‘Baba Farid’s contribution to the Path of Knowledge, the Path of Wisdom and the Path of Love in the metaphysical and cultural matrix, has left a deep impact on the men of God belonging to varied spiritual traditions in different periods of times. This was his basic vocation, which he bequeathed to posterity’
Yeh Mah-o-Sal Yeh UmraiN
Author: Farrukh Yar
Publisher: Book Corner, Jhelum
Pages: 144; Price: Rs400/-
Wabastagan-e-Multan
Author: Raziuddin Razi
Publisher: Kitab Nagar, Hassan Arcade, Multan Cantt.
Pages: 160; Price: Rs400/-
Culture and Spirituality
Author: Dr. Shahzad Qaiser
Publisher: Suhail Academy, Lahore
Pages: 242; Price: Rs800/-
Three new books forming the subject of this review and comprising noted Urdu poet Farrukh Yar’s poems (nazm), veteran poet, critic and journalist Raziuddin Razi’s pen-pictures of some literary and cultural personages associated with Multan, and eminent Punjabi poet, scholar and philosopher Dr. Shahzad Qaiser’s English treatise on the Punjabi Sufi poetry of Baba Farid-ud-Din Masud Ganj-i-Shakr, have lately appeared and engaged the attention of the discreet readers of literature.
Yeh Mah-o-Sal Yeh UmraiN
Farrukh Yar is a talented Urdu poet, nazm being his literary forte. His latest verse collection, third in a succession, comprises some thirty-five pieces of nazmsplit under three different topics viz., Surnama, Mabaen,and Darya Charha Hua Hai besides a thought-provoking critique of the author’s poetics by another stalwart of the modern Urdu nazm namely Iqtidar Javed. The flap of the book bears noted litterateur Muhammad Hameed Shahid’s concise but apt critical opinion on its literary credentials, so to say.
The topics of the poems are diverse but their implications are multi-layered with an avowed modernistic stance. Here the chaos without is transmuted into the chaos within and vice versa. The trauma of modern life, its social aimlessness, is presented on a sound imagistic pattern untainted by the freaks of a tendentious symbolistic conflation. Imagism may not be a doctrine in itself, but it does disavow the ‘sentiment and discursiveness’ characterizing a sizeable bulk of the contemporaneous Urdu verse. The narration here seeks to synthesize the mythical with the earthly, the mysterious with the obvious, and the surrealistic with the realistic. This unorthodox affinity of the opposites would seem to augment the evocative strands of Farrukh Yar’s verse.
A few excerpts from Farrukh’s verse would enlighten the reader on his stylistics and contextuality that configure on the post-structural dynamics of the modernistic verse:
Mairay roz-o-shab/Ma’aloom kay bistar par gadlay pani say geelay haiN/Ma’en arzi huN tool-e-shab ki/Woh sooraj ka matl’a hai…(Faana ki kahani Nabeel ki Zubani)
Sab seedha rakhnay ki khwahish may/Kuch ulta ho ja’ey to hum ghabra kar jeeewan gadla kar laitay haiN/Khauf may liptay sannatoN say/Bhar jatay haiN/Zara zara zinda rahtay haiN/Kafi sara mar jatay haiN…(Bay-cha’eni)
Bachpan tapa/Khauf ki garm dopahroN may/Raat guzari/Lambay khambay shahroN may/BachchoN ki aaNkhoN may utray shakti li/Khaki pinjra khak say leepa/Bhaid chunay sargoshi ki/Hum jam’a hu’ay tafreeq hu’ay/ZarbaiN khaee’N aur/Kharay kharay taqseem hu’ay…(Mabaen)
Iqtidar Javed happens to be in the vanguard of the modern nazm (vers libre) writers in Urdu; and rightfully so, because of the immensity, as also variety, of his contribution to the genre.
His critical epilogue to Farrukh’s latest work comprises a comprehensive value estimation of the latter’s poetic art. Besides, he has also questioned the contemporary critical stance (inclined to the status quo) on the credentials of modern Urdu nazm. He thinks that nazmhas its own justification, its content and contour notwithstanding. Its meta-narrative is not subservient to any cliché-ridden permutation bearing on its structural or textual formulations. Nazm is a narrative of the selfand its composer (alternately its persona), analogous to a metaphysical bard. The poet in Farrukh envisions the metaphor of time in a non-temporal, non-linear void immersing into the infinite expanse of eternity as envisaged in the title of the book.
Wabastagan-e-Multan
Raziuddin Razi has portrayed the pen pictures of twenty-five literary and cultural figures who have either lived in Multan or have been associated with it in the preceding three decades or so. In a soft discursive tone, he describes his subjects in bold outlines.
