When one thinks of poets who gave a new direction to Urdu poetry in the modern era, the names of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Noon Meem Rashid and Miraji always come to mind. There were other distinguished poets as well, such as Akhtarul Iman, Ali Sardar Jafri and Makhdoom Mohiuddin, who were contemporaries of the big three mentioned above. Slightly younger, but nonetheless a rising star, was Nasir Kazmi.

These poets, regardless of their politico-literary affiliations, ushered in a trend broadly called “the new poetry.” The “new poets” pushed the conventional boundaries of Urdu verse to include a variety of subjects that were personal and unorthodox, such as a more direct engagement with love and loss. They refurbished and expanded the range of classical metaphors and popularised styles that were idiosyncratic, even whimsical.

These poets mostly favoured the nazm as a mode of expression because it allowed more space for experimentation. In this cluster of dazzling poets, a name that often gets overlooked is that of Majid Amjad.

Abdul Majid Amjad (1914-74) was from Jhang, a small town in Punjab. His first sustainable job as editor of a weekly journal Urooj ended in 1939. Thereafter, he qualified as inspector of civil supplies in the Department of Food and Agriculture in 1944. He lived in Sahiwal for the most part of his life.

The unassuming, reticent, reclusive Amjad did not belong to any literary group, fashionable or otherwise. Younger contemporaries fondly remember his slight figure riding a bicycle to work in the morning and returning in the evening to hang out with a group of local poet-friends at the Stadium Hotel. He lived alone.

His marriage to a cousin had failed and there were no offspring. Cycling down Canal Road to his office every day, Amjad was deeply attached to the stately trees that flanked the canal. The pain he felt at the cutting down of those trees for urban expansion was poured into one of the most achingly personal poems on deforestation that I have ever read.

They who have stood at the gate of this singing stream for twenty years

Elegant sentinels at the borders of

rolling fields

Agreeably dark, shade sprinkling,

fruit-laden, tall

For twenty thousand were sold away all the verdurous trees

They whose very gusty breath was strange magic

Murderous axes came and split the

bodies of those heroes

— Translation by S.R. Faruqi and Frances Pritchett; composed 1960

Trees have a special place in Amjad’s poetry. He revels in their shade, admires their stateliness, and they bring him a solace that soothes his tortured mind. Here is an excerpt from ‘Yeh Sarsabz Peron ke Saaye’:

Alongside the black, narrow, burning hot road, the shade of these verdurous trees!

The breeze here is so cool; its gentle gusts are speckled

With cool patches;

When I passed by the row of these trees,

Pieces of cool shade slid over my body,

Broke as they fell from my body …

— Translation Mehr Farooqi; composed 1965

Majid Amjad wrote these poems long before ‘saving the earth’ became a fashionable topic of discussion. During the course of his career, he wrote many beautiful, unsettling poems about nature and the disregard of it by humans. In Urdu, especially in the ghazal, there is not much by the way of nature poetry. Nature is perceived as a unified idea, a metaphor. For example, the idea of bahar (spring) and khizan (autumn) have predetermined significance. There are a host of stipulated themes (mazmuns) and corresponding images associated with these seasons through a system of association of ideas, and certain givens in the worldview that permeates the ghazal. The poet’s individual feelings and perceptions about the seasons have almost no space, and little relevance, except in specified circumstances. As Muhammad Hasan Askari has explained, this is because the focus of the ghazal is entirely on human relationships; it is the human rather than the non-human that counts in this universe.

Askari goes on to elaborate that there are other genres in the classical Urdu and Persian classical poetry where the non-human, including the phenomena of nature, has an important space. It is in the nazm, that is, the non-ghazal poems of the traditional as well as modern types, where a more meaningful engagement with nature is possible. Iqbal, according to Askari, is the only poet who has shown the ability to relate to nature at deeper and more subjective levels. But Iqbal did not believe that man could learn from nature: perhaps he was afraid of immersing himself in intense emotional moods that nature could evoke in the imaginative soul, so he moved away from nature’s territory rather too quickly. Still, his poetry had outbursts of genuine intellectual or emotional responses evoked by the experience of nature.

Amjad’s involvement with the environment is not static or superficial. He regards nature as an entity that is alive; he empathises with trees, rivers, flowers, and birds, with an emotion that one has towards one’s own kin. In the first poem quoted above, the trees are shown as living breathing bodies, who are wounded and ultimately killed by murderous axes. Later in the poem he refers to the felled trees as piled up dead bodies shrouded by the yellow sunshine. The pain of trees being slaughtered is invoked in a prose poem ‘Jalsah,’ in which a body of sheesham trees huddled close together, is felled by saws:

A sense of melancholy pervades Amjad’s poetry. He seems to be intensely lonely; perhaps his poems were his constant companions because he liked to work and rework his compositions, never ready to let go of them, part with them. He published sparingly. Only one collection, Shab-e Raftah (Nights Past; 1958), was printed in his lifetime. After his death stacks of poems in different stages of completion were found in his small apartment. They were brought out as a collection, Shab-e Raftah ke Ba’d (1976). Subsequently, his collected works or Kulliyat was also published. Shab-e Raftah begins with this short, poignant poem, a summation of his poetic journey if you will:

*Dardon ke is koh-e-garan se

Mein ne tarashe, nazm kay aiwan

ki ik ik sil,

Ik ik soch ki hairan moorat … Garche qalam ki nok se tapke

Kitne tarane, kitne fasane

Lakh masail

Dil mein rahi sub dil ki hikayat!

