My poetry predates my appearance as a poet. While I was yet a child, my mother and other members of my family noticed that I refused to go into the lap of an ugly woman or an un-handsome man. I detested not only physical ugliness, but showed an intense dislike for oddities of dress, conduct, mannerisms, voices; with ugliness pertaining to any aspect of human behavior, I had little patience. I desired order and beauty in the architecture of a house as well as in its interior décor. I felt intense love for my friends and playmates and was deeply attached to homes, schools and playgrounds. Trees and orchards, flourishing farms, expanses of green; in fact, all that lies between heaven and earth seemed to be forever drawing me towards itself. The meanest events of life and the tiniest details of nature used to touch my heart to the point of distraction. This world seemed a mystery to me. These ineffable influences, these experiences and feelings went deep into my blood and bones, my mind and heart.

I used to be so totally lost in dance and music and so deeply engrossed even in small anecdotes that only with a great effort of will could I regain equilibrium. The sights and sounds of the world used not only to touch me; they entered the deeper recesses of my being. This was the poetry that was born within me before I could call myself a poet. A poet is one who feels much more than others and about many more things. Passing through these stages of childhood and adolescence, I was married, through deception and trickery involving me and my family, to a woman whose very sight outraged me. I was ruined at a stroke. I am till this day in ruins. I felt as though I had swallowed a poisonous fruit. My life became a cauldron of hatreds. I, nevertheless, felt that there was yet a secret power buried somewhere in my being which could save me from total extinction. I continued to be abnormally touched by each aspect of everything. But, more particularly, I was drawn into the depths of imaginative thinking, its beautiful intimacy and tantalizing distances. At the same time I was haunted by the music and undulating cadences of words. Whether I understood a particular language or not, the music and resonance of words used to dance in my soul. It was this susceptibility of mine which drove me towards literature and poetry. When, at twenty, I began writing poetry in Urdu, I was confronted with the problem of finding peace and solace in my tragic life. This quest became the very breath of my poetry.

When I came of age, modern India was emerging in full splendor. I started looking for the real and invaluable bases and ideals of Indian culture. I felt that reality and truth are not something to be blindly adhered to, but are matters for each individual or culture to discover for himself or itself. Gradually, I began to wonder whether the distinctive quality of the clay lay in its purity or its divinity. Life and nature are manifestations of this selfsame quest for divinity, and it is this apprehension that I consider to be the finest gift of Hindu culture. But this unique gift does not give license to those who call themselves Hindu to parade their superiority over non-Hindus or consider themselves separate from the rest of humanity. Real culture is that which embraces the best ideals of the entire human race. Granted, that these ideals are multi-layered. Some layers are observable, some invisible. The awareness of these depths is the true meaning of culture. An increasing awareness of these depths results in an increasing enrichment of our feelings. So much so that each speck of dust and each drop of dew begins to constitute a world unto itself and, together, they constitute a collage of beautiful human truths. It is these beautiful truths which are delineated in the Vedas and the Upanishads, in Sanskrit and other literatures and languages of India, and even in the lifestyle and traditions of illiterate Indians. Our domestic life, many of our traditions and festivals, our music and other art forms, all point up the inherent divinity of this world. In my poetry I have tried to call attention to this kind of divinity. I have tried to communicate these very feelings to my Hindu, Muslim and other compatriots. Love, romance and myriad other experiences of life have sought, in my poetry, to become Krishna-Leela (the divine tomfoolery of Krishna).

India, after passing through several stages of development, fell into a pit of degradation owing to its own inherent weaknesses. Priests and prelates not only engineered the downfall of the nation, but also dug their own grave. That was the point of time in history when Muslims came to India. But while the Muslim invaders could and did improve the quality of our national life in a hundred ways, they were innocent of the many invaluable qualities of Hindu culture. For these dormant elements to come into play, time was needed and is still needed. But what the Muslims certainly did, about a thousand years ago, was to give back to Hindustan its lost capacity for fresh ways of apprehension and renewed modes of civilized existence. Urdu language and Urdu poetry are tokens precisely of this kind of awareness. Urdu is that form of Hindi which we call city-bred or sophisticated, the language of the refined. The story of the other languages of the world is also the story of getting out of the village into the city, or getting out of the dialect into the language. For me, to embrace the Urdu language meant embracing the new India. It meant embracing the history and ethos of New India. It meant coming face to face with modern education and the emerging discoveries of science. Urdu language is a triumph of that curve of feeling, that romantic mood of New India.

All I did was to make the language called Urdu a medium of expressing all those native hues and shades of feeling and emotion which were on the wane.

(‘Meri Shairi’ taken from Naghma-Numa: Delhi, Star Publications, 1971)

Translated from Urdu by Noorul Hasan