odern Urdu poetry embraced experimentation without demoting the classical tradition. After the Partition, many Urdu poets grounded their perceptions in the emerging socio-political conditions. A new wave of realism coaxed the quotidian and the parenthetic; the embellished logos intrinsic to the form of Urdu ghazal were tampered. Both nazm and ghazal continued their coterminous journey. Nazm, malleable in form, paved the way for a wider stylistic and thematic craving. Ghazal, coiled in its decadent charm, dissuaded political interventions. Faiz and some of his contemporaries, like Ahmad Faraz, Munir Niazi and Nasir Kazmi, were exceptions in this regard. Faiz brought a political eros to the ghazal, lending it a syncretic character. Majeed Amjad, was the one poet who steered clear of ideological camps, showed an unswerving interest in nazm, and took it to sublime heights.

Born in 1914 in Jhang, known best for the folkloric love tale of Heer-Ranjha, Amjad lived most of his life in colonial Montgomery (now Sahiwal). He worked in various government departments – his paltry jobs settled with his substantial poetic drive. His persona was unique:he was almost a recluse but full of the milk of humanity. An unhappy marriage, the consequent separation and survivable penury had sharpened his sensitivity. He did not join international platforms like Noon Meem Rashid and Faiz and remained associated with small central Punjab cities.

His meeting with a German tourist, Shalat, whom he met in Harappa in 1958 gave his poetry an inimitable colour. This meeting amounted to a real-life incarnation of Robert Browning’s masterpiece Love Among Ruins. Before this encounter, Amjad’s poetry had had references to a desire for the feminine company – perennial yearning is a recurrent ghazal theme. Shalat had to leave and Amjad had no choice but to morph her into a poetic trope. Meetings with Shalat, which went on for no longer than three months, brought a streak of myth-making to his already open-ended sensibility. He had been an eager reader of Western literature.He translated several poems from English into Urdu for Shalat. In an interview with Dr Khawaja Zakaria – who compiled his works – Amjad talked about Keats, Coleridge, Shelley, Swinburne, and many American poets who had influenced his poetry. To make the most of this romantic interlude, nazm in Amjad’s hands turned into an eclectic Urdu genre. He grazed on English romanticism, and what’s more, with the German girl becoming his muse, his Urdu versification became a fabled chest of subtler forms. In his essay Nazm Kya hai, critic Shams ur Rehman Farooqi says, “in nazm, there is kind of continuity and connectivity, and since nazm is an utterance, this connectivity and continuity varies accordingly in every nazm”. Amjad successfully tapped the structural-philosophical diversity inherent in the form of Urdu nazm.

Although romanticism was a late incorporation, against odds, in Urdu poetry it also had indigenous roots. In his book Mabhis (1965), Dr Syed Abdullah commented that Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s zealous emphasis on reformism cultivated exorbitant rationalism. Therefore, Abul Kalam Azad and Iqbal crossed swords with Aligarh’s battle cry for rationalism. Muhamad Hussain Azad’s ornate prose defied a stilted prosody. Sajjad Haider Yaldram is the magic realist of the Urdu short story. By and large, the modernist eastern sublime of an inordinate scale – both fantastic and fabulous – in consonance with the spirit of European romanticism took root in the Urdu writers’ imagination during and after the two World Wars. Mehdi Afadi – born in Gorakhpur – a less-known critic, is credited with coining several critical and aesthetic terms.He called romanticism adab-i-lateef (light literature).

Within this cultural ken, Amajd made Urdu nazm an aesthetically hybrid genre of romantic literature. Shab-i-Rafta (1958) is the only collection of his poetry published in Amajd’s life.Instead of a professional preface, he included an untitled poem – an invocation in which he addressed a mother figure, a persona for a protean muse. The image of ash (r kh), invoked twice, is a reference to Romantic discourse. It denotes the creative process and its attendant ordeals. On the flap of his book, he stated: “for a long time I have been obsessed with nazm and its varied forms, and have pursued it with a self-centred rigour.”

Shalat was seen walking the streets of Sahiwal, with Amjad steering his bicycle.Two of their favourite haunts were Stadium Hotel and Café de Rose. From Sahiwal to Munich, Amjad kept the memory alive.

