Shahryar showed great organizational skills and enjoyed a successful stint as secretary; in the final year of his MA he was also the editor of the Urdu department’s magazine. While still awaiting the result of his MA, he was offered the chance to work in Hamari Zubaan, the weekly magazine of the Anjuman Tarraqui-e Urdu (Hind) by Ale Ahmad Suroor, then professor in the department of Urdu who also served as general secretary of the Anjuman from 1957 to 1974. Shahryar worked at Hamari Zubaan from 1961 to 1966.17 Suroor’s column in Hamari Zubaan, ‘Mera Safa’ (‘My Page’), soon became an intellectual lodestar of sorts in the world of Urdu literature; it shed light on a range of concerns and evolving trends, and contributed to the journal’s reach and popularity.18
The stint at the Anjuman proved to be a windfall of sorts for Shahryar; for one, it eased the financial burden and gave him an instant source of income ahead of his contemporaries. Editing the weekly also brought him closer to the syntax, structure and vocabulary, the nuts and bolts of writing as it were, which helped him in later years not merely in his career as a poet but also as a teacher of Urdu literature. During his student days, Shahryar was also associated with two other magazines, Chaupal and Ghalib.19 Evidently, this journalistic and editorial experience came handy when he edited Sher-o-Hikmat with Mughni Tabassum20 and years later the prestigious Fikr-o-Nazar.21 What is more, the experience of editing these diverse magazines so early in his career taught him the virtues of brevity and compactness, and made him aware of the perils of excess. Perhaps this is why his poetry is spare and lean, with not one superfluous word.
Baidar Bakht, an engineer by profession who specializes in the building of bridges and moonlights as a translator and writer in Urdu, was a younger contemporary of Shahryar’s at Aligarh. Even though he was a science student, he got to know of this shy young man who wrote poetry and was beginning to leave a mark at literary gatherings despite his quiet demeanour. Another point of contact between them was a mutual friend, Maqsood Hamid Rizvi, who was active in the National Student Federation (NSF), a leftist and secular organization.22 This is how Bakht recalls his earliest memories of Shahryar:
When I went to Aligarh in 1956 to take admission in the second year of inter-science, I was a sixteen-year-old scared junior. On the other hand, Kunwar Akhlaq Muhammad Khan was a twenty-year-old senior student and had become a recognized poet, under the wing of Khalilur Rahman Azmi; to my chagrin, he was also very popular with the girls. I was overwhelmed with his personality and could not dare to talk to him. He was a reasonable sportsman, playing badminton for hours in the NRSC club. He also used to play hockey; his son Humayun inherited this talent.23
While Shahryar’s gift for writing poetry may well have been God-given, Bakht points out how the early encouragement from influential and farsighted people such as Azmi enabled that gift to flower. Seldom do young poets enjoy the sort of respect and open admiration that Shahryar received; when Azmi published his seminal study of the Progressive Writers’ Movement, Urdu Mein Tarraqui Pasand Adabi Tehrik, in 1957, he dedicated it to Shahryar. For his part, not only did Shahryar dedicate his first volume of poetry, Ism-e Azam, to Azmi with the words, ‘Aalam mein tujh se lakh sahi, tu magar kahan’ (There may be many like you in the world but none is you); he acknowledged the huge debt he owed to Azmi thus: ‘Whatever I am, however I am, is only – and solely – due to Khalilur Rahman Azmi.’24 Bakht goes so far as to liken Shahryar and Azmi to Amir Khusro and his Sufi master Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya.25 Bakht cites this verse by Shahryar to support his analogy:
Khusro ki aankhon se kabhi dekhe agar tumko koi
Ahwaal hoga uska kya, Hazrat Nizamuddin ji?26
(If someone were to see you with Khusro’s eyes
What would happen to him, O Hazrat Nizamuddin ji?)
Shahryar joined the department of Urdu as lecturer in 1966. His debut collection of poems had already appeared a year before; it had ensured that Shahryar was a name to reckon with in the world of Urdu poetry. A flattering review in Nuqoosh, the pre-eminent literary journal from Lahore, by Gopi Chand Narang, who was then teaching at the University of Wisconsin, gave him the sort of international recognition that few poets of his time could hope for or expect. Narang’s review hailed the poet as an ‘authentic and thoughtful voice of the modern generation’.27 Shahryar seemed to be destiny’s child; a favourite of his teachers and elders, respected by his seniors and admired by his students, he was perched on the cusp of good fortune.
