Shahryar was unfailingly attentive to young and old alike. His vast circle of friends were drawn from a cross-section of society: there was, of course, Khalilur Rahman Azmi, among his earliest friends and mentors, but there were others with whom he stayed friends till the end of either their lives or his; they include Kamleshwar, the Hindi writer and film-maker; Gopi Chand Narang, the noted Urdu litterateur; Shahid Mahdi, the bureaucrat and former vice chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia, and his wife, Maqbool Nikhat; Baidar Bakht, the Canada-based engineer and writer–translator; Rizwan Husain and Raza Imam, both retired professors from the department of English at Aligarh; Vijay Kumar Bajaj, the industrialist with whom he played cards at the Aligarh Rotary Club most evenings and to whom he dedicated Neend ki Kirchein (Slivers of Sleep, 1995) and Shaam Hone Waali Hai (Dusk Is Round the Corner, 2004); Muzaffar Ali, the film-maker for whose films he wrote the most evocative lyrics; Mughni Tabassum with whom he co-edited the prestigious literary journal Sher-o-Hikmat (Verse and Wisdom), from Hyderabad; Shamsur Rehman Faruqi, the influential editor of Shabkhoon (Ambush at Night) and one of the finest prose stylists of modern times; and Siddiq Ahmad Siddiqi, his oldest and closest friend with whom he spent a great deal of time in the last few years of his life and to whom he dedicated the second collection of his poetry. Siddiq was not merely his friend but also the brother of Javaid who was his friend and near contemporary at Aligarh, and the son of Ale Ahmad Suroor with whose entire family Shahryar enjoyed the closest of relations. 41
The above list is by no means complete, as the circle of his friends and admirers was legendary. Being an intrinsically social person, Shahryar was out visiting friends and acquaintances on most days in Aligarh. Similarly, while travelling for the many mushairas he attended with unfailing regularity both within India and abroad, as well as the seminars and symposiums he was invited to by virtue of being a major Indian poet, he was always happy to meet Urdu lovers in the cities he travelled to.42 The alienation, angst with urban living, the sense of dislocation and loneliness of city life, the inwardness that we see in such abundant measure in his poetry were conspicuously absent in his personal life. Shahryar was surrounded by friends, admirers and relatives. His cellphone was always by his side and remained his vital link with the world. Fond of calling up friends and acquaintances, Shahryar knew that friendship was a two-way street. He was the first to reach out to someone in his vast circle in difficult times; he was the first to pick up the phone and attempt to mend strained friendships, few though such examples were. He was pained by distance or misunderstanding in his friendships. The few relationships that broke down, despite his best efforts, never stopped causing him pain. See, for instance, ‘Judaai ka Geet’ (‘The Song of Separation’):
Tum mere kitne paas ho
Main tum se kitna duur hoon
(You are so close to me
I am so far from you)
And written towards the end of his life:
Jo yeh saraab samundar numa abhi tak hai
Kisi ki pyaas se rishta mera abhi tak hai
(This ocean-like mirage is still there
The bond of my thirst for someone is still there)
Another unique quality about Shahryar was his extreme helpfulness. Those he considered his friends or those young people he took under his wing could unfailingly count upon his complete support. He was known to go out of his way to help his protégés. In sickness or ill health, he was the first to reach the hospital; on hearing any good news he would be the first to pick up the telephone to congratulate; and to those who were wrongly troubled or beleaguered, he would be the first to extend his solidarity, especially if it was a cause close to his heart.43 He was especially popular with left-leaning organizations such as SAHMAT, Progressive Writers’ Association and Janwadi Lekhak Sangh, among others. And yet he possibly saw a want or lacking in himself, for he wrote:
Hum mein hararat ki kami kal ki tarah aaj bhi hai
Tishnagi kis ke labon par tujhe tahrir karein
(The heat of passion is lacking in me today, as it
was yesterday
On whose lips should I write my thirst)
