Najm Hosain Syed
1969
In Punjab the society had been divided into master and servant since ancient past. The character and quality of the society as defined by the term communism was gradually disturbed and distorted by continual foreign invasion. Whenever an invader succeeded in breaking the local resistance, he instead of assimilating himself into the existing local way of life as an equal, tried to subject the local people to political, social and economic domination. The internal fighting of tribes for the control of land had resulted in the supremacy of the fighting groups of the people. This resulted into the emergence of a class of professional soldiers for the perpetual campaigning. Fighting though a basic and a constant factor in the organization of society, was however, not the whole-time occupation of the dominating men-in-arms. The men-in-arms in fact were primarily associated with land. They either tilled the land themselves or got it tilled by their servants. The men-in-arms gradually became a hereditary dominating class. Other workers in the village who devoted themselves to non-military occupation gradually assumed the status of hereditary service groups relegated to lower rungs of social order. The specialized workers supplied the needs of the armed masters. They were paid in kind in the shape of yearly supply of food grains. This assignment persisted in the village which was the basic unit of a tribal settlement. Even when multi-levelled feudal hierarchies were imposed on the people and the armed masters of a village became the fiefs of an overlord, the arrangement within the village continued. The new strains borne by the local armed masters as fiefs were, however, naturally transferred in part to the village serving men.
In addition to serving their own immediate master they had to attend on the overlord and his functionaries also.
The essential factor in this simplified outline of socio economic pre-British Punjab is that this region with its specialized and non-specialized serving groups in the villages had for long lived a life of subjugation. The essence of subjugation is that the dominated men have to use their human faculties for the exclusive pleasure of someone else. The relationship is not one of pleasure and love but one of coercion. The sources of initiative and will lie outside the dominated worker. He is either an unwilling or a willing slave. Either he is completely alienated from his daily work or becomes what his station demands i.e. identifies himself totally with the will of his master. He devises a strategy for living a split existence or he internalizes the subjugation.
The masters, too had their share of the malady. When you enter into a relationship with someone with some ulterior purpose, the motives of relationship being other than the relationship itself, you not only reduce the other to the status of an object, you reduce yourself to the status of an object also, to the extent that you partake of the relationship. The relationship of master and servant, however humanized and benevolent its exterior, is essentially a relationship based on ulterior motives. The bond itself has little meaning outside the needs of exploitation, convenience and expediency.
What the user and the used kill between themselves is each other’s essential human capacities. The user and the used deaden each other, and reduce each other’s emotional capacity. The strategies employed by both the master and the servant to take the sting out of the relationship only add to the mutual dehumanization. Both sycophancy and false benevolence keep you out of the possibilities of genuine emotion. When you abuse or deprive the other you are abusing or depriving yourself. When you do not fight against being abused or deprived, you are a party to your own murder, as well as the suicide of your depriver and abuser. The master in the pre-British Punjab Village was thus a victim of the domination he imposed upon artisans, craftsmen and laborers of his own community. It was an evidence of his inner impoverishment that he in turn himself became a willing victim to the domination by others. When more powerful, armed masters from the neighborhood or marauders from outside sought to impose their overlordship on him, he almost willingly consented. By bargaining his body and soul to domination and using the others over the ages, he had robbed his body and soul of the capacity for spontaneity, for love, for sensitivity. He had now nothing to defend. He had lost the inner need for freedom. He was in fact ripe for submission. He accepted the overlordship as a counter to his own inner hollowness. By fixing himself in a hierarchical pattern of domination and exploitation, he sought to absolve himself of the responsibility of his own plight. Since he could not function as a human being, having turned himself into an object, he could exit as on object by lending himself to use by a higher, more powerful entity.
Long before the British took over, the dominating class in Punjab had accepted the status of a vessel to the Moghul Emperor — the apex in the hierarchy of overlordship, the hierarchy of progressive dehumanization.
