Ustad Amanat Ali Khan, the celebrated scion of the Patiala gharana [clan] of our classical music, did wonders when he took to singing geet and ghazal. When young, I regularly used to listen to Khan’s classical and semi-classical renditions, including ghazals, on those audio cassettes that needed to be flipped over manually inside the metal or plastic chamber of the tape recorder after every 30 or 45 minutes.

Some of my contemporaries and older friends may remember that we would always keep a pencil handy to fix the cassette when the tape would get stuck in the chamber. The pencil was placed in one of the two holes in the cassette and rotated slowly within the hole to bring the tape back to its original position.

On summer afternoons and during vacations from school or college — in the humid heat of Karachi or the dry heat of Lahore or Hyderabad — I remember switching off the always irritating ceiling fan in the room and gladly bearing the brunt of the heat while listening to music. All other sounds and noises had to be cut to enjoy the music fully — especially when it was something like Ustad Amanat Ali Khan singing Ada Jafarey’s ghazal, the one that ends with the couplet: “Baaqi na rahay saakh Ada dasht-i-junoon ki/ Dil mein agar andesha-i-anjaam hi aaey [The wilderness created by my madness, Ada, will lose its integrity/ If my heart, for once, feels fear of the consequences].”

This year marks the 100th birth anniversary of Ada Jafarey — the outstanding poet who is not totally unsung but certainly less acknowledged today than many others who are less gifted. How does that matter, though? It does not for the genuine artist herself, as she transcends accolades and appreciation. They are immaterial in the larger scheme of things, be it literary criticism or canonisation.

But it does matter for the society at large in this day and age, which dangles between mediocrity and more mediocrity as it fails to appreciate the best among us. Jafarey was one of the best among us.

Those who heralded what is considered feminist verse in Urdu — from Kishwar Naheed to Fahmida Riaz — have gained more importance in our literature and public life because of the oppressive cultural and political milieu in which we exist. However, it is equally important to critically appreciate the distinct voices of those who chose not to holler, but whisper.

From Ada Jafarey to Zehra Nigah to Shabnam Shakeel to Parveen Fana Syed to Parveen Shakir to Yasmeen Hameed to Hamida Shaheen to Fatima Mehru, many across generations fall in that category.

There are many others too. Jafarey precedes them, as her first of five collections, Main Saaz Dhoondti Rahi [I Kept Looking For the Tune], appeared as early as in 1950. Her many predecessor women Urdu poets across centuries — from Mah Laqa Bai Chanda to Rabia Pinhan — never got the comparable attention to their fellow male poets in their times as Jafarey was able to capture in her time.

Her facility with the language and idiom was unparalleled. She would pick up a word and mould it to mean something different from its otherwise ordinary meaning. Most of Jafarey’s ghazals — her favoured genre — use universal expressions instead of the gender-specific parlance that most of her successors chose to write in.

Jafarey was born as Aziz Jahan in the city of Badayun in India and started composing verse at the tender age of 12. She picked her pseudonym to be Ada Badayuni. In 1947, after marrying Nur-ul-Hasan Jafarey, a bureaucrat who luckily for her happened to be a litterateur as well, she became Ada Jafarey. Her autobiography, Jo Rahi So Beykhabari Rahi [What Remains Is Ignorance] — a title taken from a verse of Siraj Aurangabadi — was published in 1995 by Maktaba-i-Danyal from Karachi. That was 20 years before her passing in 2015.

The book is a remarkable journey into the past — like any good autobiography and memoir should be — narrating her personal history, which encompassed the cultural, literary and social life of Pakistan in particular and the Indian Subcontinent in general. Besides, her travels outside Pakistan and the emotions they evoked are also described in the book.

Women and men of literary significance, as well as those folk who worked for her family, like one called Badal Khan, are mentioned. Life lived across Karachi, Lahore and other cities in the country is chronicled. There is a subdued feminism across the narrative. It is nuanced but not subdued in her verse. Or, maybe, we shall distinguish between feminism and womanhood when it comes to her work, whether poetry or prose.

Jo Rahi So Beykhabari Rahi has been translated into English by Ada Jafarey’s son Aamir Jafarey and granddaughter Asra Jafarey. The translation, titled A World of Her Own, was published in 2023 by our bibliophile friend Zahid Kazmi, of the Sungi Publishing House, Haripur, and exquisitely printed by none other than Tarique Rehman Fazlee of Fazleesons Printers in Karachi.

I am not sure if Kazmi and Fazlee recognise that this is one of the best translations of an Urdu text that they have had the opportunity to publish and print. It is surely comparable to Khalid Hasan’s English translation from Urdu of Saadat Hasan Manto’s pen portraits and Aseer Abid’s Punjabi translation of Divan-i-Ghalib.

Aamir and Asra’s translation is as close to the original as it could be without compromising English language idiom and sensibility. Ghalib once said: “Aaey hai baykasi-i-ishq pe rona Ghalib/ Kis ke ghar jaaey ga sailaab-i-bala mere baad [Ghalib, I mourn the helplessness of my passion/ After me, who will survive these raging torrents of my heart].”

Asra Jafarey has proved that she will survive the torrents that kept raging in her grandmother’s heart.

The columnist is a poet and essayist.
His latest collections of verse are Hairaa’n Sar-i-Bazaar and No Fortunes to Tell

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, June 30th, 2024