The passing away of Anis Nagi will be received by most of Urdu readers as the death of a writer they have seldom appreciated or met. The reason lies in Nagi's aloofness from the humdrum of literary life characterised by literary sittings, seminars and workshops.
He wrote scores of books and booklets, but without a proper management of marketing. They may not be anywhere except on the shelves of his close friends.
I was one of those few writers he cared for. Once he asked me to contribute a Taqriz to one of his books. It was his translations of Saint-John Perse's poems. I also enjoyed a literary duel with him and Iftikhar Jalib of the Naya Adabi or Nai Shaeri group of the 60s. His book 'Lissani Tashkilat' invited quite a few columns from me. The leader of the movement was Iftikhar Jalib, a far more talented and evocative critic and poet. Iftikhar Jalib succumbed to Ludwig Wittgenstein's views on "language" and started advocating a mathematics-type literary language shorn of redundancies.
Wittgenstein was under the influence of Professor Claude E. Shannon of the MIT, known as the father of modern digital communications and information theory. Wasn't it interesting that the architect of fool-proof language had to become a guide for the young wits of Lahore, over-whelmed by the concept of a universally verifiable language?
The young wits were mainly Iftikhar Jalib, Anis Nagi, Tabassum Kashmiri, Zahid Dar, Abdur Rashid, Salim-ur-Rahman, Yusuf Kamran and Kishwar Nahid. In fiction, they chose Anwar Sajjad as their man. His collection of short stories "Stanze" was hailed as the work of ideal prose.
They made a declaration that the poetry of such classical masters such as Mir Taqi Mir, Ghalib - even Iqbal - should be thrown into the Ravi and Yamuna and only the language such as used by Iftikhar Jalib and Anis Nagi and other members of their group could convey the real meanings of the poets' minds.
It means that the Nai Shaeri School regarded the poetry of other than the poetry of its group full of redundancies and hence only an inauthentic expression. It meant that what the generations of poets have been regarding as 'gems' of poetry were only unchiselled words and dispensable.
This group invited the disagreement of all those who mattered - Faiz, Qasimi and Wazir Agha - only Safdar Mir (Zeno) was on their side. The strange aspect of this group's whimsical advocacy was that they had declared a part of Faiz's Munir Niazi's and N.M Rashid's poetry as acceptable. Why was Munir Niazi's poetry not thrown into the Ravi along with Mir Taqi's, Ghalib's and Firaq's when Nasir Kazmi's and Ahmed Mushtaq's poetry was regarded as comprising mostly 'redundant' language?
They didn't realise that the entire beauty of poetry lay in using a bit illogical language through similes, metaphors and transferred epithets. Not only these but allusions to myths and other figures of speech may not be universally verifiable emotion but it is exactly the warp and woof of poetry right from the times when it became the vehicle of the expression of mankind. The beauties of poetry help a great deal in sharpening the human memory. The prose couldn't afford to rival the magic of poetry, which lies in the 'unpredictable' expression exciting our membranes and hence whetting our memory.
This writer took the school of new poetry on and his book 'Tawazun' (1976), which is under the process of republication by a Lahore publisher is the only book of criticism, challenged the Nai Shaeri or Naya Adabi School, to some effect. Finally it petered off. Some senior critics regarded this polemics as unnecessary but the advice was ignored.
Finally the 'Young Wits' resiled from their stand as they couldn't dump Iqbal into the Ravi on the ground that his poetry couldn't be adjudged as the universally verifiable Wittgenstein vintage nor the poetry of the great tradition of Persian and Urdu poets.
However, this group took refuge in the Prose Poem Movement. Once again they made a mistake. While they thought that only the prose-poem could express the 'real feelings' of poets they turned their cannons against Ghazal and metrical Nazm poetry.
Interesting enough they had to beat a hasty retreat here again and by the late 60s and early 70s the bubble of 'New Poetry' was burst.
However, Anis Nagi proved himself more amenable to reason and accepted that the conventional language was capable of authentic expression provided it was enlivened by new expressions of contemporary, authentic sensibility.
It was an acceptable stand and Anis Nagi's novel 'Deewar ke Peechay', 'Aik Garam Mausam ki Kahaani' and 'Qila' were a departure from the New School prose and followed the conventional language. Quite a retreat! The last two were about 1857 and Afghanistan War and confirm that the return of the native was complete.
As a friend for over 40 years, I can vouchsafe that he was not very generous to most of his contemporaries and thought that they were following the beaten track. One can't find his blurbs and introduction to more than half a dozen books. His 'History of Urdu Literature' was a great failure. He didn't write a history but a manual of chargesheets against contemporary writers. It was his right to be candid and he enjoyed his right to be himself in this way.
Anis Nagi couldn't have a group or any following and he won't be sorry for it as he couldn't expect the young generation of writers would eulogise him.
He was a liberal and enlightened writer and his absence would be mourned by his close circle of friends.
M.A. Akhyar Sahab
Veteran journalist and intellectual M.A. Akhyar has died. It is undoubtedly a great loss to journalism and literature. He was always very kind to his juniors and had a very perceptive eye for quality literature. As editor, he would candidly share his reservations about a certain piece with its author in a paternalistic way.
This writer owes him a great deal of gratitude. My first literary piece on John Elia was published under his editorship in Indus Times in 1962. The very fact that my article on a radical Urdu poet like John Elia didn't invite his disagreement and appeared on the newspaper's editorial page had immensely encouraged me. Afterwards, I wrote quite a few pieces for the Indus Times till he remained its editor. Later on, I met him in the offices of the Times of Karachi, Karachi.
I gave up writing 'Ariel' for Dawn in 2003. As soon as Akhyar Sahab came to know about it he welcomed this column in Business Recorder. "Ariel" has been appearing in the Business Recorder for more than six years and with 40 years of its life in Dawn, it is now 46 years old.
I will always admire Akhyar Sahab's devotion to the memory of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. Whenever I wrote on Sir Syed Ahmed Khan or Aligarh Movement he would say: "We are grateful to you for remembering a great old man who has brought about a great change in the lives of Muslims of India." Akhyar Sahab was a stern but benevolent gentleman whose literary taste was quite a cosmopolitan one.
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