Daily Times

Long gone are the Ides of March. April is almost done and soon May, hot weather and mangoes will descend upon us, vying with each other for prominence. Load-shedding will become the major source of political discussion in Pakistan. Other than what is referred to as a ‘black swan’event, anything else of any importance or political significance will await the end of summer, the passage of the month of fasting and the festival of the sacrifice after which we will have a short window between the festival of the sacrifice and the ten days of mourning. What that means is that but for a couple of weeks in September, not much is going to happen in Pakistan until well into October. And by that time perhaps the most important thing that will have happened will be the nomination or not of a new chief of the army staff (COAS). So as far as I am concerned, in Pakistan ‘talking heads’ and op-ed writers like me will be creating ‘crisis’ literally out of thin air to talk about or write about for the next few months.

What this means is that I will devote at least a few of my future ‘essays’ to profound issues like the heat, mangoes, load-shedding and perhaps to insignificant issues like the Panama Papers leaks (PPL), and the appointment of a new COAS. For those of us of a certain age, PPL once stood for something rather important and was, in a way, the precursor of what this newspaper once stood for. Yes dear readers, PPL stood for ‘Progressive Papers Limited’ that included the English language newspaper, The Pakistan Times, the Urdu newspaper Imroz, and the weekly Urdu magazine, Lail-o-Nihar. The editors of these magazines included Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Mazhar Ali Khan, Chiragh Hasan Hasrat, Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi, Sibt-e-Hassan and other such. Interestingly, a couple of decades ago during a chat with the poet Ahmed Faraz I found out that he had for a while worked with Chiragh Hassan Hasrat at Imroz. Interestingly, I have never read any mention of Faraz living or working in Lahore. Of course, Hasrat died in the early 1950s.

While I am thinking about those early years of Pakistan and the PPL, here’s an interesting ‘side bar’. M D Taseer, father of the founder of this newspaper and brother-in-law of Faiz was a persistent critic of the PPL and the ‘progressives’. In Taseer’s collection of Urdu poetry called Aatishkadah (house of fire) many political poems — and indeed he was a prolific political poet —were devoted to opposing and, frequently, denigrating the progressives. Being careful to avoid saying anything derogatory about his relative by marriage, Taseer was entirely dismissive of both the literary capabilities as well as the politics of most progressives surrounding Faiz. That is perhaps one of the things somebody like me finds so sadly missing in the garbage we are subjected to as commentary in TV shows today. Where are the likes of Taseer, the first ‘Indian’ to get a PhD in English literature from Cambridge arguing with the likes of Hasrat or Faiz on matters of politics and literature? If I have misrepresented any ‘facts’ I apologise. At my age entirely depending on memory is fraught with the possibility of error.

As somebody that has been to both Cambridges once asked me, why is there no ‘great’ Pakistani born after 1941. Pakistan is literally bursting at the seams with graduates from Oxbridge and the ‘Cambridge’ across the Charles River and yet most of them seem bereft of intellectual capacity that was so ‘rampant’ in the generation that came before mine. As somebody that once might have been called a Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) ‘jiayala’ (supporter), I include among the list of great Pakistanis Benazir Bhutto who was born after 1941. But other than Bhutto it is indeed difficult to come up with some Pakistani that can actually be called great and was born after 1941.The ‘great Khan’ and the entire Sharif familycan be called anything but not really great. Here I must digress. The history of Pakistanindeed has many people that were indeed great and might have been greater in their particular fields of activity if they had lived longer.In the arena of politics alone, Mohammad Ali Jinnah died a year after Pakistan came into existence, and Liaqat Ali Khan was assassinated before he could be re-elected as prime minister.

When it comes to Urdu literature and particularly to Urdu poetry, the devastation of poetsafter the partition of India was indeed dramatic. Within a few years after the partition, many of the great Urdu poets on both sides died. Mira Jee, M D Taseer, Chiragh Hassan Hasrat, Akhtar Sheerani in Pakistan, and perhaps the best Urdu poet in India at that time, Israr-ul-Haq Majaz also died young and soon after the partition. Yes, we still had Josh and Faiz and many others, but the poetic vibrancy of the pre-partition India was gone. Indeed other than some of my generation few perhaps have ever heard of or read the utterly brilliant Mira Jee. There are three things one must remember about Mira Jee. First, that he fell in love with a Hindu girl called Mira that he never met or tried to meet and yet changed his name to Mira Jee; second that he never ‘changed’ clothes he was wearing, and third that he died very young soon after the partition of India.Also I cannot but wonder whether Ahmed Faraz would be the greatest Urdu poet of his generation in Pakistan if his contemporaries like Nasir Kazmi, Mohsin Naqvi and the brilliant Parveen Shakir had not died young.

Over the next few months I will probably dwell on American politics rather than what goes on in Pakistan.And read the poetry of the likes of Akhtar Shirani and MohsinNaqvi, and remember the days when there actually was a ‘left’ in Pakistan.

The author is a former editor of the Journal of Association of Pakistani descent Physicians
of North America (APPNA)