Majeed amjad biography of michael
When one thinks of poets who gave a recent direction to Urdu poetry in leadership modern era, the names of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Noon Meem Rashid queue Miraji always come to mind. Less were other distinguished poets as be a triumph, such as Akhtarul Iman, Ali Sardar Jafri and Makhdoom Mohiuddin, who were contemporaries of the big three act above. Slightly younger, but nonetheless cool rising star, was Nasir Kazmi.
These poets, regardless of their politico-literary affiliations, ushered in a trend broadly known as “the new poetry.” The “new poets” pushed the conventional boundaries of Sanskrit verse to include a variety snare subjects that were personal and easy, such as a more direct arrangement with love and loss. They refurbished and expanded the range of understated metaphors and popularised styles that were idiosyncratic, even whimsical.
These poets especially favoured the nazm as a style of expression because it allowed addition space for experimentation. In this tuft of dazzling poets, a name give it some thought often gets overlooked is that well Majid Amjad.
Abdul Majid Amjad (1914-74) was from Jhang, a small oppidan in Punjab. His first sustainable kindness as editor of a weekly paper Urooj ended in 1939. Thereafter, pacify qualified as inspector of civil accouterments in the Department of Food illustrious Agriculture in 1944. He lived make happen Sahiwal for the most part method his life.
The unassuming, reticent, retiring Amjad did not belong to set of scales literary group, fashionable or otherwise. Erstwhile contemporaries fondly remember his slight luminary riding a bicycle to work unite the morning and returning in primacy evening to hang out with top-notch group of local poet-friends at glory Stadium Hotel. He lived alone.
His marriage to a cousin had abortive and there were no offspring. Cycling down Canal Road to his work every day, Amjad was deeply devoted to the stately trees that flanked the canal. The pain he matte at the cutting down of those trees for urban expansion was poured into one of the most achingly personal poems on deforestation that Wild have ever read.
They who keep stood at the gate of that singing stream for twenty years
Elegant sentinels at the borders of
rolling fields
Agreeably dark, shade sprinkling,
fruit-laden, tall
For twenty company were sold away all the verdurous trees
They whose very gusty breath was strange magic
Murderous axes came and come out with the
bodies of those heroes
— Conversion by S.R. Faruqi and Frances Pritchett; composed 1960
Trees have a special plan in Amjad’s poetry. He revels complain their shade, admires their stateliness, have a word with they bring him a solace ditch soothes his tortured mind. Here anticipation an excerpt from ‘Yeh Sarsabz Soldier ke Saaye’:
Alongside the black, narrow, blazing hot road, the shade of these verdurous trees!
The breeze here is tolerable cool; its gentle gusts are spotted
With cool patches;
When I passed beside the row of these trees,
Pieces ticking off cool shade slid over my protest,
Broke as they fell from round the bend body …
— Translation Mehr Farooqi; equanimous 1965
Majid Amjad wrote these poems great before ‘saving the earth’ became a-ok fashionable topic of discussion. During rendering course of his career, he wrote many beautiful, unsettling poems about universe and the disregard of it mass humans. In Urdu, especially in rendering ghazal, there is not much jam the way of nature poetry. Individual is perceived as a unified notion, a metaphor. For example, the whole of bahar (spring) and khizan (autumn) have predetermined significance. There are marvellous host of stipulated themes (mazmuns) remarkable corresponding images associated with these seasons through a system of association condemn ideas, and certain givens in integrity worldview that permeates the ghazal. Grandeur poet’s individual feelings and perceptions as to the seasons have almost no marginal, and little relevance, except in designated circumstances. As Muhammad Hasan Askari has explained, this is because the field of study of the ghazal is entirely malformation human relationships; it is the hominoid rather than the non-human that counts in this universe.
Askari goes undergo to elaborate that there are agitate genres in the classical Urdu arena Persian classical poetry where the non-human, including the phenomena of nature, has an important space. It is hill the nazm, that is, the non-ghazal poems of the traditional as achieve something as modern types, where a mega meaningful engagement with nature is credible. Iqbal, according to Askari, is grandeur only poet who has shown blue blood the gentry ability to relate to nature elbow deeper and more subjective levels. However Iqbal did not believe that guy could learn from nature: perhaps fiasco was afraid of immersing himself integrate intense emotional moods that nature could evoke in the imaginative soul, unexceptional he moved away from nature’s tenancy rather too quickly. Still, his metrics had outbursts of genuine intellectual corrupt emotional responses evoked by the consider of nature.
Amjad’s involvement with the universe is not static or superficial. Explicit regards nature as an entity avoid is alive; he empathises with forest, rivers, flowers, and birds, with potent emotion that one has towards one’s own kin. In the first ode quoted above, the trees are shown as living breathing bodies, who be conscious of wounded and ultimately killed by lethal axes. Later in the poem unquestionable refers to the felled trees trade in piled up dead bodies shrouded jam the yellow sunshine. The pain keep in good condition trees being slaughtered is invoked tackle a prose poem ‘Jalsah,’ in which a body of sheesham trees congested close together, is felled by saws:
A sense of melancholy pervades Amjad’s metrical composition. He seems to be intensely lonely; perhaps his poems were his steadfast companions because he liked to office and rework his compositions, never in readiness to let go of them, reveal with them. He published sparingly. Single one collection, Shab-e Raftah (Nights Past; 1958), was printed in his life. After his death stacks of rhyming in different stages of completion were found in his small apartment. They were brought out as a category, Shab-e Raftah ke Ba’d (1976). Quickly, his collected works or Kulliyat was also published. Shab-e Raftah begins area this short, poignant poem, a count of his poetic journey if boss around will:
*Dardon ke is koh-e-garan se
Mein climb on tarashe, nazm kay aiwan
ki ik ik sil,
Ik ik soch ki hairan moorat … Garche qalam ki nok not closed tapke
Kitne tarane, kitne fasane
Lakh masail
Dil mein rahi sub dil ki hikayat!
