KARACHI: Jamiluddin Aali was an Urdu poet, columnist, travel-writer, civil servant, banker and senator. A restless soul and a multi-talented person, he excelled in diverse domains and had many irons in the fire but it was his poetic calling that made him shine and attract the attention of literary circles early in his career.

Aali was a literary figure first and foremost, though he served several literary and financial institutions in different key positions, notably the Pakistan Writers’ Guild (PWG), Anjuman Taraqqi-i-Urdu, Urdu Dictionary Board, National Press Trust, National Bank of Pakistan and Pakistan Banking Council.

Also read: Literary luminary Jamiluddin Aali passes away at 90

His poetry, too, has different colours and moods and while on the one end of the spectrum one finds his traditional love poetry of ‘ghazal’, on the other end are his national songs which gave him recognition on a grand level. Aali’s ‘dohas’, a genre of Urdu poetry deeply rooted in Hindi’s literary tradition, reflect yet another shade of his poetic talent. His long poem ‘Insaan’, comprising some 15,000 couplets, albeit incomplete, is an attempt to capture the unpredictability and complexities of human nature.

Aali’s travelogues, philosophic and light-hearted at once, are extempore and imbued with poetic overtones. In his column in the daily Jang, which he wrote for over 50 years, Aali showed the philosophical side of his personality. He had a penchant for knowledge and had developed a taste for cosmology and futurology that reflected in many of his columns. Patriotism was another trait that his columns were known for.

Born Nawabzada Mirza Jamiluddin Ahmed Khan into a nawab family of Delhi on Jan 20, 1925, Aali did his BA from Delhi’s Anglo-Arabic College in 1944. Having migrated to Pakistan in 1947 and beginning anew in the nascent country at lower echelons in a federal ministry in Karachi, Aali passed the competitive exams and rose to some high-ranking assignments after joining the civil service in 1951. At one point in his career, he served at the President House in the capacity of personal assistant to Qudratullah Shahab who was the secretary to General Ayub Khan, the then all-powerful President of Pakistan.

It is generally believed that the PWG was the brainchild of Qudratullah Shahab, while Aali played an instrumental role in materialising the idea along with Qurratul Ain Hyder and some other writers by holding its first session in January 1959. The session was presided over by Baba-i-Urdu Moulvi Abdul Haq and addressed by Gen Ayub Khan. Some researchers believe that the PWG was created to camouflage the intellectuals’ support for the military dictatorship, which ensued the 1958 martial law under Ayub Khan, but it is a fact that the PWG played a vital role in the uplift of Pakistani writers and intellectuals, with Aali at the helm of affairs as its secretary. He was very sentimental about the PWG as he remained associated with it long after both Gen Ayub Khan and Qudratullah Shahab were gone. Aali kept working for the betterment of Pakistani writers, though he often lamented that it ate up much of his time, sapped his literary energies and, as a result, he could not write what he really wanted to.

It is a fact that Aali tirelessly worked for the PWG and had to suffer much on many counts due to his attachment to the organisation. Ironically, at one point, even some writers for whose rights he was fighting had become unhappy with him and the PWG. Once Aali said to this writer that the PWG was created basically with a view to safeguarding the interests of writers and to ensuring that their rights were not encroached upon, either by the government or publishers. In his words, “the PWG was a kind of writers’ trade union”.

Aali’s contribution in salvaging Anjuman Taraqqi-i-Urdu and Urdu College after Moulvi Abdul Haq’s death in 1961 has also been significant. He served the Anjuman as secretary for over 50 years. Yet another literary institution that Aali made survive is Urdu Dictionary Board. When he became its president in 1997, the board was in disarray. He reactivated the board and enabled it to finally go on to complete later the grand project of the 22-volume Urdu dictionary.

He was made National Press Trust (NPT) secretary in 1964. In 1967, he joined the National Bank of Pakistan and was later sent to the Pakistan Banking Council in advisory capacity. He took part in 1977’s general elections from Karachi on a PPP ticket for a national assembly seat but lost to the Jamaat-i-Islami’s Syed Munawwar Hasan. With the MQM’s support, Aali was elected a member of the Senate of Pakistan in March 1997, though he never joined the MQM as a member.

Aali’s poetical works include Ghazlen, dohe, geet, Jeevay jeevay Pakistan, La haasil, Ay mere dashte sukhan, and Insaan. His newspaper columns were published in three volumes, Sada kar chale, Dua kar chale and Vafa kar chale. His travelogues are Dunya mere aage, Tamasha mere aage and Iceland. A number of dissertations have been written on Aali’s life and works. For his literary works and the services rendered for Urdu literature, Aali was decorated with a number of coveted awards such as the Pride of Performance and Hilal-i-Imtiaz.

A restless soul, Jamiluddin Aali will be remembered in the history of Urdu literature as a poet and writer who fought on many fronts at the same time and won almost every battle he fought, except the final one with death.

Published in Dawn, November 24th, 2015