I’m not a street entertainer — Sarshar Siddiqui

By Naseer Ahmad

The traditional love-hate triangle is missing in veteran poet and writer Sarshar Siddiqui’s poetry. There is no woman in it that is as tall as a pine tree with a waist thinner than a strand of hair, a pair of almond-shaped eyes deep and azure as a lake and set in a face that rivals the rose, whether red or pink to suit one’s taste, and is shining brightly like the full moon through the dark black clouds of flowing tresses and resting on a swan-like neck….

Naturally, there is no raqeeb-i-roo siah, or charcoal-complexioned foe, always scheming to inflict agonies on the poet and earning sympathies for the poor soul, who is lucky enough to be free of the 24/7 worries – of job, price hike, electricity load-shedding, an independent judiciary etc. With these ingredients absent, it should not surprise anyone if his poetry lacks popularity among the young and those young at heart.

Living in a two-room, top-floor rented house in Gulistan-i-Jauhar, Sarshar sahib says he doesn’t care if his poetry is not understood or liked by the common people. “I write for educated people who can fathom the depth of thought in a piece of writing. I’m not like that popular poet who at 78 hasn’t grown even a single day older than 18. Neither am I a street entertainer who can please everyone,” he says in an interview with Dawn at his residence last Friday. “Even in my youth I didn’t write the type of poetry youngsters enjoy.”

His poetry is, however, of great literary merit, highly acclaimed by noted critics. Shaffaf Aadmi is a compilation of tributes paid to him on various occasions by eminent writers including Tabish Dehlavi, Prof Dr Abul Khair Kashfi, Umrao Tariq, Shabnum Rumani and Saqi Farooqui.

Uf jo ik shakhs kih mafhoom say aagah naheen

Hai who lafz jo tehreer kiay hai main nay

(Alas, that particular person doesn’t understand the meaning of the wonderful word I have written.)

He is a blunt speaker and doesn’t care if somebody is offended by his words. “Life is useless if an individual cannot do the most basic of things – speak the truth.”

His tone may sound rough, which may be attributed to the troubles he endured since an early age, but he is an upright and friendly person.

Mein nay jis haal mein ik umr basar ki sarshar

Aik hi din kabhi iss tarah guzaray koi

(Nobody can live a day in the conditions I have spent a whole life.)

If one asks how his poetry is different from others’, he will say: “as my thumb impression is from others’.”

Although he is content with what he has got in life, his lifestyle reflects his inability to please people who mattered in his surrounding. “I donate hundreds of books every year to some libraries because I don’t have the space to keep them,” he says pointing to the shelves filled with fresh books, mostly about Urdu literature. “I and my aged wife do not have high ambitions and are living quite comfortably here,” says Sarshar while explaining how he makes both ends meet. “I get a pension from the National Bank. Besides, my son living with his family in the UAE also subsidises our household expenses. All our needs are fulfilled and we do not aspire for much.”

He has suffered two heart attacks, one after the death of his younger son. Although he smilingly says “I’m waiting for a third one,” he is quite healthy otherwise.

As a young man back in India, he was an activist of the Progressive Movement and the Communist Party of India. His and his comrades’ activities annoyed a local Muslim leader of the Congress so much so that when a man turned up dead in a house in their Kanpur neighbourhood, the politician found it a windfall opportunity to implicate three of the revolutionary youths, the other two being Ishtiaq Azhar and Anwar Hussain.

Slapped with murder charges, Sarshar had no other option but to escape the long arm of the law. He fled from Kanpur to Allahabad to stay with Mustafa Zaidi. From there he went to Fatehpur, where he met Farman Fatehpuri among others. He went to Bombay to find shelter with the Progressive Writers Association, which was not in a position to support him. Desperate, he caught a special train to Pakistan and settled down in Karachi in 1950.

Here he did various jobs but the activist in him did not let him sit in peace. He got involved in trade union activities and lost jobs quickly. Finally, in 1955 he joined the National Bank of Pakistan as a public relations officer and stay put there till he retired in 1984.

The same year when a friend reluctantly asked him if he would like to join a team leaving for Umra, he said ‘yes.’ This proved a turning point for a man who had had utter disregard for religious rituals throughout his life. The pilgrimage made him a deeply religious person, but his revulsion for the clergy seems as strong as before as he refuses to stand behind the local prayer leaders. He has, however, written moving naats and other religious poems since his transformation.

Born in Kanpur on December 25, 1926, Sarshar Siddiqui began his poetic journey with Allama Niaz Fatehpuri’s Nigar, which was being published from Lucknow. He has written in various genres – nazm, ghazal, naat, haiku, etc. His poetry collections include Bazdeed, Meesaq, Hijrat par mamoor thay hum and Khizan ki aakhri shaam. His prose books include Shuneeda, Ijmal and Harf-i-Mukarrar. Besides, he has been writing columns for various Urdu newspapers for 40 years.

