The fear of being:NM Rashed’s ‘Zindagi se dartey ho?’
Faiz disagreed with Rashed’ life philosophy but respected him as a poet and a friend. Rashed and Faiz studied at Lahore’s famed Government College together
Nazar Mohammad (NM) Rashed (1910-1975) is sometimes called a ‘poet’s poet’. This is, on occasion, a backhanded compliment. It can imply, of course, that he, like the great Hafez of Shiraz (who also received that appellation) occupies a special place in the pantheon of poets.
On the other hand, there are those who derisively claim that Rashed (along with his other free spirited contemporary Sanaullah Dar ‘Miraji’) can be read but never comprehended and that his choice of subjects is incomprehensible, reprehensible or both.
Rashed, of course, would have accepted both opinions of his work. Today, when ‘free verse’ and ‘prose poems’ are often the dominant form of poetic expression, Rashed’s spirit must be smiling in the heavens. Rashed and Miraji made free verse along with the ‘stream of consciousness’ narrative style popular long before it was mainstream. In fact, in the staid world of classical Urdu poetry, their poems were a dramatic break from the past.
As with all things though, an understanding of this style must begin with the social and historical conditions prevailing at the time. Rashed came of age during the depths of the great depression that began in America with the Wall Street crash of 1929 and rapidly spread to the rest of the world. Unemployment, poverty and fear stalked the land. In America itself, one in four people were unemployed and hunger and destitution was everywhere. In India, once the crown jewel of the British Empire, the economic situation was the same. Rashed’s contemporary, Faiz Ahmed Faiz wrote of this time “The shadows of international economic ruin loomed over the land. Many college graduates pounded the pavements in search of a day’s wage. These were the days when children’ laughter died, ruined farmers left their lands in droves to look for work in cities and women of respectable families started selling themselves”. It was during the depths of this social crisis that a group of young men and women formed the All India Progressive Writer’s Association with the express purpose of breaking literature away from the moribund traditions of the past and bring it closer to the concerns of ordinary people.
While the artists associated with the Progressive Writer’s Association Faiz foremost among them but also Sajjad Zaheer, Sibte Hasan, Krishen Chander, Upendranath Ashk, Rajinder Singh Bedi and many other were inspired by socialist ideals and talked of the trials and tribulations of humans trapped in a vicious and exploitative social system, Rashed rejected this framework and along with Miraji formed the ‘Halqa-e Arbab-e Zauq’ (‘Circle of the Friends of Taste’). He did not reject the ideals of struggle but chose to express them in other ways. In his own words “…experimenting with new rhyme arrangements, (I) tried to stress some current problems, foremost among them for me being alien rule, religious dogmatism, moral repressions etc…and to achieve this, I drew upon my personal experience alone rather than the experience of others or any ulterior doctrine’. He goes on ‘while they (the Progressives) stood for a complete suspension of choice on the part of the writer in favor of a preconceived doctrine, I believed that a poet who is honest to his craft must write in the light of his individual perceptions alone’.
Rashed was quite adamant that he was not writing for the masses. His work was aimed towards that section of the middle class intelligentsia which was familiar with Western literature and poetry. This was one reason why his popularity remained limited to certain sections of society. In addition, as Faiz has pointed out, Rashed spent a large part of his life outside Pakistan and living in an alien culture itself causes some estrangement, both from society as well as from oneself.
Rashed however was no traditionalist. His poetry is full of the symbols of protest. His last will and testament itself was a form of protest. He chose to be cremated rather than buried in the traditional Muslim manner.
Faiz disagreed with Rashed’ life philosophy but respected him as a poet and a friend. Rashed and Faiz studied at Lahore’s famed Government College together in the late 1920s and early 1930s though Rashed was a few years ahead of Faiz and was, as Faiz says, ‘King of poets’ (‘Malik us-shoaraa’) when Faiz arrived at the college to start his studies. Faiz mentioned an amusing exchange that the two of them once had when Faiz commented ‘whatever the subject, you turn it into a thesis’ to which Rashed retorted ‘and whatever the subject, you turn it into a ghazal’! Rashed would say ‘you try to simplify everything so people can understand it and praise you’ to which Faiz sould respond ‘and what you write, no one can simplify’.
One of Rashed’s more accessible poems is ‘Zindagi say dartay ho?’ It has been widely read and quoted and expresses, as with all his poems, some basic psychological truths.
It begins:
Scared of Life?
Life is both you and me
Scared of Man?
Man is both of us too.
Man is both language and speech
You are not scared of that!
To the iron bond between word and meaning, Man is tied
To Man, Life is tied
You are not scared of that!
Scared of the ‘un-uttered’
That which has not arrived yet, that moment
Scared of the awareness of its coming!
Eras have passed before,
Of disillusionment, of sincere god-hood
Still you believe, desiring is futile
That this night of forced silence is the divine way!
What do you know
If lips do not move, hands awaken
Hands awaken to point the way
And become the voice of Light
Hands speak to become the morning prayer-call
Afraid of light?
I am light and so are you.
Afraid of light!
On the walls of the city
The giant’s shadow is cleansed
The night’s gown
Ripped into dust
From the human multitude came the cry of One
The voice of the Self
Like the eager blood of the highwayman in the path of Love
A new madness!
Men quivered
Men laughed and cities came to life again
You are already scared?
Since the poem, like many of his poems, is written in the ‘stream of consciousness’ style which requires the writer to write his thoughts and feeling unedited on the paper, some elements of the poem remain obscure. However, like all great artists, Rashed points to the universal human fear of freedom, of responsibility, of life itself. Not just any life but a life free of the constraints of social and moral taboos that remain unquestioned and unchallenged. Faiz referred to this in his famous ‘Do not ask of me, my Love’ as ‘the bestial spells of countless centuries’. Rashed also points to the cleavage, then already developing, between the collective community frozen in place inside the feudal social system which had lasted thousands of years and the cry of individualism, the dominant philosophy of the new bourgeois merchant and business class.
Even if one were to ignore these social-historical signposts, the sheer lyricism of the verses carries one away with its beauty. If it is true that ‘They descend from the heavens, these subjects (Ghalib)’, NM Rashed must have been visited by angels regularly.
(This is an expanded version of the essay that first appeared in the daily Dawn on 9 October 2011, NM Rashed’s 36th death anniversary.)