| April 17, 2003 | Thursday | Safar 14, 1424 |
The saint-poet of Sindh
SHAH Abdul Latif Bhitai, the greatest saint-poet of Sindh, was born in 1689 at Sui Kandhar, a small hamlet, now lying deserted near Bhit Shah on the Hala-Tando Adam Road in Hyderabad district. His father, Shah Habib, was the grandson of Shah Karim of Bulri, a saint-poet of his times. Bhitai’s ancestors are said to have migrated to Sindh from Central Asia.
Sami Ahuja has been in search of a style since he emerged from the side street on Pindi’s literary scene in the late fifties. Reading and writing were then greatly in vogue, as there was little else to do, and also because men of letters had a kind of station in society. They were looked up to. College girls fell in love with poets, and the better known writers could eke out at least a portion of their livelihood from their craft. I remember one friend, sadly who is no more, rushing into Akhtar Ahsen’s Mall Hostel suite one afternoon with the urgent request to spare some mediocre ghazal from his old disposable stock or scratch a fresh one for him to recite at Radio Pakistan in its kalam- e-shaaer programme for which poets were paid around Rs10 apiece.
He was sweating in his white shirt and over-sized necktie under the fan and was already out of breath with the thought of cycling all the way to the radio station on Peshawar Road.
Akhtar Ahsen who could be quite mean at times, in fact most of the times, obliged. Those were his most productive days. He was working on his image theory, writing controversial essays on poetics, composing bhajans, Zen poems and painting portraits. Giving away a ghazal or two to friends didn’t matter. Then there was this young novelist, Qamar something, who used to live in Bazazan street or Prem Gali on the backside in the Saddar Bazaar neighbourhood. He was a clerk in the GHQ but maintained a rather superior life style for a man of his position. He rode a Philips bicycle with a dynamo light. All this was possible because he had written a romantic novel that was selling rather well. M.Aslam could afford a summer flat in Murree hills doing nothing but churning one novel after another in quick succession. But that consideration was not in Ahuja’s mind when he, after suspending his college studies, decided to become a writer.
An iconoclast from day one he hated the prevalent prose styles. Having grown from a street urchin to an urban rowdy he had a natural bent for robust stuff, themes from life in action, crime, conspiracies. How to give this material a literary look and still retain its roughness? In the realm of mystery and crime Ibne Safi was doing that with finesse. His racy prose had become popular beyond measure. He had invented serial characters who had acquired a life of their own in people’s imagination. Surely, you could not beat him. But, honestly, was that what Ahuja wanted?
Certainly not. He wanted to create mysteries without becoming a mystery writer. So, with time, his prose started to drift towards obscurity. The mystery was served folded in an oblique diction. The outcome was a highly stylized prose that buried the story under its weight. In Jahannam jama Mein, his first collection, (that I could not bring myself to read for many years because of my childish desire to hear the story, to know what happened) this arabesque, laboured diction cost him many readers who might still be there in the early eighties when TV had submerged every thing in its deluge.
Then, in between the late sixties and the eighties, the period when he seemed to have vanished from the scene after settling down in Lahore, he, according to his own narration, went through a series of dramatic happenings in his life that involved him in revolutionary struggle in Tehran, Beirut, Cairo and Damascus and provided him with the intimate stuff he needed for his action-filled stories. Now he was his own subject. In Jahannam jama Mein the scene shifts from adventure capital to adventure capital. It remains overseas all through, seldom returning to more homely locales or more homely characters that were being written about in those days, our forex earning immigrants abroad. Their ordinary lives have no interest for him. His heroes are the Mujahedin Khalq or the Palestinians, but the local colour and details that he provides in these stories lose their authenticity in the over-symbolism of the narrative and the stagy dicor of the expression.
