Shattering Myth the
Urdu poet Rahat Indori, who made a high-brow form of art approachable for the common man, showed us that Urdu is not in decline
The phenomenon of Rahat Indori appears to be interminable. Who would have expected the 70-year-old Urdu poet from Indore, who died on August 11 after testing positive for the coronavirus the night before, to dominate the media space as comprehensively as he has since his passing? This, however, is not an appraisal of the virus. It is about the unprecedented mass appeal of a poet the cognoscenti had no measure of. The revelation was thrilling, lifting the spirits of Urdu enthusiasts. It says something of the critics, scholars and the dwindling tribe of those reared in the sophisticated milieu of Urdu. They were so out of touch with the burgeoning audiences lining up for a Rahat recitation that they gasped when they saw the crowds. Urdu had earlier administered a similar shock. Sanjiv Saraf, a cultural entrepreneur and something of a visionary, had spotted a powerful Urdu undercurrent, a yearning the literati had not discerned. In 2015 when Saraf launched Jashn-e-Rekhta, a three-day carnival of Urdu in all its forms, no one could have imagined the mini Urdu revolution it would unleash. Last year, the event, spread over six venues within the National Stadium in Delhi, registered a daily footfall of 300,000. This, too, astonished the weakened Urdu establishment. Consequently, Urdu, unshackled by traditionalism, soared. This new energy is the function of a new audience riding a wave of egalitarianism. It is axiomatic then that this kind of change, which equalises hierarchies, would bring about corresponding amendments in taste.
As a performer at mushairas, Rahat Indori was able to charge fees other poets couldn’t even dream of
The ease with which people relate to Urdu has been evident in the Hindi film industry. Lyrics and dialogues had to be more direct to be easily communicable. Little wonder then that Rahat was a favourite among popular music directors such as Anu Malik and A.R. Rahman. The beeline that Urdu poets made for Bollywood was unintentionally facilitated by P.C. Joshi, the first secretary-general of the Communist Party of India. Under the umbrella of the Progressive Writers’ Association, Joshi attracted the finest talents in Urdu poetry to Mumbai to increase the party’s cultural outreach. To supplement their meagre stipends from the party, poets such as Majrooh Sultanpuri, Sahir Ludhianvi, Ali Sardar Jafri and Kaifi Azmi began to write song lyrics, doing the groundwork for the likes of Rahat to enter the scene later. Son of a poor cloth mill worker, Rahat, through sheer hard work, educated himself, doing his PhD on a theme which later stood him in good stead—Urdu mushaira. And what a mushaira performer he was—theatrical, if not exactly mesmeric, demanding fees that none of the poets listed above would have ever even dreamt of. Artist M.F. Husain, for whom Rahat was “just the greatest”, had even designed a cover of one of Rahat’s collections. Though, that is not to say that Rahat was, in fact, actually the best. Husain was one of the greatest modern Indian painters, but that may also be why his taste in poetry was limited. Rahat’s poetry was exceptionally popular, but that itself may be the reason why it would not be considered what English poet Matthew Arnold called “high seriousness”.