Listed non-alphabetically, these figures include veteran poet, scholar and intellectual Prof. Syed Asghar Ali Shah; Farooque Ansari, the author of Mairay Zamanay ka Multan; noted fiction writer, critic and educationist Dr. Anwaar Ahmad; poet, haiku writer and educationist
Dr. Muhammad Amin; popular poet turned painter and educationist Prof. Anwar Jamal; journalist and author ofNigar Khana-e-Afkaar Masihullah Khan Jampuri; Waseem Mumtaz, a seasoned lawyer and poet of Na’at; well known poet, column writer and cultural historian of Multan Shakir Hussain Shakir; seasoned poet Qamar Raza Shahzad; Hasnain Asghar Tabassum, an ailing but courageous poet; reputed poet, column writer and intellectual Khalid Masood Khan; poet Nawazish Ali Nadeem; travelogue writer Dr. Abbas Burmani; Begum Saqiba Rahimuddin and Ujala, a compilation of her speeches on education for children and some literary and cultural topics; poet Masood Kazmi; travelogue writer Qasim Khan; physician, poet and column writer Dr. Najma Shaheen Khosa; fiction writer Rahat Wafa; physician, travelogue writer and biographer Dr. Shagufta Faraz; Seraiki travelogue writer Qasim Sial; Seraiki writer, poet and broadcaster Akbar Hashmi, column writer Sajjad Jahania; designer and calligraphist Raashid Sial; Faiz Ahmad Faiz, and Ahmad Faraz.
In recording his reminiscences associated with the native soil of Multan, the author seems to have drawn heavily on his memory, in a purely personal context – his deceased mother (who as an indigent but self-respecting widow dedicated herself to rearing her three tender-aged children by sheer hard work and application), being the fountain of these sentimental memories. As a self-made man, he has viewed and reviewed the men and matters related to his atypical socio-literary milieu with conspicuous empathy – rooted in his catholic temperament and variegated personal experience.
Culture and Spirituality
Dr. Shahzad Qaiser is a true man of letters. He has composed spiritual verse in Punjabi, written inshaiyas in Urdu and authored a number of books in English on metaphysics, religion and philosophy which bespeaks the versatility of his genius.
The present book encapsulates a critical interpretation of Baba Farid-ud-Din Masud Ganj-i- Shakr’s Punjabi poetry (in Gurumukhi and Urdu scripts) rendered in the form of Saloks and Shabads (spiritual ditties rich in contemplative wisdom and insight).
The flap of the book is self-explanatory as to its intent and tenor.
‘Baba Farid’s contribution to the Path of Knowledge, the Path of Wisdom and the Path of Love in the metaphysical and cultural matrix, has left a deep impact on the men of God belonging to varied spiritual traditions in different periods of times. This was his basic vocation, which he bequeathed to posterity. His impact is visible on different Sufi Orders spread in different spatial and temporal zones. A major cycle of Punjabi Culture and Spirituality, in this part of the world, begins with Baba Farid-ud-Din Masud Shakr Ganj (12th century AD)’, and continues as ‘a living tradition in Muslim Punjab’ with saints and mystics like Madho Lal Husayn, Mian Mir, Sultan Bahu, Bulleh Shah, Waris Shah, Mian Muhammad Baksh, Khawaja Ghulam Farid, Pir Meher Ali Shah, Baba Husayn Shah, Baba Sufi Muhammad Tufayl and others who have ‘enriched, broadened and deepened, among other things, the realms of metaphysical knowledge, primordial wisdom and gnostic love’.
In his introductory remarks, the author opines that modernism has produced secularism which ‘has no relevance to metaphysics, tradition or religion’ and consequently ‘the modern man is becoming highly cramped by negating spirituality’. The ‘disequilibrium in the traditional world’ is a direct outcome of this phenomenon. The author reiterates that ‘man has to realize that it is primarily his linkage with spirituality, which confers civilizational identity on him’. A culture bereft of spirituality, as he views it, tends to degenerate into ‘alienation, depersonalization and dehumanization’.
Modern psychology has confused the psychic with the spiritual. Baba Farid was fully alive to the linkage of Tradition with the Transcendent. He was also aware of the common man’s aspirations on language, art and culture. So he communicated with them in their own language which is a vehicle of ‘primordial wisdom’. Baba Farid’s metaphysics dwells on the principles of Reality, Truth, Knowledge, Justice, Freedom, Goodness, Beauty and Love which are first refined into the cultural values of peace, patience, compassion, humility and love and then linked to the transcendent. Thus the author has ventured to translate into English prose the Punjabi Sufi verse of Baba Farid and explicate it in the light of tradition, the spiritual tradition to be more specific.
The author has immaculately carried out the onerous exercise of translating from Punjabi into chaste idiomatic English, of Baba Farid’s Saloks and Shabads scribed separately in Gurumukhi and Urdu scripts.