He has not, however, sat idle all this while. He has been working on his style, polishing it constantly to make it unique, ‘ahujesque.’ Qaid der Qaid, his new collection of three stories, testifies to his success in designing a prose style of his own. He is ‘there’ whether you like it or not, whether you understand what he is saying or not. That is his least concern. He is not bothered. He is telling his own story in his own words. He shifts from Arabic to Persian to Urdu to Punjabi, piling words in a verbless jumble; incoherent clauses that you need time to connect, to know what is being said. From this great stylized anarchy the reader is expected to extricate the story. Sami Ahuja was never the man who gave you plain tales of the heart. His language was inventive even when he swore. And he swore with sublime abandon of spirit most through his younger years. That quality has reasserted itself in this late account of his younger days as a left revolutionary and ideologue that no one knows about. His story though more entangled than ever before is now properly dated and supported by historical facts. It is in fact a commentary on the happenings that are interwoven whimsically, almost in a stream of consciousness way that the author is not bothered if you can decipher its meaning or not. Whatever the story the important thing is this very unique prose style that should be taken note of.
In his youth, he fell in love with Saeeda Begum, daughter of Mirza Baig Arghun, the Mughal governor of Sindh. The ruler created a hostile environment for the family of the poet and they had to leave the area. While his father shifted to a nearby village, his youthful son became a wanderer in the wilderness. It was during his love affair that the young Bhitai started composing poetry. Later on, he was offered the hand of the damsel with whom he was in love. But by then he had become an ascetic who shunned family life. He started travelling far and wide in the company of mystics of the day. It is evident from his poetry that Shah travelled from Hinglaj in the southwest to Bikaner and Khambat in the east.
A stage came when Shah Latif decided to settle down on top of a sand dune (Bhit) located on the northern bank of Karar Lake, now called Bhit Shah, in the first decade of the 18th century. The inner feeling of the poet is reflected in one of his verses about the love story of Sassui-Punhoon in which he says: “Je Hitt Na Hoat Pasan, Se Keen-an Ketch Pasandiyun” (They who are unable to see the Hoat — Punhoon was a Hoat Baloch by caste — here, how can they see him even in Ketch?). In the process of his spiritual journey, he had realized that one should peep into one’s inner self to perceive divine reality.
The mature period of Bhitai’s mystic life began at Bhit Shah where he made it a daily routine to lead a group of singing Fakirs during a musical concert in the accompaniment of a five-string musical instrument, Dambooro. The classical poetry of the poets of the subcontinent besides his own used to be presented in these sitting. Shah Latif himself knew the music very well and reformed the Sindhi music to a great extent.
A musical tradition still exists at his mausoleum where his Fakirs sing his poetry collected in the form of Risalo (collection of Bhitai’s poetry) from dusk to dawn everyday.
As far his poetry is concerned it excels in idiom and philosophical content through Sindh’s classical folklore comprising popular love stories such as Sassui-Punhoon, Sohni-Mehar, Moomal-Rano, Sorath-Rai Diyach, Umar-Marui, Leela-Chanesar and Noori-Jam Tamachi, etc.
He used folklore as a vehicle for his symbolism to express his philosophy. His poetry reflects almost every aspect of life and has remained popular. Everyone from a youthful lover to a seasoned mystic, from a peasant to a suppressed woman, finds a message:
Sorrow, joys’ beauty constitute;
Joys without sorrows spurn;
By virtue of such sorrow’s mood
my love comes to my arms.
The poet lived in times of turmoil. He witnessed the invasion of Sindh by Nadir Shah in 1739, and the ransacking of his homeland by Ahmed Shah Abdali in 1747. He was 28 years old when Shah Inayat of Jhok was killed in 1718 after the first peasant movement was crushed by Mughals and Kalhoras in 1718. Suzerainty over Sindh by the Portuguese, Dutch and the East India Company also come to pass and poet saw the weakening of Mughal power.
There is a call to gallows, friends,
will any of you go!
Those who do talk of love may know
Risalo, the collection of Bhitai’s poetry compiled through oral tradition, was first published 134 years after his death in Leipzig, Germany, by Dr Ernst Trump. But, it was Dr H.T. Sorley who introduced Bhitai as one of the great poets to the west through his work “Shah Latif of Bhit,” published in 1940. Sorley counts Ibn Saidun, Victor Hugo, Hafiz, Ghalib, Iqbal and Bhitai as great poets of the world. The other western scholars of Bhitai were Dr Annemarie Schimmel and Gerd Lupke.
O God, may ever you on Sindh
bestow abundance rare;
Beloved! all the world let share
thy grace, and fruitful be.
(The English translation of Bhitai’s verses is by Elsa Kazi).