Khalilur Rahman Azmi, who knew Shahryar and his poetry rather well, found the code or password to ‘enter’ Shahryar’s world through an early poem, ‘Khwaabon ka Bhikari’ (‘The Beggar of Dreams’). The poem deserves to be quoted in its entirety to fully understand the import of Azmi’s observation:
Apne maamuul ke mutabiq hum
Aaj bhi roz ki tarah yun hi
Din ke hamrah be-khayali mein
Wadi-e sham se guzarte huye
Raat ki sarhadon ko chhu lenge
Neend ke dar ko khatkhatainge
Laakh roenge gidgidaainge
Kaasa-e chashm mein magar ek khwaab
Aaj ki raat bhi na paayenge
(As is normally my routine
Once again today like always
Walking heedlessly along the day
Going through the valley of the evening
I shall touch the boundaries of the night
And knocking on the doorway of sleep
Make a thousand entreaties and pleas
But still I shall not find a single dream
In the basin of my eye tonight)
Reading ‘Khwaabon ka Bhikari’ and then several more of Shahryar’s poems at one go, Azmi writes, he understood that poetry was for him a means of searching for the person – the real person – who dwelt inside the persona of Shahryar the poet and the man; for Shahryar, poetry was, thus, merely a means of facilitating that search, a means to an end. And all of Shahryar’s nazms, Azmi goes on to say, are merely the narration of this quest. The collision between dreams and reality, the acute sense of loneliness in the conflict-ridden world comprising a series of days and nights, deception and self-deception, mirage, dawn, sand, darkness, mist, the sense of being lost, wanting life and death and yet running away from both too – these are some of the intensely personal issues that leaven his poetry.24
In the Nuqoosh article, which had made quite a splash and brought international recognition to Shahryar, Gopi Chand Narang captured the essence of his summation of Ism-e Azam for me in the following words:
For the first time in Urdu, Shahryar’s short poems and metaphorical ghazals depicted the angst of the weary, lonesome modern man whose dreams were shattered, ideals lost and who – in this gloomy atmosphere – was looking for a ray of hope. In the post-Partition period there was an atmosphere of despondency and sadness after the euphoria of Independence. Shahryar’s voice captured the spirit of the times in simple yet unconventional idiom; it was straight, sincere and fresh. There was no burden of tradition. His language marked a complete break insofar as it was shorn of embellishment or rhetorical, deliberate design. It had only a faint touch of art which did not look like art. There was nothing contrived about it … His poems had bare, simple, sincere words coming from the heart that touched the heart. Though there was an undercurrent of polarization and an inner scuffle of pull and push between dreams versus sleep, darkness versus light, and pain versus hope, Shahryar’s keywords and expressions were altogether different (from what was in currency) and fresh … it was artful but not arty.25
Showing a remarkable degree of self-awareness, Shahryar himself once wrote:
In the early days I wrote and published a great deal. But when I realized that some very highly regarded and serious-minded people were reading what I was writing with careful consideration, I resolved that I would never – not by my poetry or my person – do anything to disappoint them. Even today, when I write my poetry or think of having it published, the opinion of such serious-minded and well-regarded people is before me.26
The self-awareness also dictated, to a large extent, the sort of subjects Shahryar chose to write about. Shahryar has made very few direct references to immediate or topical events such as the Iran–Iraq war, the collapse of the Twin Towers, the destruction of the Babri Masjid, the rise of right-wing forces and so on; nor has he written anything that is overtly personal or that can be directly linked to his personal life. Two of his contemporaries, Munawwar Rana and Nida Fazli, have used the mother as an oft-recurring image. There is no such image – of mother, father, brother, son, daughter, lover – that can be said to appear as a leitmotif. Instead, there is the night, sleep, dreams, sky, greenery, birds – images that are general and diffused and yet make a call to the reader’s imagination that can be felt both at the emotional and intellectual level. In many places, he seems to be making common cause with his readers, as though his sorrow or pain is not his alone but others share it too:
Sabhi ko gham hai samandar ke khushk hone ka
(Everyone is sad at the drying up of the sea)
Or, more specifically:
Saari duniya ke masail yun mujhe darpesh hain
Tera gham kaafi na ho jaise guzar auqaat ke
(All the problems of the world are placed before me
As though your sorrow is not enough for me to get by)
