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Literary Review
When comes such another?
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RAKHSHANDA JALIL writes about Sahitya Akademi award winning poet, A.A. Suroor, who passed away earlier this year.
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POET, critic, scholar, stalwart, Ale Ahmad Suroor was the grand old man of not just Urdu adab but all of Urdu tehzeeb. His death at the ripe old age of 91 years on February 9, 2002 has left a vacuum in the world of Urdu letters. It marks the end of an age when learning was not gleaned from books alone but was distilled, drop by drop, from the press of life and living.
Born in 1911 in the historic city of Budayun (about which it has been said that if you were to stand at any crossroad and toss a pebble, it is sure to strike a poet — or two!), he had sipped the heady wine of poetry from a very early age. His nom de plum, Suroor, meaning intoxication, was appropriate yet brimful of delicious irony for a teetotaller.
His own poetry had none of the wild passion and rebellion that marked much of early Urdu poetry. Like beauty, he believed, poetry too had a thousand faces. In contrast to his critical writings, Suroor sahab's ghazals and nazms have a sweet simplicity and a melodious, distinctly non-cerebral quality. Suroor sahab's poetry enriched his criticism and his criticism nourished his poetry. Both were rooted in his vast and varied reading. Among his contemporaries he was the most balanced, moderate yet far-seeing. He wanted to go forward and experiment, while taking along all that was the best and brightest from one's own tradition, culture and values. A critic and writer, he always maintained, should never be put into neat pigeonholes such as progressive, Marxist, realist, surrealist or whatever happened to be the latest critical theory in the west. Single-handedly, Suroor sahab took the Urdu writer as also the Urdu critic out of his self-referential web and taught him to work not in isolation but in tandem with the great literatures of the world.
Pure art lives in a glasshouse, far removed from reality. Good writing, on the other hand, is rooted in reality; it draws sustenance from the real world of the writer. Suroor sahab believed that fads and formulas will always come and go, but nothing can ever replace good writing.
Never one to rest on his laurels, Suroor sahab wrote and read and reflected. On his 75th birthday he wrote: Sitare maand hote hain to suraj bhi to ugte hain/ Yeh saaye mera kya lenge, qaba hi to chura lenge. Towards the end, in the twilight years of his life, he had become fond of quoting Yeats, especially these lines from "The Second Coming": "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity."
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Literary Review
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