March 23, 2003

THE ferocity of seasons has overawed man since times immemorial. Rain, storm, heat and cold have been a great challenge that have been met in various ways. Cyclical changes in weather, and the way it affects men and women, have become part of a powerful imagery and metaphor of world literature. Some ancient religions and mythologies even consider these elements as gods and goddesses.

Inspired by “Baramasa”, the twelve-month theme, which has been frequently used in the arts and literature of the subcontinent, poet Ghulam Fariduddin Riaz weaves his lines in terms of these seasons in the rural Punjab, exploding on the way myths that would paint the villages as pictures of serenity and calm. On the contrary he tells you of the poverty, inter-tribal feuds, rampant theft, dacoity, rape, murder and violence.

And despite all this, the poet tells you, the peasant survives, albeit under most horrific conditions. The exploitation and violence of centuries has made him wily and resilient. Life goes on: “Drums are beaten, dances danced, song sung, prayers said, festivals enjoyed and lovers meet in the cotton, sugar-cane or wheat fields.”

This living “life to the hilt”, and the “magnificent courage in the face of absolute deprivation” is what the author is “in awe of and which has been an important motivation” for his book.

The reader is told of the great Sanskrit poet, Kalidasa (4th-5th century), author of the famous Shakuntala who also wrote a book about seasons, Ritusamhra, where the six cantos of the poems relate to summer, rain, autumn, early winter, winter and spring. The author says that in the Islamic tradition seasons have been “illustrated by one Abul Hassan in a manuscript written at the end of the 14th century called Kitab al-Bulhan (Book of the Well-being).”

For Punjabi literature, Riaz quotes M.S. Randhawa from his book Kangra Paintings in Love, by Guru Nanak, which has vividly depicted the beauty of nature apart from remembrance of God. Randhawa refers to the poetry of Bulleh Shah where there are interesting descriptions of the months. He also writes about the delightful descriptions of the twelve months by one Keshav Das in his book Kavipriya. In the common Punjabi parlance the twelve months are generally known as “Baramasa”, and with some slight variations these months are based on the Sanskrit names.

The poet calls his collection a book of anecdotes about rural life, impressions, thoughts and characters; bringing out something of the hopes and dreams of the people, and something of the sounds and smells of the countryside.

Riaz comes out with a powerful assertion of the peasant both in his happiness and in his tragedy, spreading his poems into the Punjabi, “rural year”.

It is essentially a study rooted in, what Naveed Shahzad, a retired Professor of English Literature at the university of Punjab, writes in a fine introduction, “A real Punjabscape, characterized by the calloused hand, spatulate feet and onion breath...The journey starts midyear with Jeth (May) when the extravagant colours of spring are being rapidly displaced by a searing heat which clutches the land of the ‘five rivers, in a relentless, remorseless fever”. According to her, Riaz persistently returns to the theme that the “rivers bring only the slit memories and the warlords of history fade into a past where triumph was brief. It is only the land that lives on”.

Ghulam Fariduddin Riaz, born in Lahore in 1939 was educated at Aitchison and Government College. He studied political science, philosophy and economics from Oxford and joined the Civil Service from where he resigned in 1971. His wife, Princess Qudsia Sultan of Pataudi and Bhopal, died in 1989.

Earlier he had published two books of poems Shade in Passing and Escaping Twenty Shadows. Here are simple words — a “deceptive simplicity”, Taufiq Rafat-like — woven into a poetic sensibility that brings out real life images creating a new world, of rural Punjab, a world to use the words of T.S. Eliot, made “more explicit, more understood”.

 

Baramasa: Seasons of Rural Life

By G.F. Riaz

Oxford University Press,

Plot # 38, Sector 15, Korangi Industrial Area, Karachi Tel: 111-693-673

Email: ouppak@theoffice.net  Website: www.oup.com.pk

ISBN 0-19-579607-1

112pp.Price 295

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