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FOCAL POINT: The rejected classics
With his crowd-pulling charisma intact, Zia Mohyeddin came and conquered the expectant crowd that packed the Aga Khan University Auditorium with a single glance. A variegated group of Karachiites, including students, professional types, senior citizens and such basked in his charm and surrendered to the sound of his voice, whether his words made sense to them or not. They were in the presence of a celebrity and that was all that mattered.
A large cross-section of Karachiites attended the presentation of AKU’s Special Lecture Series that evening, initiated two years ago, under which eminent personalities are invited to shed light on interesting and informative topics. Not just students but the public also gets to enjoy this series and benefits from it.
As for his talk on My Unwanted Classics, it was “cold and coiled”, to quote his own description of a writer, Walter Pater, whom he also branded as dull and dreary. Zia began by striking a note that seemed as convoluted as a corkscrew. His treatise on words, with quotes from T.S. Eliot interspersed with lines from Urdu verse, baffled many a listener, especially when his homage to Eliot’s verse drama (or whatever it was), Burnt Norton (or that’s what it sounded like), appeared to be heading towards total mystification.
Zia Mohyeddin was on the warpath as obsessively as Bush, but with greater finesse. His rapier sharp wit mowed down Lamb, Bulwer Lytton, even poor dear Charlotte Bronte, over whose Jane Eyre and her heart-rending experiences, distressed female readers even today cry buckets
But being the consummate performer that he is, he quickly changed track and turned to his subject: Unwanted Classics. How thrilled his listeners were to learn that this great maestro, who was as deeply immersed in all things English as he was in his own culture, found a great many western classics unreadable. He used the same common word to describe Thomas Mann, Melville, Hawthorne, Dryden and a host of others down the ages: “boring”. When we (you and I), found these massive tomes boring, totally unreadable in fact, we had never dared to say so for fear of being labelled ignorant bumpkins.
Zia tried to lighten his heavy duty talk with quotations from that perennially refreshing wit: Oscar Wilde. “Washing one’s clean linen in public”, and “it is the scabbard that wears out the sword”, sent the audience into peals of laughter. As Zia, in his inimitable style, continued the discourse on writers who were the “epitomy of tedium”, one wondered why he had chosen to inflict them on us. But the grey-suited thespian did it with so much humour and style, and flaunted his scholarship with such enormous elegance, that far from complaining, we felt honoured.
He next proceeded to take on the Augustan Age, and promptly knocked a lot of big names into the dust: Defoe, Swift, Addison and Steele, even the moralistic Pope, all were felled by Zia’s grand gesture of dismissal. Turning to the worthy Carlyle, admirable only from a distance, Zia offered a joke about him — again quoting some big name author. “It was very good of God to allow Mr and Mrs Carlyle to marry each other”, he said. “Otherwise, instead of just two, there would have been a quartet of bored and boring people.”
The Romantic Poets, so dear to every schoolgirl’s heart, also came in for a drubbing. Reciting extensively and exquisitely from Shelley, who, along with the other great Romantics, specialized in rhapsodizing about birds — but not bees, in fact never bees — Zia refrained from ridiculing Keats. Thank heaven for that, or several traumatized young ladies in the hall would have hurled themselves at him in an excess of frustration and outrage. Byron wasn’t as lucky and his Cantos were punctured by several cruel darts, unerringly aimed at the arrogant Lord by Zia. As expected, a lady listening to the actor couldn’t take it, and later, during question time gently reproved the iconoclast for mocking Byron.
In passing Zia handed out interesting gems to his rapt listeners. “Eliot believed that philosophy must have a place in poetry, unlike the French, who didn’t want philosophy in poetry.” Bathed in the maestro’s warm golden voice and uniquely captivating recitation, the audience was all ears. Even the inevitable mobile phones seemed to be under the spell of that voice and did not punctuate the evening with their ringing. Zia continued to quote Urdu shair o shairy to reinforce whichever point he was making in English, adding an extra dimension to his erudition.
The works of Lord Macaulay, famous for codifying the law for Britain’s colony of India and also for being a prose stylist, soon joined the list of Zia’s unwanted classics. Zia’s slaughter of the classics was merciless. Nor did he spare the Greek and Roman greats. Ovid and Cicero were included among writers who dulled the minds of generations of schoolboys. ZM was on the warpath as obsessively as Bush, but with greater finesse. His rapier sharp wit mowed down Lamb, Bulwer Lytton, even poor dear Charlotte Bronte, over whose Jane Eyre and her heart-rending experiences, distressed female readers even today cry buckets.
Burdened with piles of these worthy, if heavy and bulky tomes, poor Zia sought without success to get rid of them. Packed in a tea chest, they were palmed off on the landlord when the actor moved from Highgate to Acton, but like a bad penny they were returned to him.
With one last quote, “a poet should give us pleasure, not the truth,” and a final flourish, “I still have my unwanted classics,” the seasoned actor took his bow.
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