This might be a good occasion to pause and reflect on one singular quality in Shahryar’s poetic oeuvre, namely, the lack of izaafat. Literally meaning ‘addition’ or ‘increase’, it refers to the widespread tendency among Urdu poets to coin new expressions with the use of hyphenated words.27 Among the greats, Ghalib indulged in it to a certain degree and Iqbal and Faiz introduced a startling degree of newness into Urdu poetics with their lavish, and occasionally overindulgent, propensity to use izaafat.28 The following nazm by Shahryar is not merely a model of brevity and compactness but also demonstrates how one can get by without the interlinked chain-like quality of izaafat and catch the reader’s attention with a simplicity that is startling and direct:
Maail ba-karam hai raatein
Aankhon se kahon ab maangein
Khwaabon ke siwa jo chaahein
(The nights are inclined towards kindness
Tell the eyes to ask
For whatever they wish except dreams)
The brevity and succinctness in his description and the softness and evenness in his tone set apart Shahryar’s poetry from his contemporaries. There is not a trace of anger anywhere even when ostensibly describing very trying circumstances, as for instance in this nazm:29
Sannaton se bhari botalein bechne wale
Meri khidki ke neeche phir khadey huye hain
Aur awaazein laga rahein hain
Bistar ki shikanon se nikloon
Neeche jaaoon
Unse poonchhoon
Meri ruswai se unko kya milta hai?
(Those who sell bottles filled with silences
Stand under my window once again
And call out
Shall I get out of my wrinkled bed
Go down
And ask them
What do they gain by humiliating me?
And he employed a similar simplicity, almost a conversational ease, in the ghazal as well:
Ghar ki taameer tasawwur hi mein ho sakti hai
Apne naqshe ke mutabiq yeh zameen kuchh kam hai
(A home can be built only in one’s imagination
The land is not big enough for the map I have)
This naturalness and complete lack of artifice give an effortless quality to his writing, as though he is thinking aloud or speaking to himself, be it in the ghazal or
the nazm:
Tujhse milne ko tujhko paane ko
Koi tadbeer soojhti hi nahin
Ek manzil pe ruk gayi hai hayaat
Yeh zameen jaise ghoomti hi nahin
Ajeeb cheez hai yeh waqt jisko kehte hain
Ke aane paata nahin aur beet jaata hai
(There seems no way
Of meeting you, possessing you
Life appears to have come to a standstill
As though this earth revolves no more
Strange is this thing called Time
Passing by when it has barely come)
It is these and other similarities between Shahryar’s ghazals and nazms that have led some people to point out that he did something that was almost blasphemous for the purists. Gulzar puts it best when he says that Sha
hryar reduced the distance between the ghazal and the nazm.30 He also reduced the distance between progressivism and modernism. Like Akhtarul Iman, a conventional label does not fit Shahryar; neither belonged fully to a movement, neither wrote about labourers and peasants, yet both had a socially engaged world view. Shahryar was a progressive insofar as he looked at his age and spoke of his time. At the same time, he was a poet with a distinctly modern sensibility but he was not a New Yorker; he was ‘a modernist but of small-town India. He talked of the ghantaghar (clock tower) of his town, not of the Eiffel Tower’.31
And yet, Gulzar goes on to place Shahryar in the league of the ‘big’ poets of Urdu from recent times:
Among the big poets of big poetry there was Firaq [Gorakhpuri], [Faiz Ahmad] Faiz, [Ahmad] Faraz and then there was Shahryar. You don’t see any headlines in Shahryar’s poetry; he is not raising any slogans. Faiz strings his words out taut as a banner. Firaq makes an announcement of what he has to say. So does Faraz; his words were unambiguous and immediately became a headline. Shahryar is the subtlest of all of them. He writes as he speaks. And he reads just as he writes. He speaks with the utmost patience and balance. Like a drop of water that has fallen on the leaf of a lotus, his words quiver for a very long time. When you hear it for the first time, his couplet echoes in your ear for a long time.32
The revolution, or at the very least the coming of the revolution that Faiz and Faraz spoke of with such passion and eloquence, is there in Shahryar too, but its imminent arrival is not declared to the beat of drums and cymbals, nor with raised fists and loud slogans. Instead, there is what Gulzar has so aptly described as khud-kalami, almost as though he is talking to himself. He is alert and aware of its coming but it’s almost as though he is placing his hand on the reader’s shoulder and drawing their attention in a benign, kindly sort of way:
Udhar dekho hawa ke bazuon mein
Ek aahat qaid hai…
…Agar tum chahte ho
Is zameen par hukumrani ho tumhari
To meri baat mano
Hawa ke bazuon mein qaid is aahat ko
Ab aazad kar do!33
(See there in the arms of the wind
The sound of footsteps is imprisoned...
