the rare distinction of earning his living almost solely through his poetry.
Striking the right note in his very first film with ‘Afsana likh rahi hoon dil-e beqarar ka, aankhon mein rang bhar ke tere intizar ka’, sung by Uma Devi (better known as Tun Tun), he formed a lasting partnership with Naushad. Together, they would give many hits over the next twenty-five-odd years with Shakeel consistently churning out numbers each more romantic than the other in films such as Sunghursh, Ram Aur Shyam, Dil Diya Dard Liya, Ganga Jamuna, Kohinoor and Mughal-e-Azam. Three Filmfare Awards and scores of hit numbers such as ‘Kahin deep jale kahin dil’, ‘Chaudhvin ka chaand’, ‘Husnwale tera jawab nahin’ marked him as the best man for the job; the film lyricist’s job being most memorably described by Kaifi Azmi as being as difficult as first digging a grave and then finding a corpse to fit it, given that it requires writing songs to fit a predetermined tune and scene! And, as Kaifi put it, sometimes the corpse’s head would stick out and sometimes its feet!
That Shakeel held his own against the formidable presence of the progressives already firmly established in the film fraternity in Bombay – Sahir Ludhianvi, Kaifi Azmi, Jan Nisar Akhtar, Majrooh Sultanpuri – and kept writing in the romantic strain at a time when socially-engaged purposive poetry was gaining the upper hand in a country busily engaged in Nehru’s nation-building project, speaks volumes. That the ‘high noon’ of the progressive movement of the 1940s and the charmed circle of the Bombay progressives held no especial appeal for him – given that many were, like him, either from Aligarh or other Urdu-speaking hubs and almost all had found themselves drawn to this city that had emerged as the beating heart of the progressive movement – marked him as man perfectly content in being ‘regressively’ romantic when it was fashionable to be progressive. That he kept himself aloof from all the big movements and ideas of his time – nationalism, anti-imperialism, anti-fascism, communalism, feminism to name just a few – shows a remarkable tenacity of purpose. Shakeel himself puts it best when he says:
Main Shakeel dil ka hoon tarjuman
Ke mohabbaton ka hoon raazdaan
Mujhe fakhr hai meri shayari
Meri zindagi se juda nahin
I, Shakeel, am the translator of the heart
For I am the keeper of love’s secrets
I am proud that my poetry
Is not removed from my life
While there is some merit in the charge that his film lyrics were ‘flowery, perfumed’, for indeed the heady musk of love and longing camouflage all other senses, his non-film poetry published in collections entitled Rangeeniyan, Ranaaiyan, Hanam-o Haram and Shabistan and a selection of devotional poetry called Naghma-e Firdous add other variations to the theme of love: pathos, dejection, even anger, muted and resolutely un-inflammable though it is. Picked up by singers such as Begum Akhtar and given a longer shelf life than his film lyrics, they show us a Shakeel still steadfastly absorbed in the same tropes but going back to his first love, the ghazal:
Ai mohabbat tere anjaam pe rona aaya
Jaane kyun aaj tere naam pe rona aaya
O love, I cry at your outcome
I don’t know why but today I cry at the mention of your name
And:
Mere humnafas mere hum nawa mujh
e dost ban ke dagha na de
Main hu dard-e ishq se jaan-ba lab mujhe zindagi ki dua na de
My friend, my companion, don’t deceive me in the guise of friendship
I am brimful with the pain of love, don’t bless me with a long life
In these non-film poetry collections, Shakeel offers his rejoinder to the juggernaut of rousing revolutionary poetry unleashed by the progressives when he asks:
Zindagi ka dard lekar inquilab aaya to kya
Ek doshiza pe ghurbat mein shabab aaya to kya
So what if the revolution has come with all the pain of living
So what if youth comes to a virgin in poverty
Or my personal favourite, which I quote often to invoke a multitude of ills from the perils of illiberalism to the enemies within:
Mera azm itna bulund hai ke paraye sholon ka dar nahin
