‘Use of comprehensible language can revive the dying discipline of prosody’

Karachi

In a time when people are rapidly losing their grip on basic linguistic skills in Urdu, it is a difficult task to explain prosody – study of patterns of sounds and rhythms in poetry.

Prosody is as dry as mathematics and the irony is that instead of providing young poets with substitutions for difficult terminologies used, many of its masters continue to speak vocabulary their disciples find very difficult to digest.

“Unless we make it [prosody] easy and comprehendible, its dryness will keep people away from it. The discipline is already on the brink of extinction,” said Dr Shadab Ehsani, the chairman of Karachi University’s Urdu department. He was speaking during “Kiya shaair ke liye ilme-urooz pe dastaras lazim hay? (Is mastering prosody compulsory for a poet?)” held at the Arts Council by its literary committee and Bisat-e-Yaran.

The session was presided over by renowned poet Prof Dr Sahar Ansari and was attended by eminent poets and literary scholars. The discussion circled around an old and critical debate of what role did prosody play in poetry and how two schools of thought had emerged out of the debate – one considering it extremely important and the other considering it worthless.

Speaking on the occasion, poets Farasat Rizvi and Sarwar Javed presented their arguments, asserting that the art of poetry had existed way before the invention of a set of techniques – known as prosody. They argued that poetry was more like an innate ability to express feelings, emotions and imaginations in a rhythmic form.

The arguments were backed with examples such as, an innate sense of rhythm and balance of audibility were enough for poets to be able to write sound couplets. They further maintained that poets who got lost in the world of prosody ended up losing their sense of creativity and lacked enthusiasm, that eventually barred them from creating majestic expressions.

Countering the arguments of Farasat Rizvi and Sarwar Javed, Dr Ehsani quoted the stanzas of Mir Taqi Mir, Mirza Ghalib and Allama Iqbal to establish his point that the trio of the legendary poets couldn’t have composed in rare meters (bahoor) if they were not well-versed in prosody.

According to him, Mir Taqi Mir could not have said:

Shart saliqa hay har ik amr main 

Aib bhi karne ko hunar chahiye

Nor could Mirza Ghalib have penned down:

Aa ke meri jaan ko qaraar nahin hay

Taaqat-e-bedaad-e-intezaar nahin hai

And neither could Allama Iqbal have written his phenomenal poem, 'Masjid-e-Qurtuba', if they were not well-versed in prosody.

Commenting on the opinion that prosody exhausted the creativity of a poet, Dr Ehsani refuted the argument saying that a genuine poet would never lose his creative abilities while learning prosody. “In fact, a poet will learn prosody with his genuine skills. Only a charlatan cannot make good use of his good knowledge of prosody.”  

Prof Dr Sahar Ansari said though knowing prosody was essential to avoid shortcomings in poetry that could be damaging to the credibility of a poet, too much of it could also result in stealing the true spirit of poetry, the essence of which lay in the expression of inner feelings communicated artistically yet simply.

Expressing his opinion, poet Aftab Muztar, who has recently completed his PhD thesis on “Urdu prosodic system and its contemporary requirements” from Karachi University, said poetry had existed way before prosody but learning the latter could only benefit poets, not harm their art.

Comparing poetry with a portrait and prosody with a frame, he said portrait should be fixed into the frame without disturbing their aesthetics and same was the case with poetry and prosody. “Poetry should be placed in meters without taking its life.”

He also informed the audience that Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi, one of the earliest Arab lexicographers and philologists, was the inventor of prosody.

“Urdu meters follow the metrical system of Arabic and Persian. What we really need to do is exclude those rules and techniques that don’t fit in our metrical system and understand that Urdu metrical rules exist on either two-letters (sabab) or three-three letters (watad), unlike to the two other languages where the rules are also designed for more than three letters.”