IT is after a long time that Jamiluddin Aali has appeared as his true self. His newly published volume, Dohay, brings before us once again the poet who, in previous years, was overshadowed by activities foreign to poetry. Here he is in his true poetic self, offering us the best of his life. I would like to imagine that after wasting many precious years in involvements other than literary, he has come to realize that it is poetry alone where he can achieve fulfilment.
In fact, we have been witnessing in literature two kinds of people. These are those who solely devote themselves to their creative work. The other kind is of those writers who give the impression of unfaithful lovers. They strive for things other than what their creative self demands. Much of their energy is consumed by such preoccupations. They take time to realize that their fulfilment lies in their own creative work. Will we be right in concluding from the nature of the present volume that such a change has come about in Aali’s life?
I was just saying that Dohay offers the best of his life’s work. This should not be taken to mean that his contribution to Urdu ghazal is negligible. In ghazal, too, he ranks high among his contemporaries. But it is in the form of doha where he has found his best expression and where he stands unrivalled. Here, he earned the credit for enriching Urdu with a new genre borrowed from Hindi, which till now had not been able to gain familiarity with the Urdu poetic tradition. He employed the form in a creative way and in consequence, the doha has come to stay in Urdu as a well-accepted form.
The volume under discussion is in fact a collection of all the dohas Aali has written so far. It begins with the earliest ones written in 1944, and ends with the one written in 2001. While recounting his sources of inspiration, he recollects his early years when he had the opportunity to listen to dohas by Mirabai, as recited by bards belonging to Jaipur. Then he talks of his early introduction to Kabir.
Cursorily, he also tells us of his one visit to Buland Shahr at an impressionable age. There in a village he had the opportunity to listen to rural bards reciting Alha Udal, a folk epic popular in rural UP. But, perhaps, Aali is not very conscious of this influence. He has enlisted a number of great masters including Kabir, Tulsidas and Mirabai to whom he has dedicated this volume and from whom he claims to have drawn inspiration. His critics are in general in agreement with him. But I feel that he is more under the influence of Alha Udal than any of these great masters. His very recital of his dohas reminds us of Alha as recited traditionally by the rural folk. His portrayals of beautiful damsels, too, echoes that epic.
Though these dohas have been composed in different times and in different contexts, yet we can discern a continuity in them. Taken together, they go to make a long poem with a central theme. This poem may be seen as a wanderer’s love song. We see here a romantic soul wandering from place to place and city to city. The moment he sees a beautiful face, he stops short and is under the spell of beauty for a while. But the spell, for reasons, is short-lived. He pays homage to beauty and goes forward with a heavy heart.
The portrayal of beautiful faces belonging to different races and different lands may be read as symbolizing beauty in many forms. But Aali cares more to see and depict beauty as expressed in living sensuous form and in the emotions it evokes in romantic hearts.
This collection of dohas may, at the same time, be read as an autobiography of the poet, an autobiography conceived in a romantic way and recorded in the form of dohas. Aali is so overtly autobiographical throughout that we can hardly ignore it. He freely records his personal experiences without concealing them in any poetic garb. This has helped him to depict contemporary life as he has found it. So we find a depiction of Pakistani society as seen by the critical eye of the poet. One section of society known as the bureaucracy has, in particular, been subjected to censure for its abuse of power. So we see a happy blending of social criticism and pangs of love. Kuch Ghamai Janan Kuch Ghamai Dauran. The whole carries with it a romantic flavour along with a realistic portrayal of contemporary life.
Enough pages of this book, which may be seen as a deluxe edition published by the Pakistan Writers Cooperative Society, Lahore, have been reserved for the opinions and comments of contemporary critics, who have generously paid compliments to Aali for his choice of a genre from classical Hindi and helping it to find a place in the Urdu poetic tradition. But as Aali has complained, they all discuss the form, paying little attention to the content.
IT is after a long time that Jamiluddin Aali has appeared as his true self. His newly published volume, Dohay, brings before us once again the poet who, in previous years, was overshadowed by activities foreign to poetry. Here he is in his true poetic self, offering us the best of his life. I would like to imagine that after wasting many precious years in involvements other than literary, he has come to realize that it is poetry alone where he can achieve fulfilment.
