May 19, 2002

MY last memory of Kaifi Azmi will live with me forever. I had just got back from the CID office in Mumbai after a humiliating wait to get my passport stamped for my departure to Karachi. The nexus at the CID office works on an agenda to fleece the Pakistani tourists. The line moved quickly, but when I refused to part with my money, I was made to stand aside and wait, even as the clerks prodded me gently to relent.

Pakistanis are mota bakras, loosening the purse strings wouldn’t hurt, one said. After an hour of being subjected to their contemptuous gaze and lurid comments in Marathi which I understood, a clerk with a weary conscience handed my passport to me, as the others made fun of him. But the shiny pupils hardening with puny power into points of flint remained with me.

When I related the incident to Kaifi Azmi, he reached out for my hand and kissed it, and then looking into my eyes said, “I apologize on their behalf that this happened to you in your own country.” In an instant, he had redeemed me from the feeling of being soiled and of being branded an outsider.

His death is in the literal sense the death of an era. He was the last of the doyens of the All India Progressive Writers’ Movement. My father, Jan Nisar Akhtar, was the first to pass away (among the members who moved to Mumbai and struggled to make it big in the film industry. How they struggled without compromising and wrote the most exquisite lyrics). To me then, Kaifi Azmi along with the other writers and poets became quintessentially my extended family.

And despite the years and distance, I was always guaranteed this very special feeling of belonging to the fold. As an audience at Karachi’s Press Club, I have felt encased in the pupil of their eyes quite like my father’s glance sought me out at a mushair’a.

They were the mushair’as that are etched in my mind. Particularly one, that was held in Mumbai at the Tejpal Hall. The earlier part of the evening was a recreation of a mushair’a with stage artistes dressed up as poets of the golden age of Urdu poetry. The dark stage was slowly bathed in a soft glow, as Assadullah Khan Ghalib, Mir Taqi Mir, Momin Khan Momin, Daagh Dehalvi came to life and began reciting ‘their’ poems as the shama-i-mehfil was passed around.

The effect was quite magical as the flowing robes, tall caps over locks of hair and the cultured ambience was a quick lesson for all of us, the city-bred, angrezi progeny of the poets. But this lesson would leave its mark for us, as the evening flowed into the latter half and there were all our fathers, carrying on the tradition.

Kaifi Azmi’s voice and personality mesmerized the audiences completely. He took the criticism that his voice helped his poetry in his stride, because he believed that the verbal and aural tradition was an inherent part of the recital of Urdu poetry. It was at the mushai’ras too, where as children we ran and tugged at the curtains, that we saw the last quick peg being downed. The underlay of tension marked by camaraderie took place in the green room as this group of poets epitomizing the best in Urdu poetry moved to the stage where soft mattresses with crisp white sheets and bolsters and an eager audience awaited them.

The All India Progressive Writers’ Movement members, as we all know, were a group of people who came together in the mid-thirties, led by Sajjad Zaheer. Within a span of a decade the movement had established writers, foremost being Premchand and Mulk Raj Anand. Even Tagore wrote a declaration of support and a message for the conference. Iqbal, expressed an interest, but his death shortly along with Premchand’s was a setback.

But these were unusual times, and in this heady atmosphere there arose a pantheon of poets and writers scattered across the subcontinent. Exceptionally talented they would come together and raise the bar for poetry and literature for years to come.

One of PMW’s aims according to its manifesto was , “To produce and to translate literature of a progressive nature and of a high technical standard; to fight cultural reaction; and in this way, to further the cause of Indian freedom and social regeneration.” These poets and writers took up the cause and departed from a more love-obsessed poetry steeped in Persianized Urdu to more day-to-day concerns and socially informed work inspired by the Marxist ideals. The use of actual diction of the spoken language was adopted. The earlier period of romantic poetry was followed by the Marxist-influenced poetry.

Kaifi Azmi made headway at revolutionary mushair’as writes Ralph Russell, “ ...sophisticated poets had difficulty in getting across to the unsophisticated, and Sajjad Zaheer’s account rather suggests that only Kaifi Azmi learned how to do this successfully.” Later, the movement found its true metier in the jadeed shairi where doubts and the internal confusion was discussed, the issues were real, alienation, decadence, monetary struggle, real sex vis-a-vis the bulbul imagery, and the beloved now the companion soldiering along. Kaifi Azmi made these transitions as did his contemporaries. The movement that began in the mid-thirties, thus spanned seventy-five years. And with the death of Kaifi Azmi, lost one of its guiding stars.

His heartrendingly beautiful lyrics are so deceptively simple but immensely rich not only in meaning but resonant with a dark, heavy emotion. And as the songs enthrall you, there is a sense of evanescence, as very slowly this heaviness lifts and the soul wings, as he had meant it to all along. My eternal favourites are from Kaaghaz ke Phool and Haqeeqat. But not many in Pakistan may know about this delightful film, Heer Ranjha, for which he wrote the entire dialogue in verse. It’s lyrical beauty comes with the masterly use of simple diction. Garam Hawa, was a film depicting the dilemma of the Muslims in Agra before Partition for which Kaifi wrote with an intuition and sensitivity that captures the dignity of this Muslim man, beaten but not bent, played by Balraj Sahani.

Kaifi Azmi has always been the foot-soldier among all the poets and writers of the PWM. He lived by the same principles that he espoused. Unlike many of his contemporaries who were preoccupied by the injustices and upholding the dignity of labour, Kaifi Azmi was the pragmatic social worker. In his book How not to write the history of Urdu literature, Ralph Russell quotes Sajjad Zaheer, “Most of the members of our small group wanted to become writers. What else could they do? We were incapable of manual labour, we had not learnt any craft and our minds revolted against serving the imperialist government. What other field was left?”

Russell writes, “I would add that since all of them knew very well that no writer in an Indian language could make a living by writing, they must have all known what they proposed to live on while pursuing their chosen cause.”

When asked who the ‘Progressive Writers’ were, Majaz quipped, “there are people who live in huts and dream of palaces, Tarraqui Pasand members are people who live in palaces and dream of huts.”

Many came from a feudal background or belonged to the bourgeoisie. They identified with the upholding radical views and pursuing Marxist solutions but in reality found it difficult to give up the comforts that they were accustomed to. Azmi was the exception and forged ahead, his dreams culminating in his action-oriented work in Mijwan, Azamgarh, his own village. He toiled to get pani-bijli-sadak, school and a computer training centre that the underprivileged communities dream of. He returned again and again, stubborn in his perseverance despite his frail condition.

To me he is the foot-soldier also because his disability did not pin down his spirits nor his physical self. He was a man of action and was up and about. Soon after his paralytic stroke, he was at the Prithvi Theatre, just a doorstep away from his Janki Kutir home, watching a play. After the play, an acquaintance offered his hand to help him, and he refused and said, “my beti will take me”. I held his elbow and walked with him home. Years later, he still made his way across continents.

Finally, I must mention my admiration for the full-blooded relationship that he shared with his wife, Shaukat, who soldiered along with such panache, and their combined weltanschauung evolving further in the action-oriented work of their daughter Shabana, and countless others.

It’s ironical that the mindless killings — or should one say mindful — continue in Gujarat even as Kaifi Azmi took his final curtain call. I wonder what he must have thought about it. Long ago he wrote a ghazal, “Lucknow toh nahin” expressing his dismay and disbelief as Lucknow was bathed in blood after a riot. Only this time he would reword it to “Hindustan toh nahin”.

Our identities were anchored in the cultural landscape of every religion. Saffron and green were colours in the tricolor, not symbols for ethnicity. Now a black river of hate snakes it way across the white to sever green from saffron.