Literary Notes: Urdu’s five best couplets of Haqqee’s choice
SOME 50 years ago, a publisher in India began publishing selections from Urdu poetry. Each selection consisted of 100 best couplets of an individual poet. Many such selections were published and it was planned to select 100 best couplets out of those selections. Thus began a trend to select 100 best Urdu couplets of one’s own choice.
Such was the atmosphere in those days that in India and Pakistan many intellectuals began compiling selections of 100 best Urdu couplets. Mumtaz Hasan — a civil servant, writer and intellectual — began compiling his own list of the 100 best couplets from memory alone and it overshot the limit of 100, wrote Shanul Haq Haqqee in one of his articles. Then Majeed Malik, a writer and friend of Haqqee, asked him to prepare a list of his five favourite couplets of Urdu and explain the reasons for his preference. Haqqee wrote an article and with five couplets of his choice he gave the reasons as well as some explanation of the thought expressed in the couplet. Later the article was included in his book Nukta-i-raaz (Karachi, 1972).
Here are those five couplets of Haqqee’s choice and a bit of what he said about them. But, as Haqqee put it, such selections are based on personal preferences and one cannot say for sure what has made them favourite. They, perhaps, remind one of the personal experiences or reflect one’s own feelings, which may not be necessarily shared by others. Therefore, the selection of the ‘best’ is almost always debatable. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, as the maxim goes. But the purpose of this piece is to introduce readers to some of the outstanding Urdu couplets, if not the best. The couplets have been roughly translated by this writer and are not meant to be beautiful but just faithful, though they are not verbatim either.