Shahryar held tradition in great regard. Possibly because he had come through the rigour of a formal and exhaustive education – including a PhD under the exacting early supervision of a teacher such as Ale Ahmad Suroor as well as the guidance of a scholar such as Azmi7 – that too at a university such as Aligarh’s whose Urdu department boasted some of the finest academicians and greatest connoisseurs of Urdu zubaan and tehzeeb. Unlike many of his contemporaries in the new wave of poetry that came in the wake of the progressive upsurge, Shahryar was never one to cock a snook at the centuries-old legacy that the modern Urdu poet had ready access to. He believed that tradition could teach the nuts and bolts of poetry and especially the ghazal, for the tools of Urdu poetry have remained largely unchanged while the outer appearance has changed as has its vocabulary. The manner of crafting a ghazal – a bit like ‘pouring’ ideas into a mould or wine in a bottle – has remained largely the same since the genre of the ghazal was first perfected by masters such as Mir and Sauda.8
Like cooking, which Shahryar enjoyed enormously, poetry too was a matter of getting the ingredients right. The metaphors, symbols, abstractions need to be in the right proportion; excess or want can make all the difference between magical and mundane. And just as in cooking, there is that indefinable element called haath ka mazaa (its literal translation, ‘the taste of the cook’s hand’ does not come close to doing justice to its meaning), so also with poetry. The form of the ghazal does not allow much deviation and the vocabulary too is constrained by metre and rhyme; yet, within these time-honoured constraints, the master ghazal-go can produce magic when the reader exclaims with wonder at something that touches his/her heart. Ghalib expressed it best when he said:
Dekhna taqreer ki lazzat ki jo us ne kaha
Maine yeh jaana ke goya yeh bhi mere dil mein hai
(Look at the deliciousness of speech that
when [s]he spoke
I felt as though this too lies within my heart)
Good poetry can indeed make the reader feel ‘I could have said this’ or ‘This is exactly how I feel’. And when that threshold is reached, Shahryar believed, the real aesthetic experience happens, which is essentially a mystical communication between the writer and the reader or the reciter and the listener.
Shahryar was averse to extreme topicality in poetry. For literature to pass the test of time, he believed, it must contain something within it that would live beyond the here and now. In this he differed from the progressives, especially the more ideologically driven ones, who wrote on intensely topical subjects and whose works acquired the tag of waqti adab (topical literature). As Shahryar said in an interview, it is not important how many poems are written on Korea; instead, what is important is how many good poems we remember being written on Korea. The undue importance being given to mauzu (topic) and maqsadiyat (purposiveness), he believed, was one of the reasons for the decline of the progressive movement: ‘Purposive literature must necessarily contain the known and familiar; it has no scope for new experiments. It must have common thoughts, common feelings and so on. Naturally, therefore, it can only accommodate general things about people, not individuals.’9
Making his own position vis-à-vis art and life amply clear, Shahryar was at pains to establish the importance of life in the centuries-old Art v. Life debate: Adab barai Adab (Art for Art’s Sake) and Adab barai Zindagi (Art for Life’s Sake):
I believe in having respect and regard for all forms of art on the express condition that life – in all its myriad glory – must be present in art. If such a situation arises whereby I am forced to choose between life and art, I will choose life. Poetry is nothing more than this for me …With the coming of the English, we Hindustanis discovered that literature holds a mirror to society and is a valuable tool for social change. And ever since, we have all, in our own way, been doing this. Every now and then some of us have declined – and declined most vociferously – to perform this role, but by and large literature that is seen to convey something to someone has been deemed better and more meaningful.10