Bulk of the masters i.e. the tiller-soldiers, had accepted their place in the hierarchy as dehumanizing and dehumanized agents. As agents they found meaning and satisfaction in striving for consistent and total identification to the principal. This effort towards mechanical adaptation was a total drive. Any signs of deviation would disturb the agents deeply. Deviation implied the knowledge that you still existed in your own right, for yourself, as autonomous human beings. This was the knowledge that the agent wanted to shun. For this knowledge eroded his status as an agent. It reminded him of the arduous possibility of reclaiming his humanity. The master tiller-soldier in Punjab in adopting the Moghul’s culture wanted to dissolve the reminders of his own human existence, of his own potential to be himself. Since the Moghul was an outsider, the master tiller-soldier in Punjab sought to became an outsider while living in Punjab. He disowned all indigenous cultural modes and mechanically substituted them with foreign modes. He had of necessity to speak the indigenous language as his own, but instead he owned the language of the Moghul. He denied his local roots and prepared long family trees authenticating his claim to foreign origin. He gave up his local name and took up a foreign name. He wanted desperately to believe that he did not belong to Punjab.
Language is the most effective means of expressing relatedness or distance. For it is in language that a community’s life experience comes to be deposited. This life experience continues to be evoked as the users of a language engaged in a dialogue. And the language by involving the users into sharing an evoked life experience provides a contradiction to the actual class distinction existing among its users. Either the class distinctions were to be dissolved or the classes would have their separate languages.
The dominating class attempted to solve the contradiction in the second way.
Owning the language of the foreign overlord and suppressing the local language was thus an internal necessity for the dominating class for reinforcing its exploitative hold. The master continued to use the local language in the same way as he used the serving groups for his own purposes. This use of the local language was purely functional, deeply contemptuous and callously hypocritical. It was the cultural equivalent of using the bodies of the serving men. And this cultural prostitution of the serving men, facilitated their actual prostitution. The local language could not be physically given up by the soldier-tiller. He built an inner emotional landmark against it, not using it while using it — not letting himself be involved in the communal experiences evoked by the language, while retaining its purely functional use. The master soldier-tiller’s own emotional affiliation was reserved for Persian, the language of the foreign overlord. (In earlier times, he must have reserved his emotional affiliation for Sanskrit for the same reason). He would, if he could, order about his serving man in Persian, but this was a practical impossibility. Neither was he himself proficient enough in this use of Persian in spite of his servile emotional affiliations with it, nor was Persian near enough the local language to be intelligible to the serving men. The master therefore, continued his callous functional use of the local language while maintaining an inner distance from it. His problem was solved when the British Colonizers brought Urdu in Punjab. Urdu had distinct advantages over Persian. It was near enough the local language to be utilized for functional communication while remaining a foreign language in that it could not evoke the dangerous common life experience, the equalizing memory of human emotion between the master and the servant. The British themselves had utilized and developed Urdu as a functional vehicle of negotiation between the exploiter and the exploited. The local dominating classes readily took to using Urdu for similar ends in their own field of domination. The use of Urdu in Punjab was in line with the classical use of language in a society divided into masters and servants as a vehicle of emotional distancing and functional communication, as a medium of utilizing the serving men while retaining and strengthening the distance between them and the master.
But before the British colonizers came to Punjab and Urdu came with them, the master tiller did not have the facility of using an alien medium for direct functional communication with his servants. He had to speak to his servants in Punjabi. But he took care that while he spoke in Punjabi to his servants, his words did not evoke the shared experience of human emotion in him. While he spoke, he negated the natural historical richness of the words in his own mind, impoverishing and debasing them in order to restrict them to a purely functional content. The master killed the word in his mind before he uttered it. Now functional communication is the least important use of language. Words are alive, vibrant repositories of man’s relatedness to man and nature, of man’s complex sensuous encounter with reality in history. Sensuous, uncensored use of words is a function of a free, equal relationship. When we use words freely and fully, without censoring their extra functional content, we revive and enrich our own contact with reality. We revive and enrich our senses, our primary sources of life. We open ourselves to the possibilities of thinking sensuously. A censored use of words dries the sap in us, cuts us from our own human potentiality. The master tiller-soldier of Punjab, when he used Punjabi language in a non-participatory impersonal functional way, he dehumanized and impoverished himself. What he eliminated from the word was eliminated from his own sensibility. In killing the word, he killed himself.
The master kept his records and conducted his correspondence in Persian. He sought to educate himself in the use of Persian. For these purposes he encouraged the growth of a class of scribes and tutors. Normally the religious instructor combined these functions with his routine work.
