THE months of May and June are known to us as the budget season. Almost with the same punctuality every year in the months of January and February we are fated to have two literary surveys presented by Saleem Akhtar and Enver Sadeed. But why always these two, one may ask. This I will try to explain later as I think I have got the hang of it. Let me first talk about a sitting arranged by the Academy of Letters in Lahore, which provided an opportunity for Saleem Akhtar to explain his position as a survey writer. This explanatory talk served as a preface to his summarized literary survey of the year 2001. Frankly speaking, this explanatory talk appeared to me to be carrying more meaning than the survey itself. We could gather from this talk how serious are the writers in the business of getting their names mentioned in these annual literary reports. Saleem Akhtar took pains to explain that he compiled his survey with complete objectivity and that no writer, who had written during the year some piece of prose or verse, however insignificant, was ignored. He regretted that in spite of his being so accommodative, aspersions were cast on him. He cited the example of a well known writer, who was angry with him for mentioning his name without qualifying it with the epithet mashhoor-o-maroof adeeb. How innocently he told us that he was equally accommodative of all kinds of writings, good and bad, least conscious of the irony that this very magnanimity on his part reduced the literary merit of his survey.
The literary surveys, as envisaged in Pakistan’s literary world, were meant in the beginning to review the literary trends during the year. Being written with this angle, these surveys carried some sense with them, though judging a trend within the limits of a year does not appear to be a sensible thing to do. But as in the course of years these surveys gained popularity, and writers appeared keen to see their names mentioned in them, the survey writers deemed it fit to be less strict in their judgments and tried to accommodate as many names as possible in their surveys. Two critics in particular, Saleem Akhtar and Enver Sadeed, appeared to be comparatively more accommodative and so their surveys grew in popularity. Perhaps under pressure of this popularity, they both took upon themselves the responsibility of presenting every year, without fail, a survey of writings published during the year.
Seeing the accommodative attitude of these two esteemed critics, no writer should feel worried that his writings will be ignored for want of quality and standard. It is only because of group politics that writers deeply involved in it feel threatened to the ignored. However, in that case, writers ignored in one survey hope to be accommodated in the survey of the rival critic whose loyalties lie with the other group. Such is the nature of these literary surveys, which are published in early every year by our newspapers and are keenly read by writers desirous of seeing their names mentioned there. But Saleem Akhtar insisted that while compiling his survey, he had no such considerations before him, that he discussed writers and their books irrespective of their loyalties and hostilities to this or that group. And, of course, that was evident from the paper he read in the sitting referred to above.
Being indiscriminate to this extent is admirable. But the survey writers like to be indiscriminate in respect of the quality of writings, too. Though enjoying the status of critics, they in general suspend their critical faculties for the sake of their surveys and go on to catalogue indiscriminately all that has been published during the year. And while listening to the paper read by Saleem Akhtar, I wondered at his patience as a reader. But that is what is required from a critic who has undertaken to present to us an annual survey of literary writings. He has to go through all the stuff published during the year, a kind of stuff most of which a sensitive reader of literature will not like to read. Only critics have the patience to do this kind of job. Indeed, that is what they are meant for. Critics are expected to read all that has been written and published in the name of literature and then after a critical assessment of that stuff tell us what is genuine and worth reading. As for Saleem Akhtar, he, no doubt, is an acknowledged critic, and a critic who is widely read. His short history of Urdu Literature enjoys the status of a best-seller. His critical writings may be called criticism made easy. But as a survey writer, he stops half-way. He takes pains to read all that has been published in the name of literature and catalogue it for our benefit. But for reasons best known to him, he evades to make a critical assessment of it tell us what is genuine and truly literary.
