THE passing away of one of our leading critics, Waris Alvi, should be seen as an irreparable loss for Urdu literature. In him we have lost a fine man and a sharp critical mind. Living in Ahmadabad and associated with teaching English, he started as a writer with his first love, the Progressive Writers’ Movement. His exuberance for the movement can be judged by the way Sajjad Zaheer referred to him while talking at a Progressive Writers’ conference in Ahmadabad.

But this love of Alvi’s early years could not last long. As his later writings show, the ideological charm of the movement was short-lived. But it was not a silent goodbye to the ideology and to its exponents as a large part of his critical writings is devoted to the critical study of the Marxist theory of literature.

However, Alvi refused to take sides in the controversy between the progressives and the modernists. In this respect he in particular targeted the group of short story writers who asserted that rejecting realism, which stood as an article of faith with the progressives, had adopted a modernistic mode of expression. He rejected their claim by showing that what they called a symbolist mode of expression is in fact poetic prose which in days gone by was popular in Urdu fiction under the pseudonym adab-i-latif.

As for Alvi’s reaction against the Marxist theory of literature, it primarily emanates from his belief in the freedom of the writer. According to Alvi, every ideology, be it political, religious, or nationalist, stands as the enemy of the freedom of the writer. So any ideology should, according to him, be treated as a curse in relation to literature.

But this doesn’t mean, as he is seen thinking, that literature, when inspired by ideology, is always false. In one of his articles he has discussed this situation in detail. Discussing the situation of ideology in 20th-century Europe he says that two powerful ideologies emerged in a way that they inspired people around the whole world. One was fascism, while the other was communism.

But fascism in consequence of the Second World War lost its hold over the minds of people, while communism went on inspiring poets with full force. But poets, he adds, when inspired by a concept or a philosophy, then carry it to the level of a mystique. That is what happened with the concept of revolution when the poets grew inspired by it. It did not emerge in their rich imaginations as a philosophical or a social concept, but as a mystique.

In such a situation, says Alvi, we should not get involved in the controversy of whether a particular concept or ideology was right or wrong. The correct approach is to see how far that ideology has inspired the poets to write in a genuine way. And he says, “it was not only in Urdu but also in so many other languages of the world that the idea of revolution spurred the imagination of the writers and they started dreaming of a new world and a new man.”

This objective analysis of the role of ideology speaks of Alvi’s honesty as a critic. Possessed with a keen critical eye he has observed the negative role of ideology in relation to literature, but at the same time he is not unaware of its positive role. He had the courage to explain in plain words the negative role of ideology and at the same time recognise the way ideology, with its good points, fires the imagination of creative writers.

This kind of honesty and plain speaking has been the hallmark of his critical writings. Alvi was known for his scathing criticism of literary writings. While judging a writer, howsoever distinguished in his field, he never minded his words and pointed out plainly the flaws he had detected in his writing. And he wrote with ease and facility, never trying to write in a scholarly way.

Because of these qualities he stood distinguished among his contemporaries.