At this point, let us ask a somewhat facile question: Do creative writers and poets make good teachers? While many Urdu poets have been teachers of Urdu – Makhdoom Mohiuddin, Moinuddin Jazbi, Majnoon Gorakhpuri, Ale Ahmad Suroor, among others – there can be no standard answer to such a question. But it does beg a hypothetical one: had Ghalib got the teaching job he was hoping to get at Delhi College,28 what sort of teacher would he have been? Did an entire generation of students remain mehroom (bereft) because of that one act of hubris that denied Ghalib the teaching position he so wanted? Would the department of Persian at the Delhi College have had a spectacular flowering if Ghalib had indeed joined the faculty as a teacher?
Was Shahryar a good teacher? Yes and no, according to those who were taught by him. He was clearly a much-loved teacher as is evident from the lifelong ties he maintained with many of his former pupils. Syed Muhammad Ashraf,29 whom Shahryar taught at the master’s level, puts it best when he says he cannot, in all honesty and despite his great admiration for Shahryar, rank him amongst the best of teachers. For one thing, Shahryar chose to teach in the classroom from a sitting position; for another, his lectures were extremely brief. While teaching the short story, he would take several days over a single story and insist that the class read the text thoroughly. He took all of fifteen days to teach Rajinder Singh Bedi’s ‘Apne Dukh Mujhe De Do’ (‘Give Me Your Sorrows’), giving the utmost importance to a close reading of the text. If a student went to meet him in his chamber, he would order tea and even offer a cigarette!
An important observation needs to be made about Aligarh at this juncture, one that holds true for Shahryar as well. Contrary to popular perception, Aligarh was never the citadel of Islamic thought in India; it did indeed have thriving departments of Urdu, Arabic, Persian and Islamic Studies, but then it also taught the natural sciences and mathematics and, soon enough, began to offer extremely popular – not to mention highly competitive – courses in medicine and engineering as well. While the majority of students, and teachers, were indeed Muslim, ‘the campus ethos was neither “Muslim” nor “Islamic” per se’.30 And while Shahryar may have spent the bulk of his professional life in Aligarh, there was nothing parochial about him. And, by extension, while he did indeed write only in Urdu, there is nothing in his oeuvre that makes an explicit call to any one community. If ever there is a writer who can most effectively debunk the absurd misconception that Urdu is the language of Muslims or the cultural repository of Muslims alone, it is indeed Shahryar. And it is for this reason that a study of his oeuvre is important and timely. As we will see when we examine his poetry in greater detail in subsequent chapters, there is nothing that identifies him with any one group. Shahryar wrote in Urdu, yes, he lived and worked in Aligarh for the greater part of his life, yes, but he was not a ‘Muslim’ poet, most emphatically not!