The religious instructor-tutor-scribe entrenched in the mosque was dependent on the master for his livelihood. He had to identify himself with the master’s interest. He knew that it was his function to provide cultural register for his masters. The priest-tutor-scribe sought to establish the sanctity of Persian in order to give a formal religious sanction to his master’s domination and exploitation of the serving groups. This was a part of his total effort at sanctifying the authority of the master, the higher manifestation of which was the divinization of the Emperor. The act of domination was a divine act, a natural act. It was a part of nature’s inherent human condition that people be divided into masters and servants. The culture of the master was a superior culture not only because it embodied material success but because it was a divine culture. The distance between the master and the servant was not ascribable to material causes but was divinely ordained in the interest of nature. The interest of the master and the interest of nature were thus identified. The allegiance due to the master no longer rested on his function, but was an attribute of his person, as part of nature. Persian was a language naturally superior to the language of the serving groups because its vocabulary and structure was charged with a divine purpose. The act of using Persian was, therefore, a magical act enabling you to imbibe divinity and to become a part of nature. As you drew nearer to the Persian vocabulary and usage, you withdrew from the order of mundane necessity and approached the order of natural freedom.
In reality it was securing of his own class by drawing away from the terror of the class contradictions. The priest-scribe-tutor, though not substantively living the master’s way of life, worked as an efficient agent. A deep commitment to writing in Persian grew in the towns and villages of Punjab during the days of the Moghul overlordship. These writings were not important for their content. They were important as magical means of romantic transportation into the master’s territory of power and freedom.
The serving men had the choice of accepting or not accepting the master’s domination. The choice was the station of a servant but the refusal to accept the philosophy of domination, another variation of the first form was giving up the station of a servant and withdrawing from active participation in social production. The three forms of resistance could be summarized as:
- a) the mode of the active out-law
- b) the mode of the peasant worker
- c) the mode of the Fakir.
All the three modes were based on the essential rejection of master-servant relationship as a basis for organizing society. In all the three modes, a total negation of the master’s way of life, his philosophy and culture became by itself a way of life, a philosophy and a culture. Since the established patterns of social behavior dehumanized the individual, rebellion was the only way of retaining his human essence. If the individual wanted to remain alive as a human being, he could do so only through negating the established patterns of social behavior, a subject, as an autonomous human being. You could exist as a human being only as a dominator or as dominated. This was the only mode of feeling available to you. You consequently filled your day with the search for a way to dominate or a way of submitting to domination.
The resistance to the master’s way of life could also take two forms. You could take up arms and actively struggle to overthrow the master in order to end domination as a mode of organizing society. Accepting the master’s domination could be in two forms. One, you conceded the master’s right to dominate and your consequent obligation to serve, and decided to be content with your present station. Two, you conceded the master’s right to dominate but you wanted to emulate him and acquire the status of a master yourself. Either way you accept the master-servant relationship as the only valid mode of society. You accepted domination as philosophy of life. You ingrained domination into your consciousness to the extent that it became embedded in your instincts. The passively subsequent servant and the aggressive climber were both victims of the same phenomenon. The passive or active acceptance of domination implied the negation of your own being and resisting the established modes of social organization. Rebellion, thus was an essential human necessity in the pre-British Punjab. In the British Punjab, this necessity assumed a new, more intense form. For going into that dimension, we have to understand rebellion in all its implications in the pre-British Punjab.
Conformity to the master’s way of life and the acceptance of the master’s philosophy of social organization was reflected in the use of Persian. The priest-scribe-tutor assiduously busied himself in producing literary works in Persian. This literature bore the appearance of being creative. It was actually no literature. It had the ulterior purpose behind it. It was undertaken simultaneously as an act of submission and as an act of tyranny. The Persian work was a magical concoction which made the writer a part of the master’s establishment and distanced him from the dominated class. The Persian work was only a declaration of the fact that the writer had made himself an object of the system of domination-submission and forfeited his right to active autonomous living as a subject, as a human being. Naturally, the act of forfeiting your humanity cannot result in a live, creative work of literature. The writings of the Punjabi Priest-scribe-tutor were entirely imitative in form and content of the original models from Persian. As the interest in Persian writing was a measure of conformity and dehumanization, writing in the indigenous language was a measure of rebellion and assertion of humanity. Full blooded use of the indigenous language in speech or in literary composition implied a contravention of the master’s strategy. By rebellion against his station, he asserted his refusal to become an object, he defeated the master’s operation. All Punjabi literature in the pre-British times is thus inherently rebellious; it is not merely a record of rebellion but is rebellion itself. The intensity and range of rebellion could be measured by the richness, the sensuousness and the complexity of language. (It had existed in the past when the master denied his own self while using the religious language as a functional medium).
