KARACHI: Those who write in Urdu should revisit their concept of tradition (riwayet) and broaden their horizon to absorb cultures and literatures produced in other languages of the subcontinent.

This was one of the important arguments that Indian scholar Prof Shamim Hanfi made while delivering a lecture at Habib University on Tuesday afternoon.

Prof Hanfi, who is on a two-week visit to Pakistan in which he has already taken part in a variety of literary events, started off by talking about time. He said we [in the subcontinent] were living in an era where different aspects of time coexisted –– if there were cars on the roads, we could also see tongas being used to transport people from one place to another. Therefore to understand life we could not rely on a single discipline.

‘Literature produced in some of the [Indian] languages such as Tamil, Malayalam and Gujarati are of high quality’

Prof Hanfi pointed out that the definition of tradition that we had in Urdu needed to be reconsidered. A great many people who wrote centuries back were still with us [through their work]; and a lot of writers who were writing today were centuries apart from us. He [Hanfi] had seen in Allahabad (where he studied) poets such as Faiz and Firaq together. At the same time there were other poets who received appreciation from readers, but today their experiences could not be identified with.

Broken linkages

Prof Hanfi said there were 22 national languages in India. Literature produced in some of the languages such as Tamil, Malayalam and Gujarati were of high quality. In those languages, the way they treated a verse by harmonising it with the times they’re living in was different from the way Urdu writers did. The reason for that, perhaps, was that Urdu writers had confined their tradition to a certain limit (aik tung daarey ko apni riwayet samajh lia hai). They had treated history in the same manner. One of the biggest mistakes that the Urdu language committed was that it broke its ties with other languages (bolion se apna rishta tor dia).

Prof Hanfi said while the tradition of written literature in the subcontinent was 400 years old, the tradition of oral literature was much older than that. Those who were writing in other languages had adopted the oral part as their own tradition, but we didn’t even accept someone like Nazir Akbarabadi. Also, the history of Urdu and Hindi poetry began with Amir Khusrau. Hindi writers accepted that, not the Urdu ones who didn’t even consider him a poet [the way he deserved].

Prof Hanfi said by the same token we also needed to revisit terms such as modernism, postmodernism and progressive writers. These should be used as per the conditions that existed in our society. We had had among us progressive writers who were also conservative; for example, Munshi Premchand, whose writings carried elements of both conservatism and progressivism. To boot, the progressive writers never acknowledged the worth of fictionists such as Manto and Ismat Chughtai. And poets N.M. Rashid and Miraji got the cold shoulder as well.

After further expanding on the subject, Prof Hanfi switched to 1947. He said the partition of the subcontinent was felt with great vigour in the works of two fiction writers –– Quratulain Hyder and Intizar Husain –– and a poet –– Nasir Kazmi. There’s a “sense of loss” in the works of these creative individuals. In that context he quoted the following couplet by Kazmi:

Gali gali aabaad thi jin se kahan gaey woh loag
Dilli ab ke aisi ujri ghar ghar phaila soag
[Where are the people who made the city come alive?

This time around, the destruction of Delhi has saddened the air]

Earlier, Dr Zia Ul Hassan introduced the renowned scholar to the audience. He said Prof Hanfi’s name was considered among one of the top-notch critics in Urdu literature. Despite being such a learned man, he didn’t have an air of intellectually superiority about him. Apart from writing works of criticism, he was also a poet and playwright. His criticism had a creative streak which made his books great to read.

Published in Dawn, November 21st, 2018