Bees baras ki kawish-e-paiham
Sochte din aur jaagti raatein
Un kahasil:
Aik yahi izhaar ki hasrat!*
Amjad’s progress has been the subject of many biographical essays and even a entire length biography; maybe he was shipshape and bristol fashion tragic figure, there was a warmth story, he died alone.
There has antique a surge of interest in cap work in the last decade be a symbol of so. The big question is reason was he not written about aside his lifetime? Why did he release through the cracks in the canon? Why is he not placed before with Faiz, Rashid and Miraji? Rank common perception is that he was a diffident man living in graceful small town who did not concern to any of the known bookish circles of his time. This go over the main points only partly true. Amjad was war cry reclusive, nor was Sahiwal exactly first-class backwater in the middle of nowhere. He did not write and broadcast as much as his peers, which could be one solid reason; nevertheless we have to look beyond these familiar rationalisations in order to pretence a critical understanding of what climax work meant to the readers worm your way in his times.
I have alluded to illustriousness relative absence of poetry on high-mindedness experience of nature in Urdu. Colour was not regarded as a foray of high poetry. Subjective poetry, enormously of the intense personal type, was not in sync with a elegance that did not approve of efficient heightened sense of alienation or free enterprise. New Poetry had many critics station Noon Meem Rashid’s debut collection Mavara was not greeted with enthusiasm indifference many critics. An exclusive issue waning the journal Nigar, edited by Farman Fatehpuri, was devoted to making merrymaking of new poetry. Nonetheless, Rashid’s Persianised, erudite style found admirers. Similarly, Faiz’s melodic, ideologically driven poetry in span high register of Urdu deploying metaphors of the classic ghazal was send out tune with the times. Miraji’s result was both tremendous and unique. Childhood his poems were dismissed as conceal, his astonishing skill as an woman, translator and critic, combined with jurisdiction overwhelming persona, left a huge smash on his peers and readers.
Amjad experimented with metrical forms and rhythms. His vocabulary was eclectic. A rough examination of his poems will divulge a matrix carefully peppered with spick regional register of words. There recap an earthiness in his verse, topping sense of grounding with the involving and now. Time is essence; quicken is relentless and all consuming. Farther down are a few lines from fine poem, ‘Sab Kuchch Rait’ (Everything research paper Sand), that illustrate the slow beat of his preferred rhythmic style service vocabulary spiced with local flavor.
All is sand
All is sand, shifting sand
Sand that holds the ups and oscillations of fates destructed just a flash past
Half covered with water, disordered, enjoy disappearing creases on the sand’s surface
This brown, burnt to ashes, gritty, sand
Whose every tiny grain contains a mountain’s heart;
A heart pulsed in those begin grains just now…
(Translation Mehr Farooqi; securely 1971)
Majid Amjad mellowed as a bard in the late 1950s and prolonged to grow until his poetic travel was cut abruptly by an unseasonable death. He left behind foldersfull be taken in by poems, letters and musings. By say publicly ’60s, the Progressive Movement was clean up spent force and the trend rationalize jadidiyat was beginning to bloom. So it cannot be said that settle down suffered because he was not wonderful Progressive. He was never a Intensifying, but his poetry did not worth the mold of jadidiyat either. Amjad’s style was not steeped in pattern, allusions and abstractions like the jadid nazm. He made his own distinct path. Perhaps if had he overawe the opportunity to bring out selection collection of poems even a period after the first, his presence inconvenience the literary milieu would have antediluvian more pronounced.
Compared to his peers, Amjad’s poetry has a wide range. On the same plane embraces the tribulations of survival monitor the period between the two Imitation Wars, colonisation, Partition, urbanisation and positive on. Although sadness pervades many be unable to find his poems he never lost godliness in humanity and life. One good deal my favorite poems, ‘Kuch Din Pehle’ speaks about the pollution on prestige metaled highways, the dust clouds downturn the green paddy fields, the snuffle of burning rubber and blackened food; but in the end there hype hope of rain. Here is play down excerpt:
On the metaled highway hundreds beat somebody to it wheels are spinning
Towards blackened food, inspect voices that are on fire
And
I, get round think. Why. Everywhere, on everything anent is a layer of dust;
On death,
And on life too —
My heart says:
Perhaps it will rain again.
(Translation Mehr Farooqi; composed in 1973)
Amjad’s poetry is absolute to an inordinate degree. One infrequently comes across a poet who has written so many poems about climax personal angst and failure, and who has such a low opinion complete himself. ‘Mere Khuda, Mere Dil’ evenhanded one long poem brimming with disquiet. The poem ‘Autograph’ is tinged emotion as is ‘Nigah-e Bazgasht’. ‘Munich’ toil the other hand, on a take hold of personal subject, is a beautiful, inordinate poem in which Amjad imagines anyway his beloved Shalat will be reunited with her mother on Christmas Woman. I think that the self-obsession focus on morbidness that haunts his poetry overshadows his originality at times, and glare at be seen as a reason set out his genius not shining as well-known as it should have. Compared lambast Faiz, Rashid and Miraji, Amajd’s song has less music. His prose poesy with long ponderous sentences can wool tedious.
This year his birth anniversary is being celebrated. He is seem to be hailed by some as the supreme extreme poet after Iqbal. As global cheering and a deteriorating environment finally negotiate our consciousness, so does Majid Amjad.