Punjabi literature of the pre-British times contains three modes of rebellion — the active outlaw, the Fakir and the peasant-worker. But it is also by itself a mode of rebellion — a fourth mode which is at the same time a vehicle for the other three modes. This provides us with the proper perspective for knowing Punjabi literature. We have to comprehend literature as a vehicle of the acts and attitudes of the outlaw, the Fakir and the peasant-worker. But we have the same time, during the act of comprehending this content, to know the literature’s specific significance as a mode of revolt by itself. Here we have to get into the richness and complexity of language. We have to explore now the full-blooded use of language that affirms the humanity of the serving men, how the warmth of the memory of human experience is subtly released by words, how the words revive and replenish consciousness.
The poet apart from being a medium for the other modes of rebellion was a rebel in his own right. He often combined in his person the character of the modes of rebellion. In fact, his validity as a poet rested on the fact of his having practiced rebellion in its totality. That is why the careers of important Punjabi poets have been celebrated in myths. These myths show the poet investing his whole life, the very act of living, with the modes of rebellion. The poet is seen in the myths evolving into an embodiment of rebellion through his acts and attitudes towards the prevailing system. The myths explore the growth of the poet’s consciousness, the unfolding of his being through traumatic encounters with the reality of his situation. The myths study first the poet’s own transformation and then his role as a transformer.
The British took over in Punjab not from the Moghuls but from an indigenously based regime of the house of Ranjit Singh. But the Punjab of Ranjit Singh was not qualitatively different from the Punjab of the Moghuls. The socio-economic organization and consequently the pattern of relationships and the cultural mores based on it, remained quantitatively the same. The fact that Ranjit was formally a Sikh, leads to the common mistake of tracing his genesis back to Nanak. Ideologically and politically, Ranjit was an heir to the Moghul Emperor. Connecting him with Nanak results in an essential falsity of perspective.
Nanak was a rebel, combining in his person the three modes of rebellion. He was the peasant-worker, took up arms to become an active outlaw but the intensity and the range of his revolt brought him into natural conflict with the then nascent Moghul power. Nanak’s rebellion was embodied in his poetry, but he lived his rebellion. In fact, his poetry and his lifestyle were parts of the same act of total, essential rebellion. Nanak was a member of the serving groups, but his family belonged to that thin group of people who performed certain beneficial acts for the master. This class, in spite of the fact of belonging to the dominated majority affiliated themselves with the interests of the master and did not define themselves in terms of rebellion. To the extent of their active upholding of the master’s interest they shared the master’s alienation from his surroundings and his essential inner impoverishment. Dialectically, if they wanted to recover their humanity, the need for active rebellion became more acute for them, in proportion to their material advancement. Nanak’s rebellion was born out of the awareness of the inhumanity of his station. As this awareness became more intense, rebellion became an inevitable necessity. He gave up his comfortable agent assignment in the household of a master which his family connections had secured for him. As a Fakir, he constantly moved in the towns and villages and hamlets of Punjab delivering his fiery word of negation and actively personifying that negation himself. Nanak negated the socio-economic organization of the prevailing system and its culture. These he opposed with his own living, his own view of man, and its rich poetic use of Punjabi Language. Nanak was a formulation, and an intense one, of the rebellion inherent in the socio-economic situation of the people of Punjab. After his death, his name gradually became the spearhead of a movement of active struggle against the master’s way of life. This movement gradually enlisted more members from the dominated classes. Peasants, artisans and laborers gathered in the movement in order to define their revolt and overthrow the master. The causes of Mughal decay included the land question and the peasant revolt of which the Sikh movement itself was one manifestation. Land master was trying to benefit from the effect of the peasant discontent, which had eroded the basis of the Empire. This was one of the important causes of the progressive decay of the Moghul overlordship. The rebellion of the serving groups, found an ally in the local master’s growing opposition to the enfeebled supreme overlord at Delhi. The serving groups cooperated with the local masters in ending the hegemony of the supreme overlord. But the local master was only making use of the people’s rebellion in order to succeed the Moghul overlord. He was aware of the depth of this rebellion and wanted to rest the leadership of the movement in order to defuse it after achieving his goal. This effectively subverted the movement, turning it gradually into its opposite. The rebellion of Nanak was replaced by an institution of rituals having its own pattern of submission and domination. This position was protected by the newly emergent local overlords and in turn it gave ideological and cultural sustenance to them. The name of Nanak was thus used for controverting the meaning of his life. The seeds of this development are found early in some trends during the times of Nanak’s successors. The poetry of Nanak containing his rich emotive use of Punjabi language was buried under the new institution of rituals. In Ranjit Singh the local master’s bid to succeed the Moghul overlord reached its culmination. Ranjit Singh through a hectic campaign of elimination and consolidation built a smaller empire on the pattern of the great Moghul empire. Nothing was changed except the face and the name of the overlord. The form of the Moghul administration recreated itself under local auspices. Persian was retained as the official medium in spite of the fact that Ranjit Singh himself did not know the language.
