A banker by profession, Salim Ansar has a passion for history and historic books. His personal library already boasts a treasure trove of over 7,000 rare and unique books.
Every week, we shall take a leaf from one such book and treat you to a little taste of history.
BOOK NAME: The Coffee House of Lahore: A memoir 1942-57
AUTHOR: K K Aziz
PUBLISHER: Sang-e-Meel Publications - Lahore
DATE OF PUBLICATION: 2008
“For over a generation (c. 1935 - c. 1970) the Coffee House of Lahore was the greatest intellectual and literary powerhouse in north India and later in Pakistan. I have read scores of memoirs, reminiscences, biographies, autobiographies and literary and social histories which talk about Delhi, Aligarh and Lucknow. There is no mention of the role of the coffee house in the lives of these cities. I have no information about Bengal, Bombay and South India. Therefore, it is no exaggeration in the claim that the Lahore Coffee House was in its day a unique centre of intellectual interaction and activity which produced or influenced a long and distinguished line of writers, poets, artists, lawyers, political activists (especially of the Leftist variety), journalists and widely read generalists. If you take out of our history all the people mentioned in this book there is not much left behind to celebrate or recall.
Nasir Kazmi
“Nasir Kazmi was quite a different kettle of fish, both as a man and as a poet. There were two Nasir Kazmis and I knew both. One was a young man of modest education who laughed and gossiped, chain-smoked and drank innumerable cups of coffee and tea, spent his night crawling from one tea house to another, talking incessantly and volubly, boasting of his partly-imagined affluent childhood, editing big journals for big men for a pittance, dressed impeccably in Western clothes, was vehement in his conversation, proud, self-respecting, apolitical, his right hand with a cigarette between two fingers held close to his mouth so that he could puff at the reed without the unnecessary labour of brining the hand up to the face. He loved raw nature - mountains, waterfalls, lakes, rivers (symbols of eternal motion), birds (especially sparrows), flowers, pigeons, his friends. He was fond of controversies and leapt into aggressive conversations with glee. At time he seemed to be in love with his own voice and bored his friends. He was punctual in his appointments if he made any. He was afraid of commitments.
"The other Nasir Kazmi was a poet of transcendent pain clad in unfading beauty. His dolour sprang from three main causes: the sufferings he bore and the atrocities he witnessed during the Partition of 1947, his own poverty, and the social and political chaos of his age. Nasir was more sensitive than most poets and had witnessed more unforgettable happenings. He had to abandon his home in Ambala and this was a blow from which he could not recover. He might have exaggerated the affluence of his pre-1947 life (his father was a mere subedar-major in the British Indian Army), but I was an eyewitness of his post-1947 poverty. His habits, though not really expensive, demanded money which was not there. Later he had to support a family and educated his two sons. God alone knows how he managed things. I never saw him asking anyone for help or borrowing from his friends. It doesn't matter how he made do, but he spent all his life under the overhand of starvation. Yet he never complained of moaned about his personal affliction. But he was bitter about the inequalities and oppression of the times, and he had every right to do it. He and his friends were fellow-victims of the contemporary social order. They had no permanent jobs or steady incomes. Publishers paid them puny royalties in instalments after many reminders.
“There was a great deal of injustice stalking the country: cruelty of the police, negligence of the physicians, arrogance of the tin gods who ruled the state, hubris of the rich.
"There might have been another source of Nasir's melancholy, but nobody is in a position to tell the facts and Nasir himself never spoke about it. I believe that he had loved a girl in Ambala and failed to win her or lost her in some other way. I base my nebulous conviction on textual evidence. In several of his ghazals there is, apart from general poignancy, an unmistakable note of piercing agony which speaks of a personal tragedy. I am aware that I am raising an issue which involves all poets of all languages: is the love in their poetry a personal experience or merely a hallowed tradition? But after knowing Nasir for 12 years and sat with him for few hours every day. I have an intuitive feeling that he had once loved and lost. That gives an authenticity and genuineness to his ghazals which rings true.
"Nasir was not only under Mir Taqi Mir's influence but made him his obsession. He talked of Mir among his friends and in literary circles with a passion reserved for one's hero. Mir's poetry is pre-eminently one of love, much more than that of any of the classical masters. Ghalib is a poet of philosophy, knowledge, pessimism and at times mysticism; love serves as a general shading, as in most poets. Nasir's unique contribution is that he merged the sublimity and diction of Mir with his own inner turmoil and restlessness. The result is a miracle. In Mir's six diwans there is so much pedestrian padding that a severe selection produces a mere few hundred couplets, while most of Nasir's ghazals are as good as, if not better than, Mir's best work. They are a throe of the heart.
