Side-effect

As if the recent loss of Prof. Khatir Ghaznavi, a fine poet and scholar, and of Adam Nayyar, an authority on Pakistani cultures and civilisations, was not enough, the hard-up intellectual and literary life in the country became more impoverished with the passing of Ahmed Faraz. His diction, metaphor and similes evenly kneaded in conventional Persian and Urdu ghazal make him one of the most prominent poets in the classical tradition of Urdu poetry after Faiz Ahmed Faiz. This being the most common and popular tradition among poetry lovers, promoted through mushairas, radio and television programmes and literary journals, made Ahmed Faraz a household name across the subcontinent. His style of rendition, handsome looks and a measured indifference is paralleled only by Iftikhar Arif among those poets who appeared some years after him. As a student of literature, I grew closer to the modern strand in Urdu poetry, as it were, which in my view include Noon Meem Rashid, Majeed Amjad, Akhtarul Iman, Munir Niazi, Aziz Hamid Madani, Fahmida Riaz and Saqi Farooqui among others. But I must say that without imbibing from the goblets passed on over generations from Hafiz, Khayyam, Mir and Ghalib to the poets of our times like Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Ahmed Faraz, Iftikhar Arif and Parveen Shakir, no appreciation of modern Urdu poetry or for that matter any modern poetry in our Pakistani and North Indian languages is possible. One of my old friends Fareed Anwar Siddiqui was one of the most ardent fans of Ahmed Faraz I have known. When the two of us were together in college and then at the engineering university, he would present me with a new collection of Faraz’s every now and then. Faraz Sahib was also more prolific in those years. I am indebted to Ahmed Faraz for he is among the very few who gave me the sense and awareness of poetry in my youth and helped me create my own emotional universe. Kishwar Naheed’s touching piece published in the Books and Authors section of the daily Dawn, written in the form of a letter to Ahmed Faraz, a couple of weeks before his death, encompasses how Ahmed Faraz has influenced and subtly prevailed over the love lives and political causes of his listeners and readers across three generations.

Ahmed Faraz sided with the downtrodden and believed in socialist ideals. He remained true to his cause till the very end except for a brief sojourn with the Musharraf administration wrongly thinking of the general as a messiah like many liberals believed after Nawaz Sharif was removed in 1999. He served as the head of the National Book Foundation. But when the poet disapproved of the wrongdoings of the powers that be, his official residence was forcibly vacated and his belongings were thrown out on the street. Hence, the parting of ways between the sword and the pen. During the movement for the restoration of the judiciary in the past few months, Faraz took a firm stand and subjected the military government to ferocious criticism. He was back in the folds of resistance, where he actually belonged. Paunhchi waheen pe khaak jahan ka khameer tha (the dust came back to its elements). This reminds me of another major poet of Pakistan, Shaikh Ayaz who represents the best in Sindhi poetry of the twentieth century. He also came back to us, the wretched and the condemned, after serving as a vice chancellor for some time under General Zia’s administration.

To celebrate resistance, Ahmed Faraz, Kishwar Naheed, Prof Hasan Abid and I were together in Mumbai in November 2006 at the centenary celebrations of the great stalwart of the socialist movement in the subcontinent and founder of Progressive Writers Association, Syed Sajjad Zaheer. I had the honour of reciting my poems while Ahmed Faraz was presiding over the function. Although we had met many times before and then a couple of times after that, this was the first and the last time when I received daad (vociferous expression of appreciation, translation fails me here) from Faraz Sahib. I treasure that.

The writer is an Islamabad-based poet and rights campaigner. Email: harris@spopk.org