The Punjab that the British took over from the house of Ranjit Singh was essentially and formally the Punjab of the Moghul. The fact that the British were, in a short period, able to pacify Punjab where they had had to fight the toughest battles of their stay in India, is an extremely significant one.
The society, where mores of domination and submission were deeply rooted in the socio-economic structure, easily succumbed to foreign invasion. In a society sharply and chronically divided into classes, the real inner necessity for resisting a foreign domination was tenuous and partial. The serving men had little real stake in such a resistance. Their real contradiction was with their immediate enemy, the local master. The local master had his contradiction with the overlord in that he had to share the fruits of his exploitation with the latter. But the local master at the same time found the overlord indispensable in order to maintain his hold over his serving groups. The serving men in Punjab had as little stake in the continuance of the rule of the house of Ranjit Singh as they had in the perpetuation of the Moghul Empire. For the local master, the Lahore Darbar had lost its validity as an overlord after Ranjit Singh. The local master wanted a stable replacement and there was no possibility of such a replacement from amongst his own ranks. The British were known to have provided a viable alternative elsewhere in India. The local master, therefore, was ready to welcome the British.
During the pacification of Punjab, the British found the immense potentialities of the area for stabilizing the Empire and augmenting the Industrial Capitalism at home. Punjab was important not only strategically but also for direct economic gains. The British knew that the prevalent socio-economic organization of Punjab was basically responsible for the comfortable acceptance and extension of their rule in the area. They took certain measures, which qualitatively increased the dependence of the local masters on the overlord and extended the range and depth of the local master’s domination over the serving groups. Immense new tracts of land were made available for agriculture with the opening of various irrigation networks. The network of roads added to the commercial potentiality of agriculture. The ownership of land was made a judiciable issue and the disposal of land by sale and mortgage was given institutional protection. The arbitrary and unpredictable exactions of land revenue during the last years of Lahore Darbar was replaced by the fixed mode of assessment recoverable in money. All these measures strengthened the position of the masters, extending the range and depth of their power and adding a large number of fresh recruits to their ranks. These measures also had deep effect on the range and quality of the master’s allegiance to the overlord. Some of the local masters whose loyalty was found to be complete were made owners of large tracts of land in their own areas. As canals and roads opened up this land for marketable agriculture and these masters grew in power and influence, their submission to the new overlord grew in depth proportionately. A large number of functionaries from the old Lahore Darbar and a host of bankers, priests and commercial middlemen of all shades were given owner-ship of newly opened up lands. The bankers, village shopkeepers and Shahukars from the towns, suddenly emerged as a group with new significance and new potentialities. The land-owner was always short of cash because of the seasonal receipt of crop sales. With the increasing monetization of economy and the availability of new avenues of competitive consumption, he became increasingly dependent on the banker. As the disposal of land by mortgage or sale was permitted large tracts of land passed into the hands of the money-lender. When, near the turn of the century mechanized industry made its appearance, it was from the class of money landers that the new industrial capitalist emerged. The process of transfer of land to the money-lander was largely helped by the new mode of litigation concerning the ownership of land and the social complications arising from it. In the pre-British period disputes arising in the village were dealt with on the spot by the council of elders or the Qazi. Decisions were often weighted in favor of the more influential and the wealthier of the parties but the disposal of the cases was local and summary. The new legal code was extremely complicated and had little relation to the traditional indigenous practices. Litigation was, consequently, prolonged and intricate. A new class of specialist lawyers and their touts arose in towns where the new courts were located. The litigants from the villages had to spend large sums of money on travel, stay in the town and the lawyer’s fees. Litigation was thus a premier drain on the land-owner’s cash resources and he had to resort increasingly to mortgage or sale of land in order to meet the money-lender’s demands.
