Shahram Azhar: Remembering Habib Jalib
Ik haseen gaaon tha kinaar-e-aab…
Kitna dildaar tha, dayaar-e-aab
Kya ajab, beniaaz basti thay…
Muflisi mein bhi aik masti thay…
Kitne dildaar thay hamaaray dost…
Woh bechaaray, woh besahaaray dost
Habib Jalib died 22 years ago today on 13 March 1993 at the age of 64. Shahram Azhar commemorates the poet’s death
anniversary and explains why the ‘rebel poet’ is still relevant
Early in the summer of 1982, an ageing but still youthful man
sat on the floor of Lahore Jail holding a pen and a few sheets of paper. He
would write in fits and starts: scribble a few lines, stand up, pace around his
cell, hum to himself in an indistinct yet audible voice, return to his
floor-mat, cross out what he had written earlier, and start again. His
cellmates, some of whom I met many years later, recount how he managed to
survive – and how he helped others survive – the demoralizing environment of
captivity that had shaped their lives and those of their countrymen. His poetic
compositions mythologize the ‘struggle’ for which he and his comrades were
being held captive at the time. In the simple metaphor gumbad-e-baydar (a
dome with no exit) is a bird’s-eye perspective of the misery of the moment; it
was to become the title of his third volume of poems.
The man was Habib Jalib and jail was not an alien place to
him. This was to be the seventeenth time that Jalib would be released from
prison, only to return for an eighteenth stint a few years later. His ‘crime’,
the martial law administration declared, was having written ‘inflammatory’
poetry that could potentially ‘destabilize’ Pakistan. For Jalib, however,
disrupting the synthetic sense of ‘security’ and ‘stability’ propped up by
General Zia-ul-Haq’s martial law regime – as indeed by all preceding
dictatorships – was no trivial matter. It had to be done immediately and
consistently if Pakistan were to be salvaged from the troika of Islamic
fundamentalism, military dictatorship and US imperialism that gripped the
country at the time.
Unfortunately, we live in a time when most of Jalib’s fears
have become an experiential reality: religious bigotry, the curtailment of free
thought, mindless nationalism, poverty, and the perpetual loss of economic and
political sovereignty to foreign powers and agendas are some of Pakistan’s
defining characteristics today. Consequently, it has become even more urgent
for young people who wish to change these miserable outcomes to revisit Jalib,
to understand what he stood for and retrace his footsteps. Today, 22 years
after his death, it is important to understand his life and the set of
historical and personal circumstances that made him who he was: a rebel, an
iconoclast, and a communist in the spirit of Mansoor Hallaj.
Born Habib Ahmed in 1928 in Hoshiarpur, northeastern Punjab,
Ahmed’s evolution to ‘Jalib’ – his penname – took place over the course of an
era that spanned the end of British colonialism, the partition of India and the
creation of Pakistan, and continued into the gradual decay of the ideals of
freedom and equality that had originally shaped the anti-colonial movement.
Like millions of other people across partitioned Punjab, the nineteen-year-old
Ahmed was forced to leave his native village amid the communal madness that
ensued in the wake of Partition in 1947. Youngsters such as Ahmed, who had
grown up in colonial servitude, had been promised a new world after independence,
and while he was deeply upset at the loss of childhood friends and memories
during Partition, there was hope that the loss would be reparable in time and
with the newfound ‘independence’ that the sovereign country of Pakistan
promised.
Years later, Jalib would recall this time of his life and
describe it as a ‘story of migration and shattered dreams.’ In a masnavi written
in 1975 and published in his second major work, Zikr Behte Khoon Ka,
Jalib reminisces about his early life:
Ik haseen gaaon tha kinaar-e-aab…
Kitna dildaar tha, dayaar-e-aab
Kya ajab, beniaaz basti thay…
Muflisi mein bhi aik masti thay…
Kitne dildaar thay hamaaray dost…
Woh bechaaray, woh besahaaray dost
A beautiful village by the banks of the river…
How dear was that watery realm.
What wondrous, carefree lives they led.
In poverty too a playfulness.
How dear were our friends,
Our hapless, unmoored friends.
Once in Pakistan, Jalib moved to Karachi and became a
proofreader for the Urdu newspaper Imroz whose chief editor
was the Lenin Peace Prize-winning poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz. This interaction had a
deep impact on Jalib and, in many ways, marked a paradigm shift in his
understanding of art and its purpose and place in society. It was in the company
of Faiz and his Progressive Writers Association (PWA) peers that Jalib found
himself yearning to produce quality, inspirational art: art that did not serve
the contemplating bourgeoisie but, rather, aroused the public to the notion
that it was right to rebel.
