Saghar Siddiqui remembered

LAHORE:Saghar Siddiqui was a political poet with a social consciousness whose every ghazal has at least one or two verses which indicate the negative forces afflicting society. This view was expressed by Raza Naeem in a special talk on the poet titled ‘Saghar Siddiqui (1928-1974), The Poet of Darkness and Consciousness: The Man and the Myth’ here on the 50th death anniversary of the legendary poet.

Naeem, who is a translator and the President of the Progressive Writers Association in Lahore, began his talk by posing a question as to why a poet like Saghar, who did not wish to preserve his poetry and routinely burned his verses, was awarded the Sitara-e-Imtiaz in August 2022.

He said Saghar wrote one of the first national anthems for Pakistan after migrating to Lahore in 1947 and was singled out by communists because of this since they regarded him as a ‘nationalist’ rather than a progressive poet. Similarly, he was either ignored by critics or labelled as romantic, obscurantist and pessimistic, despite the fact that his verses used to be on everybody’s lips while he was alive.

Naeem also dispelled the impression that Saghar was a right-wing poet by saying that his relationship with Pakistan’s first military dictator General Ayub Khan was more complex than his admirers thought and while he admired Ayub but later he refused to meet him.