But then, as though to contradict himself, he has also written:
Aandhi ki zad mein shama-e tamanna jalayi jaaye
Jis tarah bhi ho laaj junoon ki bachayi jaaye
(Within the storm’s range the torch of desire should
be lit
No matter how, the honour of passion must be safeguarded)
Like his poetry, there were no high notes in Shahryar’s personal life – no extreme views, no high-pitched agenda-driven polemics and virtually no rhetoric. When an argument became intense and venomous, Shahryar was known to step back with a smile. When peers and fellow writers, especially the progressives who were still active in the early part of Shahryar’s writing career, picked up their pen to vent their ire or spew vitriol, Shahryar was muted, even oblique in his use of seemingly personal and idiosyncratic images. This does not imply the absence of a world view; if anything, it shows how it is entirely possible for a poet to mingle the personal with the political, as for instance:
Woh jo aasman pe sitara hai
Usey apni aankhon se dekh lo
Usey apne honthon se choom lo
Usey apne haathon se todh lo
Ke usi pe hamla hai raat ka
(That star in the sky
See it with your eyes
Kiss it with your lips
Break it with your hands
For, it is the target of the night)
And elsewhere there is a perseverance:
Mana saahil duur bahut hai
Mana darya toofani
Kashti paar nahin hone ki
Koshish to karni hai
(Yes, the shore is far
Yes, the river is in spate
And the boat is not likely to make it across
But, still, one must try)
And even an occasional pragmatism:
Jo jahan hai qadam jamaye rahe
Kya khabar kab zameen chalne lage
(Let one stay put wherever one is
Who knows when the ground will begin to move)
But never ambiguity, as for instance:
Bechi hai sehr ke haathon
Raaton ki siyahi tumne
Kii hai jo tabahi tumne
Kisi roz sazaa paoge
(You have sold the ink of the night
To the morning
You will be punished some day
For the devastation you have wrought)
As Kamleshwar writes:
Shahryar is a quiet poet who does not deem it appropriate to present what he has to say in a loud voice … This ability to turn his quiet, polite voice into a creative scream in a strange unspoken way is Shahryar’s most important contribution. And this he has achieved by skirting past the way shown by Faiz and Firaq. I feel that despite avoiding the outspokenness of Faiz and the intense critical and cultural endeavours of Firaq, Shahryar has, like them, but in his own way, produced those signs and symbols that though they belong to poetry, also end up becoming the signs and symbols of a restless mankind. From being the emblems of gham-e jaana (‘sorrows of the beloved’), they also become symbols of gham-e daauran (‘the sorrows of the age’).44
Perhaps the following lines best exemplify a Faiz-like outspokenness but manifested in a different mizaaj, a temperament as well as a tone and tenor that is so typical of Shahryar:
Tumhare shahr mein kuchh bhi huwa nahin hai kya
Ke tumne cheekhon ko sachmuch suna nahin hai kya
Main ek zamaane se hairaan hoon ke hakim-e shahr
Jo ho raha hai usey dekhta nahin hai kya
(Has nothing happened in this city of yours
Have you really not heard the screams
For long I have wondered why the ruler of this city
Cannot see what is happening here)45
Writing the foreword to Shahryar’s first collection of poetry, philosopher-critic Waheed Akhtar had c
ounted Shahryar among those poets whose poetry can be called ‘waqt ki awaaz’ (‘the call of the time’). In a literary career spanning five decades, it is interesting how Shahryar always managed to remain topical and his poetry could always be called ‘the call of the time’. This ability to remain relevant and to always have something to say consistently over a period of time is a singular quality. Equally remarkable was Shahryar’s ability to forge relationships and sustain friendships across generations.46 And it is this that possibly made him the poet of a ‘new’ age for every age and each successive generation hailed him as the voice of ‘their’ time. Despite the passage of time, Shahryar’s egalitarianism remained undimmed, for he believed:
Koi bada hai na chhota saraab sab ka hai
Sabhi hai pyaas ke marey sabhi barabar hain
(No one is big or small; the mirage belongs to everyone
Everyone is thirsty alike, everyone is equal)