Mujhe khauf aatish-e-gul se hai ye kahin chaman ko jala na de
My conviction is so great that I am not fearful of the sparks of others
My fear is of the fire in the flower that might set the garden on fire
7
THE ABSENT PRESENCE:
THE PARTITION IN MODERN
URDU POETRY
POLITICS AND HISTORY ARE SAID to be interwoven, but not commensurate. But then, so are politics and literature. Recent studies have shown that, given the close relationship between social reality and literary texts, it is important to reexamine and revisit the literature produced during times of great social and political upheaval. Doing so can provide a far more nuanced understanding of historical events than a mere perusal of historical records or documents. The events of 1947 were witnessed by some of the finest Urdu writers who saw and commented on what they had experienced, in many cases, at first hand. While there is a great deal of Urdu fiction dealing with the Partition, there is comparatively little in Urdu poetry that directly addresses the taqseem. There is of course Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s ‘Subh-e-Azadi’ (The Dawn of Freedom) and Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi’s ‘Phir Bhayanak Teergi Mein Aa Gae’ (Once Again We have Come into a Terrible Darkness) but given the huge corpus in prose, these seem like slender pickings. What is more, when one goes looking for something specifically on the Partition by Indian Urdu poets, while one is met with a great deal on azadi or freedom and, in fact, several poems entitled ‘Pandrah Agast’ (Fifteenth August), one finds it difficult to find something that addresses the issue of Partition in the same gory detail as, for instance, the short stories of Saadat Hasan Manto or Krishan Chander or Rajinder Singh Bedi. It is enough to set one thinking. Partition marked the coming of age of the Urdu short-story writer; it all but numbed the Urdu poet. Why was that? Is the Urdu poet more squeamish than the Urdu short-story writer? Or is it the very nature of poetry that clothes itself in the indirect, the oblique, the allusive? Is the difference in output merely due to the inherent difference between poetry and prose?
In a poem written long before the Partition, ‘Inquilab’ (Revolution), Asrar-ul Haq Majaz had predicted a bloody end to imperial rule long before 1947:
Khatm ho jaane ko hai sarmayadaron ka nizam
Rang lane ko hai mazdooron ka josh-e inteqam
Khoon ki boo le ke jangal se haiwan aayeinge
Khoon hi khoon hoga nigahein jis taraf ko jayeingi
Jhopdiyon mein mahal mein khoon, shabistaanon mein khoon
Dasht mein khoon wadiyon mein khoon
Kohsaraon ki taraf se surkh aandhi aayegi
Jaabaja aabadiyon mein aag si lag jayegi…
Aur iss rang-e-shafaq mein ba-hazaara anaab-o tab
Jagmagayega watan ki hurriyat ka aaftab
The rule of the capitalists is about to end
The labourers’ passion for vengeance is finally coming true
There will be blood, only blood, everywhere
Blood in the huts and the palaces and bedchambers
Blood in the plains, blood in the valleys
A red storm shall come from the mountains
Setting the settlements on fire
And on the horizon, amidst a thousand tumults,
Shall rise the sun of our land’s freedom
As we inched towards Partition, when the possibility of freedom became clearer, poets like Sahir Ludhianvi began to seize the immense possibilities of social transformation that an event like freedom from the imperial yoke presented:
In kali sadiyon ke sar se jab raat ka aanchal dhalkega
Jab dukh ke badal pighlenge, jab sukh ka saaghar chhalkega
Jab ambar jhoom ke naachega, jab dharti naghme gayegi
Woh subha kabhi to aayegi
When the veil of the night will slip from the brow of these dark centuries
When the clouds of sorrow will melt and the goblet of joy will brim over
When the skies will dance with delight, when the earth will sing songs
Surely that morning will dawn some day
All through the 1940s, several members of the Progressive Writers’ Movement had been writing songs of freedom that linked the anti-colonial struggle with the freedom movement. The dawn that was awaited was going to be a red one. And, so, there was Makhdoom Mohiuddin, the poet from Hyderabad writing:
Lo surkh savera aata hai, azadi ka, azadi ka
Gulnaar tarana gaata hai, azadi ka, azadi ka
Dekho parcham lehrata hai, azadi ka azadi ka
Look, the red dawn is coming, the red dawn of independence
Singing the red anthem of independence, freedom and independence
Look, the flag is waving of liberty, freedom and independence
But as we shall see in the poetry being written after the Partition, the red storm that Majaz had predicted became the red tide of blood - not revolution - as the country plunged into a horrific bloodbath, and the dawn of freedom became a night-bitten dawn. By far the most famous comment on the Partition is contained in ‘Subh-e-Azadi’ by Faiz Ahmed Faiz:
Yeh daagh daagh ujala yeh shab-gazida sehr
Woh intezar tha jiska yeh woh sehr to nahi
This patchy light, this night-bitten dawn
This is not the dawn we had been waiting for
Persistent and sustained readings within the narrow definition one had set for oneself – Partition poetry, that is poetry on and about the Partition - eventually revealed certain poems by Josh Malihabadi, the firebrand revolutionary, the ‘Shair-e-Inquilab’ as he was called, by Akhraul Iman, Jagannath Azad, Sahir Ludhianvi and Sardar Jafri. These, I believe, need to be retrieved and read once again. For the progressive poets, especially those who were members of the Communist Party, Partition and the freedom that came in its wake, was a ‘false freedom’. Taking the Party’s line, many poets too spoke of the sense of inadequacy, the squandering of dreams that the dawn of freedom brought in.
Josh Malihabadi in a poem called ‘Maatam-e-Azadi’ (The Lament for Freedom) written in 1948 strikes a sombre note:
Ai ham nafas! Fasana e Hindustan naa pooch
Apna gala kharosh-e tarranum se phat gaya
Talwar se bacha, to rag-e gul se kat gaya
O friend, don’t ask me for the tale of Hindustan
Our throats were torn by the scratching of our songs
When we escaped the sword, we were beheaded by the veins of the rose
Majaz too had lost some of his youthful ebullience by 1948 when he writes:
Hindu Muslim Sikh Eesai aman ke moti ro lenge
Khoon ki holi khel chuke hain rang ke dhabbe dho lenge
Hindu Muslim Sikh and Christian will shed tears of peace
Having played Holi with blood, they will now wash off these stains
By the time India celebrates its first Republic Day, Sahir Ludhianvi’s disenchantment with the new republic is already palpable. In a poem titled ‘Chhabbees Janwary’ (twenty-sixth January), he invokes the beautiful dreams the nation had seen, dreams of a better tomorrow and asks:
Come and let us ponder on this question
Whatever happened to all those beautiful drea
ms?
The helpless cannot even afford a shroud to cover their nakedness
Whatever happened to those promises of silks and brocades?
Then there is ‘Pandrah Agast’ (Fifteenth August) by Akhtarul Iman:
Yahi din hai jiske liye maine kati thee in ankhon mein raatein
Yahi seeli aab-e baqa, chasma noor hai, jalwa-e toor hai?
Issi ke liye woh suhane, madhur, rasbhare geet gaye they maine?
Yahi mahwash nisa, husn se choor, bhar poor, makhmoor hai woh?
Like Faiz, not content with this dawn of freedom, Ali Sardar Jafri in ‘Subh-e-Farda’ (The Morning of Tomorrow) speaks of standing on the border waiting for a new morning, the morning of tomorrow:
Yeh sarhad khoon ki, ashqon ki, aahon ki, shararon ki
Isi sarhad pe kal dooba tha sooraj ho ke do tukde
Isi sarhad pe kal zakhmi hui thi subh-e-azadi
Jahan boi thi nafrat aur talwarein ugayin thi
Yeh sarhad jo lahoo peeti hai aur sholay ugalti hai
Hamari khaak ke seene pe nagin ban ke chalti hai
Saja kar jung ke hathiyar maidan mein nikalti hai
On this border of blood, tears, sighs and sparks
The sun, broken in pieces, had set on this border
On this very border the dawn of freedom was wounded yesterday
Where you had sown hatred and grown swords
This border that drinks blood and spits sparks
It slithers on the bosom of our soil like a serpent
It enters the battleground bedecked with the armaments of war
But You Don't Look Like a Muslim Page 13