…If you want
To rule over this earth
Heed my words
Set free
The sounds imprisoned in the arms of the wind)
And elsewhere:
Tumhari talwaar zang-alood hai
Isliye ki tumne usey kabhi istemaal nahin kiya
Aur istemaal karte bhi to kaise
Tum apne dushmano se na-waqif thay
(Your sword is rusty
Because you have never used it
And how could you have
After all, you were unacquainted with your enemies)
Shahryar’s Prose
Phool mehnge ho gaye, qabrein purani ho gayeen
(Flowers have become expensive, graves old)
A sense of Shahryar’s prose can be gleaned from the columns and editorials he wrote for different journals at different points in his career. Of these, the most useful are the ones he wrote for Khair-o-Khabar, from Aligarh, all through the late 1970s. Many of these have been put together by the indefatigable scholar from Jamia Millia Islamia, Sarwarul Huda, and are awaiting publication.34 In these writings, Shahryar touches upon a range of issues: the role of a columnist, senior and ailing writers from Urdu and other Indian languages, friends and fellow writers, student politics, the importance of sports and literature for physical and mental well-being and democratic values for spiritual health, changing literary values and why this change is important and necessary, the enduring debate on art and life, among a host of issues.
There is an ease and simplicity in these writings; he is writing as he speaks. There is none of the adjectival overdrive, the play upon words and verbiage one normally sees in a great deal of popular or journalistic writing. In one column, he describes in detail the measures undertaken by the new vice chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University (A.M. Khusro), namely, the decision to make the chairmanship of a department by rotation and the ire it evoked among senior professors, an ire second only to the abolition of the zamindari system by the government shortly after Independence! To add insult to injury, the vice chancellor also took away from the heads of departments the right to appoint new staff members; instead, the education committees of the departments were entrusted with the task. He ends his column with the following one-liner: ‘I do not have the slightest doubt of Khusro sahab’s intent.’35
Writing on the periodic communal riots that rocked Aligarh, he first points out the historic link between Partition and communal riots, and then proceeds to talk of the nameless fear and strange hatred that mar all relations between majority and minority communities. More than anything else, he writes, it is the sense of guilt that drives people to violence against members of the ‘other’ community. And he goes on to make an eloquent case of the inaction that grips even otherwise well-meaning people and political parties, an inaction that is crippling and in the long run as proactive as the acts of violence themselves and which, perpetuating a vicious cycle, further deepens the sense of guilt and alienation. The column is titled, appropriately enough, ‘Yeh Nakhoon Kya Kaam Denge Jahan Dil ki Girah Uljhi Hui Hai?’ (‘What good will these nails do when the knots around the heart are so tangled?’)36
There are other columns too with lyrical titles indicating that they come from a poet’s pen as, for instance, ‘Zindagi Bhes Naye Sham-o Sahar Badlaiikii, Ankhon ka Kaam tha Dekhna so Dekhaki’ (Life Kept Changing its Guise Every Eve and Morn/The Task of the Eye was to See and It Kept Seeing’), ‘Musalmaano ke Sahi Numanindon ka Masla: Hadd Chahiye Sazaa Mein Aqoobat ke Waaste’ (‘The Issue of True Representation of Muslims: The Need to Set Limits in Punishment for the Sake of Fairness’), ‘Yeh Bhi Suno: Jo Gosh-e Haqeeqat Nyosh Hai’(‘Listen to This as well: This is the True Reality’), among others.
