Ibne Insha as Romantic Revolutionary

The town of Phillaur in Jalandhar, Indian Punjab, is quite unremarkable. In 2017 it briefly got in the news by virtue of Anshai Lal’s debut film Phillauri starring Diljit Dosanjh and Anushka Sharma. Though bracketed as a Hindi fantasy comedy flick, at least for this scribe the film had serious undercurrents running underneath the ostensibly light veneer – not least being the relationship between art, the people and social change. Moreover, the 1919 massacre at Jallianwala Bagh - a hundred years old this year - provided a compelling backdrop to the film itself.

On closer inspection, however, one finds that at least two poets born in this seemingly unhistoric town, born almost a hundred years apart, actually put it on the map quite clearly. One is Shardha Ram Phillauri - notice that the poet protagonist in the aforementioned film also assumes the pen-name of Phillauri - who is regarded not only as the composer of the popular Hindi hymn Jai Jagdish Hare but also the first Hindi novel. But more than this particular Phillauri, there is Ibne Insha (1927-1978), who was born 92 years ago on the 15th of June earlier this month. He is of special interest because his literary career - poet, humourist, travelogue and children’s writer, and translator - defies easy categorization. Abruptly felled by Hodgkin’s Lymphoma at the age of 50, his poetic output over a period of three decades was marked by two singular qualities: consistency and variety. At a time when the best and brightest of Urdu poets vacillated between “shabab” and “inquilab”, meaning romance and revolution, the two poles around which most of Urdu poetry has always gravitated, Ibne Insha spoke up steadfastly for both.

That Insha held his own against the formidable presence of the Progressives and romantics already firmly established in Lahore: Faiz, Rashid, Faraz, Jalib, Nasir Kazmi, Majeed Amjad, Mustafa Zaidi, Saghir Siddiqui - and kept writing within both the revolutionary and romantic strains, speaks volumes. Insha himself puts it best when he says:

But I have chosen to fight separately on the fronts of love and non-love. With me there is neither the mixture of ‘come my love the revolution’ nor do I like the gesture of turning the veil into a banner.

His poetry published in collections titled Chand Nagar, Dil-e-Vehshi, Is Basti ke Ik Kooche Men, and a collection of poems children called Billo ka Basta, has a distinctive diction laced with language reminiscent of Amir Khusrau in its use of words and construction – one that is usually heard in the more earthy  of the Hindi-Urdu complex of languages. His themes include using the moon frequently in his verses as a metaphor for an unattainable but attractive El Dorado and the ephemerality of this world. Picked up by singers on both sides of the border, such as Amanat Ali Khan the maestro of the Patiala gharana who beautifully sang the famous Insha-ji utho, and Jagjit Singh who sang “Kal Chaudavi ki raat thi, shab bhar raha charcha tera”, they show us an Insha returning to his familar tropes, the temporariness of this world and worldly love itself.

Arise, Insha-ji, let’s depart

This city’s no place to settle down

We are madmen, we abhor peace

Mendicants have no place in a town.

 

Cast a glance at your tattered soul

Ponder awhile, with reason calm

Your heart’s but a shroud pierced with holes

Dare you use it to beg for alms?

 

The night is done, the moon is down

A strong secure chain locks your gate

How’ll you explain to your love now

The reason you’ve returned this late?

 

Her beauty is a pearl, but I

Can merely watch but dare not touch

Such treasure is hardly worth much,

Eludes the grasp and haunts the eye.

 

If city-dwellers forsake me

Should I in forests seek respite?

I am fated to insane speech

For such talk is the madman’s plight.

The world knows him mostly as the author of melancholy ghazals such as “Insha ji utho ab kooch karo” or the biting satire that can be witnessed in his masterpiece Urdu ki Akhri Kitab. However, little known is the fact that he was one of the early supporters of the Progressive Writers Association (PWA) in colonial India and would undoubtedly have been one of its leaders had he lived long enough in independent Pakistan.

He also left behind about a dozen intensely political poems showing an uncanny awareness of the horrors of war and imperialism. They range from colonial machinations in the Middle East at the beginning of the Cold war and the advance of Mao Zedong’s armies to victory in Beijing to the horrors of the Korean war, and from a dirge mourning the defeat of Arab forces to Israel in 1967 and the failures of world bodies like the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) to provide adequate food to war-ravaged children. In the preface to his first collection of poetry Chand Nagar (Lunar City), Insha admits:

“My longer poems are mostly the product of the conflict between the bitter realities of my surroundings and my romantic temperament[…]The Korean War shook me up and its echoes will be heard in all my poems until the present. For me, war is not a headline of any newspaper but it signifies fire and destruction, and a soldier is not merely a uniform, gun and medal, but a body and form of a son, brother and loved one.”

