His parents wanted him to be a maulvi, but Kaifi Azmi chose protest and hope over God
Naresh Nadeem on Kaifi Azmi
Born as Athar Hussain Rizvi on January 19, 1919, in a Shia landlord family of Mazwan village in Azamgarh, Kaifi travelled an arduous road to fame.
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Young Athar saw the cruel oppression of peasantry in his own village, making him a life-long enemy of the zamindari system. His parents had sent his older brothers to Aligarh to get a western education and they wanted a maulvi in the family. So, the mantle fell on Athar. He was sent to Sultan-ul-Madaaris, a Lucknow-based seminary where Shia boys were educated to become clerics. But as fate would have it, the boy turned into a staunch opponent of all that a maulvi symbolises.
An early influence on Athar was Angaaray, a short story collection that stormed the Urdu literary world when it came out in 1933. It included five stories by Sajjad Zaheer (Banne Bhai), others by Mehmooduz-Zafar, his wife Rasheed Jahan and Ahmed Ali, who later wrote an English novel Twilight in Delhi. Angaaray shook the traditional Indian Muslim society to its very core with its boldness occasionally bordering on obscenity, transgressing the accepted norms of “decency”. The great Urdu/Hindi writer, Premchand, welcomed the book, albeit guardedly. He said these young writers wanted to say something different from what older people like him were prepared to listen to, and that their voice must be heard and pondered over even if one differed from them. But the Muslim clergy of the day issued an edict against the book, asking the community not to read or buy it. The British government proscribed the book.
But while some people publicly fulminated against the book, many of them read it with relish in private. Like the maulvis teaching at Sultan-ul-Madaaris. They shut themselves in a room everyday during the lunch recess to read these stories. The stifled laughter from behind the closed door naturally aroused the curiosity of their students. It was Athar Hussain who finally stumbled upon the secret, and somehow procured himself a copy of Angaaray. The book transformed his outlook, and he eventually joined the ranks of Ismat Chughtai, Rajinder Singh Bedi and Saadat Hasan Manto, who were all influenced by Angaaray and became, in a sense, its literary successors.
It was around this time that the young Athar began to send his poems to a progressive Urdu magazine of Lucknow under an assumed name. The pieces were appreciated but also aroused curiosity about the poet. He had composed his first ghazal at the age of 11, but the intervening 8 or 9 years had sharpened his thinking. He was not afraid of his conservative parents or teachers but feared his poems may not meet the standards already set in this field.
Fortunately, Sardar Jafri spotted his talent and introduced him to Sajjad Zaheer and other leading figures of the Progressive Writers Association (PWA). Soon, in the wake of the Quit India movement, the young poet quit the seminary. As short story writer Ayesha Siddiqui put it: “Kaifi sahib was admitted to Sultan-ul-Madaaris to learn how to recite fatiha. Instead, he read fatiha on religion itself and came out.”
In 1943, Kaifi came to Bombay and began to work with the undivided Communist Party’s Urdu journals Qaumi Jung and Mazdoor Mohalla. He retained his association with the movement till the last; his faith in socialism remained intact even when the USSR disintegrated.
While in Bombay, Kaifi also developed into a talented stage actor and helped form the Indian People’s Theatre Association (1943) with stalwarts like Balraj Sahni, Manmohan Krishna and A.K. Hangal. (He also served as IPTA chairman for some time.) A glimpse of his acting talents can be seen in Saeed Mirza’s film Naseem, where he plays the grandfather. It was at a mushaira in Hyderabad in 1947 that he first met Shaukat. She was not only an enlightened girl—a rare thing for the time—but also active in theatre. He wooed and married her. This union of hearts owed more to theatre than to poetry.
Kaifi established himself as a poet of protest with his very first collection Jhankar (1943), and his reputation grew with Aakhir-e-Shab (1947) and then Awara Sajde that came out a quarter century later. Besides these, there is the collection of lyrics which he wrote for Bollywood.
Kaifi’s poetry, composed over a span of six decades, includes some memorable verse like ‘Makaan’. The poem opens with a ringing call:
‘Tonight here blows a wind too hot;/To us on the footpath, sleep comes not./Let me, and you, and you, arise all,/A window will appear in this very wall!’
Much has been said about one of his last poems ‘Doosra Banwaas’, penned after the demolition of the Babri Masjid. The vivacity of his style can be seen here in its full glory. Yet, the poem is just a continuation of what he had already written on the issue of bigotry, fanaticism and communalism. ‘Bahuroopani’, for instance, forthrightly exposes these evils without mincing words. And no less relevant are the poems like ‘Ibn-e-Maryam’, where he gives vent to his anguish over the failure of religion to create a better world for mankind. He arouses our sense of disgust with the imagery of a Christ icon adorning a den of smugglers.
Perhaps, the most important poem of this genre is ‘Peer-e-Tasma-Pa’:
‘Riding my shoulders, someone chants/Bible and Vedas and Quran/Flies keep buzzing near my ear;/With mine ears so injured,/My own voice how can I hear!’
The poem uses the symbolism of an old man forcibly riding Sindbad the sailor’s shoulders, crushing him under the dead weight of myths. The poem lambasted both Hindu and Muslim bigots. But Muslim clerics took exception to the reference made to the Prophet’s journey to the moon and compelled the government to ban Awara Sajde when it came out. The poem is missing from the anthology Sarmaya, too. Instead, we read the following couplet: Wa hasrata ki kitne sukhan-haye-guftani/Khauf-e-ataab-e-khalq se na-gufta reh gaye (How sad that a number of things worth talking about, couldn’t be talked because of the fear of people’s outrage!)
Kaifi was among the poets invited to a mushaira at The Grand Eastern Hotel, Calcutta, in 1971, to collect relief for the refugees pouring in from then East Pakistan during the civil war there. Some hecklers had planned to disrupt the function. But the late Zo Ansari, a renowned poet and critic, took the mike and explained to the audience the liberal, secular tradition of Urdu poetry, and situated ‘Peer-e-Tasma-Pa’ in that tradition. The result: the audience not only listened to the controversial satirical poem with rapt attention but even demanded more from Kaifi.
The same satirical talent scaled new heights in Kaifi’s weekly column ‘Nayee Gulistan’ which he wrote for about a decade (roughly 1963-73) in the Urdu Blitz. It was political satire written in prose, but this prose itself was no less poetic—of the same genre that we find in his verse dialogues for Heer Ranjha. His language has a flavour of its own and the column delved into the intricacies of politics during that period. (Ambien)
As for what he wrote for Bollywood for half-a-century, it is not as voluminous as what, for instance, Anand Bakhshi wrote. My estimate: 240 lyrics for 79 films. One has to accept that he was neither as lyrical as Shakeel or Shailendra, nor do his songs have the freshness of idiom that we discern in Saahir or Jan-Nisar Akhtar.But the words that Kaifi gave to songs in Pakeeza or in Garam Hawa, or his lyrics in Kaagaz ke Phool, Arth, Haqeeqat, Heer Ranjha and several other films do have an abiding value. But it is as a poet of hope—one who was certain that a better tomorrow was just around the corner even if he did not live to see it—that he will be remembered. In his own words:
Bahaar aaye to mera salaam kah dena/Mujhe to aaj talab kar liya hai sehre ne! (When spring comes, give her my regards/Me the desert has already called).
Leaving The Land In Your Care, Friends