March 16, 2008

‘Man is a riddle, an enigma inside a mystery’. Jamiluddin Aali’s Insaan is more of a riddle and an enigma; less of a mystery, more of a mistake. In the words of Sir W.S. Gilbert’s: ‘Man is ribald, man’s a rake, man’s Nature’s sole mistake’. Whence, where, why: The perennial existential dilemma. As per Zauq, ‘Apni Khushi na aai na apni khushi chale’ (Neither we willed ourselves into being nor out of it) The Maker in His supreme wisdom and absolute will acts as He wishes and let us hapless beings carry the onus.

According to the poet Mir, ‘Chha hain so aap karain humku abas badnam kia…’ (We are only there to blame for fate’s handiwork). Where then lies the choice and the responsibility in the face of wanton birth and certain death? One of Doestovesky’s characters in The Possessed (Also translated as The Devils) argues: ‘if there is God it’s all His will: if there is no God then it is all my will’. Thus the right to take one’s life, that is to commit suicide, is the ultimate assertion of the supreme personal will. The absolute freedom to do one’s bidding untrammelled by any collective obligation. Or in other words, the strength and resolve to rebel against the very accident of one’s birth in which one is without the choice of parentage, place or race and religion. Why would He bring us at all into the impermanence of being and certain death from the bliss of non-being? Birth is, after all, the drumbeat of death.

Aali’s Insaan dares address his Maker to ask ‘If thou art there, why didn’t thou consult me before my birth…Why did thou let the sperm fertilise the egg. Why oh Why? Only tell me my Maker why am I condemned to live. I, a prisoner of sanity and insanity, in hectic search for an answer without ever finding one?’

A poetic tome of 7,800 free verses, Insaan, in the words of the publisher, is a prism of literature, philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, history, science and more.

It took the poet half a century of constant meditation, concentration and hard work before committing his work to print in its present yet unfinished form. The sheer weight and volume of the work is not only impressive but truly awesome. How much will his reader, even one generally well-versed in literature and history, be able to and enjoy the work bulging with such scholarly content? That is a relevant question best left to the future reader and critic to answer.

A work of this magnitude and depth must take time to trickle down to the level of appreciation and understanding, even for the educated elite to whom it is essentially addressed. It is not the same as the rest of Aali’s poetry, especially the duhas and ghazals of his youth which made him a sort of poetic prodigy. Rendered and recorded in his own rich voice with a natural (Rajasthani) bass, they touched one’s heart without tormenting one’s mind.

Insaan is an altogether different genre; a different cup of tea too strong to swallow. In his preface (Ibtedayya) Shahzad Ahmed pleads his inability to follow the manuscript: ‘It is days since I have been reading the manuscript of Aali Sahib’s work and yet am unable to go through it completely. After every page or two, I feel as if have come up against some sort of a wall, and there I stop. In his long poem, Aali Sahib has spoken a lot about man’s earthly existence, of his many shortcomings, failings and achievements without sitting on judgment on anything.’
 

In his preface Shahzad Ahmed pleads his inability to follow the manuscript: ‘It is days since I have been reading the manuscript of Aali Sahib’s work and yet am unable to go through it completely.
 

To my mind, as a reader, the best part of Aali’s work is that he is non-judgmental and charitable in his assessment of man and his personality. He has projected man as weak and vulnerable, with little choice or strength to opt out of the world in which he was born. He is a prisoner and captive of his genetic code and of fate over which he has little or no control.

To his credit, despite his courtly background and affiliation to a princely state, he remains refreshingly untainted by the charisma and myth of ‘the prince’ and the superman.

The poet himself seems to be aware of the inherent complexity and nuanced subtlety of his work to make it difficult for a common reader to follow. However, this is not to detract, from its quintessential literary merit. Aali’s Insaan is no ordinary individual: he is the finished product of his poetic imagination. He is one of the crowd and yet not a part of it. While he shares the pain of living with everybody else; generational, inherent burden of pain and its excruciating consciousness is all his own.

He remains unique in his capacity to articulate pain without screaming for help. His pain is all his own in its unfathomed depth and unspeakable intensity. Himself conscious of his erudite — almost esoteric — form and content, Aali invokes verses from Ghalib, Mir and Iqbal to explain his long-winded text with the help of just a couple of their couplets or so. Brevity would be the last thing an epic like Insaan can claim. A prolific writer of prose and poetry, war songs, newspaper columns and sundry writings, his printed material can be spread over as many as 20,000 pages.
 

Insaan
By Jamiluddin Aali
Maktaba Hamzaban, Karachi.
554pp. Rs400
Reviewed by A.R. Siddiqi