Consequently, Jalib – who had been writing Urdu
poetry since primary school – turned his poetic attention away from personal
‘romance’ to the cause of human emancipation. This dismayed some of his
contemporaries who argued that the artist should occupy himself with the
tranquility and tremors of personal love and use poetry to depict the lighter
side of life and romance in the classical Urdu tradition. They criticized him
for writing in, what they considered, a ‘commoner’s’ tone and a style unsuited
to the ‘intellectual’ poet. To this, Jalib responded:
Jo sadayain sun raha hun, mujhe bus unnhi ka ghum hai
Tumhain sher ki pari hai, mujhe aadmi ka ghum hai
The cries I hear, to which I tend:
You fret over verse, I despair for men.
With an official ban on the Communist Party and the PWA in
the aftermath of the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case in 1951, the writing and
dissemination of anti-status-quo material became a crime in Pakistan. If the
ruling military junta had hoped to finally curtail any dissent, it soon received
a rude awakening. Barely a year after the Ayub dictatorship had taken over in
1958, a mushaira organized and aired by Radio Pakistan from
Rawalpindi broadcast the following words:
Kahin gas ka dhuan hae
Kahin golion ki barish.
Shab-e-ahd-e-kam-nigahi
Tujhe kis tarah sarahein?
Here, the stench of teargas,
There, a hail of bullets.
In the twilight of such darkness,
What praises must we sing of You?
Jalib was immediately arrested and banned from participating
in any publicly aired programs on Radio Pakistan. This did not deter him and
he was once again imprisoned three years later for reading Dastoor (The
Constitution) – a powerful and moving critique of the anti-poor Ayub
constitution of 1962 – at a public rally.
The poem effectively went viral: in a matter of days, the
slogan ‘Mein nahin maanta, mein nahin jaanta’ (I refuse to acknowledge! I
refuse to accept!) became an idiom of resistance to General Ayub Khan’s regime
across Pakistan. The tug-of-war between pro-democracy forces and the
dictatorship culminated in the 1965 Ayub-versus-Fatimah Jinnah election
campaign, in which Jalib stood firmly by the Quaid’s sister. While Ayub was
able to defeat Jinnah in a rigged election, the military regime failed to
curtail the popular sentiment that eventually led to the people and students’
revolt of 1968/69. Most of Jalib’s poetry from this period was published in his
first collection, Sir-e-Maqtal, and remains key to grasping the social and
political context of the time.
The rise of General Yahya Khan, and later Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto, led to the breakup of Pakistan in 1971. Jalib saw this as a product of
the ethnocentric and elitist policies of a central government that was
monopolized by an agrarian feudal elite and an army unwilling to cede political
space to genuine nationalist movements. While many left-leaning intellectuals
became inspired by Bhutto’s ‘socialist’ reforms, Jalib remained a firm critic.
On one particular occasion, Bhutto personally asked Jalib to join the Pakistan
People’s Party, to which the poet responded: ‘Kabhi samandar bhi dariya mein
utray hain? (‘When has the sea ever merged with the river?’).
Despite
remaining a vociferous critic of Bhutto’s policies during his regime, Jalib
remained true to his creed and immediately joined the Movement for Restoration
of Democracy, which was launched in the aftermath of Zia’s dismissal of the
Bhutto government in 1977. For most of the 11 years that Zia ruled Pakistan,
Habib Jalib remained in jail; his books Zikr Behte Khoon Ka and Gumbad-e-Baydar were
published and subsequently banned during this period.
When democracy returned in 1988/89, Jalib reminded his
people that this was not the destination, but rather, the means to the end
Habib Jalib died 22 years ago today on 13 March 1993 at the
age of 64. As a third-generation descendant of migrants from the same district
of Hoshiarpur and Jullundur to which Jalib, too, belonged, I have found in his
poetry an explanation of what my grandparents would also talk about in their
tales of shattered dreams and solitude. But Jalib did not just interpret the
world as he saw it. He was not a pacifist who merely sought to ‘explain.’ In
fact, Jalib embodied the Marxian dictum that we must not only interpret the
world, but also actively seek to change it. This is why Jalib must be read and
sung and his message communicated to the widest possible audience. Now more
than ever.
