Of language, criticism and music

Title: Alamgeeriyat aur Urdu aur deegar mazameen

Author: Dr. Nasir Abbas Nayyar

Publisher: Sang-e-Meel Publications, Lower Mall, Lahore

Pages: 327 – Price: Rs.990/-

Title: Khushk Chashmay kay Kinaray

Author: Nasir Kazmi

Publisher: Ilqa Publications, 12-K, Main Boulevard, Gulberg 2, Lahore

Pages: 330 – Price: Rs.695/-

Title: Indus Raag 2 – Karachi Concerts

Produced by: Sharif Awan

Projected by: Tehzeeb Foundation of Pakistan, Karachi

Pages: 48 (Booklet + 6 Audio CDs – 1 DVD)

A legacy to the world at large

Nasir Abbas Nayyar’s style bespeaks his artistic felicity with the exposition of the changing trends in the conventional critical theory

Globalisation is the watchword of modern civilisation. An offspring of science and technology, it has wrought a revolutionary change in all spheres of human life, across the globe. Language, literature and the fine arts are no exception to this miracle of a phenomenon. Transcendence is its quintessence, and merger its ‘structure’!

Language, criticism and music are internally tagged into a triangular symmetry in line with the modernistic convolutions of globalisation. The assumption is sought to be explicated in this review covering the aforesaid three publications.

Alamgeeriyat aur Urdu Aur deegar mazameen

Dr Nasir Abbas Nayyar, a noted educationist and literary critic, has authored this book in the fast-changing linguistic global scenario. It is an anthology of his essays (16) on language as an interchange of cross-cultural communication with specific reference to Urdu besides some thematic essays on chosen authors.

The book comprises sixteen chapters that highlight Urdu in a global perspective, Urdu in India, Achebe’s views on home and exile, Edward Said’s lectures, the intellectual versus the social change, beyond the theory, the critical practice and Urdu criticism in the 21^st century, an outline of the contemporary Urdu criticism, the classical and neo-progressive aesthetics in Ali Sardar Jafri’s critical stance, a psychoanalytical study of YadoN ki Barat, the post-9/11 world and Manto, the post-colonial background of Intizar Hussain’s short story, Balraj Mainra’s story centred on a dialogue between death and life, Rasheed Amjad’s collection of short stories titled The Story of a Common Man, Asad Muhammad Khan’s short story on home-coming and the yearning to travel, and a critique of Razia Faseeh Ahmad’s short story.

Nasir Abbas Nayyar’s style bespeaks his artistic felicity with the exposition of the changing trends in the conventional critical theory. Here are a few specimens supportive of this view:

The battles of truth and untruth, faith and disbelief are mostly fought within and through a language where it serves as a sword or a shield.

Redoubtable intellect would not ignore the fact that a set of clichés, however pleasing they might be, often tend to be tyrannical.

The ‘mega fact’ about Intizar Hussain’s fiction is that it has lent a distinct expression to the post-colonial world which its fiction had either ignored or marginalised. He has centralised it in his own fiction that has led to the expurgation of the post-colonial rhetoric of the genre of fiction.

Serenity, space, and self-abnegation (vicariousness) are attributes of supreme art, produced not by any notion or idea but by a lofty vision transcending any kind of dualism.

The ‘mega fact’ about Intizar Hussain’s fiction is that it has lent a distinct expression to the post-colonial world which its fiction had either ignored or marginalised

It does not behoove an intellectual that he should extol his own culture to the exclusion of other cultures which in turn would tend to preclude its integration in such cultures.

Josh has proved that he was a classicist who believed in the primacy of vision and unconscious. His imagination outclassed his reasoning faculty. YadoN ki Barat does not show that its author was a modern rationalist.

The book in its essence is a critique of a lingo-literary globalism, as it were, with its content centred on the trans-cultural diversity of the modern critical theory criss-crossing the language and literature of Urdu.

Khushk Chashmay kay Kinaray

Nasir Kazmi (1925-72) was an art prodigy. Generally it is believed that his renown rests on his poetics. But that is only one side of a platitudinal truth. He was a fecund but versatile prose writer also. His editorial association with literary journals of the like of HumayuN, Auraq, Khayal, and others as well as radio, would seem to further qualify this statement.

