I am sure posterity deserves to see some other photographs of Miraji, the brilliant editor, poet, translator, a leading intellectual of his times and of modern Urdu. Yet the image that is ubiquitously enduring, even synonymous with his memory, is the one in which he looks like some weird faddist. (I later found out that this picture was taken when he was dressed up as a Brahmin priest for a two-minute role in a Mumbai film.) The image shows a slender man with piercing eyes, patrician nose, thick mustache, with long, almost matted hair flowing down to his shoulders. He is wearing large hooped earrings and a double string of big rudraksha beads around his neck. An image that crosses boundaries.

It is one of the ironies of Urdu literary history and culture that a genius of the stature of Miraji was dwarfed by his idiosyncratic habits and appearance. I therefore pose the question: Did it really matter who he was, what he wore or did if he wrote scintillating poetry and prose and produced the most empathetic translations of some of the most complex western and eastern poets such as Mallarme, Baudelaire, Li Po and many more? Apparently, it did; and it was not just that. It was also because Miraji was apolitical. He was a rebel. Not a male rebel as he is made out to be but an unconventional rebel.

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Sanaullah Dar (1912–1949) began writing as a teenager under the pen name Sahari (mesmeriser) and his work was published in the famous children’s journal Phul. Although he was remarkably intelligent, for some unknown, obscure reasons he did not finish high school. He soon emerged as Miraji, a sensitive poet hanging out in the coffee houses of Lahore that were the haunts of creative writers.

The literary scene was flooded with new talent that was restless to break out from colonial humiliation and oppressive traditions. Prominent among Miraji’s contemporaries in Lahore were N.M. Rashed, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Pitras Bukhari, Qayyum Nazar, Nasim Hijazi, Yusuf Zafar, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Upendranath Ashk and many more. Miraji spent his days at the local library where he discovered and connected to the larger international community of poets and a sea of poetry from the East and West — mashriq-o-maghrib ke naghme. Thus he began a stupendous labour of love: poetry translations often accompanied with critical commentaries or notes for would-be poets and readers. He was invited to become the deputy (naib, although virtual) editor of Adabi Duniya, a position that he filled with distinction, inaugurating innovative projects that widened the reach of Urdu readers and aimed at refurbishing the canon to make it more inclusive of Urdu’s sister languages like Braj, Bhojpuri, Maithili and Awadhi. This diversity of registers was expressed in his poetic voice. He built pathways into the poetic traditions of the past but he also introduced the most strikingly original form of experiential poetry that Urdu had ever known. For this he preferred the nazm form. He was innovative in composing geets as alternative to ghazals as well.

Miraji’s nazms have been dubbed obscure by his critics. However, not all his nazms are opaque. He composed a collection of “paband” nazms that are closer to geets (songs) but very different from traditional Urdu paband nazms (metrical) in that Miraji’s tone and vocabulary are singular to his emotional, creative state of mind. Some of his poetry had to be ambiguous because it was experimental.

He was venturing to communicate a highly individualistic sexual experience that he ably mapped onto the emotion of life itself, bringing it closer to nature. Miraji’s poetic voice has a fluidity that is uncommon though not unheard of in Urdu poetry. In some of his poems the narratorial voice, or the I, is female. For example, poems such as “Preet ki Reet”, “Raat ke Saaye”, “Ghana Garm Jadu” (all from Paband Nazmein) etc. have a female voice. There is an intertextual flavor in his poetry as well.

Miraji’s absorbed reading of symbolist poets is evident in his nazms. His good poems combine the densely complex experience of the Mallarme and Baudelaire kind on the one hand and the classical ghazal’s metaphorical ambiguity on the other. He layered it with the lyricism drawn from his engagement with a variety of traditions. The result was poetry of staggering intensity couched in exquisite language. His poetry demands an empathetic reader. It demands a new reading. It demands to be read outside of the biography that has been foisted on him through the “story” of his unrequited love for Mira Sen.