One of his lyrical antiwar poems, Aman ka Aakhri Din (Th Last Day of Peace), originally published in 1952, is still a relevant warning about the horrors of war. As readers will undoubtedly see, here he comes across as a deeply political and prescient poet, a far cry from the anomie of his exquisite ghazals and the affability of his sophisticated humour.

“Why in every headline of the evening papers today

Every word weaves a tangled web

With every cloud a doubt emerging

Thoughts lie writhing in the corners of the mind

Now every line reeks of gunpowder

It is difficult crossing every page unsuspected.

 

A multitude of memories comes forward like a fleet for a night ambush

Let’s see what happens as the morning arrives

So many thoughts one had never thought before

So many faces one had never seen before

With faces like nightmares embracing every vein and fibre

All those marks becoming hazy by the evening.

 

The storm is about to rise from the West

There is still hope in the veiled lamp

The atom with its embrace of a thousand upheavals

The Adam whose collar is still torn with grief

A peace which was found after offering a life

A tear still luminous on the dead faces.

 

That gun which will be subdued somewhere one day

That mass of bombers comes advancing

Sometimes over the peasant’s house, sometimes over his corn

A merciless bolt of lightning waves

Sticks leap from every corner

Sparks burn village after village.

 

The pension given to the brave soldier in return for which

He is given a jerky crutch to one side

A platoon which flew to reach the field

Those loved ones who never returned from there

That medal awarded after years of toil

And is left shining on the chest of a corpse.

 

A delicate twig in a garden of youth

Blown to bits by the flying parts of the bomb

The fruit of his aged parents’ years of prayer

He breathed his last in some alien field

The threshold of the house will not buzz with the returning footsteps

‘Your darling child has sacrificed himself for the country.’

 

That bazaar of war going where

Man’s price has still not increased in centuries

That silver, those sparkling silver coins

Which could not buy every single thing in the world

But even after every 20 years, the same deals

The same traders, the same commodity, even the same price.

 

That tale left on the lips unsaid

That longing entombed within the bosom

The rush of thoughts which ceases all at once

The body pressed within the empty hollows of the ditch

The tanks will arrive to level the pile

The unmarked graves will be overgrown by forests within two years.

 

The land of hearts brimming with pain

The trembling chest, the spilled tear sometimes

The elegant mention of some friend

Alas! The fragrant flowers of how many past springs

Today lies buried within the stench of corpses

Blood issues from the wounds of cold bayonets.

 

That same rail whistle, the same attractive face

That same night, its terrible dreams, the same

Who is this abruptly rising from the bed, startled

‘May God keep my child safe’

A star had broken at one place, drowned elsewhere

The postman will arrive in a couple of days with a telegram.

 

That poison which will again dissolve in the soul

That wound which arrives with news even of the heart

Even now there will be a festival of the great Pir in the village

Spring will come in the swaying fields

But the flautist will not return by these lanes

The pasture will not roar with his tunes.

 

The turban of some bridegroom, a flower of some bed

The burning lead, the edge of some bayonet

The sorcerers of politics sitting at home

With every morning newspaper held on their knees

They think while reading the latest news

About the increase or decrease in the cotton rates.

 

Far from my city are those fields where

The flame licks the gunpowder’s chest

A minaret of a mosque, the roof of a school

Becomes a burning rubble in an explosion

Any field or factory or bridge or rail

Is a world which may not be built in years despite effort.

 

That morning which in the expanse of every mind

Sows a row of unseen crosses

The vomited poison of the news supplements

Which just increases the pressure of horror

The names on the lists begin to dance with impatience

Eyes become tombs for unshed tears.

 

In the desert of Tobruk still

One can hear the call of one’s lost relatives

There is neither news of victory nor meetings and processions

A wind comes and passes

Who would really love bones?

Here there is no friend, companion or visitor.

 

The river of darkness carries a storm on its shoulders

It arrives to drown the little boat of hope

And when the days of the duration of evil extend further

Tomorrow’s joy becomes rare

The sorrow that is not more special than the beloved or the world

But the heart cannot recover from its pain.

 

Victory which took something but couldn’t give

Tomorrow remains like a ghost

A town which was never so desolate

The bluish smoke does not arise from the stoves anymore

And there are neither the fields nor the crops or their minders

And an owl cried in a village chaupaal.

 

The lotus eyes, the bookish face

A tress which was dwelling in fragrance

And when soldiers from far-away lands came

The vulture won these stakes in the open field

Korea informs us of so many desolations

This place was a city, a village, a town.

 

A singing bullet from a gun

Targeting some unknown soldier

A shadow left to writhe in some ditch

Carrying years of his desires in his chest

A strapping youth brought up in 22 springs

A corpse which can rot within two days.

