Masoodul Hassan Tabish Dehlavi
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Masoodul Hassan Tabish Dehlavi
April 29, 2007
OPINION: A disciple, but not quite
By Humair Ishtiaq
FROM the puritanism of classical poets to the anarchy of modern-day exhibitionists, Masoodul Hassan Tabish Dehlavi lived long enough to experience the entire spectrum of literary linguistics. Having rubbed shoulders with the high and mighty of his time, it needs to be taken as some achievement that he still could find his own footing in terms of style and diction. As the fable goes, the late Dr Zakir Husain once visited the Delhi radio station where Tabish was a young broadcaster.
Introducing him to the visitor, the station head said, “Dr Husain, this is Tabish Dehlavi, one of our best announcers. He writes ghazals in the style of Fani.” While Tabish was getting mentally ready to be admired and appreciated for following in the footsteps of the legendary Fani, there came the retort from Dr Husain, “Why not in his own style?” That must have made Tabish realise the folly he was committing in his youthful infatuation with the fantastically cynical Fani.
Regardless of whether or not this episode was the turning point in his life, the fact remains that though Tabish’s love affair with Fani continued till he himself crossed over into eternity a few years ago, his poetic philosophy and phraseology took little time in growing out of the mould of his mentor where death happens to be the prism through which Fani loved to see the world. Not many Urdu poets could reach the level of Fani in respect of the portrayal of pathos.
But Tabish had no such limitations and that enabled him to have an idiom that is diverse, a diction that is lucid, and an imagery that is acceptable to an audience of varied and assorted palate. The element of pathos is, indeed, very much there in Tabish’s poetry, but it has a touch of Ghalib’s pragmatism. The compilation of his entire works, Kisht-i-Nawa, that has recently hit the shelves, bears ample testimony to it.
The voluminous anthology, apart from his poetic offerings, contains well over a couple of hundred pages of prose dealing with reminiscences, sketches and a bit of critique. Therein one can see his efforts as a dedicated disciple of Fani to justify his guru’s approach. His interpretation is not just interesting but also valid for he spent so much time with him. In that context, the anthology enables the reader to not just enjoy some wonderful poetry but also to have a better understanding of the phenomenon that Fani was. This in itself would be more than worth the effort to browse through the tome that Kisht-i-Nawa is.
When the inner feelings are intense, says Tabish, they sometime have opposite outward manifestations. We all laugh but only rib-splitting laughter leads to tears in the eyes.
Fani, he asserts, was more pragmatic than the most hard-nosed pragmatist, and more optimistic than the most sunshine-in-the-pocket optimist. Now this is interesting stuff for it might have left even Fani a bit flabbergasted. But Tabish does not lay claim for nothing; he has his arguments and they do have a ring of logic about them. When the inner feelings are intense, says Tabish, they sometime have opposite outward manifestations. We all laugh but only rib-splitting laughter leads to tears in the eyes. Even otherwise, light is essential for clear vision, but dazzling light in an environment leads to blurred vision and causes momentary blindness. Poison kills but is used in authentic medical concoctions for just the opposite purpose; to save lives. Fani’s apparent fascination with death, he argues, was of a similar nature.
He used the idiom of death and the desperation of death in his poetry as the biggest proof of one being alive.
Since Tabish himself was an eminent poet of stature and spent some of the more meaningful years in his life with Fani, he deserves to have the last word on this count, but this does remind me of a recent interaction with Intizar Hussain where our rambling discourse moved towards the equation between a creative writer and a literary critic. “I simply tell a tale when I have the urge. It is only after going through the narrations of literary critics afterwards that I come to know of ‘particular meanings’ in my story, or the ‘blatant bias’ in one dialogue or the other,” he had remarked with a twinkle in his eyes. Had he been around, Fani might have had occasion to agree with Intizar!
However, to Tabish’s credit, it is quite difficult, if not impossible, for the lesser mortals to decipher the mystifying ways in which a creative mind works.
Contrary to the impression that might have been generated by the foregoing, the anthology basically relates to Tabish’s own poetry and not to his interpretations or criticism of Shaukat Ali Khan Fani Badayuni. And therein lies the fun. It is all in the classical mould where the nuances and aesthetics of the language reign supreme. Tabish’s poetry is nothing but liquid grace that has a sublime flow. It is first-rate stuff, indeed.
Kisht-i-Nawa is published by Kul Pakistan Halqa-i-Adab, C-21, Fourth Floor, Shelazone Centre, University Road, Gulshan-i-Iqbal, Karachi. Tel: 021-4972413. Price: Rs600
