Alfaz Foundation, Karachi, has brought out a collection of 25 marsiyas selected and compiled by Dr Hilal Naqvi. It is titled, Jadeed Biyaz-i-Marsiya.

I am not in a position to pass judgement on the nature of these marsiyas and determine how far all or most of them are a departure from the traditional marsiya, so as to be treated as jadeed or modern marsiyas. So I am content to say that it is a collection of selected marsiyas picked from those written during the post-Aneesian period.

After going through the preface, I was perturbed to find Dr Naqvi talking about the injustice meted out to the form. He says that it “has been a practice in every period to ignore the marsiya and that even today, it is treated as a form of poetry exclusive to a certain sect.”

Is that really so? Dr Naqvi is a serious scholar, a serious student of the tradition of Urdu marsiya and I did not expect such statements from him. I must inquire what led him to arrive at such a conclusion. I could only gauge from what he has written in the preface that he has some grievances against those officials of the education department who, according to him, have managed to exclude the marsiya from the Urdu textbooks of the Bachelor’s degree in Karachi.

Mir Anees, as Dr Naqvi says, is very much a part of the course. But the compilers have played a trick. Anees is primarily known for his marsiyas, but they made a selection from his rubaiyat and included those in the Urdu course. Dr Naqvi is here at liberty to doubt the intentions of the compilers. In that case, the act should be deemed similar to the petty politics of government officials and should be treated at the same level rather than being seen as a conspiracy against the marsiya tradition.

Here I refer to the histories of Urdu literature written in different periods. We have a series of such histories starting with Maulana Mohammad Husain Azad’s Abe Hayat to the latest volume by Jameel Jalibi which is in the process of being written. It has been the job of literary historians to take into account all that has been produced in the name of literature and determine its place in the history of that literature.

A survey of these histories can well reveal to us the treatment meted out to the genre of marsiya and whether attempts have been made to sidetrack it by associating it with one sect. Fortunately, I have gone through a number of these histories. I am indebted to these volumes for enlightening me about the development of the marsiya tradition right from the Deccani period to that of Sauda, Dabir and Anees. At no stage did I feel that an attempt was being made to sidetrack or depreciate the status of this tradition or to ignore or limit it by associating it with a certain sect.

For instance, let me refer to Jameel Jalibi’s history in this respect. After talking about the marsiya in the early volumes, he discusses this tradition in detail in the fourth. In the first chapter, Jalibi talks about the tradition of marsiya, its development and its background. The predecessors of Anees and Dabir also figure in this chapter. The second chapter is reserved for Anees and Dabir. In the third we are introduced to Mir Moonis, Mir Ishq, Mir Tasshuq, Mirza Mohammad Jaffar Auj, Mir Nafees and Piyarai Sahib Rasheed.

This is how Jalibi has depicted the development of the marsiya during the 19th century which, according to him, was at its highest point.

The development of the marsiya during the 20th century will perhaps be discussed in the fifth volume, which is due soon. I think that if Dr Naqvi goes through Jalibi’s history much of his suspicions will be allayed.