Majaz and his special romantic imagination
Dil ke zakhmon ko latifon mein chhupane wale/Khatm hota hai yeh andaaz-e-wafa tere baad
(Hiding the injuries of the heart under humorous and satirical jokes / This style of loyalty ends with your end).’
— Rahi Masoom Raza on the death of Majaz.
Majaz Lakhnawi died in 1955 at the age of about 45. He has been and continues to be an immensely popular poet. Born at Rudauli (Barabanki) in a family of zamindars (landlords), he lived in Lucknow and was thus a typical product of Oudh’s feudal culture. He studied at Aligarh Muslim University and was the one who wrote a ‘tarana’ for his alma mater which is enthusiastically sung at its functions evoking nostalgic sentiments. He was also in love with a woman he could not get. He was intelligent and good looking with a knack for sarcastic humour.
A romantic by temperament, Majaz is sometimes called the Keats of Urdu poetry. His is not a poetry of vision. It is a poetry of beauty, love and restless sentiments that has found its most powerful appeal among the youthful audience. Here are some specimens of his poetry:
‘Narm sofe goad mein firdaus-eranai liye/zulf ke kham marmari shanon ki barnai liye
(Softness carrying in their lap the beauty of paradise
The curls of hair holding the majesty of white shoulders).’
These are the glimpses of a beautiful damsel met by the poet somewhere in the drawing room. Quoted below is now a stanza from his most famous poem ‘Awara’.
Shahr ki raat aur main nashado-nakara phiroonJagmagati jagti sadkon pe awara phiroonAye gham-e-dil kya karoon, aye wahshat-e-dil kya karoon.(This is city’s night and I roam about useless and disappointed.
A vagabond through living and glittering streets.
Oh heart’s sadness, what should I do, Oh heart’s unrest, what should I do.)’
By no stretch of imagination could this poem be called revolutionary as some have tended to suggest. The agony, restlessness and helplessness, which are its most conspicuous features cannot be the voice of a person who is rebellious and expecting the advent of any desired change. The poem is rather a lament on a dying order. Here and there in his work, we do find some traces of revolutionary ideas but they are neither his true voice nor is he popular due to them.
When Majaz opened his eyes, it was a golden period of Urdu poetry. The period saw the birth of such splendid ghazal writers as Yagana, Fani, Asghar, Jigar and Firaq the like of whose intellectual collection was not to be found at any time after Ghalib. This is not to speak of what Iqbal and Josh did to glorify Urdu poetry at that time. Majaz’s own friends and companions namely Faiz, Jazbi, Makhdoom and Sardar Jafri had captured the new poetry and the master poets of an earlier era had explored human thought and sensibilities as to leave little scope for the rise of any great poet for a long time to come. Against this background, the emergence of Majaz as an extremely popular poet is something of a surprise.
The most outstanding characteristic of Majaz’s poetry, as identified by critics, is the intellectual and emotional representation of the age the poet lived in. Majaz never travelled beyond his world. His foot remained firmly steeped in his own soil and atmosphere. Here is found only one period in place of many periods, only one class in place of many classes, only one part of human life (namely youth) to the exclusion of other parts of human life. That is why his personality, despite being colourful, remained limited. Like Jane Austen, he worked on a short canvas. But within this narrow confine, he is surpassed by none.
From the time of Mir and Ghalib until Jigar, the beloved is conventional in style and appearance with whom we do not feel any natural affinity. Whereas the picture of the beloved given by Majaz strikes us as real and something familiar. No poet after Jigar and Josh has been able to create the ecstatic condition of mind to which the young readers have been susceptible by reading the romantic poetry of Majaz.
The period of Majaz is still too near to us and a time may come when he may have to pay the price for popularity as was the case with Byron. There are some critics even now who are not prepared to accept him a great poet because his poetry shows a lack of philosophy or deep thought. This is not a correct way of judging a poet. It is rather the aesthetic quality of an art that touches the heart that matters. Who can deny the greatness of Keats, Spencer, Hafiz or Firdousi? Here, there is no philosophy or system of thought.