NOON Meem Rashid is a difficult poet to understand. To begin with, his language is at once too rich and too adventurous. Like a stormy night that falls as if in rage, he comes pouring down with one unfamiliar expression after another in a blizzard of complex compounds, throwing upon his readers hail after hail of modern Persian verbiage — verbiage that appears in post-classical usages, usages that are daunting and hitherto unseen. Here, known words are re-cast into moulds unknown; intimate locutions are veiled in defeating complexities; and friendly utterances are severed from their received canonical meanings and rendered strangers. How does one weather all of this?

Then, there is this haunting subjectivity in Rashid’s poetry. He is a richly individuated poet. While the neat taraqqi pasand (progressive) critic’s dichotomy of darun bini (looking at the inner world of the self) and jahan bini (looking outside to the external world) is an obscuring separation which upon closer analysis breaks down (in fact it ought to be broken down with deliberate methodological action), Rashid, the poet, characteristically dives into his own being in some kind of a desperate subjective search all the time. Yes, all the time. And this results in an abstract poetic discourse, generating ambiguities and therefore at once a multiplicity of meanings. The profusion and simultaneity of meanings dislocates the audience for it demands a new sensibility altogether. And more, the many meanings engendered can well be mutually inconsistent or even contradictory.

Recall the titles of Rashid’s four collections: with the exception of one, Iran mein Ajnabi (Stranger in Iran), which was his second collection, all of them are mercilessly abstract — Mavara (The Beyond); La = Insan (x = Human Being); Guman ka Mumkin (Possibility Inhering in Supposition) — and seem to arise in some kind of a Platonic world of ideas, beyond history, transcending the realm of kaun-o-fasad, the everyday sublunar realm of coming-to-be and passing away. What concrete object can these titles possibly refer to?

Indeed, many leading Urdu literary figures of our times have tried to contend with this abstractness. For example, in an attempt to unravel Rashid’s complex symbolism, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi once carried out a very illuminating study of one of the most intricate of his poems ‘Ae Ghazal-e Shab!’ (O Gazelle of the Night!), throwing into sharp relief Rashid’s own insistence that his poems are not to be read as his biography or as embodiments of the actual temporal vicissitudes of his real life. And yet, Faruqi Sahib did read into the Ghazal-e Shab the poet’s subjective turmoil and an expression of the real experiences of his inner self. So for our redoubtable critic, here it is the human individual Rashid speaking — what we have here is not a voice of a poet. The gazelle, so the interpretation goes, is some kind of a mental or spiritual or imaginal being that the poet wishes to trap. Given this fascinating reading of the poem, then, the tempting graceful young animal can be seen as a metaphor for “some piece of poetry, or an achievement of the imagination that is anxious to emerge into existence out of non-existence.” Rashid is struggling to hunt down this elusive animal, falling into illusion after illusion by the thousand faces of mirage.

In the same vein, one can look at another non-linear, convoluted, “meta-physical” poem ‘Harf-e Na-Gufta’ (The Unuttered Word). “Beware of the havoc wrought by the unuttered word!” So begins the poem. The subject matter of this poem of Rashid is by no means novel; we find it all over the place in Urdu poetry — in Mir Taqi Mir, in Ghalib, even in Faiz. But the excruciating self-searching that Rashid’s verses embody is indeed unique. There is something left unuttered, stuck in the recesses of the poet’s inner being, and now plays havoc. Recall Ghalib saying, “Ah, the drop of tear left unshed turned into a storm …” Again, there is an inner turmoil, an anxiety; there exists something in the poet’s world of imagination that longs to move from potentiality to actuality.

But then, it is certainly possible to come up with other interpretations of these poems. And these alternative interpretations can be equally valid. For example, one can read into these poems a search for a real beloved, an actual human being, or even a search for some career goal. The unuttered word may well be the declaration of love before a beautiful woman, a declaration the individual Rashid is unable to make. Of course, to me Faruqi Sahib’s reading is way more plausible; it has what one would call qarina. But that is not the point. The point is the effulgence of a rich plurality of meanings issuing forth from Rashid’s poems — equally defensible meanings that require rending his obscurities with non-classical lancets. Yes, this can be said of all poetry, but in the case of Rashid complexities multiply.

Yet another challenge Rashid poses to his readers is his non-standard rhythmic structures and his espousal of what was a pioneering poetic form of Urdu free verse (azad nazm). Nobody who is in touch with the aesthetics of Urdu can deny the sheer beauty of Rashid’s language and its copious flow. He presents us with a high horizon studded with countless moving stars; they shine bright as they come before us and go into the distance. But then, how does one grasp his maze of sounds? I have said on many occasions that Rashid is a sound-maker (saut-gar) like no one else in the whole history of Urdu poetry. Can we scan his verse metrically? Is it possible to give a rational account of his complex musicality? The answer is in the affirmative — but then, we’ll have to ponder over his sound patterns, for they do not lend themselves at all to simple and straightforward scansions.

