A TRICKY question: which are the poets that deserve to be counted as the ‘greats of Urdu poetry’? The recently held Urdu Conference at Islamabad made the query a bit more tricky by having its own choice of the three great Urdu poets of all time.
Generally, there is a consensus of opinion on Mir, Ghalib and Iqbal as the three top-most poets of Urdu. But there has been a demand for an addition of one more name to them in order to make a galaxy of four great poets in Urdu literature. But who should be the fourth one? In this regard, one of the most advocated names is that of Mir Anis.
The Urdu Conference, however, made its own choice. It chose Ghalib, Iqbal and Faiz as the three Zehn Saz, or to be more precise, three epoch-making poets of Urdu. A full session was reserved for paying tributes to them. Three scholars, Dr Aftab Ahmad, Dr Justice (retd) Javaid Iqbal, and Dr Ludmilla from Russia read papers on them respectively. Dr Ludmilla, who is a great admirer of Faiz, did not, perhaps, like the fact that now when the Soviet Union has disintegrated, Faiz should be counted among its camp-followers. She took pains to prove that Faiz in his later period was disillusioned with Soviet Russia. His verses written in that period, according to her interpretation, speak of his disillusionment with the Soviet Union. If so, one may ask, why didn’t he care to dissociate himself from the Soviet Union?
Presidium at the session consisted of Dr Gopi Chand Narang and Fateh Mohammad Malik. It was left for Dr Narang to point out a grave flaw in the choice of epoch-making poets as it had ignored Mir. He asked, how could we afford to ignore Mir while making such a selection? Mir has been acknowledged by all as one of the three greats of Urdu poetry, the other two being Ghalib and Iqbal. He took upon himself to introduce this first great poet to the Urdu Conference’s audience and spoke about him exclusively in his address.
Dr Narang is a critic and a scholar. It was in this capacity that he felt duty-bound to make the conference conscious of its obliviousness to a poet who heads the list of the big ones of Urdu.
On the other hand, Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi is a poet. His reaction to such a situation must be different from that of a critic. So, when he in his column reacted against this trio of poets, he provided an alternate list of epoch-makers. It was a long list of major and minor poets, who in his view are all equally qualified to be treated as epoch-makers and deserve to be bracketed with Ghalib and Iqbal.
However, Fateh Mohammad Malik did not show this kind of generosity at the conference. He restricted his recommendation to one poet alone. In his presidential address, he paid glowing tributes to Ghalib, Iqbal, and Faiz, and saved some of his adulatory comments for a fourth poet whose name he was going to announce later. He assertively announced that after Ghalib, Iqbal, and Faiz the fourth epoch-making poet was Ahmad Faraz. The poets present at the session appeared to be disturbed by this announcement.
To be fair to present-day poets, in the case of Mir, Ghalib and Iqbal, they are well-reconciled to the high position granted to them. They don’t mind if those distinguished souls are held in high esteem and treated as great poets. The reason for that is that the greats belong to the distant past, and any kind of honour conferred on them doesn’t pose a threat to present-day poets. But Faiz has not yet receded into the distant past. Till yesterday, he was very much among us, provoking a sense of rivalry and jealousy in the hearts of many a contemporary of his. So his bracketing with Ghalib and Iqbal should naturally be seen by his rivals as a direct threat to their elevated positions as imagined by them.
It’s been two decades since Faiz passed away. But his image of a living person still lingers on. Let us wait for the day when our memory of the poet as a living person is sufficiently dimmed and he recedes into the past. That will be the time when we will be in the right frame of mind for granting him the kind of veneration usually reserved for great masters. The Urdu Conference had, perhaps, acted a bit prematurely.
In the case of Iqbal, the respectable distance in point of time between him and our times has put us in a position that we are at perfect ease seeing the two poets bracketed together. For that same reason we can discuss Iqbal dispassionately. And so Dr Javaid Iqbal could afford to quote the Maulvis’ hostile pronouncements against Iqbal without any rancour. And we listened to them with amusement.
A TRICKY question: which are the poets that deserve to be counted as the ‘greats of Urdu poetry’? The recently held Urdu Conference at Islamabad made the query a bit more tricky by having its own choice of the three great Urdu poets of all time.
