| December 5, 2001 | Wednesday | Ramazan 19, 1422 |
Tribute to Majaz: LITERARY NOTES
THE obituary of international cricket has been written many times, bodyline, Kerry Packer, ball tampering, match-fixing, the undertakers have the engines of their hearses running. What happened in the latest row was a clash of vanities, neither the ICC nor the Board of Cricket Control of India (BCCI) was prepared to lose face.
What happened in the end could have happened in the beginning, the exercise of commonsense. In this age of instant communications, Malcolm Speed could have got on the telephone to Jagmohan Dalmiya or vice versa and thrashed out an interim solution, the honour of the match referee upheld pending a review of his harsh decisions and I might add decisions that were aimed to punish the Indians to the exclusion of the South Africans.
As I pointed out last week, the ICC had legality on its side and the Indians righteous grievance. The ECB chairman Lord MacLaurin has said that decision will strengthen the authority of the ICC. Not for the first time, do I disagree with him. Both the ICC and the BCCI have ended with egg on their face and have been shown up to be stubborn, waiting to see who would blink first.
The one, I feel sorry for, is Virendra Sehwag. He got caught in the cross-fire. Dropped in what the BCCI insisted was an official Test match with the ICC equally adamant that it was unofficial, he has had to sit out both, the one at Centurion and the one at Mohali underlining the wisdom of the Kikuyu proverb that when two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers. Though, in this case, it appeared more likely that it was not elephants but mules.
It is being said by both sides that cricket has been the winner. How anyone can come to that conclusion beats me. The authority of the ICC was challenged and the ICC did not come out of it, taller. Dalmiya ended up by having his bluff called but he demonstrated that there is a racial divide within the ICC and it can rear its head. Whether it is true or not, the perception is there that the game, willy-nilly, is still being run by Australia and England. Why is the headquarters of the ICC at Lord’s?
There was a time once when Lord’s was considered the ‘home’ of cricket. No it’s just another cricket ground. There seems to be no reason why the headquarters cannot be rotated. David Richards, an Australian was the first chief executive of the ICC. He was succeeded by Malcom Speed, also an Australian. Among the Test playing countries which number ten, four are from South Asia, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Was there no one qualified from these countries for this post?
The ‘quarrel’ was between the ICC and the Indian Cricket Board. Why should former and present cricketers have jumped to offer their opinions. They had no locus standi as such.
Who the hell wanted to know what Steve Waugh or Nasser Hussain or Ian Botham thought about it? It was an administrative matter. Nasser Hussain had every right to feel concerned whether England’s tour of India would go but where was the need to go on public with this concern?
Nasser, in any case, is not a role-model. If memory serves me right, he once trashed a dressing-room when he felt he had got a bad umpiring decision. Offhand I cannot remember whether the match referee took any notice of it.
Whatever else may have happened or not happened, the institution of the match referee stands discredited. Mike Deness who had maintained a stony silence has finally broken it. He has thanked the ICC for standing by him. Unfortunately, he has been made a villain for he had the reputation of being a pretty decent chap. He was captain of England when I was the team manager of Pakistan on its tour of England in 1974. I didn’t have too much to do with him except to exchange a few courteous greetings. But he did not strike me as a Douglas Jardine. He was pretty easy going. I was surprised that he should have been such a stickler for the letter of the rules.
It now transpires that Sachin Tendulkar was not punished for ball-tampering but for cleaning the grass off the seam of the ball without the umpire’s permission, a mere technicality. If only this had been made clear at the beginning the whole dreary tamasha could have been avoided. It was Tendulkar being named that enraged the Indian public not Sehwag, the only one in the drama who came out as a loser.
IT was 46 years ago that modern Urdu poetry lost one of its great lyric poets, Asrarul Haq Majaz Lucknawi. Irtiqa, a literary forum, did a great service to remember him.
