ABID Hasan Minto is a big name in the legal community. He is one of the founding members of the Pakistan Bar Council to which he was elected when this statutory body was formed back in 1966. He remained on the Council till 1983. During the period he was elected as the president of the Lahore High Court Bar in 1982 and then again in 1984. He was also the president of the Supreme Court Bar for the 1997-99 tenure. While doing all this serious stuff, Minto had enough time for films, music and, of course, books. This only helped him keep balance in life.
As a politician, he was always found on the Left of the scene, having been among the founding members of the Pakistan Communist Party. When it was banned, Minto joined the National Awami Party, and later joined hands with C.R. Aslam to form the Pakistan Socialist Party. Currently, he is heading the National Workers Party which was formed in May 1999.
Abid Hasan Minto developed a fondness films and stage plays at a very young age. He acted and directed stage plays when he was a student of the famed Gordon College, Rawalpindi. He remembers one such play, Sahar Honey Tak (1950) which he directed and acted in when he was a member of the Pakistan Communist Party. Hope for an egalitarian society was the subject of the play.
Before Partition, he used to watch old Indian movies with a relish. He used to like romantic films like Mun Ki Jeet and historic-action films of Sohrab Moodi, like Sikandar-i-Azam and Pukar, alike. He says the Indian film scene saw a turning point after 1940s when ground realities gave way to idealism and romanticism.
Though he felt the change and did not particularly like it, he still watched them. Dilip Kumar was on top of the filmdom during the period, and Minto idolized him. Deedar, Andaz, Aan and other such films used to be his favourites.
After Partition, the quality of Pakistani films, he says, was no less than the Indian films. He remembers films like Kartar Singh, Heer Ranjha, Umrao Jan Ada (which he says was better than the Indian movie of the same title), Wada, Intezar, Shaheed and Neend. The last named film was produced by Shamim Ashraf Malik who was also a political comrade for Minto.
No composer has impressed him more than Khawaja Khurshid Anwar. But he was also impressed by Rashid Attre and Feroze Nizami whose tunes of Dopatta still refresh his memory. But Minto had a liking for classical and semi-classical music more than light music. He is a great admirer of Malika-i-Mauseeqi Roshan Ara Begum and Ustad Salamat-Nazakat Ali. He himself plays sitar well, and for him this is “the king of all musical instruments”.
He has a special reverence for Ustad Mohammad Sharif Poonchwale and Pandit Ravi Shankar. But, above all, he is impressed by Malika-i-Tarannum Noor Jahan, who, he says, had a voice “as sweet as honey”.
The leading jurist of the country is also a writer in his own right. He has been associated with the Progressive Writers Movement since the beginning, and was the moving spirit behind the establishment of the Halqa-i-Arbab-i-Zauq which was the first literary movement of Lahore after Partition. Literary criticism is Minto’s main field and he studied fiction and poetry with the eye of a critic. His favourite writers are Ranjinder Singh Bedi, Balwant Singh and Saadat Hasan Manto. He has a book on literary criticism, Nuqta-i-Nazar, to his credit. Another edition of the book has recently been published.
He has a great fondness for Russian writers like Gogol, Chekhov, Tolstoy and Dostovisky whose writings reached here through Urdu translations. He also has vastly studied a number of European writers which gave him an enlightened view of society.
FAVOURITE BOOK: War and Peace
FAVOURITE COMPOSER: Khurshid Anwar and Ustad Sharif Poonchwale
ABID Hasan Minto is a big name in the legal community. He is one of the founding members of the Pakistan Bar Council to which he was elected when this statutory body was formed back in 1966. He remained on the Council till 1983. During the period he was elected as the president of the Lahore High Court Bar in 1982 and then again in 1984. He was also the president of the Supreme Court Bar for the 1997-99 tenure. While doing all this serious stuff, Minto had enough time for films, music and, of course, books. This only helped him keep balance in life.
