November 21, 2004

THAT Ahmad Mushtaq is a better poet than Firaq Gorakhpuri was a judgment given by Shamasurrahman Farooqi. It was provocative enough for Ahmad Mushtaq’s contemporary poets, more particularly for those in Lahore, whose jealousy was fuelled by the former’s indifference to them. So the opinion was received with taunts, jeering, and hostile comments. The critic and the poet both came under heavy attacks from different quarters. And both of them kept their cool, showing no reaction to any of the attacks.

Farooqi did not need to react. His two-pronged purpose was well served. Mushtaq till now was underrated. Now being overrated a little in such an aggressive way he became the focus of attention of many an eye. His contemporaries could not afford to ignore him anymore. The other purpose too was well served. After all Farooqi was living in the same city where Firaq resided. A poet and a critic living in the same town is like two swords kept in one scabbard. Farooqi must be settling an account with the poet, who was notorious for annoying people. The account, if there was any, had now been duly settled.

If Mushtaq was underrated or ignored as a poet, he himself was partly responsible for it. He was hardly a sociable being. Social courtesies were foreign to him. The Tea House was his favourite haunt, where all kinds of writers rubbed shoulders with each other. Sitting there he was cautious enough to remain aloof. He had no patience for bad poets. And the whole literary crowd humming around him at the Tea House was to him a posse of bad writers and uninteresting people. He could well afford the discourtesy of refusing to share a cup of tea with them. He was, what we call, Mardum Baizar in Urdu, and was content to move only in closed circle of his selected friends.

With this attitude he lived in Lahore where he had settled after migrating from Amritsar. The world he moved in began from his residence in Krishan Nagar and ended at the Tea House, a spot just in front of the bank where he worked. He was averse to travelling and was happy in the little world he moved in. But all of a sudden, one fine morning under family pressure he left Lahore and flew to America, a country he hated most. He never revealed his address to any of his friends, which made them unable to keep in touch with him. Therefore, for years we had no clue to his whereabouts. And for years we remained under the impression that he had stopped writing. We consoled ourselves by saying that he, while in Lahore, had written enough to come up with two collections of ghazals, Mujmooa and Gard-i-Mehtab.

But one fine morning we received an issue of Shabkhoon, a literary journal published from Allahabad under the editorship of Shamsurrahmman Farooqi. We were pleasantly surprised to find in it a series of Mushtaq’s newly written ghazals. In the following months, we received subsequent issues of the journal and each issue carried his ghazals. And now Shabkboon Kitab Ghar has brought out his Kulliyat in which we find his two previous volumes and newly written ghazals.

So Mushtaq has chosen to stage his re-appearance via Allahabad. Well and good. Allahabad is no small place. It enjoys the status of being the city of Firaq Gorakhpuri, and the abode of his critic and promoter Farooqi. Here I am reminded of late Muslehuddin (of PTV fame) who used to say that Amritsar too has given birth to Firaq Gorakhpuri. Mushtaq is our Amritsar’s petty Firaq Gorakhpuri. And don’t forget that Firaq has been a source of inspiration for Mushtaq, in fact, both for Nasir Kazmi and him.

As mentioned earlier, Kulliyat includes ghazals that were written after his departure to America. Most of us had thought that isolation from his soil and from the social and cultural environments he had grown in would adversely affect his verse. We were wrong. In fact, his expression has become more chiselled and more meaningful.

Mushtaq is a classicist possessed with modern sensibilities. On the one hand he is steeped in the classical tradition of ghazal, while on the other hand he has developed an awareness of the age he lives in. How aptly he has said:

Main phiroon hazar idhar udhar

Nahin gird-o-paish sai baikhabar

Mera dil zamana-i-haal main

Mari ankh ehd-i-qadeem per

So he need not annihilate the poetic system of ghazal known as taghazzul to demonstrate his modernism. His classical sense of restraint will not allow it. But at the same time his new consciousness will not permit him to reconcile with what is trite and traditional. So, a sense of something new permeates through his chiselled expression giving it a new flavour.

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