Kishwar Naheed’s remaining dreams

Kishwar Naheed has brought out this interesting book, Baqi Maanda Khwab — the remaining dreams — for the ignoramuses of the literary world. However laymen like me are also allowed to benefit from this digest of great and famous writers’ views about their trade that one may consult to know why, if at all, must one take up the pen. On the title cover Kishwar Naheed stands pen and notebook in hand with Yevteshunko, Ezra Pound, Ionesco, Elliot, Rasul Hamza, Dylan Thomas, Nabakov, Jung, Anais Nin, Erica Jong and others while from the balcony above Kundera, Sartre, Pasternak, Naipaul and others look on (look on is one of our patent description of persons in press photographs who seem to be doing nothing). On the back of the book her portly figure is pasted against a gallery of red masks; holding in one hand what looks like a ‘million pound note’ that Gregory Peck had failed to encash in the British movie of that name.

These ‘remaining dreams’ — that is the views and feelings of the great writers, poets, and artists that she has collected from different sources in this book and translated them for Urdu readers — Kishwar Naheed has no hesitation in owning them as her own. She has felt them spoken to her in her mind. What inspires literature and what makes it great has been the critics’ eternal search, but few, says Kishwar, have it in their stars to know and experience new things. Until the creative writer himself started to explore and analyse the sources of his work, the metaphysics of the literary experience did not come into being. These pieces of writings in which the writers and poets talk about their art, what moves them, how they work, whether they have a plan of work or a scheme to work on, or if they sit down with a blank paper and a pen, if it is an empty mind from which the poetry flows or an agitation that makes them take the pen; or is it that the pen itself does much work?

These questions however do not shape into a theory or philosophy of some kind. What makes the critics so profound on the other hand is their total unfamiliarity with the mystique of the creative process. Erica Jong who is not exactly a writer of great merit but who became famous after her Fear of Flying book, admits she starts off with a sentence. That is all she has when she sits down to write. It is true for many others. It is only the commercial writers who sit down with a plan. In America publishing houses distribute chapters among writers on their pay roll to finish the book in a given time.

Sidney Sheldon and some other popular fiction writers worked in this manner. But they were producing reading material for commuters and not exactly literature. But, says Robert Graves, even literature proper in the way we understand it, is written for such motives as money, fame, enjoyment, escape and possibly some other reasons in that order. This would of course be true in the western countries where one can live off writing books, but not in Pakistan though fame and escape or power in society may be some of the likely sources of inspirations.

Compared to the general lot of the writers, and poets, some of the critics enjoy more than their due of respect and awe in our literary milieu but in the West the writer feels no fear in openly rejecting critical estimates. Karl Shapiro in his essay Criticism and Poetry dismisses criticism and critical theories as irrelevant to the work of a poet. He gets along well with those poets who have not read criticism. Anne Sexton who got a Pulitzer for poetry is not shy of telling us she knows nothing about poetical analysis, never went to school and first learned to write at the age of 27. And if someone asked her if there was such a thing as a Sexton style, she would not know. Ezra Pound whose own word is law for some critics puts this simple task for them: to find what the purpose of the writing is, not what it should have been. Brevity and completeness that some of our moderns pay no regard to, in addition to making sense, are virtues in a writing that give it weight and life.

Simone de Beauvoir writing about Jean Paul Sartre says he did not consider himself to be someone special or unique but he thought he had discovered the importance of truth and it was his mission in life to teach the people to speak the truth. He had found that our generation was more unhappy than the previous one, because we knew that our life was better than theirs. This made Simone laugh but when Sartre explained what he meant she understood the entire system of his thought.

Mexican poet and diplomat, Octavio Paz in his essay on the relationship of poetry and history holds the former’s power of supercession over the latter and explores how history, society and language constitute the basic elements of poetry. Every line has reference to the preceding line but the poet’s language is constructed by his perception of history. It seems as if Octavio Paz is talking about our Urdu ghazal. Eugene Ionesco regards freedom as liberation from history, from the chain of continuity, from being a tune in the symphony — an impossibility that art achieves. Talking about his poetry Rasul Hamza says that though it is an expression of his uniqueness, yet its joy lies in sharing it with others. The more it is shared and acknowledged as true, the more he considers his work as worthwhile. This is a slap on the face of those who pretend that they write for themselves and their purpose is not communication.

Henry Miller’s letter to his lawyer defending him in the obscenity case against his book, Sex, is a comment on the nature of literature and puts to the judges this interesting query whether the atom bomb was more life supporting than pornography. It is in defence of the people’s right to read what they like. He warns the court that if his book is banned more people will read it. We know that how charges of obscenity made Manto a celebrity in no time and made him the most read writer of Urdu language. “What is bad poetry” is not only Hermann Hesse’s amusing defence of what we call second rate poets, who continue to compose poems knowing they will never attain to greatness, but also an essay on what a poem is all about.

This is just a sampling from the kaleidoscopic views of some 60 great writers and poets on things that have moved them and what in their eyes true art is. Instructive in their astonishing simplicity and avoidance of verbal fuss they may teach some of us in the writing business a thing or two. If that happens, the purpose of Kishwar Naheed’s labour of love would have been served.