A self-confessed Marxist, Shahryar was however not an atheist.47 He believed there was a power, larger than him and inscrutable and omniscient, that guided the course of his life. And he was always deeply thankful to that power for he truly believed that he had been dealt a good hand. He was thankful not merely for the awards and encomiums that came his way in such plentiful measure, but he also retained a positive attitude towards life in general. This was most evident in the last few months of his life when he was diagnosed with an advanced stage of lung cancer. As his children ensured the best possible medical aid and home nursing and his many friends and admirers rallied around him, Shahryar showed an indomitable spirit. He took the rigours of chemotherapy with good cheer and remained cheerful and optimistic till the end. He breathed his last on the eve of Valentine’s Day, 13 February 2012. Towards the end, he was fond of reciting these lines, published in his last collection:
Aasman kuchh bhi nahin ab tere karne ke liye
Maine sab taiyyariyan kar li hain marne ke liye
(There is nothing for you to do anymore, sky
I have made all the preparations for dying)
And:
Kitna aasaan lag raha hai mujhko aage ka safar
Chhodh aaya peechhe parchhainyon ko darne ke liye
(How simple the journey ahead appears to me
Having left the shadows behind me to be fearful)
In an interview to The Hindu, conducted by me in November 2010, long before his illness was discovered, I had asked Shahryar if the world was a dark place for him. Or, did goodness and light outweigh evil and darkness? His answer was illuminating:
I am an optimist. When I look at the world around me I see enough reasons to be glad and hopeful. In the midst of despair (when the right-wing government, the NDA in its first outing, was in power), I had written:
Siyah raat nahin leti naam dhalne ka
Yehi toh waqt hai suraj tere nikalne ka
(The dark night is showing no signs of ending
Now is the time, Sun, for you to rise)
When I go abroad and people ask me about the state of affairs in India or the state of Urdu, I say:
Aaj ka din bahut achcha nahin tasleem hai
Aane wale din bahut behtar hain meri raaye hai
(I agree that today has not been a good day
But I am convinced tomorrow will be better.)
2
The Call of Unknown Destinations
Phir kahin khwaab-o haqiqat ka tasadum hoga
Phir koi manzil-e benaam bulati hai humein
(Once again, a conflict between dreams and reality
will rage somewhere
Once again, some nameless destination calls out to me)
A New Kind of Poetry
Naya Din, Naya Azaab
Sard shakhon pe os ke qatre
Hain abhi mehv khwaab aur sooraj
Rath pe apne sawaar aata hai
A New Day, A New Calamity
(Dewdrops on cold branches
Still immersed in their dreams when the sun
Comes riding on his chariot)
A NEW KIND of poetry began to be written under the influence of the progressives. It loosened the hold of tradition and opened the way to new subjects and styles. Let us first talk about something that is often overlooked in the one-upmanship of language politics, namely the linkages between Urdu and Hindi literature from the 1940s up till the late 1960s when, alas, the ‘campism’ of the two warring groups reduced the commonalities and increased the distances. From the 1940s, new experiments were being conducted in Hindi prose and poetry and the Urdu writer was neither unaware nor unaffected by them; it was much the same in Hindi. Despite the jingoistic nationalism that projected the cause of Hindi and the zeal with which language chauvinists promoted one language along with its literature and respective literary culture at the expense of the other, there were still some spaces where Urdu and Hindi writers met and interacted.
Aligarh, with its robust Urdu and Hindi departments, had healthy interactions between their respective faculty and several common platforms where writers and teachers of both languages met and exchanged ideas.1 In fact, Aligarh reflected the situation at the pan-Indian level, that is, of concurrent movements in Hindi and Urdu which prove that the ideas that propelled these movements were collective and widespread rather than unique and localized to individual languages and their respective literary cultures. And, if not mirror images, the Urdu and Hindi literary landscape displayed sufficient similarities to point to a commonality of concerns and inspirations in the years leading up to the 1960s when Shahryar began to find his poetic voice.