That Shahryar kept a keen and perceptive gaze on contemporary events and their long-term implications is evident in an editorial entitled ‘Bahuguna and Company ka Alamiya’ (‘The Tragedy of Bahuguna and Company’).37 In a ruefully titled editorial, ‘Isey Kya Kahiye…’38 (‘What Does One Call This?’), he bemoans the fact that even a quarter-century after Independence, the educational system has never received the attention it deserves. It is another matter, he notes, that all political leaders irrespective of their ideological bearings use universities as laboratories for their experiments. Be it central or state universities, when it comes to fulfilling the agendas of bodies such as NCERT, UGC, ICHR, CSIR or others, everyone has short-term goals.
There are some delightful pen portraits scattered among these writings too – of friends such as Salahuddin Pervaiz, of much-admired teachers such as Rashid Ahmed Siddiqui, among others. In a column entitled ‘Kuchh Apni Safai Mein’ (‘In My Own Defence’), he admits that these short essays are not pure journalism, as they are meant for readers in Aligarh or those who know Aligarh and its people. Aligarh and the Aligarh Muslim University, he goes on to say, reflect certain ideas and ideals. And it is these that he took up for elucidation and comment in column after column during his stint at Khair-o-Khabar.
The activist always hidden inside Shahryar is evident in an editorial entitled ‘Adeebon ki Trade Union ki Zaroorat: Jab Jeib Mein Paise Hotey Hain, Jab Peit Mein Roti Hoti Hai’ (‘The Need for a Trade Union for Writers: When There is Money in the Pocket and Food in the Belly’). While it was occasioned by the news of eminent litterateur Baqar Mehdi being ill in Bombay and the poet Bani being sick in Delhi, it makes an eloquent plea for an organization of writers from different parts of India writing in the many bhashas which can serve as a watchdog for their rights, provide a safety net during bleak times and generally help spread awareness about works in different languages, a job that is ideally tasked to the various anjumans and academies but one which they do not always fulfil. In another editorial entitled ‘Kuchh Ishtirak
iyat ki Himayat Mein’ (‘In the Defence of Socialism’), he speaks out against self-styled leaders who claim to be representatives of religious and ethnic minorities.
That Shahryar did not subscribe to the artificial distinction between high literature and popular literature is evident in another editorial entitled ‘Kuchh Maqbool-e Aam Adab aur Filmon ki Himayat Mein’ (‘In Defence of Popular Literature and Films’) which begins with the following verse:
Doston kyun ho is se khauf zada
Zindagi hai koi bala to nahin
(Friends, why are you so scared
It is life after all, not an ill omen)
The aam aadmi (common man) looks for his idealism in films because our intellectuals are so embroiled in politics and writing, Shahryar writes. Like the dastans of yore, our popular literature and films sometimes take us to a world of fantasy and this, he maintains, is not a bad thing, for were it not for the occasional fareib (deception), surely life would become intolerable. In another column entitled ‘Chali Hai Aisi Zamane Mein Kuchh Hawa Ulti/Ke Seedhi Baat Samajhte Hain Aashna Ulti’ (‘A Strange Breeze is Blowing About in the World Today/Whereby the Straightest Thing Appears Wrong to Friends’), he locates an Aligarh fighting for survival after a spate of communal disturbances in the national discourse.
What emerges from a reading of these editorials spanning two decades is his keen eye for the topical and the urgent as well as his reverence for tradition and those he regarded as the pillars of Urdu literary culture. At the same time, it must be said that Shahryar was no prose stylist; while some of his columns are indeed evocatively, even lyrically titled, their contents are couched in a language that is not extraordinary. Shahryar’s prose shows none of the luminous brilliance and innovativeness of his verse. Certainly not pedestrian – far from it in fact – these columns would have had no special significance for us today had they not emerged from Shahryar’s pen.
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