The class of masters now included, apart from the resident and the absentee landowners, a growing number of urban professionals of all varieties. The masters could make use of the expanding facilities of higher education and consequently it was from their ranks that middle and higher-level bureaucrats were recruited.
The new generation of masters was not essentially different from their pre-British predecessors in either their submission to the overlord or their domination of the serving groups. The range and intensity of submission and domination, however, increased substantially and this resulted in a change in the quality of domination and submission. The new masters knew that now their everyday existence was much more deeply and in a more complex and inextricable way connected with the powerful overlord. Their commitment to the overlord’s interest and to his ideology and culture became more deeply ingrained and submission assumed a highly compulsive character. Their inner alienation from the dominated classes, and consequently from the sources of indigenous culture also became an intensely compulsive phenomenon. To the serving groups the masters represented a way of life distinct from their own—a way of life which implied not only material existence but also values ingrained in behavior and attitudes. But in the pre-British times the master’s way of life stood embodied through heredity in the traditionally entrenched families. The master’s way of life was synonymous with certain particular groups of people. It was ideal for the members of the serving groups to think of joining the ranks of the masters. For this they had to be re-born as nobles with remote or immediate foreign roots. The route to such a re-birth lay through joining the service of the imperial overlord and then rising through a couple of generations to the status of titular owners of land. This route too was not open to everyone and it was a rare luck for anyone to have the opportunity of taking this route. The number of people who entertained the ambition of taking this route was naturally limited. Positive submission to the master in order to become a master in your own right was not very common. The British expanded the opportunities of land ownership and opened new possibilities of commercial and professional employment. Also, they expanded education, to a new level, as a potential means of employment or ownership. The route to the status of the master was thus opened on a regulated and systematized basis. It was no more a mystified hereditary preserve of certain individuals. Attaining the status of the master was now not only possible, but necessary for every individual. The status was now in fact advertised. This had significant implication for serving groups. This removed the natural opposition between their way of life and that of the master. They were invited to view their own position now not as radically opposed to that of the master but as a necessary corollary to it, as a stage in the progress towards the final goal. The master’s way of life was now not that of an enemy but of a successful rival. The antagonism for the master’s values and attitudes was thus subverted. The patterns of domination and submission, conformity and alienation, were now not to be fought as symptoms of a disease, but to be ingrained in the consciousness as necessary equipment for advancement. Rebellion was now increasingly seen as a hindrance to the possibilities of life. Rebellion was a reactionary mode of behavior — it was an outmoded philosophy. Rebellion was debunked on a serious level by thinkers and creative artists produced by the new education. Education represented a crucial contradiction. Education was a necessary qualification for the open door to the way of the master. It automatically involved an intensification of conformity and alienation. At the same time, it was advertised as the only means of access to factual knowledge of universe and humanist traditions of thought. The only means to enrich your sensibility, to make moral and aesthetic distinctions, was to go first to the school and then to the university. The human goals of life were thus subtly but inextricably linked with the goal of making good in the master’s system. Alienation and conformity were taken to be necessary attributes of a sensitive and profoundly aware consciousness. Conversely anyone who retained some resemblance of a cultural connection with the serving groups was made out to be less aware of life and less human in sensibility.