Person, Persona, Personality
Waqt teri yeh ada main aaj tak samjha nahin
Meri duniya kyun badal di, mujhko kyun badla nahin
(Time, I have never understood this trait of yours
Why have you changed my world, but not me)
Shahryar was fond of watching Hindi films, travelling, eating out, dressing well and meeting new people. Yet, for a seemingly gregarious person, he was not especially fond of giving lectures or talks or even, for that matter, reading papers at seminars. In fact, a criticism levelled against Shahryar by fellow academics was his refusal to present papers or engage in intellectual discourse or appear on panel discussions. If at all he attended a seminar, it wou
ld be to read his poetry. It was almost as though he was highlighting the fact that he was a poet first and foremost and whatever he might have to say on politics, literature and society would be through his poetry and poetry alone.31 Gopi Chand Narang, who started off as a friend of Azmi and Suroor and gradually became a close friend of Shahryar as well, is candid in his assessment and the reasons why Shahryar chose to stay away from academic debates. ‘His mind,’ Narang believes, ‘was neither academic nor analytical; it was only creative.’ He goes on to elaborate:
Shahryar wrote his PhD thesis for purely professional reasons. Did he ever publish it? I don’t know. I never heard him discussing issues in depth – be they literary or political. He discovered his poetic voice quite early and once he did, he stayed with that. He preferred to be in a circle of friends and admirers and shunned debate. In comparison, Azmi was a scholar who was aware of all the great debates in the world of literature. Shahryar avoided prose; at least I have not seen any of his published prose pieces except for (transcribed) interviews. That was the way he was.32
Shahryar’s style of reciting his own poetry has come in for a lot of criticism. Several people have commented on the fact that he would appear at mushairas as though he had come under duress, recite his poetry with evident disinterest even in front of an interested and engaged audience, and rush off the stage as if he had come to perform a painful task and was relieved when it was over. In private conversations and interviews, he admitted to suffering from nervous pangs before a live audience – a rare occurrence for teachers since they are used to addressing a class full of students. While he soon got over his nervousness, given the sheer number of mushairas he was routinely invited to, he never managed to recite his poetry with any degree of flair, let alone obvious enjoyment, unlike many poets popular in the mushaira circuit who are good performers apart from being tolerably good poets.33
Sadiqur Rehman Kidwai, Shahryar’s near contemporary at Aligarh who retired as professor of Urdu at the Jawaharlal Nehru University and is presently the secretary of the Ghalib Institute in Delhi, has pointed out that low-key quality and absence of flourish and rhetoric were hallmarks of Shahryar’s personality and poetry from the earliest days. Kidwai refers to the dheemapan (low-key quality or moderation) that was most attractive at a time when high-decibel poetry and poster-boy poets, especially at mushairas, were the norm.34 He recalls how Shahryar would appear silently on stage, recite his poetry with no particular vim and vigour and no prefatory comments either, taking the least possible time on stage. Even as a student, Shahryar received measured and sober applause as befitted a poet who had the respect of his audience. Kidwai goes on to argue that by keeping himself aloof from the politics that had begun to seep into Urdu poetry and the ‘campism’ – between the progressives and the modernists – Shahryar kept writing his own kind of poetry and making a name for himself. And while his association with the progressives was never hidden, his poetry – especially his nazm – shows the profound influence of N.M. Rashid.35
The late 1950s and the early 1960s were an important period in purely literary terms. The era of the progressives was drawing to a close and another literary movement – jadeediyat – was exercising its spell over the literary arena in Urdu and Hindi.36 While Shahryar would no doubt have read the progressives (for not only were there large numbers of progressives in Aligarh but Azmi had also published a definitive study of the Progressive Writers’ Movement in 1957 which had created quite a stir among literary critics) and been influenced by them, he was equally taken in by the new kind of poetry being produced by the modernists. He has acknowledged the influence of Faiz on his poetry, but he has also spoken of the impact of the new crop of poets writing a new kind of poetry, such as N.M. Rashid, Miraji, Akhtarul Iman, Munibur Rehman and Munir Niyazi.
As a poet and as a person, Shahryar evolved and changed over time. He believed his later poetry was different from the nazms and ghazals in his early collections, that he was not repeating himself as a poet and also that the changes were triggered by a natural process of growth as well as intellectual and emotional crises in his life.37 We will examine whether Shahryar was a progressive or a modernist in greater detail in the next chapter but as Gulzar, who knew and admired Shahryar in the last stage of his life, told me in the course of a free-wheeling telephone conversation, it isn’t necessary to categorize him as one or the other; it is sufficient to say he was influenced by both these radically opposed schools of thought and that he took what he wanted and what worked for him from both and disregarded those other elements that did not suit his poetic temperament.
There was another side to Shahryar that few would know. His love for good food was of course well known; what is lesser known is Shahryar’s penchant for cooking. Throughout his married life, he cooked some of his favourite dishes for his family. When his children were married and his nest was empty, he would prepare some of his favourite foods – aloo gosht, qeema do-pyaza, kaleji and istoo – for his friends in Aligarh and have them sent across. As he was fond of telling people, he could cook a ‘complete’ meal from scratch, complete, that is, without the rotis – making rotis being an art he could not master till the end. He was also justifiably proud of the near-perfect tawazun or balance of ingredients in the dishes he cooked; the spices, chillies and salt were just so, neither less nor more. Like poetry, he maintained, good food should be perfectly proportioned with not the slightest bit of excess.
