Ghulam Hussain Sajid's A'naser (elements) - By Professor Dr. Saadat Saeed

 

If a poet claims that he has experienced new realities and created novou dreams it is his artistic duty to reflect them in a type of language completely different from the traditional one.

Ghulam Hussain Sajid is a poet whose poetry is flavoured absorbingly with bunches of his fresh imagination, having the spirit of social consciousness. His latest poetic collection has just appeared in the market. This collection contains Ghazals written in the perspective of elements of life.

Sajid seems to be a great discoverer as he has discovered dream as a new element besides the traditional elements of life: clay, water, fire and air. Expressing his opinion about Sajid's poetry Muzaffar Ali Sayed a bilingual aesthete states, "To me Ghulam Hussain Sajid should be kept in the company of those few new writers who have made their creative ability the example of artistic learning and cultural coupling.

His collection Mausam (1985) was considered as a bridge between traditional Ghazal and modern verse. In A'nasir we see a new city appearing around it. "In this collection Sajid has tried to reunite his dreams on the foundation of his existence, which already is processed by four traditional elements of life.

Sajid's Ghazal reveals the aesthetic taste he achieved during the process of his literary studies. Being a modern poet he always hankers after unused expressions. Though Sajid's latest poetic collection has appeared after a long time, he has kept intact his repute and has broken many a literary ground in it. The art of this collection lies in the philosophical attitude of the poet, which forced him to comprehend his experiences in a meaningful totality. Flipping through its pages even an ordinary reader can well imagine the classy quality of the poetic skill the poet possesses. Mirza Hamid Beg has revealed in the preface of this book that in Sajid's poetry the totality of the poetic character combines and develops all the ranges of his experiences. The Ghazals published in this collection are dramatic, daring and stunning. For Hamid Beg breaking down of the traditional linguistic structures, forms and rhythms could be named nothing but craziness, and he claims Sajid does not indulge him in it. Mirza Hamid Beg himself is a communicative story- teller, how can he be aware of the fact that in poetry a poet writes the essence of his subjectivity, which can necessitate the birth of an entirely new language. During the process of writing the experiences of their pure subjectivities, Iftikhar Jalib and one or two of his followers broke down old Urdu linguistic structures and tried to create and construct a poetic language suitable to their experiences and passions. In western literature even in their prose, James Joyce and Eugine Ionesco could not avoid to create a new language in portraying their experiences. In this connection we can seek help from Jean Paul Sartre, who writes rightly in the notes of his widely read article  “What is Writing" "Originally poetry creates the myth, while the prose writer draws its portrait. In reality the human act, governed by needs and urged on by the useful is, in a sense a means. It passes unnoticed, and it is the result, which counts. ---- Poetry reverses the relationship: the world and things become inessential, a pretext for the act, which becomes its own end. The vase is there so that the girl may perform the graceful act of filling it; the Trojan War, so that Hector and Achilles may engage in that heroic combat. The action, detached from its goals, which become blurred, becomes an act of prowess or a dance." Sartre further says poetic language rises out of the ruins of prose. If it is true that word is a betrayal and that communication is impossible, then each word by itself recovers its individuality and becomes an instrument of our defeat and a receiver of the incommunicable." In this context we can refer to the major portion of the poetry by a Persian poet Mirza Abdul Qadir Bedil and Urdu poet Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib which of course is incommunicable in its very nature. So Mirza Hamid Beg should reconsider seriously his views on language and poetry. How an incommunicable subjective experience can be captured in traditional linguistic structures. And it goes without saying that new linguistic structures created to capture the new and unique experiences in their totality can bamboozle traditional critics like Mirza Hamid Beg and Muzaffar Ali Sayed whom the intellectuals benefited by them declare modern and new. Ghulam Hussain Sajid's outlook and way of expressing his subjective experiences indicate his capabilities to create new linguistic structures. And we think in this connection he can make his Ghazals more dramatic, daring and stunning in the real sense of the words. Though Sajid's predecessor Zafar Iqbal now has completely forgotten his artistic new experiences projected in his collection 'Gulaftab.' Under the great influence of the movement of linguistic formation in Urdu, he should project his real experiences emerging from the unique world of his dreams and realities. .