I WAS happy to receive Mohammad Izharul Haq’s new volume of verse along with clippings of the columns written about him on this occasion.
I grant that Izharul Haq is a poet worth talking about and his present volume offers much which is genuine and meaningful. But I cannot resist the temptation of first saying a few words about the writings referred to above. In fact, I had hoped that these writings would be helpful in my understanding of the poet. Of course, they have helped me in knowing Izharul Haq as a bureaucrat. The commentators are all praise for him as an officer without the air of a bureaucrat. That is very fine. But what about his poetry?
Here, while engaged in going through his volume, Pani pe Bicha Takht, I am concerned with him as a poet. His bureaucratic status is simply irrelevant in this context.
In my quest for some clue to his poetry I turned to the back cover of the volume where some distinguished writers have expressed their opinion about his poetic achievements. But these opinions are vague, and in some cases, fantastic. A popular novelist says: “Izharul Haq’s poetry is a devastated text, a white sheet of sorrow.” Then he stoops to superlatives and announces: “I honestly feel that when poetry degenerates into non-poetry, someone like Izharul Haq makes appearance and transforms non-poetry into poetry.”
Superlatives do serve a purpose in literary criticism. Often, they offer a garb to pseudo-critics for concealing their lack of understanding of a literary work. Poetic statements have often been seen serving the same purpose. But, unfortunately, that is in general the way a new work is welcomed in our literary world.
I think one can afford to appreciate Izharul Haq’s poetry without indulging in superlatives and poetic statements. As compared to his other admirers, Zafar Iqbal’s verse appears to be more genuine and nearer to understanding his verse. He is right in saying that Izharul Haq has a phraseology of his own and has woven a poetic atmosphere in his own way. Let us say that away from the modern world which has found its expression in modern Urdu verse, he has constructed a world which reminds us of a distant past linked with the distant lands of the Muslim world. Cities such as Samarqand, Bukhara, Basra and Baghdad speak of its vastness and cultural richness.
No doubt, the poet off and on returns to his own geography and is seen singing of his own soil, the soil where he was born. But this coming back is temporary. He cannot stick to this soil for long. His imagination is constantly hovering over legendary Muslim cities of Central Asia and the Middle East. And of all the rivers, it is Jihoon, a Central Asian river, that attracts his imagination.
In fact, Izharul Haq is closer to Allama Iqbal than to his contemporary poets. As is well known, it was for the first time in Iqbal’s poetry that we see a landscape extracted from the geography of the Muslim world. And touched by the poet’s imagination, it becomes alive. And it is there that we see a number of cities and certain rivers of the Muslim world transferred into symbols of Muslim glory. In consequence, Iqbal’s verse brought with it a new imagery hitherto unknown to Urdu poetry and a phraseology very different from that of his predecessors. This imagery, along with its phraseology, is steeped in the cultural past of the Muslim world.
Izharul Haq appears treading in the footsteps of Iqbal. Even we can mark out a few parallells. For instance, in Iqbal’s verse, we see river Al-Kabir turned into a source of inspiration, helping the poet to recall the past glory of Muslims in Spain. As a rejoinder to it, Izharul Haq has chosen the river Jihoon, serving him as a source of inspiration the same way. But, thank God, he has not treaded in the footsteps of Iqbal the way leading him to turn into another Asad Multani or Ameen Hazin Sialkoti. Though his way of thinking and feeling reminds us of Iqbal, but in spite of that, his verse has a flavour of its own.
Izharul Haq has constructed in his verse the tribal experience of life which is still alive. The echoes of the tribal ways of life in his poems impart a peculiar flavour to his verse.
Izharul Haq is equally well-versed in the ghazal as well as in free verse. In both forms, he has been able to devise a diction, which distinguishes his verse from those of his contemporaries.
I WAS happy to receive Mohammad Izharul Haq’s new volume of verse along with clippings of the columns written about him on this occasion.
