Essays

Marked by a variety of voices and styles, contemporary Urdu poetry from Pakistan combines the classical and the modern.

The literature of Pakistan is a mosaic of various languages and traditions that bear strong links with each other but are at different stages of development. The Urdu language has a rich tradition that dates back several centuries and it continues to be a major medium of literary expression in both Pakistan and India.

Post-Partition Voices

Classical Urdu poetry was dominated by the ghazal but later developments led it towards altogether different directions. The voices of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, N.M. Rashid and Miraji are distinct and they are regarded as major, influential figures. In the early days of the newly independent country, the left-oriented and organised Progressive Movement was subjected to state repression as magazines were banned and writers like Faiz and Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi put behind bars.

Faiz wrote in a highly polished neo-classical style and with a consummate artistry that spoke against tyranny. Well-loved, he came to be regarded as the spokesman of the oppressed. Faiz’s work was widely translated into English and he went on to win the Lenin Prize, among other honours. He continues to be Pakistan's most prominent poet. While Miraji died in India at a relatively young age, Rashid developed as a highly skilled craftsman.

Rashid’s complex and rich vision of man as an undiscovered entity in a bewildering universe was initially called ambiguous but is now being recognised as among the most rewarding poetry of the age. Similarly, Majeed Amjad's later work expresses the musings of an adventurous but lonely spirit, in a more open and experimental style. Recognised by critics as a major poet, his is the poetry of the future.

The most poignant voice of the post-Partition period was that of Nasir Kazmi. With his ‘new ghazals’, he returned to classical roots to give a lyrical expression to the tribulations of an uncertain era. The ghazal showed its resilience when Saleem Ahmed and later, the mocking and iconoclastic Zafar Iqbal, introduced anti-romantic themes and a mock-serious tone, to deliberately invert age-old conventions.

The ghazal attracts all poets and among its practitioners are Mehshar Badayooni, Hameed Nasim, Ahmed Mushtaq, Shahzad Ahmed, Ahmed Faraz, Juan Elia, Athar Nafees, Anwer Shaoor, Obaidullah Aleem, Tauseef Tabassum and Iftikhar Arif.

Ahmed Faraz, a much admired poet for his haunting love poetry, was no less remarkable for his politically charged poems bemoaning Pakistan’s long period of suffering under dictatorships.

Habib Jalib’s verses, quoted even today, too take to task the many dictatorships that ruled Pakistan. A progressive outlook combined with chaste diction characterises the poetry of Aziz Hamid Madani, a poet with a grand style and vision. Meanwhile, the loss of innocence and bewilderment at an enchanted world define the terrain of distinguished Punjabi poet Munir Niazi.

In the 1960s, the modern nazm established itself not as a separate movement but as a distinct phase and was exemplified by the work of Saqi Farooqi, Kishwar Naheed, Fahmida Riaz, Sarmad Sehbai, Akhter Hussain Jafri, Javaid Shaheen, Salahuddin Mehmood and Saher Ansari. A more radical experimentation was advocated by Iftikhar Jalib but while it influenced literary theory, it did not produce any significant work of poetry. Where there was silence earlier, the emergence of a number of women poets from Ada Jafarey and Zehra Nigah onwards, now led to the formulation of feminist perspectives.

‘Tradition of the Modern’

The first generation of poets born in Pakistan like Sarvat Hussain, Mohammed Izhar-ul-Haq, Khalid Iqbal Yasir, Ghulam Hussain Sajid, Fatima Hassan, Shahida Hassan, Muhammed Khalid and others, took the ghazal further by drawing upon images from the dastaans and the heyday of Islamic glory. Among these poets is Parveen Shakir whose tragic death cut short a remarkable career that grew from adolescent sentimentality to a mature style in both nazm and ghazal. Equally at home with the nazm and the ghazal, poet Iftikhar Arif’s work combines classical diction with modern sensibility.
The ‘tradition of the modern’ continues in the works of a number of poets. In the late seventies and early eighties, the establishment of the prose poem, despite controversies, was another formal breakthrough. The prose poem became increasingly important in the nineties and its exponents included post-modernist poets like Abbas Athar, Abdul Rasheed, Nasreen Anjum Bhatti, Afzaal Ahmed Syed, Azra Abbas, Asghar Nadeem Syed, Ahmed Fawad, Sara Shagufta, Abrar Ahmed, Naseer Ahmed Nasir, Zeeshan Sahil, Tanvir Anjum, Mohammed Anwer Khalid, Saeeduddin, Yasmeen Hameed, Ali Muhammad Farshi, Ali Akbar Natiq and many others. The mundane activities in life's routine, an ironic view of history from the victim's point of view and a cosmopolitan spirit, characterise the new voice in Urdu poetry today.
The work of Kishwar Naheed and other women poets is a remarkable development in modern poetry.

 

Kishwar Naheed celebrates her status in no uncertain terms:

“It is we sinful women
Who are not awed by the grandeur of those who wear gowns,
Who don’t sell our lives
Who don’t bow our heads
Who don’t fold our hands together.”
(We Sinful Women, translated by Rukhsana Ahmed.)
The distinctive voice of Azra Abbas describes the seemingly banal, everyday experiences from the perspective of a woman and an ordinary citizen:
“How to write a poem of love?
How to write that the weather is picture perfect
How to tell everybody
           To turn off their TV sets
Each channel is repeating the same
        tale of dead bodies
But windows are open everywhere
The carts for picking 
       the dead bodies make such a din
I can hardly hear anything.”
(The Banner, translated by Asif Farrukhi.)

 

Later, hard won independence was challenged by the upsurge of terrorism and subservience to given ideologies, but poetry provided a space where dominant ideologies could be challenged.

While classical Urdu poetry is often difficult to translate, modern poetry has fared better in the hands of some of its translators and there are a number of good anthologies that introduce readers to this rich body of work. These include An Evening of Caged Beats: Seven Post-modernist Urdu Poets (translated by Frances W. Pritchett and Asif Farrukhi, Oxford 1999) and Pakistani Urdu Verse (translated and edited by Yasmeen Hameed, Oxford 2010) and Modern Poetry of Pakistan (Dalkey Archive Press, UK 2011) compiled and edited by Iftikhar Arif and Waqas Khwaja.

Several translators have attempted to translate Faiz. Separate volumes also make available the works of Munir Niazi, Kishwar Naheed, Fehmida Riaz, Saqi Farooqi, Parveen Shakir and Iftikhar Arif. The selected poems of later day modernist poets Afzaal Ahmed Syed, Zeeshan Sahil and Tanveer Anjum are also available.