The publication of a slim volume of Hindi poetry, Taar Saptak (1943), opened the door to a new wave of experimentation (prayogvaad) which, in turn, laid the foundation of the nayi kavita (new poetry). Taar Saptak contained the poetry of seven young poets: Agyeya, Muktibodh, Shamsher, Raghuvir Sahay, Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena, Kedarnath Singh and Kunwar Narain. All seven were firm in their belief that:
(i)they belonged to no ‘school’ of poetry;
(ii)they were merely fellow travellers along the same road, who had differing opinions and world views;
(iii)they had not reached a destination or arrived at any grand conclusion; the journey was their destination.2
In fact, Agyeya, the compiler of the anthology, went so far as to say that his fellow contributors considered ‘poetry a subject of experimentation’ and that they were ‘explorers of new ways’. This ‘new’ poetry turned out to be new in both form and content. The Saptak poets – and others who came under their mesmeric, insistent spell – were caught up with the need to convey a deeply felt, intensely personal, emotional experience. This resulted in the evolution of startlingly new metaphors and images, radical experiments in form and content, new rhythms and sound patterns that were meant to reflect harsh new truths and the deliberate use of laconic, abstruse, even occasionally dense images and ideas. The entire process – spanning close to two decades – bore spectacular fruit by the 1960s.
Elucidating the commonality between the concerns of the Hindi and Urdu poets of the 1960s, especially those who came in the immediate aftermath of the progressive upsurge, Manglesh Dabral, Hindi writer and poet, notes: ‘In fact, poetry, both in Urdu and Hindi, of and after the 1960s carries the melancholy, irony and sadness of its time with a “pessimism of the mind and an optimism of the heart”, as famously put by the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci.’3
The waning of the progressive movement coincided with several other factors that plagued the body politic all through the 1950s and 1960s: disillusionment with the fruits of independence, simmering communal tensions, rampant corruption and unemployment, increasing scepticism about the very idea of freedom, in fact, a fast-eroding faith in any form of organized belief system be it religious, political or intellectual. The nayi kavita in Hindi and the jadeed shairi in Urdu were the result of this manthan or churning in the post-1947 India.
Eminent Urdu critic Gopi Chand Narang acknowledges Shahryar’s closeness to the Hindi d
epartment in Aligarh, especially its most charismatic teacher Kunwar Pal Singh, Prem Kumar who taught at a college in the city, Ravindra Bhramar who was a distinguished poet and teacher in the department of Hindi, and Neeraj, the pre-eminent Hindi poet of Aligarh who no matter where he worked always returned home to his perch in the city. However, he feels Shahryar possibly benefitted more from early models of modernist poetry available in Urdu itself, such as Majeed Amjad, Nasir Kazmi,4 Munir Niyazi and the young Turks of the ‘new wave’. Then there were the French models, the symbolists who had influenced N.M. Rashid and whose influence was plentifully available in Urdu through some spectacular and image-laden poetry, as well as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Narang mentions the small leftist group lead by Maqsood Rizvi and the influence of Munibur Rehman, poet and teacher, on an entire generation of young men at Aligarh. Shahryar was at the fringes of almost all ‘left’ activity in Aligarh – from his student days, as well as when he was a member of the staff and then again post-retirement till his death. The campus leftists regarded him as a fellow traveller – as one sympathetic to their cause if not exactly one of them, technically speaking, that is. Narang puts it well when he says, succinctly enough, ‘Shahryar’s urge was inner and his own.’5
Poetry, Shahryar believed, must necessarily have an element of music. Without music there can be no poetry and like music, poetry too must follow some rules and principles. Above all, like music, poetry must have rigour. While it is easy to say that poetry and music come naturally to those who are gifted, Shahryar maintained that even the gifted must follow certain rules and regulations if they are to be true to their gift. Mere practice is not sufficient to become proficient as a poet. For a seed to sprout, the soil in which it is planted must also be fertile. Also, any seed will not sprout in any soil – no matter how much you may plough it or water it or add nutrients. It might appear as though anybody with any imagination can produce a creative work, but that is not so. Everyone cannot marshal the ideas produced by their imagination, organize them into a coherent and meaningful manner and present them in a way that is pleasing or new. Nor can everyone gather together scattered ideas and thoughts in a way that is startling. The primary function of any art form is to surprise; it is the most magical effect that art can produce.6
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