Another lesser known fact about Shahryar is that he was a complete family man. Devoted to his three children, Humayun, Saima and Faridoon, he was in later years equally close to his grandchildren.38 Always proud of being a hands-on father to his three children, he would get up in the morning, help them get ready for school and also help in various household chores. The divorce from his wife marked the end of family life as he had known it. While not lonely, there was nevertheless a haunting sorrow of living alone. In a poem entitled ‘Jeene ki Lat’ (‘The Habit of Living’), he wrote:
Mujhse milne aane wala koi nahin hai
Phir kyun ghar ke darwaze par takhti ab hai
Jeene ki lat padh jaaye
To chhut ti kab hai
(No one will come to meet me
Why then have the nameplate on my door
The habit of living
Is hard to let go)
Shahryar had dedicated the third collection of his poetry, Hijr ke Mausam, to his wife, Najma Mahmood – a teacher in the department of English in the Women’s College at Aligarh, whom he had married in 196839 – with the following verse:
Aankhon mein teri dekh raha hoon main apni shakal
Yeh koi vahima, ya koi khwaab toh nahin
(I am seeing my face in your eyes
Is it a whim, or a dream)
The same volume also included ‘Najma ke Liye Ek Nazm’ (‘A Poem for Najma’); far from a conventional love ballad and entirely free of the traditional metaphors of romantic poetry, especially romantic poetry in Urdu, it contained a hint of the intense relationship between the two:
Kya sochti ho!
Deewar-e faramoshi se udhar kya dekhti ho!
Aina-e khwaab mein aane wale lamhon ke manzar dekho
Aangan mein purane neem ke saath mein
Bhaiyyu40 ke jahaaz mein baithi hui nanhi chidiya
Kyun udti nahin!
Jungal ki taraf jaane wali
Woh akeli pagdandi kyun mudti nahin!
Tooti zanjeer sadaaon ki kyun judti nahin!
Ek surkh gulab laga lo apne judhe mein aur phir socho!
(What are you thinking!
What do you see beyond the wall of forgetfulness
Look at the spectacle of coming moments in the mirror of dreams
Beside the neem tree in the courtyard
Why does the little bird
in Bhaiyyu’s boat not fly away!
Why does the solitary track
going towards the jungle not turn!
Why does the broken chain of calls not mend!
Shahryar wore his worries and sorrows lightly. While there is ample evidence of a deep well of sadness in his poetry, in his personal life he was unfailingly cheerful. Among friends and well-wishers, he could be relied upon to be the life and soul of any party. His amiable disposition, his ready laughter and his seemingly inexhaustible fund of jokes, anecdotes and amusing qissas about people and places never failed to draw chuckles. What is more, his jokes and anecdotes were always mauzoo, that is, perfectly in the spirit of the moment. Obviously, it requires intelligence and incredible recall to have just the perfect joke or amusing incident to narrate – that too with a flourish – at the right time and right place. Shahryar was naturally blessed with both. He also had an amazing recall of Urdu shairi.
Unlike most poets, Shahryar seldom recited his own poetry to suit an occasion but unfailingly produced a sher by a contemporary or one of the ‘masters’ to prop his conversation and to drive home a point. In the best tradition of conversations in the educated, genteel Urdu-speaking milieu, the shurfa as they are called, a conversation with Shahryar – no matter how prosaic the subject – was never complete without a sprinkling of the choicest Urdu verses and an amusing incident or two narrated with a ready laugh and twinkling eyes. However, Shahryar was unfailingly careful with his language in mixed company and was never known to use expletives or narrate ribald jokes in the presence of women.
Fond of good clothes and expensive aftershaves and perfumes, Shahryar was always a natty dresser. In fact, in his choice of well-tailored Western-style suits and jackets, he cut a dapper figure, vastly different from the pajama-kurta or shervani-clad and topi-wearing, long-haired, dishevelled Urdu poet of the popular imagination. Possibly the long years in academia had given him the poise and innate confidence to hold his own among all strata of society.
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