Poet Hasan Abid, the editor of Irtiqa, read out a paper summarizing his memories of Majaz. Hasan Abid belonged to the circle of writers who would frequent Majaz’s residence and the Lucknow Coffee House to hear as much from this popular senior poet as possible.
Majaz was a good student of Urdu literature. It was his romantic attachment with a Delhi girl which changed his life and he took to drinking as an escape from reality. He was a very popular poet. College girls sometimes would literally abduct him and make him sit in their company as an object of adoration. Even elders would pardon their daughters’ indulgence in adoring Majaz, who took fancy to one of his fans. But the bitter reality dawned upon him that he could be accepted as a demi-god, not as a husband. He turned to alcohol but that was not the remedy.
Born in October 1911 in an affluent family, Majaz had poetry in his genes. He was loved by the elders of Lucknow’s aristocratic society. Hasan Abid has fascinating things to say about the poet as he had accompanied Majaz in many a mushaira. According to him, one great quality of Majaz was that he pleased all those who interacted with him and he, in turn, was pleased by them.
He was born at a time when the hold of traditional poetry was loosening up. Sir Syed, Hali and Maulana Mohammed Husain Azad’s literary canons had been accepted by a large majority of poets. Allama Iqbal’s ‘unusual’ voice was a rage and it was in this atmosphere of purposive, nation-building fervour that the progressives arrived on the scene to preach the gospel of socialist viewpoint. The agenda was social change, and literature had to serve as a catalyst for that change. Had the patriotic fervour or the reformist concerns not occupied the centre-stage, the Progressive Movement could have faced more obstacles than it had to.
Majaz died at the age of 44 in December 1955. It was the year of Manto’s exit from the scene as well and one couldn’t forget Majaz’s comment on Manto’s death in the first month of the same year. When approached by some young writers — Hasan Abid included — to record his impressions, he couldn’t write beyond the following line:
Aksar hamare sath ke beemar margaye, and Majaz said almost everything in the above line.
Majaz, uncle to Jawaid Akhtar, brother-in-law to Jaan Nisar Akhtar and brother to the inimitable Safia Akhtar whose letters to Jaan Nisar Akhtar are perhaps only next in importance to Mirza Ghalib’s, could be regarded as a very important romantic poet in a phase of Urdu poetry which merges with the progressive poetry.
In this world of ours a progressive has to be, by definition, a romantic but the same could not be said about the romantic. Majaz’s poem Raat aur rail has been rightly regarded as the most effective poem that conveys symbolically the message of the Progressive Movement. The way the railway train pierces through the darkness and goes on annihilating ‘distances’ in a highly lyrical rhythm took the Urdu critics and readers by storm.
Faiz Ahmad Faiz, a few years junior to Majaz, is on record having admitted that had Majaz lived on for a decade or more, his contribution to Urdu poetry would have been second to none in the Progressive Movement. Faiz had said at a Karachi Press Club meeting: “Majaz knew how to imbue his lyrical poetry with revolutionary fervour. He made revolution a beautiful song, and we have to learn this art from him.”
Majaz’s collection of poems, Aahang, is a lean volume but it possesses high literary merit. His nazms and ghazals belong to a special vintage. He writes with great ease and spontaneity. Majaz proved that ghazal could imbibe a revolutionary fervour without hurting the flavour of the genre. Majrooh went a step further in this direction, but it was Faiz who perhaps did exhaust all the possibilities of the revolutionary ghazal, vying with Hafiz’s ghazal embodying the yearnings for the beau ideal, that is the beloved.
Majaz, apart from being a front-ranking progressive poet, has another claim on young Pakistanis: he is the author of Pakistan’s first national anthem during the 1945-46 election when he was working for the Muslim League, with many other progressives such as Sajjad Zaheer and Makhdoom Mohiuddin. His anthem is included in Aahang. Makhdoom Mohiuddin had also written a Pakistani anthem. It is a pity that these two anthems, with many more written by poets who did not see Pakistan as a reality, have not been compiled in a book form.