The poem, ‘Mere Bhi Hain Kuch Khvab’ (I Too Have Some Dreams), for instance, has a dominating meter, like a dominating note in a symphony, and around this the poem is crafted most intricately and skillfully. This metrical motif of Rashid is a catalectic (muzahaf) form of a classical meter called hazaj. But the meter has been truncated or augmented or shaken or violated all over. But more, the poem has verses that are blank, but mostly it rides on rhyme (qafiya) and sometimes also contains fixed end-rhymes (radif), and yet it is rhythmically non-classical. All this analysis is not easy to carry out. It ought to be acknowledged here that, again, Shamsur Rahman Faruqi remains the most erudite guide for a study of Rashid’s prosody and sounds. Incidentally, the verse “I too have some dreams” appears in the title of a new book on Rashid written by Sean Pue to which I shall turn shortly.

Another difficulty posed by the recalcitrant poetry of Rashid is that its begetter has left no defined legacy for one to draw upon and appeal to. Certainly, the impact of Rashid on contemporary Urdu verse is deep — but this impact is diffused rather than convergent; it is all over the place rather than manifesting itself pointedly in a specific individual or in particular individuals. We cannot point to a Rashid school or a Rashidian genre. The individual poet who appears closest to him is Saqi Faruqi; but again, Saqi cannot be classified as being thoroughly Rashidian, for despite his deference and passion for the master he has some basic disagreements with the mentor and has his own distinct voice. So as I said at the very outset, Rashid is a difficult poet to understand. But then, even more difficult is to explain Rashid to the reading public. His poetry has exercised some three generations of scholars and critics. Hasan Askari, Salim Ahmad, Aftab Ahmad, Wazir Agha, Mumtaz Husain, Miraji and Faiz are among the many personages who have taken him on. And let’s not forget that Jamil Jalibi edited a full volume on Rashid that he published in 1986. This volume has an impressionistic article written by Saqi Faruqi, but more valuable is the Rashid-Saqi correspondence included in the volume; and what constitutes a literary archival treasure is the body of letters that the poet wrote to Jalibi; these letters too are to be found in this volume.

I have already acknowledged the newer and most learned studies of Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, and to these recent critical works ought to be added the writings of Fateh Muhammad Malik, Sa‘adat Saeed and other contemporary figures. And now we have a beautifully produced volume on Rashid by Dr A. Sean Pue of Michigan State University. With his thorough training and methodological sophistication, this younger scholar has given us a glowing gift from across the Ocean of Darkness. Well organised, lucidly written, this work was published just recently by the prestigious University of California Press and constitutes a major contribution to Rashid studies.

Pue has undertaken the arduous task of explaining Rashid to a global audience. Indeed, one chief good of this book is that it positions the poet within the drift of contemporary discourses on world literature, whereby it becomes meaningful to readers not only of Urdu poetry but also across linguistic and literary boundaries to those engaged in, for example, English literature. The verse “I too have some dreams” appearing gracefully in the margin of the cover, the rest of the title declares the book’s main thrust: N.M. Rashed and Modernism in Urdu Poetry.

I have always had reservations about employing the category of “modernism” to Urdu literature without qualifications, as many people do. Now it so happens that Pue raises this crucial question, confronting it head-on, and writing a historical and conceptual disquisition that promises to remedy much of the thoughtlessness that one typically finds in the transplant of the term into the world of Urdu.

There are many original observations too in Pue’s study, observations that have far-reaching methodological implications. For example, he places Urdu poetry in the company of Hindi and Bengali poetry, and argues that modernism or experimentalism emerged in all three of these in the same period of time, with Bengali having some temporal priority. Censuring literary histories of Urdu for obscuring the importance of romanticism as the ground for the rise of modernism, he makes the pronouncement that this is an insight blocked by the standard single-language approach. For me, Pue has in the same vein brought into much sharper focus the distinction between progressivism (taraqqi pasandi) and modernism (jadidiyyat) in Urdu poetry.

Pue has undertaken a formidable task. Nearly half of his book consists of transliterations and translations of Rashid’s poems. The historic long poem ‘Hasan Kuzagar’ (Hasan the Potter), which was published in four strings in two different collections, is fully translated here. If Sean had done nothing else, he would have deserved my commendations.