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A reduction in imagination and a lack of philosophical thinking contributed to the downfall of Urdu poetry
“Aate Hain Ghaib Se Ye Mazaameen Khayaal Mein
Ghalib Sareer-e-khaama nawaa-e-sarosh hai…”
(According to me from the subject (for my poems) of God’s hidden source,
The sound of scratching that resonates with my pen like an angel’s sound)
There were several writers who worked on these ideas in Urdu literature, but they were not formally conceptualized until Muhammad Hussein Azad, Altah Hussein Hari and Shibli Nomani began to engage in these concepts. They were the people who laid the foundations for modern literary criticism in Urdu literature. But the very principles that underpinned poetic thinking in Urdu are now under threat.
Today, unfortunately, many Pakistani poems contain thought-out imitations. This goes against Aristotle’s notion of imitation, in which artists internalize the process of imitation to imagine ideas in their minds and create works of art by employing their imagination. There is no doubt that emotions and emotions play an important role in poetry, but unless brought into a creative framework, they remain incongruous and confused. Fredrich Nietzsche in his book The birth of tragedy He said that creativity manifests in two ways: Dionysian and Apollonian. Nietzsche was the view that the tragic poems of ancient Greece came from a rare cooperation between the Dionysian spirit, infusing vitality and passion into the work, and the Apollonian spirit, the force that gives the form of harmony. As he tried to harness Dionysia’s energy, it is important to grasp this before attempting to tackle Arama Iqbal’s poem.
Dr. Khalifa Abdul Haikoum in his bookfikar-e-iqbal ‘ Iqbal’s poems seem to suggest that they are more inspired by Dionysia’s enthusiasm than his Apollonian spirit. Hakeem contextualizes Nietzsche’s idea of Dionysia’s ec bone addiction in the Muslim context by supporting the nomani favour of Arab poets who urged warriors to fight with the typical Dionysian passions through poetry. Here we can clearly see Iqbal’s thoughts and the division of poetry. However, the purpose of this is not to reduce the quality of his work, but to try to identify where poetic thinking diverges from rational thinking. Both poetic and philosophical thinking explain the same experiences through the same medium, but use different teleology.
Wisdom comes from the cultivation of a unified sensibility. To understand the writing of Urdu of thieves in Pakistan, it is helpful to compare it with the current plight and literary ideas that came to define German literature. The works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Holderlin, Christian Friedrich Hebbel, Heinrich Wilhelm von Christo and Guntergrass were immersed in philosophical concepts.
The idea of poetry offers only joy, not ending in wisdom. However, today’s Urdu poetry is not the sole victim of the poverty of this idea, but actually represents the general intellectual state of the region. Taking stock from the pre-Urdu literature era, Darver (The Court) is a king and ruler filled with a legion of poets competing against each other by playing with words and making poets. In the courts of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the poet finds himself indulging in the typical jealousy and aims to win his favor through poetry. However, in these times we cannot find many examples of thinkers discussing ideas related to the humanities, science, philosophy, and other fields of knowledge. This problem only gets worse over time, and therefore the current predicament facing Urdu poetry today.
When Azad and Hari began their literary modernism project, they wanted to introduce fresh themes and inject new ideas into the poems by recreating the modern literary canon. In a lecture in 1874, Azad urged the writers to free the poem from traditional enclosures and bondage. Otherwise, he warned, “The day will come when your descendants will find their language without traces of poetry.” Urdu later witnessed quality poems that integrated the breadth of thought, depth of emotion, and sublime of imagination. In the mid-20th century, Urdu poetry enriched the poetic works of Urdu literature, accompanied by increased disillusionment with the modern world. But now the waves are around, and the modern literary landscape of Urdu poetry is increasingly similar to the wasteland. There are two factors that contribute to this worrying scenario. It is a reduction in imagination and a lack of philosophical thinking. When the poets stop absorbing new flows of knowledge, this only limits their imaginative vision.
Abdul Rahman in his bookMa’rrat ul Shair’ Comments on how both of these factors contributed to poetry poverty. According to Rahman, only when the poet’s knowledge is enormous, he can find rich meanings and speculative phors. He writes,
“Whether between thoughtful and vulgar poetry, the former will always find a wide range of ideas, and the latter will find narrowness and shortfall. Those that deal with a wider idea will repeat the same idea hundreds of times, but always express them in new ways in new ways, while those that stick to the narrow spectrum of ideas will fail to do so.”
Therefore, many of Pakistani poetry today are found to be lacking as the fountain of philosophy is almost exhausted. As a result, our minds are still saturated with emotions, but our minds are becoming increasingly philosophical thinking. Urdu poetry today requires a reconciliation of thought and emotions by creating a new romanticism in which both poetry and philosophy can begin to inform each other again. This is essential if you want to regain the glory of your Urdu poetry.
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