Adistinguished poet, radio anchor and peace activist, Anjum Saleemi, has been playing a pivotal role on the literary and cultural scene of Faisalabad for the last three decades. He was born in Faisalabad in 1963 to a family, which has migrated from Jalandhar to Pakistan during the Partition.

Saleemi remembers his childhood as an isolated child who loved being alone or with his books for long hours. He inherited these qualities, silence and meditative temperament, and love for Buddah, from his maternal grandmother, who was of Burmese origin.

“When I entered Rangoon for the first time, I had a strange but delightful feeling, a feeling of freedom, a feeling of being a free soul. The streets looked familiar and I strongly felt that I have been living there before,” he recalls.

Saleemi started writing stories and composing poetry at a tender age for children magazines. ‘Sukkay Athru’, his first book of Punjabi poetry, was in print when he was a teenager. It was followed by another book of Punjabi poetry, ‘Santaap’ in 1996.

‘Santaap’ was widely appreciated, awarded by prestigious literary awards and became his hallmark. He has two books of Urdu poetry to his credit in which he has tried to improvise the traditional genres of Urdu poetry.

“I started as a prose writer, but poetry suits my unorganised temperament. It evolves spontaneously from my very own self and I don’t need to do a disciplined effort for that,” he explains.

He is running a small publishing house, ‘Hamkhial Publications’, which has published more than 400 literary books so far.

During his childhood, Faisalabad was a politically charged city. He finds himself lucky to have the company of literary legends, intellectuals and political activists such as Fazal Husain Rahi, Afzal Ahsan Randhawa, Dr Maqbool Ahmed, Prof Abdul Qayyum, Prof Saeed Chaudhry, Prof Ashfaq Bukhari, Ali Arshad Mir and Irshad Ahmed Khan.

“Irshad Ahmed Khan was very clear about his concepts and had great communication skills; he helped me a great deal in my political and creative grooming,” he says.

With the help of like-minded people, he made ‘Halqa-e-Arbab-e-Zouq, a literary forum, dominated by progressive writers. They had to face hostility from the local administration and the right wing writers, who wanted to promote ‘Naat’ as the only form of poetry. The environment started changing after the Zia regime.

“I felt myself in a molten state; a burden was removed from my head and a new being was born that day, he vividly recalls the moment he heard the news of Zia’s death.

He remained the secretary (culture) of the PPP for a few years, but left the party when it came into power. “I am an activist with a firm belief in human equality; it was hard for me to digest the changed behaviours of a ruling party,” he says in a bitter tone.

A few years back, he launched a street theatre performance and managed to continue it with a small group of volunteers, committed to creating a parallel theatre.

A frequenter to East Punjab, he is always motivated by the freedom of speech and space for free thinking in India which he feels shrinking day by day in Pakistan.

“I will pen down these experiences, visiting the land where my forefathers had been living for centuries. Re-uniting the families which were separated during Partition and meetings with Gulzar, Kaifi Azmi, Amrita Preetam, Amroz and Dalip Kumar are a treasure to cherish and share with people, he says.

He has been working as the secretary of Progressive Writers Association, Faisalabad, for the last five years. He loves grooming young writers, knitting people together to read and discuss literature. Staying far away from the materialist world, he is living the life of a wanderer, and is grateful to his family who gave him ample time to travel, read and write.

Most of his poetry is a dialogue with another self within him. He dares to touch the subjects which are considered as taboos, with a very delicate expression of his own. He sounds mellow and romantic in most of his poetry except for few blunt reactions to socio-political injustices.

Published in Dawn, August 9th, 2015

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