Among his seniors, Shahryar has acknowledged the influence of Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Miraji, Munir Niyazi, Akhtarul Iman; but among his contemporaries his poetry was likely to have commonalities with Zafar Iqbal, Nasir Kazmi, Ahmad Mushtaq, Muhammad Alvi and Salim Ahmad, because they had possibly read and been influenced by the same sort of people he had. In India, he regarded the ghazals of Hasan Naim, Khalilur Rehman Azmi and Shaz Tamkanat as being among the finest – both in terms of technique and content. However, Gopi Chand Narang offers us another way of seeing Shahryar and viewing him alongside his contemporaries.11 For one, he doesn’t believe one should necessarily go by how a poet assesses himself with regard to his peers. In his opinion, a poet’s views about himself can be discussed but should not be taken at face value. Narang goes on to talk about how ‘all poets, including Ghalib or Mir, try to play safe … they may exaggerate or deconstruct. There is always a crisscross of influences…’
Narang is also willing to speculate that since Azmi was the earliest mentor, his must have been the earliest influence on Shahryar’s poetry and it is possible that Shahryar chose to list Shaz Tamkanat and Hasan Naim rather than Azmi, as the two were indeed current in those days and he might even have liked their works. But Narang himself is of the opinion that there is no trace of either Tamkanat or Naim in Shahryar; the two score in terms of craft but little else, whereas Shahryar ‘speaks in his own voice, an authentic voice. There is no trace of even Mir or Ghalib what to speak of Tamkanat’. Though Narang goes on to concede, ‘…there may be a bit of Nasir Kazmi or Munir Niyazi … They were the poets of their age. Munir in his own natural way of wonder and awe vis-à-vis the onslaught of urban culture, and Nasir Kazmi, via Firaq Gorakhpuri, rediscovered the painful and lonesome voice of Mir.’ But Shahryar’s creativity, Narang insists, was his own. Even if he wanted, Shahryar could not go the way of Nasir Kazmi or Munir Niyazi. Shahryar interacted with them just as he did with his other contemporaries and fellow poets at mushairas and nashists but ‘once he had found his voice he was content and hardly looked around’ (emphasis mine).
So, was Shahryar a progressive? Or was he modernist?12 This question has vexed many, for while he started writing poetry and gaining recognition as a poet when the modernist movement was gaining momentum, Shahryar himself was at pains to establish his socialist–Marxist credentials. We have already established that when it came to the crunch, in a debate on Art for Art’s Sake v. Art for Life’s Sake, Shahryar could not have aligned himself with the former. Asked if poetry can afford to be wilfully self-referential, his answer was equally unequivocal: ‘There can be no poetry without the self.’ But he was also quick to clarify:
At the same time, no one can be expected to be interested in the purely personal details of other people’s lives, in the joys and sorrows of others. Some poets have tried to do that, for instance Akhtar Shirani wrote poetry that was intensely romantic yet extremely personal. But that has never appealed to me. I have a Marxist world view. I believe in the social and political commitment of literature. You may not always find direct references to my world view in my poetry. But you will find them in the oblique and the symbolic.13
Asked if poetry must necessarily have a social commitment, a framework within which it must be located and a frame of reference that is accessible to all its readers, Shahryar’s answer became more general. All good poets, be it Iqbal or Faiz, he said, speak of the world, to the world. And then he tossed a ‘googly’ at me when I was least expecting it by declaring: ‘In some respects, Faiz is a greater poet than Iqbal precisely because he is more human, more interested in all humanity and not one community or group.’14 This one seemingly offhand statement, possibly made on the spur of the moment, seems to contain the kernel of Shahryar’s own poetic vision and holds the key to understanding his perception of a poet’s role in society.
