Shan-ul-Haq Haqqee (1917-2005) was a much-respected scholar of the Urdu language and it was his indefatigable work in lexicography that he was best known for.

Haqqee devoted his entire life to the service and cause of the Urdu language, in particular, compiling the Urdu dictionary. In this process, he picked up a number of awards and titles, all of them very well deserved.

It comes as a bit of a pleasant surprise that he retained his sense of humour, despite the demands of his work. This can be best seen in the compilation of his articles and radio features, recently published under the title, Nok Jhok. Haqqee began his writing career by jotting down words for children. For children’s literature, he had to keep his tone light and lively, a style that he picked up slowly and gradually. These articles were published regularly but over time most of them got lost.

The articles that he wrote for radio were also not secured properly and hence got lost as well. However, he was able to retrieve some of these articles from the archives of Lutfullah Khan, who was great at maintaining all kinds of archives, particularly music. Mercifully, more of his works were retrieved from Pakistan Link published from Los Angeles, Allahabad’s Shabkhoon, Akhbar e Jahan and Afkaar, Karachi.

Urdu has had many front rank humourists like Patras Bokhari, Imtiaz Ali Taj, Mirza Farhat Ullah Baig, Ibn-e-Insha, Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi and Shafiq-ur-Rahman, among others. But after these writers – as rightly pointed out by Wazir Agha in his short note in Nok Jhok – the tone of later writers became strident, personal or polemical, and violently so. The quiet restraint of a classical humourist was lost. The emphasis shifted to satire and that too very direct and unabashed.

These days everything has become more direct, with an aim to shock and expose. There is also an increasing tendency to create humour by focusing on personal.

It is important that humour remains humour and does not cross over to satire because satire is much more contentious and does not have the light-hearted touch of humour. It is more judgmental and at times becomes discriminatory. It involves a certain sense of superiority which can be laced with offensiveness. Satire is in your face whereas humour retains and carries with it the dignity of having said it all while avoiding an offensive tone.

Perhaps this tone is absent in literature all over the world these days as everything has become more direct, with an aim to shock and expose. There is also an increasing tendency to create humour by focusing on personal.

But Haqqee belonged to old school humour. His purpose was not to expose or to shock but to create another line of argument or another side to a person. He did it so that the unsavoury aspects of a person’s life could be accepted with grace, through an understanding, not meant to be provocative. It is not surprising then, that many a time, the way he created humour revolved around language itself.

Language in itself carries sufficient firepower to create humour and cause a laugh. In this case, humour is created by the use of the language and quite wonderfully so. With language are conjoined the cultural patterns and their particularities. The articles or pieces in Haqqee’s book, about relations within the family, sensitivity to the language and its nuance are quite well treated.

Nok Jhok is not a conscious effort, but comes effortlessly from a person being comfortable with the language, no matter in what shape or shade it may come. It is a pleasurable read that exposes the subtler side of Urdu which has become increasingly loud and unequivocal of late.

Nok Jhok

Author: Shanul Haq Haqqi

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2019

Pages: 263

Price: Rs595/-