New trends in Urdu Poetry
By Syed Afsar Sajid
1. ‘Ku-e-Malamat’ — Aftab Ahmad Shah’s poetic divan
2. ‘Hamzad’ —— Tauqir Ahmad Faiq’s verse collection
Poets (late) Aftab Ahmad Shah (1948-2021) and Tauqir Ahmad Faiq belong to the Pakistan Administrative Service. Coincidentally they hail from the same tehsil and district viz. Malakwal and Mandi Bahauddin, and are alumni of the same university i.e.
University of Dacca (now Dhaka).
The former’s divan ‘Ku-e-Malamat’ comprises all four of his published verse collections titled ‘Fard-e-Jurm’, ‘Ta’zeer’, ‘Kuch To Hogi Baat’, and ‘Akhkhar Auhla’ (Punjabi). Tauqir Ahmad Faiq’s ‘Hamzad’ is his maiden verse collection, appearing in print only at the fag end of the preceding year.
‘Ku-e-Malamat’ (A cursed habitat)
Late Aftab Ahmad Shah was an outstanding writer, poet and orator. His erstwhile peer, poet and column writer Muhammad Izhar-ul-Haq of the Pakistan Military Accounts Service, has penned the preamble to the coveted divan of his distinguished contemporary. Both of them were students of MA Economics at the University of Dacca in the late 1960’s. Izhar-ul-Haq was deeply moved by Aftab Ahmad Shah’s wondrous intelligence, his mercurial temperament, and his imperviousness to worldliness.
He proceeds to review the latter’s poetics in the light of these somewhat quaint attributes.
‘Dus rahay haiN Aftab Ahmad wohi ab/AasteeN kay saNp jo maaray nahi haiN’. Thus Aftab’s poetry amply reflects the zeitgeist of the turbulent decades that he was destined to live out as a hypersensitive literary aesthete.
‘Fard-e-Jurm’ bears an aptly written preface (1982) by Zafar Iqbal, a literary wizard of our
times. He views Aftab’s verse as a replica of intellectual fecundity, distinctiveness of style, and a good mastery of the art of articulation of feelings. The collection contains 78 ghazals in multiple rhyming schemes. It is a poetry of protest (symbolizing as a charge sheet) but in a mellow tone. The poet seems to be overly conscious of the vacuity of human desires in the face of ‘all that glitters is not gold’.
But his cry is not a cry in the wilderness; its reverberance tends to arouse a corresponding resonance in the reader’s mind, providing it a much needed cathartic relief. ‘Ta’zeer’ is a continuation of the ‘charge-sheet’ in ‘Fard-e-Jurm’. In criminal proceedings when charge is proven, accused is convicted and sentenced. Veteran politician Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan, who was a seasoned poet also, wrote its foreword (1988). He has appreciated Aftab Ahmad Shah’s poetic virtuosity. He thinks that Aftab’s poetry is an embodiment of truth, self-respect, and self-contentment.
The book contains a Hamd, a Na’at, 4 nazms and 50 ghazals in all. An artistic merger of mundanity and spirituality besides a fulsome prosodic formulation, makes it a thing of beauty.
‘Kuch To Hogi Baat’ (2003) is the third component of the divan. It is a collection of a Hamd, a prayer, a Na’at, 14 nazms, 79 ghazals, 2 qit’at, and another 2 ghazals in Farsi (Persian).
‘Akhkhar Auhla’ (the mask of words) is a small anthology of Aftab Ahmad Shah’s Punjabi
nazms and ghazals purporting to have been written during the period from 1963 to 1990.
The wordage and tenor of these pieces is characteristic of the poet’s stylistics in general.
‘Hamzad’ (An alter ego)
Tauqir Ahmad Faiq’s aforesaid verse collection, affectionately dedicated to his younger
brother (also a well-known literary figure) Iqtidar Javed, contains 64 ghazals, 21 nazms, 2
qit’at besides a Hamd and a marsiya. The book carries a thought-provoking foreword by
Rao Manzar Hayat, an ex-bureaucrat and a leading Urdu columnist, who eulogises Faiq’s
qualities of head and heart in no uncertain terms.
In his opinion Faiq’s verse is like a fresh and fragrant gust of wind in the realm of Urdu poetry that serves to distinguish him amongst his contemporaries. At the same time Rao Manzar Hayat regrets that his class of civil servants (DMG), with some exceptions, was gradually distancing itself from literature and literary activities which has impacted their general attitude and demeanour, albeit imperceptibly.
Noted poet Nazir Qaiser, eminent scholar and former bureaucrat Dr. Shahzad Qaiser, and
popular writer and poet Ata-ul-Haq Qasimi have written commendatory notes on the flaps
of the book intended to elucidate its formal and textual artistry.
Faiq is a poet of fine sensibilities. His verse envisages a unification of thought and feeling in the framework of a quasi-metaphysical creativity. His knowledge, experience, vision, and artistic prowess tend to elevate his poetic stature and fortify the imagistic base of his verse. The imagist, in the line of Ezra Pound, would aim at ‘clarity of expression through the use of hard, accurate, and definite images’.
Similes or metaphors aside, in this process the soul of poetry is expressed ‘in the recording of the rapid impingement of images on the consciousness, setting up in the mind fleeting complexes of thought and feeling’. Faiq’s poetic work is a conspicuous illustration of the notion.