When the Jnanpith Award was conferred upon Shahryar, Manglesh Dabral noted:
Shahryar
belongs to a generation of poets that emerged out of the remnants of the progressive movement and, of course, from the disillusionment with the meta-narrative of the Nehruvian era. The disturbing aftermath of its dreams and hopes had culminated in a deep sense of loss in the new generation of poets and cultural practitioners. The works of the poets to come to the fore in the post-progressive era, such as Nida Fazli, Balraj Komal, Mohammed Alvi and Shahryar, signify the alienation from ‘the big dream’ with a tinge of nostalgia and sadness for the past that once seemed so much full of promises of a new dawn, a resurgent democratic and egalitarian society. This sense of loss is evident in almost all the ghazals and nazms of this period.15
For his own part, Shahryar was at pains to maintain a distance from labels: he has said how he was neither entirely a progressive nor a modernist; he took what he liked from these two, often opposing, schools of thought. He believed that the intellectual and emotional content of a creative work as well as its style and technique were all equally important; merely its topic could not be important. For instance, many poets wrote in white heat on the Partition, but why is only Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s ‘Yeh daagh daagh ujala, yeh shab-gazida sehr’ (‘This patchy light, this night-bitten dawn’) remembered?16 Obviously, there was something in this ghazal that lifted it above its time and circumstance and made it not only universal but also leagues ahead of the copious outpourings of Faiz’s contemporaries. This ghazal by Faiz, then, becomes an anthem of despair and disappointment of not Faiz alone but speaks in the voice of those countless others who saw the events of the calamitous year as neither batwara (partition) nor azaadi (freedom) but as a ‘night-bitten dawn’ that brought a ‘patchy light’ instead of a joyous awakening to a new dawn.
Despite the preponderance of images and metaphors that seem to emerge from a wellspring deep within his own psyche, Shahryar’s worst critics cannot say that his poetry is only about himself. For, it has none of the opacity, inwardness and deliberate, wilful obsession with the self that marred much of the output of the jadeed parast. Also, while personal and often idiosyncratic, his choice of words and images (night, dreams, wakefulness, silence, the sound of wailing animals coming from a distance, unripe guavas, uncreased bed and so on) is by no means incommunicable. As we will see when we examine his ghazals and nazms in greater detail, his poetry does not withhold or exclude; if anything, it draws the reader with an insistent pull; even while talking of the personal and the individual, Shahryar seems to be making common cause with the world outside his self, a world he never, ever, ignores or excludes.
While the modern Urdu poet has been at pains to establish a set of symbols (alaamatein) that recur in their poetry, some poets came to be identified with a certain school, and their choices of images and symbols came to represent their ideological drift: a markedly ‘Eastern’ slant would have references to the caravan or the tavern, a philosophical or religious bent of mind would talk of the mard-e kaamil (the perfect man) or the mard-e momin (the man of faith), the progressives would talk of the red dawn that was nigh and of fingers dipped in the heart’s blood, and so on. Early on in his poetic career, Shahryar began to use a set of symbols and stayed true to them over the years. A dream is one such symbol that crops up again and again. Here it is in the very first poem in his maiden collection:
Khwaab tabeer ke shikasta dil
Aaj phir jodne ko aaye hai
(To mend the broken hearts of interpretation
Dreams have come once again)
And again from Ism-e Azam:
Khwaab ki taal par
Neend ki thaal par
Raat phir raqs kar
Shama aashufta sar
(To the beat of dreams
On the platter of sleep
Let the night dance again
As the candle burns in a frenzy)
And among the last poems published in his final collection, Shaam Hone Wali Hai, dreams make an appearance yet again in a poem entitled ‘Subah Se Udaas Hoon’(‘I Have Been Sad Since the Morning’), but the candle is gutted and there is no way to light up his dreams:
Hawa ke darmiyaan aaj raat ka padao hai
Main apne khwaab ke chiragh ko
Jala na paunga yeh sochkar
Bahut hi bad-hawaas hoon
Main subah se udaas hoon
(The night has set up its camp in the middle of the wind
Thinking that I will not be able to
Light the lamp of my dreams
I have been much distressed
I have been sad since the morning)
Asked about the importance of communication, whether it was essential or even required that everything be instantly accessible, or revealed, to the audience, Shahryar had the following unequivocal response:
Communication is all. A poet must reach the greatest number of people. Some of his words may be clothed in myth and metaphor, but they must eventually be realised by his readers. If his images are too oblique, if his symbols too dense, then, no matter how exquisitely beautiful his words or how well-crafted his syntax, he is failing as a poet.17
