A session held on Urdu Nazm Ki Riwayat in the LLF was more on ghazal form of poetry than on poem as Kishwar Nahid among the three speakers was left high and dry to defend poem.

The moderator, Syed Nomanul Haq, said Urdu poem developed under the influence of ghazal and it’s an extension of ghazal, adding that only versification could not be called a poem.

Zehra Nigah said Urdu literature could not deny the influence of ghazal as it was the fountainhead of all kinds of poetry in the language. “Iqbal’s poems looked like divine intuition but he used the technique of ghazal so much that ghazal itself must have been surprised,” she said, adding no genre of poetry was better than ghazal. She said writing a poem was very difficult at the start and she began writing it with a delay.

“A whole history could be written in a few words in a ghazal. Both forms of poetry are important but ghazal is the real yardstick,” she said. She said once she asked Faiz Ahmad Faiz why he did not write prose poem, he said, “Hum sey aati nahi” while puffing at his cigarette.

When it was too much of harping on the ghazal tune, Kishwar quipped, “The topic of the session is Nazm Ki Riawayat while Noman is obsessed with ghazal”. She added that there were more poems in Urdu poetry than ghazals. Nomanul Haq replied that he was obsessed with poetry (not any form). Nomanul Haq then asked Kishwar a question about the relevance of poem with the changing times to which she replied that she was not there to have a contest with him but because the forum was for poems that’s why poems should be discussed.

“We will talk on ghazal some other time and there I will recite my ghazals too,” she added.

At this, Zehra Nigah said it was hard to win against Kishwar in debate.

At the start of the session, Ms Nigah said the new poem in Urdu started with Altaf Hussain Hali, adding that prose poem was not a recent phenomenon in Urdu as Sajjad Zaheer had written that kind of poem about 70 years back. She said ghazal had its precise and concise which was its beauty as well as shortcoming while poem had more a vast canvas. “However, it still needs a form and proper mastery over technique. Faiz’s poems contain whole lines which look like those of a ghazal.”

Kishwar Nahid said she had started writing poems on insistence of poet Mukhtar Siddiqi, saying her ghazals contained a continuation like poems. “Nazm is a difficult form of poetry as it has a unity from the first line till the last. People don’t understand prose poems and attempt to write it thinking it’s easy”.

Giving the background of her famous poem “Gunahgar Aurtain”, she said it was written in the background of torture that she and other woman had to bear at the hands of police in 1983 when they were protesting against dictatorship of Gen Zia. “Asma Jahangir and Aitzaz Ahsan locked me in a room and asked me to write a poem. That’s how Gunahgar Aurtain was written.” She recited her poem in the end.

Published in Dawn, February 21st, 2016