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March 23, 2003
Review: Supremely individual
YAGANA was the founder of the anti-ghazal in Urdu. His diction was totally conventional; he chose the miniature forms of poetry; the ghazal and rubaiyi, yet his approach to life and literature was supremely individual. He shunned love and revolution, the dominant themes of his age. His repertoire consisted of reflections, metaphysical in nature, voluntarical in import.
It is true, as Prof Mumtaz Husain conceded, that the philosophical content of his poetry is not substantial. It does not have a creative dimension, nor even a system. He campaigned for the cause of wisdom in the manner of Voltaire but he also betrayed an anxiety for his salvation, which is reminiscent of Marlowe. Because of this underlying trait, his scepticism becomes more genuine than Ghalib’s as well as more tragic.
Yagana never admitted to his intellectual affinity with Ghalib, his bete-noire, but was content that his style was on a collision course with the nineteenth century master, terse, intense and vehement.
Yas Yagana was a prolific poet, yet his poems (ghazals and rubaiyat) are not generally available. His published collections have been out of print for more than fifty years. Even these collections Nishtar-i-Yaas (Lucknow, 1914), Ayaat-i-Vijdani (Lahore, 1927), Ganjina (Lahore, 1947) have poems, which overlap. There are a number of poems which are scattered in old and defunct literary magazines, some quoted in his letters and some are to be found only within the several holographs which Yagana left behind.
Had Mushfiq Khwaja, the editor of the Kulliyat, wished to take the easy way out, he could have just edited the last holograph of Yagana and published it. Even that could have been a great service to literature. Yet, to this reviewer’s personal knowledge, Mushfiq Khwaja spent more than twenty valuable years in searching for the rare and uncollected, unpublished verses of Yagana. As an editor, his achievement is prodigious. Within this volume all collections printed or in manuscript have been compiled in such a manner that all the published collections are reproduced and the overlapping poems or verses have been edited from later collections.
The same process has been followed for the unpublished and uncollected verses. They form the second part of this volume and here also, they are collected according to both rhyme and their year of composition.
To determine the chronology of Yagana’s poetry Mushfiq Khwaja has had to sift through thousands of pages of letters, magazine issues and personal memoranda. He has given the notes about the chronology in around 300 pages. These notes also tell the readers about the journals or manuscripts in which they were first inscribed as well as giving them the textual history of almost every variant found in Yagana’s output. This section is followed by a glossary of the proverbs, sayings and idioms employed by Yagana throughout his poetry.
With this section Mushfiq Khwaja has brought back many verbs and proverbs from the brink of oblivion. Yas Yagana had a penchant for versifying idioms and proverbs of the high society of Lucknow. This he did, as Mushfiq Khwaja himself recounts, to show his linguistic affiliation to Lucknow and to distance himself from the linguistic peculiarities of the Azimabad school to which Yagana actually belonged. Neither the poet nor the editor have a linguistic affinity to Lucknow and Mushfiq Khwaja in particular is praiseworthy for tracking down these words and phrases which are not to be found in the usual Urdu dictionaries. The people of Lucknow as the people of Delhi prided themselves on being the speakers of pure and chaste Urdu. Yet the pride of place must go to the editor Mushfiq Khwaja for meticulously determining the meaning and the occasions when these phrases were employed.
Editing of manuscripts is always an endeavour which demands high scholarship. Only two poets, Ghalib and Shad, have had their poems edited in this manner by Kalidas Gupta Raza and Kaleemuddin Ahmed respectively. Yagana who was a pupil of Shad and who set himself up as a rival of Ghalib has been fortunate in this respect to have the best editing so far devoted to his poetry. Mushfiq Khwaja has raised a monument of scholarship dedicated to the one poet of the twentieth century who when he died was unwept, unhonoured and unsung.
Kulliyat-i-Yagana
Compiled by Mushfiq Khwaja
Academy Bazyaft, Urdu Centre, 1st Floor, Room #2, Urdu Bazar, Karachi Tel: 021-2634330, 0330-2172366
Email: mukalama@cyber.net.pk
960pp. Rs500
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