Poetry, like spirituality is the call of soul and once the siren within calls upon poet to wake up to his ministry and mission, the flame catches each pore of his existence like the Hallajian flame and the poet can’t resist but bring forth “songs, cries, mourning, lamentations” from his heart. No amount of resistance can suppress this call from within and poet feels pushed to precipice to make manifest through his poetry “the song of soul”.
The case with Nazki is no different, and the poet within as he was, polished by the craftsmanship of father, he couldn’t resist but to express himself in poetry and this expression crossed linguistic contours to embrace Persian, Arabic, Urdu and Kashmiri in its leap. Here we shall confine ourselves to the realm of Urdu and trace the trajectory of Nazki’s Urdu poetry, the leitmotifs found therein and look for the paradigmatic undercurrents, if any.
Having read Khamsa E Nizami under the tutelage of his father, Nazki was little inclined to Urdu and the grandeur of Persian left him with fewer occasions and reasons to engage with and appreciate the aesthetics and ideals of Urdu poetry. All this was to change when, in his words, he came across Azad’s “Aab E Hayat”, which changed his attitude towards Urdu poetry forever and he soon started experimenting in this language. It is pertinent to mention that around this time, the traditional school of poetry was much celebrated and imitated in the subcontinent.
Though Ghalib had experimented in “Andaaz I Bayaa Aur”, and Iqbal was claiming “Mann Nawaye Shair E Fardastem”, Nazki continued to write under the aegis of tradition, the school which had the patrons and devotees like Dhaag, Fani, Ameer, Zauq, Seemab and others. But Hamidi Kashmiri and others (Sheeraza – Nazki Number) inform us that Nazki was vigilant to the trends taking place in Urdu poetry in terms of form and content and in wake of this vigilance, he annulled his early poetry – which was written in imitation of classical masters. What direction did he then chose to go in and how to characterize his poetry in wake of its departure from tradition, at least in substance? It should be no difficult for any reader that Nazki strived for the poetry of purpose.
He constantly strove to make the aesthetics of meaning and the purposive character of his poetry reflect one another. To this end, he seems to have fulfilled the Hali’s idea ansd ideal of poet, where poetry becomes not an instrument of idolizing the words, worshiping the altar of aesthetics, but is primarily seen as a mirror in which the individual and the society inspects its face and corrects the aberrations and abrasions found therein. But a word of caution is needed here. Nazki doesn’t turn his poetry into didactics, into moral sermon, into the statement of politician, the commentary of journalist or just the poetry of statement. Nazki doesn’t know aestheticism for its own sake, but that shall not imply that he subverts the poetic ideal of aesthetics into some sort of barren commentary.
He does engage with the issues at hand, but in the spirit of true poet, as Prof. Zahuruddin informs us “He took special care of the fact as not to only comment on his milieu and society, but tried to enter into dialectical discourse with it. He knows, he is not a photographer, but painter, as photography merely reflects the surface, but painter pierces the heart and soul of phenomenon”. This is the insignia of what we identify as Higher poetry or wisdom poetry, which has been particularly practised in Persian poetry throughout ages and no wonder that Nazki was inspired by his Persian predecessors in making “Contemporary consciousness” reverberate in his poetry without sacrificing the poetic ideal.
He tried to recast the didactics of Sa’adi in the idiom of Hafiz and even if he failed at times in meeting this lofty poetic ideal, but he set out an ideal for himself and for others to imitate and this is truly an ideal worth abiding by. He too, like Ghalib, juggles “Mushahida E Haq” and “Baad O Sagar” and no matter, if he misses a catch a times, for he more than often succeeds in this jugglery. Nazki doesn’t submit his creative call to the mammoth of tradition, so as to lose himself like a speck amidst constellation. He instead prefers to speak in a voice of his own, asserting his creative individuality without completely breaking away from the past. The dynamics of tradition and continuity emerges so profoundly in his poetry that I prefer to call him “the progressive orthodox”.
Tradition stands like a bottomless sea and the risk of losing oneself to is always alive. But, it is in the very genes of great poets that they celebrate and relive the tradition without being annihilated, absorbed or annulled by it. Instead they sparkle as emeralds in the crown of tradition, being influenced by the tradition and in turn influencing it in reciprocation. They do not submit their existence so as to become the grass of pavement; instead, they chose to become roses and lilies, adding to the beauty and odour of garden. The description holds true for Nazki verbatim. He didn’t dissolve himself in the infinitude of tradition, he rather asserted and maintained his individual poetic talent in the face of gnawing tradition, which had by then absorbed hundreds of poets in its homogeneous and overarching singular identity.
Deflection from tradition never meant for Nazki an outright boycott or antagonism against the same. He continued to explore and utilise the “traditional forms”, traditional idiom, the crafty usage of language and proper selection of words – all of which were characteristic to traditional Ghazal. But he continued to incorporate the contemporary consciousness into the fabric of poetry and captured the tumult of his era in similes, allegories and other poetic devices maintaining “Guft aayad dar hadeesay deegaran”. At a time, when our poets where smitten by the fever of progressive/socialist poetry, Nazki showed little inclination to it, thus again asserting his uniqueness and individuality in the face of changing and waxing circumstances.
If poetry is life or at least a reflection thereof, then it must reflect life, its crests and troughs, its dark and bright sides, aspirations and threats in equal measure, lest it falls short of poetry into the smithy of half-truth, propaganda or statement making. Nazki seems well aware of these demands that poetry makes from the poet and he seems to have, with artistic dextreousity, accomplished the mission of artistic call. He painted life, with its all diversity and complexity in his poetry, but his representation is neither archaic nor tiring. But his expressions and ideas are refreshing, penetrating, awakening, enlightening and evocative. Let us begin with one of the dominant leitmotifs of his poetry – the agony of life, the pain of existence, the myriad sorrows veiling life to its core…..To be continued
