AS mentioned by Mubeen Mirza in his intro to this book, which he has compiled, Sa’adat Hasan Manto wrote that ordinary and normal persons living normal lives may be useful for the society and its system to run smoothly, but they are useless for my [Manto’s] stories.
“Manto had written these words to defend the uncommon and deviating characters found in his stories, but the same stands true when it comes to the art of pen-sketch writing,” says Mirza. He thinks that uncommon and vivacious people who do not accept the norms of society make the best raw material for short stories as well as pen-sketches.
As for the history of pen-sketches, it is an oft-repeated mantra that Nazeer Ahmed’s pen-sketch written by Mirza Farhatullah Baig is the first pen-sketch ever written in Urdu. But some critics believe that the earliest traces of Urdu ‘khaka nigari’ — the term used in Urdu to refer to pen-sketch writing — had had its genesis much earlier in the shape of the accounts of poets narrated in ‘tazkiras’. ‘Tazkira’ is a semi-biographical and semi-critical genre that briefly describes the poets’ lives, their poetic style and reproduces samples of their poetry. These ‘tazkiras’ also served as the earliest critical evaluation of Urdu poets and poetry, albeit insufficient and somewhat lacking in authenticity. Muhammad Husain Azad’s evergreen book Aab-i-Hayat is a good case in point: Azad has described personality traits and lives of some poets in a manner that brings these accounts closer to pen-sketches.
Khaleeq Anjum wrote that a sketch-like account by Ghalib in his Urdu letters describing a maidservant named Bi Vafadar is pretty close to the genre that later on developed as pen-sketch. But one feels that it can only be referred to as the rudimentary prototype of the genre that was to emerge some 50 years later. Yet another citation for the earliest Urdu pen-sketch came from Abul Khair Kashfi who, in preface to his book Ye Log Bhi Ghazab Thei (Ferozesons, 1989), pointed out that the pen-sketch titled ‘Khaafi Khan’ was Urdu’s first ever sample of the genre. It was a sketch of Hasrat Mohani written by Sajjad Hyder Yildirim and published in December 1908 issue of Zamana, Kanpur.
Aside from the debate as to which one is Urdu’s first ever pen-sketch, it is a fact that the genre proliferated in an unprecedented manner ever since the publication and tremendous popularity of Nazeer Ahmed’s sketch by Farhatullah Baig. The sketch, titled ‘Nazeer Ahmed Ki Kahani Kuchh Un Ki Kuchh Meri Zabani’, not only pioneered the genre in a formal way but it also defined the style and mood of the genre that has become so popular that thousands of pen-sketches have been penned in Urdu ever since its smashing success.
Rashid Ashraf at the end of his two-volume work, named Urdu Ke Nadir-o-Kamyaab Khake, has appended a list of some 500 books that are collections of pen-sketches. Shahid Hinai in his book Urdu Khaka Nigari: Fan, Tareekh, Tajzia has also given a detailed list of collections of pen-sketches. It simply puts the number of pen-sketches written in Urdu in thousands. But selecting the best pen-sketches out of these thousands must have been a cumbersome job for Mubeen Mirza who has compiled Urdu’s best pen-sketches in three volumes.
First published in 2001 and running into an unauthorised edition from India in 2004, the book Urdu Ke Behtreen Shakhsi Khake has now been reprinted by National Book Foundation.
The first volume includes pen-sketches from the earliest times to pre-Independence era and pen-sketches in this portion are written by stalwarts such as Muhammad Husain Azad, Mirza Farhatullah Baig, Moulvi Abdul Haq, Rasheed Ahmed Siddiqi, Josh Maleehabadi, Chiragh Hasan Hasrat, Zameer Jafri, Sa’adat Hasan Manto, Ismat Chughtai, Upender Nath Ashk and some others.
The second volume has the pen-sketches by some luminaries such as Meerza Adeeb, Mumtaz Mufti, Shaukat Thanvi, Shahid Ahmed Dehlvi, Qurratul Ain Hyder, Intizar Husain, Fikr Taunsvi, Aslam Farrukhi, Dawood Rahbar and some other prominent writers.
The third volume has sketches by many of our contemporaries and veterans, which include Hameeda Akhter Husain Raipuri, Jameeluddin Aali, Khaleeq Anjum, Mushfiq Khwaja, Saqi Farooqi, Asad Muhammad Khan, Mujtaba Husain, Mazher Mahmood Sherani and some others.
Some of the best Urdu sketches are indeed part of this book and it must have taken a back-breaking labour to compile such a voluminous work, which all in all has some 1,200 pages. The compiler Mubeen Mirza is a critic, short-story writer and editor of literary magazine Mukalma. He must have gone through heaps of books to select and compile the best Urdu pen-sketches written during the last 100 years or so.
Readers who want to enjoy some special time that would make them cry and laugh at the same time must grab these three volumes. Also, the scholars, students and researchers would find some rare gems of information about some giants of Urdu literature in these pen-sketches. They show us that the luminaries, the towering figures of our history and literature were after all human beings and they had some foibles as all of us have.
Published in Dawn, November 17th, 2020
