New book on Josh opens new fronts

By Mushir Anwar

Dr Mohammad Ali Siddiqui’s book, Josh Malihabadi— Aik Muta’ala, has very gently removed the thickening sheet of disregard that since the poet’s death has been used to curtain off his stupendous poetry and undermine his singular personality. It is however evident that induced amnesia cannot erode the value of his vigorous verse nor nit-picking truncate his stature. The novelty and variety of themes that he explores, the expanse of his intellect, the all-embracing drift of his creative mind, the cutting bite of his wit and the iconoclastic audacity of his thought would ever daunt his detractors. As a pillar not only of Urdu poetry but also of Urdu prose his position is unshakeable. Whom else in our era would you name as the fiery voice of protest, if not him, tempered and cultured in poetic aesthetics as it is and possessing a creative stature that is all his own, asks Dr Hilal Naqvi commending Dr Siddiqui among progressive critics for opening new approaches to the appreciation of Josh through his insightful work.

Though he remained with the progressive movement, his disregard for the western form-driven ideas like structuralism, deconstruction, prose poetry etc that won a ready following among the trendy moderns, imposed on him an isolation from general attention that society’s growing religiosity in later years turned into a kind of intellectual ostracisation. As a result though several collections of stray essays have appeared as well as some personal studies, no systematic study of his poetic work has been done. Dr Siddiqui’s book is an effort in that direction. And as is his predilection for relating creative work to influences of time and place that he calls ‘specifity’, he has attempted to study Josh’s poetic work from Ruh-i-Adab to Mehrab-o-Mizraab in that light.

Josh’s intellectual and poetic tradition seeks closer attention to the immediate natural surrounding than reliance on far fetched similes and exotic places; it replaces sentiment with passion and imbues poetic thought with hope instead of inordinate despair. Then his uncompromising faith in reason and conception of the Supreme Being as a universal force as opposed to love and a personal god made him a virtual rebel of the Urdu poetic tradition. He puts beliefs under rational examination and rejects their solace in favour of turbulence and ardor. He has upturned poetry’s placid tavern into a battlefield, says Dr Siddiqui.

From his school days Josh was influenced by Tagore’s romantic tradition which the latter had derived from the romanticism of English poets — Wordsworth’s naturalism and Byron’s rebellious passion — leading to his revolt against Urdu poetic tradition. The publication of Rooh-i-Adab in 1920 established him as the first representative poet of free thought. This was the time when between the banks of Iqbal’s love-suffused concept of Khudi and Josh’s reason-drenched free thinking coursed the national torrent of poetic thought. Dr Siddiqui thinks it is absolutely necessary to study the evolution of Josh’s verse in the context of the formative influences of that period. His concepts of the Divine, pantheism, the supremacy of reason and respect for man all come from the influence of Romantic thought and its close bonding with Nature. Since this core of his poetry is beyond pettifogging critics, all they are left with are the so-called redundancies that they make so much of, conveniently skirting the fact it is so much a part of his rich classical heritage (that can be enjoyed in its own right if one were not so mulish) and, in their zeal, quite forgetting that poets of his stature are not remembered for catalogues of crafted faults but on account of the impact their work makes on the future of art and thought.

Dr Siddiqui goes over the various phases of the poet’s work, from Rooh-i-Adab to Samoom-o-Saba, Tulu-i- Fikr to Najum-o-Jawahar to his last Mehrab-o-Mizrab published after his death. From 1920 when his first collection was published to 1982 when he died his work is divided into five periods that register noticeable changes in his work, some in response to historical and political developments of the time. In the first period, (1921-32) for instance, alongside Tagore’s influence runs the contrary empathy with the down-trodden masses of the world, an issue that came to prominence in the wake of Soviet Union’s emergence. In the pre- Partition decade Dr Siddiqui notices the uncertainties of impending change taking their toll on the poet as he harks back to memories of his ebullient youth, though still in possession of his characteristic vigour that shows no sign of deceleration. This survey of his work, book by book, often in its historical perspective, traces the course of his thought that Dr Siddiqui subjects to candid and unsparing examination which is this study’s outstanding feature. Josh’s own terms and conditions that he sets for critics are squarely rejected.

Josh’s elegiac verse is discussed in a separate section partly to answer some serious allegations against the poet that conservative religious opinion has habitually levelled against him and in part to further understand the poet’s approach to religion. Dr Siddiqui also debunks Shahid Ahmad Dehalvi’s insinuation that the elegies were a seasonable expedience.

Introductions to Khurshid Ali Khan’s Hamaray Josh Sahib, Raghib Moradabadi’s Khutoot-i-Josh, a brief essay on Ghalib, Josh and Faiz as proponents of modernity and change and another on Josh as a target of his assailants — that these days one may more aptly call ‘Josh in the line of fire’ — in which Ibn-i-Arabi’s influence on the poet’s pantheistic understanding of the Divine is also discussed at length, form a separate section of the study. The first two of these have great historical value as both Khurshid Ali Khan and Raghib Moradabadi have been Josh’s close friends. Shahid Ahmad Dehalvi’s gossipy article on the poet and Josh’s polite rebuff provide a lively end to this very absorbing book.

Concluding Dr Siddiqui suggests one way to study Josh could be to see how an enlightened poet looks at our situation and to find under which tenet of intellectual poverty our society so narrows its mental horizon that it appears we have no capacity left for serious deliberation. Every society keeps a space for retreat in case its advance faces reversal, but our society has made no advance to make a retreat from. This moribund state is Josh’s dilemma that his poetry as no other poet’s laments over.