In India’s brahminised concept of secularism it was
inevitable that a little noticed five rupee postal
stamp issued on March 28 to celebrate the anti-imperialist,
anti-capitalist Urdu poet Asrar ul Haq Majaaz showed his handsome visage
superimposed on the picture of a mosque.
The fact is that Majaaz, a renowned romantic and agnostic,
had as little to do with a mosque as his contemporaries like Faiz and Josh
or Ghalib and Mir who preceded them by well over a century. But the
dominant semi-official formula – Urdu equals Muslims equals mosques – is
not unique to India alone.
Early protagonists of Pakistan fell into the trap until
Bangladesh happened and, at great cost, showed up their mistake. However,
even if for the wrong reason, Urdu has at least been saved in Pakistan
from the slow extinction it has been subjected to in India. Last week,
thanks to the rare effort of its scholarly vice-chancellor, the Jamia
Millia Islamia in Delhi unveiled a conference hall named after Mir Taqi
Mir.
The complex has a room dedicated to the memory of the
matchless marsiya writer Mir Anis. What becomes of these facilities
eventually is for the future to tell. The last time I heard of it, the
spot in Lucknow where Mir’s grave would be stands dissected by a railway
track.
It would be well-nigh impossible for us to locate Ghalib’s
grave in Delhi but for the efforts of filmmaker Sohrab Modi who built a
simple marble tomb over the place near the Hazrat Nizamuddin shrine,
rescuing it from the squatters and stray animals that defiled it. To mark
his centenary some years ago, Ghalib’s famous haveli in Gali Qasim
Jaan of Old Delhi was cleared of the coal depot it had become. Though a
public telephone stall still operates from within its precincts, at least
his countless lovers can make their pilgrimage to the fabled narrow lanes
and an aesthetically restored haveli.
But perhaps I am complaining too much. After all, the
modest philatelic event for Majaaz was an uncommon official gesture in the
service of Urdu literature, a language shunned, I suspect, because it
embarrasses freed India’s comprador administrators. After all, Urdu
encompassed a culture of resistance to man’s enslavement by man, intense
love and passion, eclectic mysticism, full-blooded hedonism, unrelenting
anti-imperialism and a defiant conversation with god and the mullahs when
necessary – mullahs who were more often than not depicted as dishonest
agents of religious lottery.
The new Indian state connived with the mullahs to throttle
Urdu and to turn it into a language of their prescriptive religious
seminaries. That’s how the unstoppable Sahir Ludhianvi was compelled to
observe the state of affairs bluntly amid the official Ghalib
celebrations: Ghalib jisey kehtey hain, Urdu hi ka shayer tha Urdu pe
sitam dha ke Ghalib pe karam kyun hai? (Ghalib was an Urdu poet, his
muse you’ve all but killed, Celebrate him but destroy his language? Is
that what he willed?)
So 52 years after Majaaz was picked up on a freezing
winter morning from a country liquor shop in Lucknow, this full-blooded
agnostic was declared a religious Muslim in the Indian capital by sheer
innuendo. He possibly lived for a few hours more after being rescued by a
passer-by but the end came soon enough (either of pneumonia or was it
cirrhosis) at Lucknow’s Balrampur Hospital. The tragic news spread to the
far corners in an instant thanks to the sway that the Progressive Writers’
Association held over much of India those days. Majaaz was the group’s
most beloved and most tragedy-prone member.
Showing Majaaz with a mosque is a metaphor not unique to
him. The Congress leaders had successfully belittled Mohammad Ali Jinnah
when they overlooked his impeccable liberal credentials and painted the
giant national leader as a smaller representative of Indian Muslims.
The dangerous ploy boomeranged hard when Jinnah did become
a leader of Indian Muslims. Would the Government of India bring out a
stamp on its best known icon of liberal ideals, Jawaharlal Nehru, with a
Hindu shrine in the background even if he may have visited the most
splendorous temples in southern India? I am pretty certain they dare not.
They know that images carry far more loaded meanings than words can ever
convey.
Aligarh University, where Majaaz studied, is not about
mosques alone, as the stamp tries to suggest. It has the beautiful
British-built Strachey Hall and countless other secular symbols. The
university reminds me more of great historians like Irfan Habib,
progressive writers like Jazbi and Sardar Jafri and, of course, Majaaz and
more recently, Shahryaar, an excellent Urdu poet doomed to be known as the
fellow who wrote lyrics for a movie about a famous courtesan.
Let me quote a poem by Majaaz to illustrate why the mosque
was the wrong symbol for him. He wrote Khwaab-i-Sahar in 1939, the
title of hope suggesting that morning dreams often come true. The poem is
mostly about man’s exploitation by vendors of religion. A few relevant
lines go thus:
Masjidon main maulvi khutbe sunate hi rahe,
Mandiron mein barhaman ashlok gatey hi rahey
Ik na ik dar par jabeen-i-shouq ghisti hi rahi
Aadamiyat zulm ki chakki mein pisti hi rahi
Rahbari jaari rahi, paighambari jaari rahi
Deen ke parde mein jang-i-zargari jaari rahi.
(The mullah and the pandit and their ceaseless sermon
Man bowed before each one of them but did he learn
The great messiahs came claiming divinity
Their religions, mostly ruses for plunder turn by turn.)
Its peculiar association with South Asia’s Muslims has
accompanied the virtual dismemberment of Urdu in India. This shows
insensitivities on two counts. First, it is unfair to South Asian Muslims
of other hues such as Tamil, Malayali, Telugu, Konkani, Gujarati, Bengali,
Baloch, Punjabi and Pashtun among others. Secondly, the approach insults
the invaluable contribution of Hindu and Sikh writers of Urdu such as
Brijnarayan Chakbast, Premchand, Firaq Gorakhpuri, Upendranath Ashk,
Rajinder Singh Bedi, Krishan Chander, Malik Ram and Ram Lal. There were
notable Anglo-Indian Urdu poets too.
Releasing the stamp, Indian Vice-President Hamid Ansari
described Majaaz as a revolutionary poet whose writings impacted an entire
generation: "His poems were full of romance and revolution." From the
corner of the stamp, Majaaz appeared to mock the proceedings where he must
have spotted nephew and film lyricist Javed Akhtar and sister Hameeda
Salim. In a message scribbled in Urdu, the dying language of India, Majaaz
laughed:
Bakhshi hain humko ishq ne wo jurratein Majaaz
Dartey nahi siysat-i-ahl-i-jahaan se hum.
(Unalloyed love gives me a potent elixir that I can dare
The politics, the cunning intrigues of life everywhere.)