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By Sarwat Ali
Being steeped in tradition, Ahmed Rahi’s was the true voice of the Punjabi ethos
– the same
sweetness and rhythmic flow that is the
characteristic tone of poetry
Ahmed Rahi was a very significant poet of Punjabi because he provided the bridge between the poetry that was orally rendered and poetry that was written.
The Punjabis had switched to writing poetry in Urdu by the turn of the twentieth century as the educational system found no place for their mother tongue. The grand tradition of poetry from Baba Farid to Mian Muhammed and Ghulam Rasul was in a state of crisis as the Punjabis had reduced their poetry to an oral tradition while written poetry was gradually monopolised by Urdu. Most of the major poets of Punjabi had been Muslims, but during the colonial rule and the independence struggle Punjabi suffered at the hands of those ideologues who promoted Urdu as the language of the Muslims and therefore made it an important ingredient of the cultural back up to the independence struggle. Unfortunately Punjabi in due process was perceived as the language of the Sikhs or of the uneducated and the plebeians.
It was left to poets like Ahmed Rahi to restore the veneration of the written word to Punjabi. But his greatness was that he did not let the spontaneity of the spoken language be marred by the well wrought versification of the written form. He retained the spontaneity, and yet wrote poetry about higher concerns of life that had to be taken seriously.
Actually a whole civilisational transition took place with colonial rule. The oral tradition of poetry had suffered a decline, as it was considered to be frivolous and only worthy of a fleeting appreciation. It did not have the depth of the written word which could always be referred back to. But the Sikhs continued to write poetry in their language because Punjabi was venerated by them not for the purposes of literature but for the purposes of religion. As an awareness of ones owns roots grew with nationalism Sikhs wrote poetry in Punjabi. For their most important emerging poet Amrita Preetam, it was an act of compliance, for Ahmed Rahi, a contemporary of hers, writing poetry in Punjabi was an act of defiance.
Soon enough Rahi was recognised as a significant voice among the poets who were coming into their own by the time of independence. The important aspect in his poetry was that he captured the ethos of Punjab. The poetic content was replete with landscape and the various cultural patterns that have regulated the physical and emotional lives of people. The objective surroundings had a deep impact on him and the imagery was all drawn from local resources because he was well versed in the classical tradition of Punjabi poetry. Being fully aware of the rich tradition and the complexity of the idiom, he employed the same idiom but with a contemporary nuance which made tradition come alive without appearing to be static. This was a departure from poetry rendered orally which seemed to have become repetitive and restated the emotional responses without adding anything new or contemporary. But with Rahi his traditional tone was extremely deceptive because it contained much more than the restatement of an emotional encounter.
His being steeped in tradition was the true voice of the Punjabi ethos – the same sweetness and a rhythmic flow that is the characteristic tone of poetry, there was the same longing for the beloved, a helplessness in the face of overriding passion, the same muted contest between the individual and society, though he added the dimension where the rules of the contest were undergoing a change.
He employed for most part the traditional poetic forms as well – the mahiya, the bolis, the tappas but these forms spoke of the contemporary sensibility. There was no loudness in the poetry of Rahi but a sadness that almost bordered on the tragic. A great deal of the poetic experience of Trinjan was drawn from the horrific events of partition. Punjab went through a holocaust as the lives and destiny of millions were changed overnight. The main representative character in his poetry too was the woman and it was her suffering and helplessness that was captured with such great intensity. To be truthful to experience, to be steeped in the ethos of his land and to be sensitive to the sorrows and happiness of the people in his society formed the basis of his progressive outlook. There was hardly any slogan in his poetry – it was the resilience and the will to love that formed the silver lining of a dark and menacing cloud.
Rahi was not a prolific poet and one can also say that his energies were consumed in writing songs for films. It is a pity that only one book of his poetry Trinjan was published as far back as 1952, and it had created such an impact that it ensured his position as a front rank poet. People waited all these years in vain for more of his immense talent to be realised in poetry. He was more prolific where lyrics were concerned and many of his songs composed by the very best film music directors became extremely popular. But to judge his poetic merit on that basis would be erroneous, for his poetic ability was far in excess, and probably did not fully blossom due to this divided attention.
As a person Rahi was the closest that one can get to being a malang. Totally oblivious of worldly gains and self advertisement, he lived a life away from official patronage and demonstrative public adulation. He never spoke about him being a poet of great merit and a song writer of immense popularity. He shunned all this and fitted more in the prototype of a Punjabi Soofi poet who denounced patronage, recognition and luxury. All his life he lived a spartan existence never soliciting rewards for his poetry. He just followed the tradition of his forebears but was an aberration in an age where artistic creativity is for sale to the highest bidder and not a protection from it.