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Miraji cherished new ideas. As editor he encouraged young writers to think differently. Urdu’s preeminent literary critic Muhammad Hasan Askari (1919-1978), a younger contemporary of Miraji, attests the significance of the latter’s editorial acumen. In his khakah on Miraji, Askari reminisced how much he treasured the austere postcard from Miraji that communicated the acceptance of his short story for Adabi Duniya. “Miraji ke us card ko main ne panch saal tak ta’wiz bana kar mahfuz rakha.” Askari’s observations on Miraji shed a different light from the rest of the bunch who have gone to town in painting him as a pathologically sexual male.

According to Askari, Miraji’s lifestyle was fashioned by his desire to be an enigma, an afsana, which is why he has been the subject of so many personal essays, each of them relentlessly pursuing the enigma of Miraji; failing but nonetheless creating in the process this remarkable archive of horrific stories about Miraji’s habits, excesses and violations. According to Askari, Miraji never wrote about his personal life. He said different things to different people about himself. It was impossible to get to the haqiqat (truth) of the afsana that was Miraji.

At Askari’s request to nominate his “best” (behtarin) poem and a personal biographical note for an anthology that he was editing, Miraji wrote a somewhat surrealistic account of his childhood that went into details of two explicit experiences that were poetically reconfigured in his nominated poems. He unabashedly recounted some other moments of sexual arousal that he has worked into poetry. His essay, “Ek Namukammal Self Portrait” (An Incomplete Self Portrait) serves to complicate his sense of self even more.

A famous contemporary of Miraji is Manto. Both were born in 1912. There are many similarities and also a few important dissimilarities between Miraji and Manto. Both were of Punjabi-Kashmiri stock. They shared a common literary language-milieu and a love for alcohol. Both were expelled from the Progressive Writers’ Association for writing on sexual themes in explicit ways. They got acquainted in the late 1930s when Miraji was the powerful editor of Adabi Duniya. They met often in Delhi in the early 1940s when Miraji was a rising script writer for All India Radio and finally over an extended period of time in Mumbai (1946–1948). Now Manto was a successful script writer for Mumbai cinema and Miraji reduced to a penniless poet, alcoholic. In those last years, Manto financed Miraji’s daily alcohol. They spent time together with common friends, often on the Juhu shore. Both died young and tragically from excesses of alcohol: Miraji at 37 and Manto at 43. I would place Manto’s khakah on Miraji, “Teen Gole”, as one of his less persuasive, tentative pieces in that genre. Manto calls Miraji a dervesh and a pervert. He struggles to find a slot for the likes of a unique individual as Miraji. Ultimately Manto declares that Miraji was the lover, beloved and the union between them. In other words, he lived in a perpetual state of bekhudi. Miraji took the idea of love and clothed it in every possible vision of womanhood until he became one with it.

Anyone who writes on Miraji cannot escape the compulsion to comment on some aspect of his unusual life. Geeta Patel’s study of Miraji’s lyrical haunting desire asks some original, quirky questions. A male writer with a woman’s name? Was it an impulse that prompted him to adopt the name of this woman named Mira who did not return his affections? Would it have been different if her name had been different? Did wearing Mira’s identity have deeper connotations? Did it lead him to the Bhakti poet Mirabai whose life long quest for her beloved Krishna led her to wander thirsting for spiritual union? Miraji translated Mirabai’s poetry. He wanted to call the collective translations Miranjali. Patel proposes rewriting Miraji’s story to explore the correspondences between the Miraji and the Mirabai that might otherwise seem tenuous.

One of the implications of foregrounding the Mira Sen story is that it allows other stories of Miraji’s desire to disappear. It prevents us from reaching out to Miraji’s fluid, unconventional poetic self. There have to be other ways of reading Miraji’s work. Poems such as “Ba’d ki Udan”, “Ras ki Anokhi Lahren” and more invite new readings.

Miraji’s genius could have led him to the pinnacles of creative accomplishments. Yet something in his make-up prevented him from pursuing the obvious paths to success. He remained quintessentially a poet to the core, lusting for experiences to clothe into words for posterity.