Despite being impelled to breathe in an irresolute atmosphere that breeds violence, intolerance, bigotry, jingoism and unbridled consumerism, man still wants to fathom the soothing yet complex rhythm of his mind that draws its sustenance from deep rooted despair and fleeting ecstasy. It is the precise reason that one frequently feels tempted to impale the most inextricable emotional knot of life – love – and he feels completely bewildered to realise that humans have become too fragile to sustain love. The dreadful narrative of personal loss can only be scattered to the wind if one reads love poems or love life of the litterateurs. This is what being produced in Urdu literature.
Instead of harping on a rueful discourse of unreciprocated love, the contemporary Urdu poetry goes beyond adolescent fantasy and self absorption and Khurshid Akram’s recently released collection of laconic love poems “Pichhli Peet Ke Karne” produces an innovative and strikingly fresh take on the most frequently articulated theme. In line with it Fay Seen Ejaz’s thorough book “Love Life of the Litterateurs” is a timely intervention that gives a vivid account of romantic and aesthetic sensibilities of 75 eminent poets, writers and visionaries belonging to several countries.
It is intended to capture the attention of those who feels exulted in celebrating St. Valentine’s Day and remain oblivious to the nuanced notion of love. Fay Seen Ejaz, author of nearly two dozen books and the editor of “Insha”, an internationally acclaimed literary magazine, has worked out an authentic and pulsating perspective on understanding the romantic literature. The articles focusing on the creative and social persona of the writers, are reliable, incisive and startling without being offensive or scandalous.
Love has its own morality that subverts all human frailties. Here waywardness coexists with a kind of innocence and this runs through almost all passionate affairs of many prominent classical and modern writers such as Bhartrihari, Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe Jacques Rousseau, Maxim Gorky, Tolstoy Gustav Jung, Charles Dickens, Rabindra Nath Tagore, Meer Taqi Meer, Ghalib, Dostoevsky, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Momin, Iqbal, Munshi Prem chand, Amrita Pritam, Chalam, Michel Madhusudan Dutt, Sarat Chandra Chatterjee, Chandi Das, Khalil Gibran, H.G. Wells, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Charles Baudelaire, Sahir Ludhianvi, and eminent ideologues such as Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Nehru and Nelson Mandela.
The volume also carries writings of Balraj Verma, Mushraf Alam Zauqi, Qateel Shifai, Josh Malihabadi and Khalid Sohail that blurt out their ethical dilemma. The essays draw into a history that is varied, interesting and least understood. The author has also included love poems of some selected poets that betray burst of poetic eloquence. It is a book impossible to put down. It is firmly located in academic vigour and each of its essays focusing on a particular litterateur is a worthy read on its own.
Khurshid Akram’s mettlesome and equally pungent love poems venture beyond overwhelming sense of loss and wipe out the miasma of intimate half-truths and exotic accusations related to sultry adventures. His poems such as “Buzdili” (cowardice) and “Veeran Raste Ki Paimaeesh” (Mapping deserted path) impeccably create an illusion of some wistful experience that still exists to upturn all that summarises the settled life
His poems are emotional without being maudlin and push the reader into contemplation and introspection and the poet’s creative outpouring hardly go into the veracity of his narration. Poems are an elaboration of the turmoil that has overtaken him but they are not evidence for it. The young poet consciously gives up inherent lyricism and hardly ropes in oodles of hyperbole and leaps of reasoning to initiate a dialogue with whom once he loved. The poems included in the collection strive for effacing the noise and they seem to be cathartic in nature. In the humdrum of we more than ever need his creative art. If we refuse to get bogged down by insensitivity then we have to look for poems. “Had it not been the solace provided by the poems the world would have gone to flames,” says Akram.
