In Karachi, the Sindh Culture Department and the Arts Council of Pakistan recently organised a national conference to celebrate Shaikh Ayaz’s 98th birth anniversary. Writers, poets, scholars, journalists, politicians and cultural commentators attended the event. At the outset, a documentary film was shown on the poet’s life. It was followed by multiple sessions to explore his personal life, political struggle and poetic genius. The event ended with a befitting recitation of the poet’s works by Zia Mohyeddin.

Ayaz is among the very few who gained legendary status in their lifetimes. It is not just the resistance against oppression and struggle for fundamental freedoms in Sindh that he symbolises in both poetry and prose; he has holistically captured the Sindhi living experience, its highs and lows, enchantment and anxiety. He has also versified Sindh’s habitat. In Sindh, Ayaz is rightly considered the true successor of Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai — one of the greatest poets born in our part of the world.

Once, in a lecture delivered on Allama Muhammad Iqbal, German scholar Anne Marie Schimmel had said that Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi had significantly impacted the overall South Asian poetic tradition. However, she said, he had two principal disciples in this tradition: Iqbal and Bhitai.

What I have humbly learned is that, in Rumi’s tradition, matter and soul do not exist without each other. That removes any duality between body and spirit, and between the here and the hereafter. All is one and all is a continuum. Seeking another body and spirit is the same as seeking the universe. There are events in that continuum which should not be seen as culminations.

You find the same thread running in Iqbal and Bhitai. Iqbal has both depth and grandeur. His choice of themes and, at times, enunciatory style, cannot be decontextualised from his lived colonial experience. For that matter, no one’s work can be decontextualised, even if considered universal at the time of canon formation. In the case of Bhitai, there is depth and soberness. The roots of his tree are embedded in the soil of Sindh, watered by the Indus. But his trunk is tall and large, with branches spreading out to give shade to humanity anywhere.

Bhitai is universal, humanistic, cosmopolitan and plural. He had had access to world history, but his times did not offer him the possibility of actually knowing what was happening simultaneously in other parts of the world when he was writing in Sindh. Ayaz’s times — the 20th century — offered that possibility of being an internationalist. He and his contemporaries had the choice to know, analyse and write on the events and circumstances of struggling nations and classes across the world.

Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Ghani Khan and Mir Gul Khan Naseer were in the same country, but Ayaz could also reach out to the works of the likes of Chile’s Pablo Neruda, Turkey’s Nazim Hikmet and America’s Sylvia Plath. From Chile to Nigeria and from Iran to Vietnam, Ayaz knew what struggles were waged. However, he did not become a creeper with thin roots, but followed in the footsteps of Bhitai, the difference being that he would know who was sitting in the shade of his branches that spread outside Sindh.

Being a part of the Progressive Writers’ Association, Ayaz started writing in Urdu and, over the years, published two volumes of Urdu poetry: Boo-i-Gul, Nala-i-Dil [Fragrance of the Flower, Lament of the Heart] and Neelkanth Aur Neem Ke Pattay [The Bluejay and Neem Leaves]. He is steeped in the classical tradition in terms of language and style, but deals with contemporary existential, social and political issues. There is work available on him, but it is unfortunate that his exquisite verse has not attracted the contemporary Urdu reader’s attention and the literary critique that it deserves.

Himayat Ali Shair comments in his essay on Ayaz that it was the political developments in Pakistan in the 1950s and ’60s that snatched from us a thoroughly bilingual poet of Sindhi and Urdu. Ayaz became active with the resistance movement for the rights of Sindh and the Sindhi language. He was incarcerated for years, and was then compelled to choose a primary language for his work, because of his political conviction. Nevertheless, in my view, whatever Ayaz has written in Urdu is worthwhile and enough to receive due attention.

One of the tragedies brought upon a serious reader of literature by the unfortunate and expedient linguistic politics in Sindh is that the body of work in Urdu poetry by Sindhis, spread over centuries, faces neglect. Much before Ayaz, in the 18th century, the great Sachal Sarmast wrote in multiple genres of Urdu poetry. Later, the distinguished scholar and writer Mirza Kalich Beg wrote in Urdu. There were many other lesser-known poets who have continued to publish volumes of ghazals, and later nazms, since the 18th century.

After Ayaz, we see Adal Soomro, Sahar Imdad, Imdad Hussaini, Noorul Huda Shah and many others who are bilingual and have contributed substantially to contemporary Urdu verse. Even among my contemporaries, and those a little junior to me, there are such bold and powerful voices as Hasan Mujtaba, Abdul Rehman Pirzado, Aziz Gopang, Attiya Dawood, Khuda Bux Abro, Mustafa Arbab, Sahar Gul Bhatti and Javed Soz Halai.

I am sure there are many more and a single newspaper column cannot do justice to all or offer an exhaustive list. Mujtaba’s Tum Dhanak Orrh Lena [Drape the Rainbow Around You] and Pirzado’s Intizari [Waiting] are amazing collections to have come out recently. My friend Jami Chandio once introduced me to Yasir Kachelo. He was a literature buff and used to write poetry only in Urdu. His poems carried the same fragrance and sweetness of the Sindhri mangoes that Kachelo grew in his orchards. He died young.

It is time that the Urdu verse produced by Sindhi writers is taken seriously in the Urdu world of letters across Pakistan, India and other countries. But to begin with, there is a need to strengthen the tradition of Urdu-speaking writers in Sindh who have cherished both Sindhi and Urdu literature, from Ilyas Ishqi and Afaq Siddiqui to Fahmida Riaz and Syed Mazhar Jameel.

The columnist is a poet and essayist based in Islamabad. His latest book is a collection of verse, No Fortunes to Tell

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, March 21st, 2021