‘O Muneer! Is this country haunted or something wrong has happened to it? It moves very fast, but travels very little!’

No, Muneer Niazi (1922-2006) was not around when the demons took over Peshawar’s army school last week and tried to stop the country’s journey ahead. But Muneer Niazi had seen so many demonised episodes that took place in this country that his sense of wonder had turned into the sense of despair. Many of his couplets, as the one quoted above, sound relevant even today and remind us how sensitive and visionary he was.

Muneer Niazi was a poet, short story writer, columnist, journalist and a songwriter, but it was his Urdu and Punjabi poetry that made him so popular.

Though poets are somewhat notorious for their inflated egos, some poets are unjustifiably known for their egoism and conceit. Muneer Niazi (1922- 2006) was one such poet. Some rumours and isolated incidents quoted out of context painted Muneer Niazi as someone with an attitude problem. But a recently published book by Misaal Publishers Faisalabad has cleaned all the haze surrounding Muneer Niazi and has made him look like a man from the real world instead of a mere poet lost in an arcane, imaginary world.

As is evident from the title of the book, it is an endeavour to rediscover a poet who was a friendly and down-to-earth person, far from what is usually perceived about him. Written by Dr Sumaira Ijaz, Muneer Niazi: shakhs aur shaer is a book that not only tries to understand the real message of Muneer Niazi’s poetry but also tries to see through the persona that somehow created false impressions about the poet who had suffered a lot in many ways and many of his personality traits were nothing but reaction to those painful incidents. Tracing the poet’s childhood memories and early life, Sumaira has first tried to establish the poet’s correct date of birth and has concluded that 1928 could not be Muneer Niazi’s year of birth, though it is commonly believed so. She insists that Muneer Niazi was born on Oct 14, 1922.

Digging up details about Muneer Niazi’s early life, she says that Muneer Niazi’s real name was Muhammad Muneer Khan and his father died when Muneer was quite young. Muneer Niazi passed his matriculation in 1939. His uncle sent him to Bombay (now Mumbai) to join the Royal Navy. There he was introduced to the beauties of literature through some friends, though his mother too used to read classics of Urdu prose, which must have influenced him.

In Bombay, he would sit on the seashore and read literary magazines that his friends passed him. The latent poetic talent had been bolstered but the navy’s strict disciplinarian environment was a bit too much for his tender, poetic nature. He deserted the navy but was caught and severely punished for running away. It only heightened his desire to flee and soon he got away, reaching to the safety of his hometown this time around. Then he decided to enhance his educational qualifications and took admission to Sadiq Egerton College, Bahawalpur; Dayal Singh College, Lahore; and Amar Singh College, Srinagar.

Though his poetic nature and keen interest in sports, especially hockey, interfered with his regular education, he met some teachers during his studies that were known for their literary works and they inspired the young Muneer a lot. They included Allama Tajver Najeebabadi, Syed Abid Ali Abid and Dr Khalifa Abdul Hakeem.

After independence, his family moved to Montgomery (now Sahiwal) and here he met Majeed Amjad, the well-known modern poet, who later became his mentor and friend. Here Muneer Niazi’s sense of loneliness and love of solitude waned but when he departed with Majeed Amjad and settled in Lahore, his utter sense of loneliness returned and he felt that “there was no friend to talk to and to recite poetry to”.

Dr Sumaira Ijaz has beautifully traced Muneer Niazi’s entire life, describing how the sensitive soul suffered through setbacks in life. The book has been divided into five portions. The first chapter not only narrates his biographical details but psychological and mental upbringing of the poet is also discussed in detail. It sums up Pakistani society’s literary scene in the 1950s and 1960s as well. The second chapter gives details about Muneer Niazi’s creative journey, his books, columns and his literary skirmishes with Urdu’s literary giants, such as Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi.

Muneer Niazi is considered one of the important poets of modern Urdu poem and the third chapter evaluates Muneer’s standing in this regard. The fourth chapter discusses Muneer’s ghazal. Geet, or song, is a genre of Urdu poetry that is deeply influenced by Hindi’s literary traditions, Hindi lexicon and Hindu mythology. Muneer’s geets too reflect this aspect. The final chapter of the book studies this aspect of Muneer’s poetry and personality. The author has taken pains to discover and study some unpublished works of the poet as well.

One must say that Dr Sumaira Ijaz, who teaches Urdu at Sargodha University, has thrashed all aspects of Muneer Niazi’s poetry and personality and, as Dr Ghulam Abbas has put it, she has meticulously worked out and discovered a Muneer Niazi who is not a citizen of a mysterious, imagined world but a living, mundane poet. By unknotting Muneer’s complex personality, she has opened the doors of understanding of his poetry in true perspective.

Dr Syed Aamir Suhail has rightly mentioned that it is not easy to see the personality and the poetry of a poet in a unity and entirety but when a researcher becomes a part of the poet’s universe, lives there and shares its joys with the readers, both the writer and the reader are bewitched by creative magic. Dr Sumaira Ijaz has just done it.

Muneer Niazi died on Dec 26, 2006 in Lahore.

drraufparekh@yahoo.com

Published in Dawn, December 22th, 2014