In Pakistan, research has become a drab affair; it is mostly compilation of facts from various sources and little analysis.  The situation is worse while researching in Urdu language, where academics focus on a person and facts on him. Rarely does one come across a dissertation in which the researcher tries to tread a different path.

Dr Sumaira Ijaz has worked untiringly to collect facts on poet Munir Niazi. The basis of her book, Munir Niazi Shakhs Aur Shair, is a PhD thesis, divided into five detailed chapters, that study the personality as well as the creative genius of Munir Niazi.

She starts off by painting a vivid and endearing portrait of the poet in the first chapter and questions various versions narrated by different scholars about the exact date of birth of Munir Niazi.

She introduces to us a Munir Niazi who was a compulsive dreamer from his early days and edited literary journals as well as found a few publishing ventures, which faded away due to lack of resources. Niazi joined the Royal Indian Navy as a sailor but soon quit as he found the job quite tedious.

One also learns that he was passionate about hockey, as he claimed he would have been a national hockey player had he not pursued the literary path. In this book one finds many lesser-known facts about Munir Niazi.

Niazi was not only a Urdu and Punjabi poet, he also wrote columns, a short story and an unfinished novel. His maiden short story Dareen Sarai Kuhan was published in the issue of Adab-e-Latif in July 1950.

Dr Ijaz rummages through the dust laden pages of the old journals and tells the readers that Munir Niazi was planning to write a novel of which he wrote only ten pages that were later published in Mehrab, a literary journal edited by Sohail Ahmad Khan and Ahmad Mushtaq in 1982. He wrote pen sketches of Majeed Amjad and Khawaja Khurshid Anwer that were published in Nusrat Lahore on June, 1961, and Adab-e-Latif in January, 1965, respectively.

Since various publishers published Munir Nizai’s book in different years, the researcher has done good by listing different publishers -- for the benefit of the aspiring scholars. She has devoted two chapters of her book to the ghazals and nazms of Munir Niazi.

Dr Ijaz rightly observes nostalgia in Niazi’s poetry, as he weaves a lilting verse for his ancestral town Khanpur where he passed his carefree days. The nostalgia for the lost days turns into a piercing grief that comes in the wake of migration. It’s a feeling of getting uprooted from your own soil which becomes a recurring theme of his poetry. While going through these two chapters a reader gets a bit detached as s/he has to suffer quote after quote of various scholars that may be a requisite for a research dissertation but bores a common reader like me.

Munir Niazi Shakhs Aur Shair by Dr Sumaira Ijaz is a must-buy for all those that enjoy the poetry of Munir Niazi.