From the very first collection, dreams and sleep become a recurring leitmotif in his poetry. Surely, they meant something more to him apart from their obvious significance as metaphors. Again, we find the answer in his own words:
Dreams and sleep have meant different things to me at different times. Dreams can be joyful or fearful. Sleep can beckon; and it can elude. Dreams can be an escape from unpleasant reality, or they can be a punishment of sorts. When I have most yearned for sleep and been denied it, it has been my worst nightmare. And when I have slept soundly and dreamt, I have felt most blessed.18
Finally, to quote one last time from the interview published in The Hindu, when asked if, looking back on his poetic journey he saw a change or evolution, he said:
I used to write a great deal more; now, my output has decreased considerably. I write very little, I am aware of the expectations people have of me. I am reminded also of what the noted critic, Ale Ahmad Suroor, wrote on the flap of my first book: ‘If he remains safe from the danger of takrar (repetition) and thakan (exhaustion), he will go far.’ Today, when I look back, I can see I have been fearful of the consequences of both. Mujhe thakan aur takrar ka khauf hai (I am scared of repetition and exhaustion).19
Kamleshwar likened Shahryar’s poetry to wet sand (bheegi rait);20 and indeed, it has neither the sheen and softness of silk and satin nor the coarseness and crispness of cotton. Like wet sand, it is heavy with myriad droplets of feelings and emotions. Like wet sand, Kamleshwar goes on to say, you cannot wring out Shahryar’s poetry in search of meanings; all you can do is sense whether a river of deep feelings is running below it or a sea of emotions lapping at its shore.
Coming to translating Shahryar into English – which prompted my own serious interest in his poetry and formed my bridge to helping others access his poetry across the barriers of language and script – I feel one must be either very brave or very foolhardy to attempt to translate the Urdu ghazal into English. People have attempted this and while I admire their courage, I myself did not feel equipped to do so.
Reading poetry in translation has been described as an experience similar to looking at the wrong side of a carpet, for a translation can seldom match the colour and sheen, the play of light and shade, the intricate word patterns of the original. In translation, the ghazal poses far more obstacles than the nazm, which is kinder to the translator. So, when it came to translating Shahryar into English I chose to concentrate only on his nazms. I selected 100 nazms for the collection entitled Through the Closed Doorway, published by Rupa & Co in 2004. For the purpose of this study of Shahryar’s life and work, I have perforce had to translate some of his ghazals as well as his nazms. But I must confess that my translations are functional at best and make no claim to serving any other purpose save carrying across the barrier of language and script some of the meaning that Shahryar intended; that the magic of his words, especially in the ghazals, is missing is my bi
ggest loss as a translator.
Baidar Bakht, who has translated both Shahryar’s nazms and ghazals, has a more sanguine view. He says: ‘While Shahryar was well aware of the tradition of classical Urdu poetry, his ethos was that of a modern educated man. That’s why his poetry was relatively easy to translate into English.’21
I leave it to the good reader to decide!
Understanding the World and Its Ways
Poochho to paagal ka sapna, samjho to sansar
(If you ask it is the dream of a madman, if you understand it is the world)
In the foreword to Shahryar’s maiden collection of poetry, Ism-e Azam (1965), Ale Ahmad Suroor had written:
The first good quality I noticed in the ghazals and nazms by Shahryar is that they are entirely free of the defect of verbosity. The other distinctive quality about these poems is that they are alive and aquiver with brevity and (their) emotions carry the impressions of those young minds that are caught in the conflict between dreams and reality.22
The choice of title for his maiden collection is, in many ways, illustrative of who Shahryar was and where he was headed. It takes a certain self-confidence to call one’s very first anthology – especially when one is all of twenty-nine years of age – Ism-e Azam, literally meaning ‘highest name’, but used to refer to a legendary name that can open the doors to the far reaches of the universe and reveal the countless mysteries of the created world. The Sufi masters had understood ‘Ism-e Azam’ to be the name of Allah, whose zikr will bring untold benefits and rewards. According to the Quran, all the Most Beautiful Names belong to Allah23 and every person has one special ‘Ism-e Azam’, that is, one special name for the Almighty which he or she can recite over and over again to get what he or she desires. In other words, every individual has his or her personal ‘Ism-e Azam’ – a bit like a unique code or password or a mantra to gain entry, as it were, into a world of untold munificence.
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