The mapping of creative culmination

By Shafey Kidwai

Contrary to the popular perce ption, Urdu poetry is undoubtedly more than the multilayered portrayal of unrequited and obsessive love; it goes well beyond exoticism as many celebrated Urdu poets nuancedly delve into the myriad intricacies of the essentials of day-to-day life. The existence of home and its longing cohabitate in different dimensions of being.

Iftikhar Arif, one of the most widely admired Urdu poets of the subcontinent, whose latest collection “Baagh-e-Gule- Surkh” just appeared brings forth an epiphanic resolution, which is articulated with unmatched creative dexterity. The literary circles of the subcontinent eagerly await his verse after the passing of Faiz Ahmad Faiz, and the connoisseurs of the contemporary poetry tune in on his densely textured verses frequently.

The long-lasting dwelling space is not the locus of one’s existence. House, place of residence and abode are not interchangeable words. Beyond its concrete settings, home betrays a state of mind that tames down the everactive consciousness and explores the lived experience in all its richness, infirmity, complexity, and variety. Home tunes and untunes its residents by combining quotidian and sublime. It is the space created by euphoria and regret and denotes a human hankering for things that might be other than they are. The habitants earnestly long for converting a house of longstanding into a home. It is a threshold and a dream state that confronts adversity and seeks sustenance from the sensual body.

The home not built by bricks but with the texture of our sensibilities becomes the lightbox of longing. Ifthikhar Arif renounces the sentimentalised homesickness and fashions a gripping narrative of habitation. For him, the residence is a means of rapture and continuity that fetches consolation and misery simultaneously. Home denoting coherence, stability, and desires seems elusive.

Since his first poetry collection, Mehr-e- Doneem (1981), Ifthikar Arif has been reckoned a poet who does not regurgitate the traditional themes centred on various dimensions of unfulfilled love, erotic relations, social inequality, and a yearning for the divine. Instead, he adroitly rolled up a new idiom of memory, the mainstay of existence, by juxtaposing spatial and temporal to a repertoire of contrasting elements. The memory conjures it up, and the poet puts it in the Persianised register, but it carries the cadence of the spoken word. Even a trivial object or a nondescript and longforgotten place becomes poetic when the poet wistfully refers to it in his luminous poems.

The poet ingeniously articulates typologies of emotions in a series of sensuous images to make the past simultaneous with the present. Remembrance is a positive emotion wrapped in the tone of loss, and for the poet, it is the creative sorrow that refuses to subside. Memory lays bare a network of possibilities, but an emotional response to deprivation and loss is not portrayed as a lifeaffirming entity. Critics tend to analyse how Ifthikhar Arif employs personal, cultural and religious nostalgia to firm up our grieving and healing processes. He depicts the suffering caused by being away from home, but it is not reduced to bewailing the calamity of separation in a prosaic manner. He zeroes in on the risks and allures of nostalgic pathos as he seems to be fully aware that the idealised past never existed and yearning for lost time cannot upend the irreversibility of time. His many couplets are a cherished part of public memory, and transform an idealised or imagined past into the site of immediate concerns where readers realise that their desire to return home remains unfulfilled despite reaching the places once they lived.

Constant privation on this count will remain unabated as the turn of the clock cannot be reversed. In one of his poems, “That City”, Iftikhar Arif poetically reverberates Immanuel Kant (1724(-1804), who had noted that people who did return home were usually disappointed because they did not want to return a place but to a time, a time of youth. The ever-growing tendency of using nostalgia as a ruse to strengthen discrepant nationalism, chauvinism and fevered religiosity prompted Iftikhar Arif to blend the said and unsaid together to create various dimensions of ironic nostalgia.

Recalling the imagined past does not solve the problem of deprivation. The poet meticulously tries to create a dwelling space with a cliché-free vocabulary that builds solace filled homes for migrant subjects.

Athar Farooqui, secretary Anjuman Tarraqi Urdu Hind, Delhi, published the I