A hundred years ago, the poet Nasir Kazmi was born in Ambala on December 8, 1925; his contemporary, the fiction writer and essayist Intizar Hussain, was born a day earlier in Dibai near Meerut on December 7, 1925. They met at Lahore in the tumultuous years following the seismic Partition of the Subcontinent and went on to shape the trajectory of Urdu literature in the newly formed state of Pakistan.

In this brief essay I will touch upon the role these two great writers played in conjunction — Nasir Kazmi, through his innovative reshaping of the theme and tenor of the ghazal, and Intizar Hussain through his thought-provoking lucid prose narrative anchored in memories of the past. Both writers shared the trauma of migration, an uprooting so deep and meaningful that it mirrored the classic ‘hijrat’ or migration that is the leitmotif of Islamic journeys.

The city of Lahore afforded spaces for the newly arrived youthful writers to meet and share their dreams and experiences through outpourings in poetry and prose. Nasir Kazmi was searching for a path to negotiate the pain that spilled from his being and seeped into everything associated with the tearing apart of his personal world. He wanted to find language that could encapsulate his emotions; and he did. Nothing could be more poignant than his lament:

Gali gali meri yaad bichhi hai pyaaray rasta dekh ke chal
Mujh se itni vehshat hai tau meri hado’n se duur nikal

[Every lane, every pathway is laid with my memories, walk carefully dear friend/ If you are so afraid of me then stay far away from my haunts]

The Urdu ghazal after its efflorescence in the classical period of Mir Taqi Mir and Ghalib needed fresh blood to resuscitate its drooping image of love and pain. Indeed, the pain, the force of love was its core, but it needed new metaphors for expressing the pain, the open wound of being ripped from one’s roots, the familiar haunts of childhood, the memories of the trauma of migration.

Nasir Kazmi found, or rather, forged language to express both the personal and the collective pain of parting that resonated with whosoever read his poems. His “new ghazal” became the symbol of the restless present, the echo of devastation so deeply profound that it continues to resonate within our soul.

Intizar Hussain’s memoir Chiragho’n Ka Dhuaa’n captures the heady disquiet of the days and nights when the small band of displaced, youthful “new writers” paced the lanes and streets of Lahore, hung out at tea houses and paan shops, pouring torrents of poetry from their creative selves. Hussain and Kazmi became close friends. They were in sync ideologically; they believed in the power of memory to retrieve and recreate; memory as a pathway to go forward, to heal the present, immortalise the past.

The literary critic Mahmud ashmi called the new writers’ methodology “the poetic method.” The poetic method’s basis was a sensibility [sha‘oor] that would transcend consciousness to mine the depths of the unconscious, in which the writer’s sensibility becomes a mirror of a consciousness [idraak] that reflects the environs of both the present and the past.

In the 1950s, Urdu’s new writers adopted the poetic method so that they could connect with the worldwide literary trends — symbolism and surrealism permeated their work as did existentialism and a radical mindset. All this together can be broadly understood as modernism in Urdu.

At this time, Intizar Hussain published his pathbreaking essay, ‘Hamaaray ‘Ahd Ka Adab’ [Literature of Our Times] where he asked the burning question: what is the past? When one contemplates this, history, religion, ethnicity, mythology, old folktales, belief and fears all come into play. This convoluted, layered map makes the question very tangled, And, for the new writers, it assumes the shape of a knot. Where are our roots?

Hussain further elaborated: before Partition, we complained about the ills of our culture. But hijrat scattered the foundations of our culture. In different regions, the different cultural receptacles [saanchay] were broken, cities and qasbahs were lost to our sight. Writers such as Qurratulain Hyder worried about the disappearance of this cultural map, became sad and wrote about it in a romantic way. Even the imagery of the ghazal changed. Nasir Kazmi evoked the bastis and the qasbahs that now became memories of that civilisation’s repositories. Travel became a metaphor.

Jangal mein hui hai shaam ham koBasti se chalay thhe moonh andheray

[Evening overtook us in the jungle/ We left habitation at dawn]

The experience of hijrat brought a new kind of awareness — human beings are not merely what they appear to be. Human relationships are spread more deeply inside us than outside [zaahir aur baatin]. Social reality is not self-determining, it is born of a mingling of myriads of unconscious and conscious, lost and recovered realities. Eras [zamaanay] are not two but three; and the three are entwined in tangles that cannot be separated or put in boxes. We breathe in the present, but our roots are spread in the past.

Hussain’s friendship with Nasir Kazmi gave him hope that one could find a voice for the first literary generation of the new nation. Migrating presents the risks of not belonging; pledging allegiance to a new country poses the dilemma of what to do with loyalty to the old.

As someone who has experienced migration (though nowhere close to the intensity of Partition), I can relate to the risks of not belonging. However, living in a globalised world does provide new, unforeseen ways of connectivity. Urdu poets and writers are linked through ether; they share and read each other’s work through virtual ‘links’. Yet is there something one could identify as a ‘voice’ in Urdu’s generation of internet poets?

I see glimmers in the work of Urdu writers straddling more than one cultural sphere. We are moving more towards hybridity that is bound to reflect in our literature. If Urdu survives, and I hope it will, a hundred years from now, who will be our Nasir Kazmis and Intizar Hussains?

The columnist is Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia in the US. X: @FarooqiMehr

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, January 4th, 2026