Alienation and conformity, the will to dominate and the readiness to submit, were naturally more pronounced in those who had already launched themselves on the way of the master. But the germs of these tendencies took root the moment you felt inclined towards the master’s way. The master’s way was not a finished state, although it was advertised as such. It was in fact an attitude of mind, an inner orientation which ordered your energies and determined your drives. Whenever even passingly you entertained an inner approval of the master’s status, you became a party to the master’s way of life to the extent of your approval. And to that extent you withdrew from rebellion. The two ways of life were jealous adversaries and could not bear any mode of co-existence.
The new education implicitly and explicitly inculcated the protestant work ethics of the 19th Century British middle class. This work ethics consisted of an almost mystical regard for individual hard work. The goal of the hard work was achievement of competitive material advancement for yourself and your immediate family. The work ethics emphasized meticulous individual honesty in everyday dealings; it advocated extreme abstemiousness, especially in attitude towards sex. Sensuous responses to Life, were an unnecessary extravagance, a hindrance to your purpose and had to be eliminated from your system. Sexual drive was only a means to acquire a family. It was a part of the plan for material advancement. Any other attitude to sex was disruptive of your already tight schedule and ultimately disturbing for your total personality. The repressive abstemiousness and divorce from sensuous response to life is reflected in all attitudes of those launching themselves on the way of the master. You and your family had to turn into a mechanism of “making good in life” – “life” being synonymous for competitive struggle for a footing in the master’s world. The prototypes embodying character and virtue were “the worthy successor” and “the self-made man”. Repression of sensuous responses became a necessity and the drive for material acquisition became a part of the instincts. That which was associated with sensuous responses to life now became a vehicle for the expression of the instinct for material acquisition. Sexuality became a subtle mode of possession. Thus, even the deviation from the work ethics of “the worthy successor” or “the self-made man” was made to serve the overall goals of ensuring conformity and promoting alienation. The deviationist often used his sexuality for satisfying his instinctive desire to become the master.
Sensuous repression was integrally related to conformity and alienation. This relation had existed in the pre-British days as had the display of sexuality as an attribute of the master. Now these relations became more and more a part of the non-remarkable everyday norms. When the master was professionally a soldier, sexuality was a form of conquest. Now that the master was not necessarily a soldier, sexuality gradually became an expression of acquisition in competitive market. The rituals of conquest associated with marriage started dying out.
Vicissitudes of rebellion can be studies in the literary trends in the British Punjab. A significant phenomenon is the gradually but surely expanding quantity of literature produced in Urdu. Urdu had been brought into Punjab by the British as a medium of functional communication between the masters and the serving men. The British had already utilized Urdu for this purpose in other parts of India during the colonization. Urdu had become the language of colonizers camp. A specialized corps of scribes, translators and interpreters existed as a part of the camp. These scribes, translators and interpreters, played an important role in the pacification of Punjab. They found an ally in the class of Persian knowing scribes who had served the Moghuls or the house of Ranjit Singh in various clerical capacities. In addition to their own specialized function, the scribes formed the nucleus of the lower bureaucracy which gradually became the most effective arm of the new order. These groups of functionaries established the use of Urdu as a medium of functional communication with the serving groups. Functional communication implied simultaneous distancing from the serving men. Both the communication and the distancing were essential features of pacification and colonization. Urdu was the vehicle of this dual drive towards communication and distancing. It was a very successful vehicle: it was sufficiently close to the indigenous language for facility in functional communication; and yet it was not the indigenous language and could efficiently establish the required distancing. Since the new educational system was created to serve the needs of pacification and colonization, Urdu was given a prominent place in the system. The acceptance of Urdu as a cultural and educational medium thus became a factor in and a measure of the colonization of Punjab. Urdu became the means of plugging the rebellion inherent in the full-blooded use of their own language by the serving men. The use of Urdu effectively alienated the user from the serving men and integrated him with the master. Through Urdu, the user could easily draw himself away from sensuous and emotive involvement with his surroundings. The use of Urdu assured that the surroundings did not evoke a sensuous and emotive response, and for those who accepted the use of Urdu it became easy to disown the surroundings. Disowning the surroundings was a necessity for launching