Meri khaak mujh pe giran hui mera aasmaan hai gumshuda
Mera ism-i-ishq badal gaya mera har nishaan hai gumshuda

[My homeland’s earth became unavailable, my sky is lost
My name has changed, my every mark is lost]

Kunwar Muhammad Jamilur Rahman Khan Jamil was born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan. He served as Joint Secretary Halqa-i-Takhleeq-i-Adab, Lahore from 1975-77. A political activist, he has spent the rest of his life away from Pakistan, living in the West, moving first to Germany and then Holland. Since 2008, he has resided in England.

Jamilur Rahman not only journeyed from the East to the West, he carried the legacy of poetic traditions in his heart. A poet who traverses the breadth of poetic forms from the age-old Indic geet [song] to the contemporary nasree nazm, or prose poems, is versatile indeed. Rahman has proven his poetic talent by just doing that.

He has published six books of poems. I am exploring two of his recent collections: 2019’s Gumshuda Aasmaan [Lost Sky] and 2022’s Maadum se Maujood Tak [From the Hidden to the Present]. Gumshuda Asman has a section called ‘Sargam’ [Melodies] that comprises a venerable poetic form of song — the melodic, heartfelt geet.

Travel is an age-old stimulant known for giving the creative impulse a boost. Rahman mines travel’s displacement in his poetry, the bittersweet in-betweenness of simultaneously inhabiting multiple cultural worlds. I was struck by his ability to cross genres seamlessly. While geet may seem a lesser form of poetry than the ghazal, the process of composing geet is quite different.

Geets are traditionally composed in the feminine voice. The great Urdu poet Miraji comes to mind. Miraji, too, composed in a variety of genres, including geet, and published the collection Miraji Ke Geet with a short but insightful preface titled Geet Kaisay Bantay Hain’ [How Songs are Made].

In this preface, Miraji explored the creative inspiration of song creation, noting in lyrical prose: “Geets are created when waves of concentration (dhyaan ki lehrein) splash and spray, when rivers murmur, when the forest sways with bird song, waves crash and water cascades from waterfalls with a roar. The sky collects them all into its embrace and makes a harmony … the heart’s voice, the heart-melting call of loneliness emanating from the depth of the night’s recesses. This is how geets are made. Geets were songs expressing an individual’s emotions; now they have reached the wider audience.”

Jamilur Rahman’s geets mirror the eloquence of Miraji’s description of song creation:

[Nights flying on the winds of time/ Its wings unbroken/ Darkened all the seas/ Its colours false./ Whose reflection glimmers in the mirror/ Who except for you is in the groves.]

From writing mystical, musical song, Rahman moves effortlessly to prose poems. In the preface to his aptly titled collection Maadum Se Maujood Tak, he reflects on the medium of prose poems as a means to cross genres, to simultaneously inhabit multiple forms of expression and to relinquish the trapping of language and forms. After dipping into his repertoire of prose poems, I wish to add — or rather, expand — on this reflection.

Rahman not only crosses the obstacles of language and expression, but succeeds in producing a language that can negotiate complexities of emotion and existence: the anxieties of identity, the experience of alienation.

Through his poems, he can overcome the losses and forge new connections — the connection between the language of his culture, the mother tongue Urdu, and the language of his abode from where he writes and filters his experiences now. His language has matured, enriched through the winding journeys in the alleys of German and Dutch culture. Interestingly, these journeys make him, or bring him ‘home’ in Urdu.

He has shed the awkward, the assumed or the stilted stance that can hold back a poet from direct communication. He has also shed the high register of Urdu and embraced the colloquial in his poems. Prose poems are shorn of the devices of metre, rhyme and refrain; in fact, even of the cadence of language, if need be. Then how does a poet forge a language that can be perceived as an appropriate language for this genre that is neither prose nor poetry?

So let us go deeper into Rahman’s poetry, explore his existential angst, his connections with the past and his bridges to the present. For example, the poem ‘Shanaakht Ka Bohraan’ [The Crisis of Identity] begins with memories of the monsoon season.

Frogs, fattened with desire, start to croak and call for mates. The village pond is filled with ecstasy as the sky bends and pours rain; this awakens a longing in young bodies; a longing tinged with an unknown sadness. There is a well in the middle of the village, like the navel in the body, for travellers from far-off lands who seek the water. But the well reminds them of their unquenched thirst for the past.

The poem goes on to dive into the depths of memory through monsoon imagery. It connects the fat frogs from the village in the Third World to the fried frogs’ legs served in restaurants of the First World, and to the poetic voice that sees it all from the damp corner of his being.

It is in poems such as these that Rahman’s engagement with the globalised, shrunken, emotionally diminished world shines through. He is not simply a voyeur, but a body suspended, torn, in the tortured existence of cultural in-betweenness.

In another poem, ‘Kaali Billi Aur Main’ [A Black Cat and Me] he explores the angst of a bilateral existence that tears at his sense of being:

[Before I could reach your home,
A black cat crossed my path/ And, suddenly, the whole day/ Collapsed.

[…]

I couldn’t escape from the clasp/ Of tracks wrapped round me/ Like shadows. I tried to pull out my hunting/ Knife to cut their root/ But I was shocked to see/ My own head spinning/ On the knife point]

Urdu, a modern language that grew out of a mixture of Indic and Farsi vocabulary with Hindi grammar, is at a crossroads. It is struggling to hold its ground in a global culture that tends to favour English. We must keep building bridges with and between languages so that we can stay connected to our past.

The columnist is professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia. She tweets @FarooqiMehr

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 23rd, 2023