Zehra Nigah, the
pre-eminent poet today, once made a very interesting observation in the course
of a conversation during one of her frequent Delhi visits. She pointed out for
me how, the majmua-e-kalam of even
some of the greatest poets have a lot of
padding or fluff; she used the delightfully colloquial but apt description: bharti ke sher, alluding to the
unevenness that is inevitable and therefore taken as a matter of course while
reading a diwan or majmua from cover to cover. It is a
rare poet, indeed, she said who exercises enormous self-restraint and is capable
of a rigorous self-edit to publish a collection of his or her poetry. I was
reminded of Zehra Apa’s words when I first glimpsed through Ijlal Majeed’s debut
collection of poetry, entitled Khud-garifta.
A slender volume, no more than 140-odd pages, there is nothing here that can
remotely be described as fluff. Certainly no bharti ke sher whatsoever mar the evenness of tone and the
immaculate, even stringent selection of what goes, and what stays back.
A writer of both the
ghazal and nazm since the 1970s, Ijlal sahib has chosen only ghazals for this
selection. Such nafasat, too, is rare
for the modern poet seldom makes so stern a distinction between the two; Ijlal
sahib does so on grounds of lehja and
mizaj. He says the two are completely
different in the ghazal and the nazm. In fact, his own lehja, his own idiom is far removed from the conventions of the
Urdu ghazal. His choice of words and images is starkly modern. As he himself
says:
Badsaleeqa, lu-ubali, baavla,
phakkad mizaj
Ab use jo chahe kah lein who magar
achcha laga
And elsewhere:
Kiss-kiss jatan se jisko kiya tha kabhi shikaar
Khwabon mein ab bhi chawkrhi bharta hai woh hiran
A retired Professor of
History at the Saifia College, Bhopal, Ijlal sahib has been known and well
regarded as a poet as his poetry and essays on poetry have been published in
both Urdu and Hindi. In Bhopal -- the city of enlightened Begums who nurtured
literature, among a circle of connoisseurs and rasiks who can be best described as a latter-day
‘Halqa-e-arbab-zauq’ – Ijlal sahib has enjoyed a reputation as a ba-zauq person and a poet for over five
decades. When I meet him for the launch of his book in Bhopal (launched,
incidentally, by another ‘son of Bhopal’, Javed Akhtar), I ask Ijlal sahib the
reason for this kam-goi. For a person
known as a poet to publish his first collection at the age of 74 is unusual in
ange when every nausikhiya poet is in
a hurry to publish. Ijlal sahib tells me that while he has always read and
reflected and ruminated on poetry, literature and the arts, for long periods of
time he ceased to think of himself as a poet: ‘Sirf tab likha jab kuch kehne ko hua.’ Giving a glimpse into the
oceon of loneliness that lies within every creative person, he writes:
Ek
ek kar ke uddh gaye panchchi
Khud-garift chattan tanha hai
Literature is
understood to mirror social realities. To what extent is Urdu poetry,
especially the ghazal, capable of reflecting this reality, with all its
violence, contrariness and extremes, I ask him? While, no doubt, the Urdu poet
has wrenched himself free from the limitations of the time-honoured ghazal
format and freed himself of the classical repertoire of shama-bulbul-parawana, can the ghazal reflect contemporary reality?
Can it say as much or as freely as the nazm can, I ask Ijlal sahib. While he
agrees that the nazm enjoys far greater freedom, the ghazal can nevertheless
allude to many things; it can, for instance, give ample express to the angst,
alienation and exclusion that is such an integral part of the modern-day
reality:
Dariya
chadha to paani nashebon mein bhar gaya
Abke bhi barishon meon apna hii ghar gaya
Another remarkable
quality about some of the ghazals included in Khud-garifta, is the compactness of the metre; while no poet myself,
I believe the chhoti behr ki ghazalein demand that much more brevity
and compression from a poet than one with a more languid metre. As for
instance:
Udti
chiriya ka saya hai
Main samjha patthar aaya hai
Ik girti deewar girakar
Apne bheetar kuchch dhaya hai
Khod ke hamne in teelon ko
Kya
khoya kya paya hai
Published by Yatra Books
in both Devnagri and Urdu, Khud-garifta brings
to the fore a fresh, ‘new’ voice; the fact that it is not new at all, and that
the poet has been active and well-known in the Hindi-Urdu circles of Bhopal
tells us how provincialism has become the bane of good literature in modern
times. One particular ghazal, written in 1979, has been known and loved by a
select few for decades; yet it had to wait for a mainstream publisher to be
placed before a larger audience:
Shiryanon
mein phire darinda
Qaid mushaqqat sahe darinda
Fursat mein kya kare darinda
Ghaaron mein but gadhe darinda
Patta-patta lahu bahaye
Jhaadi-jhaadi chhupe darinda
Purab-paschim wahi shikari
Yaan nikle waan chhupe darinda
