I have said this before and I repeat: Noon Meem Rashid is not an easy poet to capture in the reader’s cognitive grasp. He is much too abstract in his substance and merciless in his verbiage, pounding us like stormy winds in a hailstorm and sweeping us away into an intellectual and emotional scatter.

Then, given Rashid’s expertise both in classical and contemporary Iranian linguistic milieu, the violent gushes of his Persophile language are generally overwhelming and can even be quite fearsome with their unfamiliar Persian-bitten compounds.

But now, half-a-century after his death in 1975, Rashid beckons us from the banks of the Chenab river where he was born. He beckons us lest we forget him completely in the dust of our emotional scatter.

Here is a poet who marks a milestone in the annals of Urdu poetry, but who never gained the general acceptance, let alone popularity, of his contemporaries such as Faiz Ahmad Faiz or Ahmad Faraz. One recalls that he has been called “a poet of poets”, not a poet for the ordinary reading public.

And yet, we must recognise that Rashid is unique, and he is unique in multiple senses: one is that, despite his monumental greatness as a poet, he left no prodigy, no successor, nor a poetic school, so he is unique, literally — standing all alone.

In my younger days in London, I used to hear about him from Saqi Farooqi, often bitterly jousting with my senior BBC colleagues like the broadcaster Yunus Wasti, when Wasti sahib objected to the poet’s non-standard use of language. Then, it was the actress, poet and broadcaster Sahab Qazilbash who talked about Rashid. And that’s all; there was nobody else around me holding Rashid in active consciousness.

Perhaps it is quite appropriate that Rashid be left all alone — for he is uncompromisingly subjective, locked in what seems to be the solitary cell of his inner world. Yes, he does connect himself to the vast cosmos and also to human history and mythology, but he carries this out only by means of an inner self excursion. And this is another uniqueness of Rashid, his subjectivity, haunting at times.

We remember that, in a powerful poetic expression, he once talked about three major poets — Mir Taqi Mir, Ghalib, and Miraji — and said:

Mir ho, Mirza ho, Miraji ho
Sab apni zaat ke ghirbal mein chhan jatay hain
[Whether it is Mir, or Ghalib, or Miraji
They all come filtered through the sieve of their inner self]

Here the particular verse of Ghalib that he quotes is a graphic one that happens to invoke the spectacle of a chamber of mirrors, in which the heart is broken up (shikast-i-dil) in the luxuriance of images —

Mudda‘a mahv-i-tamaasha-i-shikast-i-dil hai
A’ina khaanay mein koi liye jaata hai mujhe
[The desire I had is lost in the spectacle of the shattering of the heart
Someone takes me into the chamber of mirrors]

Then Rashid himself cries: “We kept standing on the shattered pieces of mirrors.” Is he not talking about the shattering of his own inner self, producing an infinity of reflections?

Rashid is unique on other counts too. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that he stands as a milestone in the entire history of Urdu poetry. We observe that, in the post-Iqbal era, there is nobody quite like Rashid in terms of scope of language, fecundity, novel structures, subject range and, above all, rhythm.

True, there did exist Urdu poets around Rashid who subverted old poetic forms and violated standard requirements of meter, monoryhme and genres; Tassaduq Husain Khalid is a glowing example here. But Rashid marks that point in literary history where modernist Urdu poetry begins in full-blooded earnest, and when Urdu poetry rises from the performative world of the musha’ira to the literate world of reading.

Note that Rashid’s poetry, or that of Miraji, or even, to a great extent, the poetry of Faiz, is not musha’ira poetry — it is for reading, and reading over and over again. At the same time, Rashid embodies most significant ironies. For example, despite his intense modernism, he is concerned with history, salvaging that which has been extinguished by the ravages of time.

In fact, his concern with the past seems to exist in the essence of his poetic being, for the characters and entities he invokes are often deeply rooted in the old scriptural tradition and even in ancient mythologies. Nimrod, Abu Lahab, Solomon, Saba (Biblical Sheba, a kingdom also mentioned in the Qur’an, chapter 27: Naml, and in chapter 34: Saba), and Israfeel — all of these figure in his oeuvre.

Then, there are lines in Rashid’s poems reminiscent of complete Qur’anic verses. We also find in his verses mediaeval historical entities, such as Somnath, the temple destroyed by Mahmud Ghaznavi.

So Rashid is, at once, very contemporary and very ancient. In fact, this dialectic of old and new manifests itself forcefully in his unparalleled rhythms and complex play of sounds. His lines, and there are very many of them, are always constructed in some established classical meter.

For example, Rashid’s relatively well-known poem, ‘I Too Have Some Dreams’, hovers most creatively around a known meter called hazaj. I once called him a ‘saut-gar’ [soundsmith] and a highly learned study of his mind-boggling sound creation and his rhythms is carried out by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi in his essay, ‘Rashid: The Sound-Meaning Dialectic.’

Rashid beckons us from the banks of the river Chenab.

The columnist is currently teaching at the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, December 21st, 2025