The subjectivity entrusted to the form of nazm eternalised his passion for the German girl. Amjad wrote in extended, short, clipped, indented and elliptical meters (behers). He was steeped in Indo-Persian and Indo-Sanskrit traditions and often described a woman’s beauty in terms of Hindu mythological ethos. Admittedly, he indigenises the figure of Shalat, turning her into a goddess from the Indian realm. In his trans-creation of Coleridge’s Kubla Kahn, the damsel transforms into a devadasi. In the poem, On that Day in Freezing Wind,written in 1968, each spate of icy wind contrives a form vacillating for a balance. The long and short lines muddle, signifying the varying speed of the winds and the intensity of the poet’s passion for his muse:

that day in front of the freezing wind

I looked much older than ever

Amjad’s work is swayed by both temporal and atemporal recognition of Shalat’s figure. It can be divided into the pre-Shalat and post-Shalt phases. The early poems show the emotional baggage carried by an introverted lover – there is no windmill of sensual carnality tearing him down, but desires rollin mystical whirls. The increasing desperation for a heartfelt touch of the imaginary woman is conceived in images of female accoutrements, dress and finery, especially the veil. Mulaqaat(Meeting) and Kaun (Who) are some of the early poems in which the observer-persona is peeping shyly at the figure of a woman whose beauty is behind the veil but whose fingers, toes, and eyes are visible. The mystique of a woman with a nimbus is frequently mentioned in the classical verse of Ghalib and Mir- the eponymous parda nasheen (harem). These poems are loaded with allusions to Shalat haunting the poet musing on her absence.

whose face is hidden behind these veils

bangled elbows, a bejewelled forehead

As shades of a brown evening quivered on the face of a lake

my heart,too, rippled with a little understood desire

The poem Munich is the most expressive of all post-Shalat poems.In it Amjad addresses his beloved with her name. Shalat has stopped over at Malaya, China and at the ruins of Mohanjodaro. The spatial spectra of ruin loom over Amjad and Shalat’s tale of love turning their love into a fossilised relic. Having the trappings of a romanticism cleft between Eastern and Western sensibility, the landscape in the poem is miraculously hybrid. Amjad had never travelled outside Pakistan, perhaps even the Punjab, but the image of snow-capped streets, alehouses, and rituals of Christmas Munich come alive in the poem, transposing the readers to a level of rare similitude. Throughout, Amjad associates Shalat with the image of white snow – his version of Western sensibility. Earlier, mentally indoctrinated by her brief stay in his life after her departure, he begins to see her as a force liberating his poetry. Yet, to all intents, even the transfiguration of Shalat into a psychological intricacy and transcendental abstraction does not bar Amjad from emotional submergence:

free of the noose of distance

my heart is like the city of Munich

in any direction one turns, one sees

the snow fall, the music play on.

Quetta Tak (Till Quetta Comes) is both a valedictory and elegiac poem. Amjad had accompanied Shalat on a train journey to Quetta, from where she probably left for Europe via Iran. He had wanted to gift her bangles but shied away. As the train pierces through the rugged landscape of Balochistan, he sees Shalat’s image in the age-old crevices – her phantom inhabits the recesses of the poet’s mind:

I woke from the reverie of your thoughts only

to find a world fragrant with your grief all over

The missives exchanged between Shalat and Amajd were unfortunately lost. Javed Qureshi, the then deputy commissioner of Sahiwal, made the arrangements for the last rites of Amjad. He also took possession of the latter’s personal effects. However, the bag carrying the letters was never found. Scholars Anwar Sadeed, Sohail Ahmad, Nawazish Ali, Khurshid Rizvi, Nayyar Abbas, among others, have speculated on the mystery. Wazir Agha’s Amjad ki dastan-i-Mohabbat (2011) is a symbiosis of hermeneutics and biography. Using dispersed biographical sources, Agha constructs a seminal narrative on the poet’s hallowed love life.

Shalat was once seen walking in the streets of Sahiwal, with Amjad steering his bicycle.Two of their favourite haunts were Stadium Hotel and Café de Rose. From Sahiwal to Shalat’s Munich, Amjad kept her memory alive. In a rare interview with Pakistan Television, he stated that behind every form of creation is the continuity of an act of goodness (amal-i-khar ka tasalsul). The arrival of the German muse contributed to this process, but the pain of becoming eclipsed leans on his imagination – it defies translation.

The writer is a poet based in Lahore. His first collection of poems Lahore,I Am Coming (2017) was published by Punjab University Press