"Nasir's second major contribution is that, perhaps as a response to the Progressive poet's taunt that the ghazal had had its day, he transformed the traditional ghazal into modern poetry by retaining the classical mode, mood and style but making it voice modern sensibility. In doing this he stands on the summit of modern Urdu verse. He founded a new school which several of his younger contemporaries and later admirers have enriched.
"There is another characteristic of his poetry which sets him apart from all modern poets, and that is his choice of words. In this again he established a new fashion which most modern poets find difficult to follow. He chooses his vocabulary with gentle care and then polishes it in the light of his reading and knowledge. In this simple, innocent diction he stands alone. He performs another miracle when he uses this vocabulary to create a spark. The only other poet to do this is Faiz. But Faiz achieves this end by using Persianised constructions which already have a beauty of their own and have been borrowed by Faiz. Nasir makes magic from simple Urdu words which are his own. He explores the range of words with an innovative eye and a fresh taste. He also wrote a few critical articles which demonstrate his wide reading and deep understanding.
"I met Nasir for the first time in 1945 or early 1946 when he was studying at Islamia College, Lahore, and living in the college hostel. He was composing poetry at this time and reciting his ghazals in mushairas in a melodious tone. His teacher, Rafique Khawar, was impressed and arranged a meeting with Sufi Ghulam Mustafa Tabassum. Nasir won the Sufi's appreciation and thus embarked upon his historic but brief journey Parnassus. He started coming to the Coffee House after the family's migration from Ambala. He acquired a very modest house in Old Anarkali from which both the Coffee House and Tea House were within five minutes' walk, which suited him very well. Later he shifted to a bigger house in Krishan Nagar.
“It was mainly in the years 1948-54 that I cultivated him, because of my interest in literature (to begin with, chiefly English). I found that he had an intelligent interest in the subject, asked many questions and listened attentively to what I told him. My knowledge was fresh and my enthusiasm irrepressible, and we talked for hours on Shakespearean tragedy, Keats's poetry, Milton's Satan and many other topics. Soon he broadened his inquisitiveness to cover European thought and sociology. I was surprised at the range of his inquiries. He also wanted to read English translations of major modern French poets. One day he asked me to get him Toynbee's A Study of History. The college library did not lend this multi-volume set and with some difficulty I persuaded the librarian to let me borrow one volume at a time during the 1953 summer vacation months. I don't know if Nasir read or even completely understood all the volumes, but he read parts of the book and discussed some points, particularly about ancient oriental civilizations. He also read several books on Western psychology and the problems of modern society. He was especially interested in the crisis caused by the impact of modern industrialization on Europe and the Americas. I noticed one major omission in his demand for books. As far as I know he never showed any interest in Islam as a religion or civilization.
"Salahuddin, in his study of Nasir's mind, refers to many books which he supplied to Nasir and claims that he read through many long and difficult books during the night and returned the book to Salahuddin the following morning. This I find hard to believe. Nasir's formal education was only up to the intermediate level (that is, school leaving certificate and 2 years of college instruction) and that at an inferior college (Islamia College, Lahore). His ability to understand and digest a scholarly or erudite book written in English was limited. He was also at this time catching up with his reading of classical Urdu poetry and prose and keeping abreast of what was being published currently. He spent his daylight hours in earning a precarious living and spending a lot of time in the Coffee House and Tea House. His close friends bear witness that he spent his nights in restaurants and tea stalls. When did he find the time to read and ponder over all the books he borrowed from his friends? I know that he was better read than most of the poets of his time, but his claims to have read and understood hundreds of English book (some on arcane and difficult subjects) fall in the category of pretension.
"In Nasir lived many personalities. One of these which confounded his friends was a tendency to create fantasies and live with them. He was not a liar in the generally accepted meaning of the term. He respected himself too much to indulge in this habit. What he did was to conjure up pictures of his past. Thus he told us about his large house in Ambala surrounded by orchards, his childhood spent in luxury, his career as a pigeon fancier, his big hunting and so on. He could not be found out because he related these gilded dreams consistently and with apparent sincerity. He lived with them till the end. He did not lie; he enlivened dull reality with rhapsody. The nimble shuttle of his fancy wove an imaginative pattern of events. We loved and respected him too much to question his claims or make fun of him."
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