The instant work with an auto-suggestive symbolical title, conceived by Nasir Kazmi himself, has been posthumously compiled by his dear ones Nasir Sultan Kazmi and Hassan Sultan Kazmi. It comprises a broad spectrum of prose writings embracing his published and unpublished articles, radio features, a few unclassified prose pieces, a couple of biographical essays, some editorials, dialogues, and an interview.

Nasir’s prose is as delectable as his verse. It is a veritable exercise in idiomatic felicity reinforced by his deep intimacy with the dynamics of literature — past and present. Khushk Chashmay kay Kinaray is the key article in this book which is in fact his presidential speech at the thirtieth annual session of Halqa Arbab-e-Zauq held at Lahore, way back in November 1969. The speaker laments the downplaying of the role of the literary writer in the post-Partition scenario of the country. He is overly critical of the increasing gap between the ruling aristocracy and the common masses at home which by implication could lead to a dialectical confrontation between the two, empirically denominated as bourgeoisieand proletariat. But he is not disappointed of the writer who could turn the tide by virtue of his creative pen to raise a dilkusha niwa (a clarion call) heralding the millennium. Maey kyuN likhta huN (Why do I write?) seems to be a continuation of the argument raised in the opening piece albeit in an autobiographical simulation.

In a quasi-aphoristic style, Nasir has broached a multiplicity of literary issues in the book that relate to contemporaneity, tradition and human evolution, quest for the fourth dimension, poetic truth, literature and social taboos, the charm of meaning, the new ghazal, the poet and his quest for the Eternal, the poet and his seclusion, our national language, and the amalgamation of new and old (cf. the Humayun) in the body of literature.

The book also carries concise literary portrayals of Abdur Rahman Chughtai, Ahmad Mushtaq, Shad Arifi, Nazeer Akbarabadi, Ghalib, Dagh, Hasrat Mohani, Iqbal; Rashed, Meeraji and Faiz; Sajjad Baqar Rizvi, Meeraji, Meer Dard, Meer Taqi Meer, and Hafeez Hoshiarpuri. The dialogues involving Nasir Kazmi, Intizar Hussain, Hanif Ramay, and Nasir’s last interview by Intizar Hussain project Nasir as a vivacious but insightful man of letters with a singular comprehension of the literary idiom in its variegated plurality. That is how Nasir has employed the metaphor of an arid fountain to denote the worsening native conditions following the partition of the sub-continent, and inflamed by the menace of materialism.

Indus Raag 2 – Karachi Concerts

This booklet is a sequel to Indus Raag – Music Beyond Borderslaunched in the year 2012. It comprises a box set of six audio CDs and a DVD containing about ten hours of quality music featuring 65 musicians from Pakistan, India, UK, Germany, France, Turkey and elsewhere. The ‘soundscape’, an outcome of seven years of music making, is specific to Karachi and it ‘captures the melodic flavours peculiar to the spirit of the city’.

Sharif Awan, a seasoned bureaucrat and virtuoso curator/producer of classical folk and world music, has launched this project under the banner of Tehzeeb Foundation of Pakistan. He has worked with great musicians from all over the world, to promote the cause of culture in Pakistan. In token of his services to the cause of music, he was recently granted a Gold Medal at the Global Music Awards (1916). Besides, the project has also been nominated for the Independent Music Award, New York which has recently been received personally by Sharif Awan, producer of Indus Raag, in New York.

The performers in the videos include artistes like Ustad Rais Khan, Farhan Khan, Ustad Fateh Ali Khan, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, Salil Bhatt, Ustad Nasiruddin Saami, Ustad Mubarak Ali Khan, Ashraf Sharif Khan, Asad Qizilbash, Ustad Bashir Khan, Mumtaz Ali Sabzal, Ustad Abdul Sattar Tari, Akbar Ali, Kamal Sabri, Sajid Hussain, Shahbaz Hussain, Vidya Shah, Ustad Nafees Ahmed Khan Sitar-Nawaz, Farha Parvez, Sam Carter, Asif Sinan, Ustad Shahid Hamid, Abaji, Faheem Mazhar, Julian Joseph, Umakant Gundecha, and Ramakant Gundecha. In fact it is a legacy which does not belong to Pakistan alone, but to the world at large, and it merits preservation at all costs. The Indus Raag Series is thus inspired by a futuristic as also evolutionary vision in the realm of music, essentially classical.