Re: Disowning History
interesting
AUTHOR: Song of thirsty peacocks -DAWN - Books and Authors; December 25, 2005
Shaikh Ayaz’s mother was a Hindu who converted to Islam before marrying his father, a Persian poet by the name of Shaikh Ghulam Hussain. In his home Shaikh Ghulam Hussain kept all kinds of books on a variety of subjects. There were books in Persian, Urdu and Hindi. That is probably why Shaikh Ayaz became fluent in all the three languages when he was just a primary-level student. “For me Hafiz, Omar Khayyam and other great poets of the East were no new names,” he wrote in his autobiography.
The Shikarpur of pre-partition days was the hub of cultural and political activities. It was famous for people with different religious backgrounds. The city was also known for its well-stocked libraries. According to an old librarian of the Masoum Shah Library of Sukkur, the young Ayaz, fond of reading that he was, had left no book unread.
Ayaz started penning poems at the age of 12. His first poem was published in the magazine Sudershan. His teacher Khaildas Fani called him a “little poet with a vision”. Ayaz became known in the literary circles of Sindh soon after his work started getting published in Sindhu, a monthly literary magazine.
Partition left a deep scar on Ayaz’s soul. His friends, many of whom were Hindu, migrated to India and Ayaz stopped writing poems in Sindhi. From then on he began to write in Urdu and also became famous in the Progressive Writers of Pakistan. He translated the Shah Jo Risalo in Urdu. His two collections of Urdu, Boi-i-Gul and Nel Kanth aur Neem ke Pattey, were well-received though not as well as his Sindhi verses.
Finally it was Muhammad Ibrahim Joyo from his alma mater, who persuaded the poet to return to Sindhi poetry. Once Shaikh Ayaz said, “Although I was popular among the Urdu literary circles, I could only achieve my destiny in my mother tongue.” And with this he bid farewell to Karachi and returned to Sukkur.
But Sukkur was not as inspiring for a poet as he had hoped it would be. Being a lawyer by profession he got busy with his practice in Sukkur till the One Unit was imposed on the provinces which created unrest in the political and literary classes. Sindhi authors, poets, short story writers and political workers gave vent to their sentiments in the changed climate. Ayaz reached new heights. His revolutionary poems of those days are some of his best work ever. The following line is from one of his most famous poems of that time which was sung by Fakir Abdul Ghafoor:
“Sindhri tey ser ker na dendo, sahando ker mayar. Oh yaar”
(Who’ll not sacrifice his life for Sindh, who would dare to face this humiliation?)
This was the poem that literally shook Ayub Khan’s regime. Shaikh Ayaz’s books were banned. He was even arrested and kept in Sukkur jail for several months during the 1965 Pakistan-India war. However, this only added more passion to his work. He became an icon for Sindhi youth. He was again put behind bars in 1968 on charges of treason, this time in the Sahiwal prison where Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was his jail mate. Ayaz compiled his jail experiences in a beautifully written jail diary titled Sahiwal Jail Ji Diary which has now also been translated into Urdu.
Ayaz was arrested three times during the Yahya regime. He was labelled as an Indian agent. One of his masterpieces, Kulhey Patum Kinaro, was written during his Sukkur jail days. The famous poem “Such Wado Dohari Ahey” (Truth is a great sinner) is included in this collection.
Ayaz became known as the voice of Sindh during that time. He was one of the few Sindhis in Shaikh Mujeeb’s Awami League. In Sann, G.M. Sayed’s native village and a centre for Sindhi nationalists, Shaikh Mujeeb had reportedly heard Shaikh Ayaz’s famous lyric, “Terri pawanda tareen jedhan garha gul tadhn milandaseen” (We’ll meet when red roses bloom). After that Shaikh Mujeeb was heard saying, “Why don’t your dead come alive after listening to such poetry?”
On the insistence of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Ayaz agreed to take over as vice-chancellor of Sindh University. His friend and short story writer Ghulam Rabbani recalls the evening when he saw Ayaz along with his luggage in front of the office of the Sindhi Adabi Board in Jamshoro. “I told him you didn’t do a good thing. It will not be an easy task,” Rabbani writes. To which Ayaz replied in English, “The die is cast, the die is cast.” The youth who were motivated by his poetry were ready to die and that became his worst nightmare. “Those three years were a waste of my time and I paid a heavy price for it,” he later lamented. But much later he confessed to a veteran journalist and exiled poet, Hasan Mujtaba, “I had two choices: either to accept his offer or to accept imprisonment in Kot Lakhpat Jail”.
But there was more to Ayaz than just this. He came up with new themes and subjects in Sindhi poetry along with a different tone. He brought “internationalism” to poetry and introduced the Sindhi youth to new literature, ideologies and books and authors that the readers of Sindhi hardly knew. He wrote a series of verses on Anne Frank, the Jewish girl trapped in Nazi Germany during the Second World War. The books written during the communist regimes (where strict censorship was practiced) and writers like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy would become popular among Sindhi readers through Shaikh Ayaz’s references in his books.
To Che Gauvera he dedicated his poem, “Kehn bhi Azadi Nahey Roee Warti”. When General Pinochet seized power in Chile and killed the elected president, Allende, during the early 70’s, Ayaz wrote a poem addressing Pinochet. “Pinoche! Chile ji pan pan mein parlau ahey” which, when roughly translated, means, “Pinochi there is an utter echo in every leaf in Chile”.
On the death of Chile’s rebel singer Victor Hara, he wrote: “Bakh futee jo roz budhan tho/! Voctor Hara’ khey/ Ho jo Chile jo ragey aa,/ Muhnji bhau jiyan aa,/ Un ji dukhyari dharti jann/ muhnjey mau jiyaan ahey”. (I do listen daily at dawn to Voctor Hara, who is a singer of Chile seems my brother. And his greived homeland I do feel like my mother).
He was inspired by the Spanish Civil War in which writers and poets threw their pens away to replace them with guns. So he inspired his fellow people by telling them about such literary movements all over the world. He even wrote a beautiful poem on the Spanish poet Lorka who was killed by fascists. Many such names became popular in the literary circles of Sindh thanks to Shaikh Ayaz.
Although Shaikh Ayaz accepted the influence of leftists in his younger days, he was not blind to the atrocities committed by the communist regimes on writers who wanted to live by their conscience. When Mikhail Gorbachev’s book, Peresstroika, was published he wrote an essay on it and endorsed it, saying, “Now you can call me a ‘democrat communist’.” But once the Berlin Wall was torn down and the Soviet Union collapsed, he welcomed the “New World”.
It was said the poet’s worst nightmare was seeing his friends turn into foes which eventually led to his isolation from the world. His final days were spent writing poetry and completing his autobiography which became his only interests. In his home, he replaced the statue of Comrade Lenin with the statue of a cat and listened to the inspirational recordings of Bhagwan Rajneesh in the morning.
When I visited his home in Karachi for a documentary that I was doing for a Sindhi TV channel, I got a chance to see the books lying in his library. From the floor to the roof, there lay before me the complete works of the authors of great classics such as Somerset Maugham, Kazanzakis and Charles Dickens. After his death, there are these countless books but not the poet. He said, in one of his remarkable poems, “You wouldn’t see me on my chair as the wind would come opening my door; and would return in vain.”
“My father would tell me,” recalls his daughter, Dr Roohi, “My children won’t need to write any poetry as I am leaving them with enough poems for seven generations.”
No doubt, Shaikh Ayaz is remembered today as a new prophet of Sindhi poetry who left behind universal traditions and truths for generations to come.