Bees baras ki kawish-e-paiham

Sochte din aur jaagti raatein

Un kahasil:

Aik yahi izhaar ki hasrat!*

Amjad’s life has been the subject of several biographical essays and even a full length biography; maybe he was a tragic figure, there was a love story, he died alone.

There has been a surge of interest in his work in the last decade or so. The big question is why was he not written about during his lifetime? Why did he slip through the cracks in the canon? Why is he not placed along with Faiz, Rashid and Miraji? The common perception is that he was a diffident man living in a small town who did not belong to any of the known literary circles of his time. This is only partly true. Amjad was not reclusive, nor was Sahiwal exactly a backwater in the middle of nowhere. He did not write and publish as much as his peers, which could be one solid reason; but we have to look beyond these familiar rationalisations in order to get a critical understanding of what his work meant to the readers of his times.

I have alluded to the relative absence of poetry on the experience of nature in Urdu. It was not regarded as a subject of high poetry. Subjective poetry, especially of the intense personal type, was not in sync with a culture that did not approve of a heightened sense of alienation or individualism. New Poetry had many critics and Noon Meem Rashid’s debut collection Mavara was not greeted with enthusiasm by many critics. An exclusive issue of the journal Nigar, edited by Farman Fatehpuri, was devoted to making fun of new poetry. Nonetheless, Rashid’s Persianised, erudite style found admirers. Similarly, Faiz’s melodic, ideologically driven poetry in a high register of Urdu deploying metaphors of the classic ghazal was in tune with the times. Miraji’s output was both tremendous and unique. While his poems were dismissed as obscure, his astonishing skill as an editor, translator and critic, combined with his overwhelming persona, left a huge impact on his peers and readers.

Amjad experimented with metrical forms and rhythms. His vocabulary was eclectic. A cursory examination of his poems will reveal a matrix carefully peppered with a regional register of words. There is an earthiness in his verse, a sense of grounding with the here and now. Time is essence; it is relentless and all consuming. Below are a few lines from a poem, ‘Sab Kuchch Rait’ (Everything is Sand), that illustrate the slow cadence of his preferred rhythmic style and vocabulary spiced with local flavor.

All is sand

All is sand, shifting sand

Sand that holds the ups and downs of fates destructed just a moment past

Half covered with water, disordered, like disappearing creases on the sand’s surface

This brown, burnt to ashes, gritty, sand

Whose every tiny grain contains a mountain’s heart;

A heart pulsed in those tiny grains just now…

(Translation Mehr Farooqi; composed 1971)

Majid Amjad mellowed as a poet in the late 1950s and continued to grow until his poetic journey was cut abruptly by an untimely death. He left behind foldersfull of poems, letters and musings. By the ’60s, the Progressive Movement was a spent force and the trend for jadidiyat was beginning to bloom. Thus it cannot be said that he suffered because he was not a Progressive. He was never a Progressive, but his poetry did not fit the mold of jadidiyat either. Amjad’s style was not steeped in symbolism, allusions and abstractions like the jadid nazm. He made his own distinctive path. Perhaps if had he found the opportunity to bring out another collection of poems even a decade after the first, his presence in the literary milieu would have been more pronounced.

Compared to his peers, Amjad’s poetry has a wide range. It embraces the tribulations of survival in the period between the two World Wars, colonisation, Partition, urbanisation and so on. Although sadness pervades many of his poems he never lost faith in humanity and life. One of my favorite poems, ‘Kuch Din Pehle’ speaks about the pollution on the metaled highways, the dust clouds obscuring the green paddy fields, the smell of burning rubber and blackened food; but in the end there is hope of rain. Here is an excerpt:

On the metaled highway hundreds of wheels are spinning

Towards blackened food, with voices that are on fire

And

I, alone think. Why. Everywhere, on everything there is a layer of dust;

On death,

And on life too —

My heart says:

Perhaps it will rain again.

(Translation Mehr Farooqi; composed in 1973)

Amjad’s poetry is subjective to an inordinate degree. One seldom comes across a poet who has written so many poems about his personal angst and failure, and who has such a low opinion of himself. ‘Mere Khuda, Mere Dil’ is one long poem brimming with angst. The poem ‘Autograph’ is tinged pathos as is ‘Nigah-e Bazgasht’. ‘Munich’ on the other hand, on a very personal subject, is a beautiful, profound poem in which Amjad imagines how his beloved Shalat will be reunited with her mother on Christmas Eve. I think that the self-obsession and morbidness that haunts his poetry overshadows his originality at times, and can be seen as a reason for his genius not shining as much as it should have. Compared to Faiz, Rashid and Miraji, Amajd’s poetry has less music. His prose poems with long ponderous sentences can be tedious.

This year his birth centenary is being celebrated. He is being hailed by some as the greatest poet after Iqbal. As global warming and a deteriorating environment finally penetrate our consciousness, so does Majid Amjad.