 

The embrace of the beloved, but death too

Not possible to commit to both, simultaneously

The melodious song of the stream, but napalm too

Now should one befriend one, or the other?

It is not difficult to choose between life and death

Do not cloak straight talk with arguments.

 

Time is passing by

Whims come knocking on the door of the heart

The dove may yet be ready and full of lightness

But a thousand miles until the bombers speed

Sharpen; sharpen the melody of the song of peace

The noise of the cannons is being heard from the far shore.

 

The dashing heroes are out and about

To make every village a Hiroshima

Memories which neither become hazy nor erased

And once again we are on the threshold of war

Those Josephs will not be given to God

They will set upon the same alien fields again.

 

The sky is unfortunate and dark, the stars sad

The moon afraid of emerging out of the cloud

The flame of the lamp of hope has been trembling for so long

The heart is pressed within the passionate mass of clouds

See far away that church gong struck

The morning caravan arrives – but where?”

And so once again we are reminded that he was not just a literary craftsman who had imbibed the art of creating natural, effortless humour out of the ordinary, but that his travelling had also exposed him to the conflicts of the Cold War, especially in the Middle East.

Even before Insha was struck by the disastrous Arab defeat to Israel in 1967, he travelled the Middle East. Whatever tragedy he saw unfolding in its bazaars and bylanes, he distilled his entire anguish in the form of a long poem, Baghdad Ki Ek Raat (A Night in Baghdad), written exactly 70 years ago this year. Written at the cusp of the beginning of the Cold War, this poem today is starkly prescient in anticipating the humiliating subjugation of the Middle East by imperial powers, in league with its various shahs, emirs and tinpot dictators, many of whom are still in power.

Insha’s villains are not only the imperial powers (in the poem it is Lawrence and Glubb Pasha) and their satraps in the region, but also the cunning oil traders. On the other hand, his heroes are the ordinary people of the region, the oppressed masses; its “rusted slaves, importunate beggars, the peasant and the workers of the oil mill”. Later in the poem, he wonders aloud whether the region is resigned to its benighted fate.

But like all progressive writers, Insha was an optimist and gently encouraged the “people of Egypt and Baghdad” to awaken and take their fate into their own hands.

Insha did not live to see the Iranian masses rise up to do the same in 1979, just a year after he passed away. And just 60 years after his poem was written, the masses in Tunis, Cairo, Sana’a, Damascus, Manama and even Algiers and Khartoum (as I write this) awakened to take back their rights in the form of the Arab Spring. Insha would have been elated at this development, and perhaps would have written a follow-up to his aforementioned poem.

For those who love Ibne Insha, as well as to aid a deeper understanding of the poet and humanist who was against war and all forms of imperial exploitation and believed in a socialist future for mankind, a rereading of this poem is vital:

“Sindbad take me with you today,

One entertains the mind when one wants to be entertained

With you, I disappear from the view of time,

A constellation of thoughts accompanies me

Now or after, perhaps we might end up in the same city.

 

Those were halcyon days, everyone had leisure

People used to live in kingly splendour

Everyone used to have a magic lamp in their pocket,

Djinns used to perform every task.

 

Where is the Baghdad of Scherezade’s imagination?

Politics of oil and crude dominates the atmosphere,

Even some caliph disguised as an oil trader

Emerges from a Baghdad thoroughfare.

 

Till when will the city and desert nourish this hunger?

Will Aladdin’s magic lamps be for everyone no longer?

Will no Prince deliver the counter-magic?

Will someone suggest an escape route?

 

From the lanes of Bukhara and Samarkand, the morning breeze brings the message of spring

And leaves, whispering to every flower

You too may overturn the gardens system,

It’s within your power.

 

To awaken the fate of Adam you do not need

To invite the sorcerers of Babylon and Nineveh, so pay heed

To keep the affairs in Egypt and Baghdad straightened,

Their people will have to be awakened.

 

Otherwise the ill-destined rusted slave standing on the royal parapet

Will do nothing but to cry and fret,

And on every turn the importunate ‘Please, in God’s name!’

Will follow every traveler, its demands the same!”

There is my personal favourite, which I quote often to invoke a multitude of feelings from the perils of old age, to the uncertainty of power, even life itself – from Insha’s tearjerker classic, Ab Umar ki Naqdi Khatam Hui (Now the Assets of Age Have Atrophied), which he wrote when he would have heard the summons of death while fighting throat cancer in London:

 

“Now the assets of age have atrophied

Now I have need of a loan

Is there anyone who will be a lender

Is there anyone who will be a giver

Some years, months, days, people

But without profit or interest, people!” 

Raza Naeem is a Pakistani social scientist, book critic and award-winning translator and dramatic reader currently based in Lahore, where he is also the President of the Progressive Writers Association. He can be reached at: razanaeem@hotmail.com