yourself on the way of the master. For you cannot efficiently use the environment for your own advancement if you keep belonging to it in an emotional and sensuous way. You have to dehumanize yourself towards the environment if you want that your human contact with it should not hinder you in manipulating it. An indigenous language is the source of the human contact with your surroundings; it not only expresses this contact but also replenishes and enriches it continuously. When an indigenous language is downgraded in the scale of social acceptance, it implies that human contact with the surroundings is being debunked as a value. When a medium other than the indigenous language is encouraged, it means that a mechanical and manipulative attitude towards the surroundings is being inculcated. Spreading the use of Urdu in Punjab was thus a vital factor in the strategy of colonization. The new class of masters were indebted to Urdu for their birth and their existence. They had a vital stake in its retention and progressively expanding application. They came to look on Urdu as the talisman which had released them from the human bondage with their surroundings. They considered the new medium a functionally necessary attribute of their class. As their class grew in numbers and strength, a section of the local masters became aware of their contradiction with the foreign overlord. At this stage they used Urdu as a rallying point and an emblem in their struggle against the overlord. In this capacity the use of Urdu did come to symbolize a self-assertion. But this was the self-assertion of the local master against the foreign overlord. When you owned Urdu as a medium of self-assertion against the overlord, you simultaneously asserted your status as the local master, you simultaneously displayed your desire and ability to distance yourself from the dominated class. In the relations between the local masters and the serving groups, Urdu naturally continued to stand for the antithesis of rebellion. This dialectical situation was not understood by the intellectuals and writers produced by the new education. They asserted that Urdu was the indigenous medium and that its use by them implied that they were rebelling against the foreign overlord as well as as the total system of the masters. They did not realize that content notwithstanding their Urdu writings (and speeches) continued to be a medium of alienation and conformity. They could not realize that. Their education was a long stretch of preparation for launching themselves on the way of the masters. And proficiency in Urdu was a part of that preparation.
By not understanding the implications of the use of Urdu they simply affirmed the goals of their education. Giving up Urdu would mean giving up these goals. The effort of the writers and intellectuals who expressed themselves in Urdu actually implied the use of their gift for assuring themselves that they belonged to the class of the masters. The gift was, for them, a substitute for the actual occupation of the status of a master; it was an instrument of domination and alienation. The writer and intellectual expressing himself in Urdu was the cultural counterpart of the local master.
In making the dominated classes the subject of his writings he was in fact reducing them to the status of an object—an object for the use of the masters. It was like gathering game for your patrons. If a member of the dominated class could read his portrayal by the Urdu writer, he would recognize himself as an object—an object of the medium of the master. He could be repelled or enticed by this recognition. He could not be really moved by it because it was not a portrayal of himself for himself.
Another motive of the Urdu writer was to lessen the dehumanizing effects of alienation by differentiating himself from the purely functional user of Urdu. But he did not realize that the aesthetic pleasure he gained and gave by romanticizing the medium of alienation would drive it to deeper, more sub-conscious levels.
It is significant that the ability to use Persianized phrases and a general preference for Arabic-Persian vocabulary was the criterion of excellence in Urdu literature. This was the cultural equivalent of what the Patwari or the Thanedar did on the functional level. It was the functionaries of this category who had to initiate the process of mystifying the master’s power. The master was distant; he was a different kind of human-being. His power originated and rested in this distinction. Governance was a function of this distinction. The vocabulary of governance had to embody this distinction. If the serving man could comprehend the vocabulary of governance, he would strive to annul the difference between himself and the master. He would no longer be an object of governance. The registers, reports and diaries of the Thanedar and Patwari wore their incomprehensibility as an ornament. The validity of these documents rested on the non-indigenous character of their form. To the Urdu writer too the validity of his form depended on its quantitative difference from the indigenous forms. A large part of the aesthetic pleasure derived from the Urdu writings and speeches by the literatures and their clients was the pleasure of distancing themselves from the indigenous forms. By withdrawing from the indigenous forms, they withdrew from the status of serving men. Writing in Urdu or being able to enjoy Urdu literature was magic. This magic enabled you to escape the wretchedness of the serving man, and gave you a momentary foothold in the dreamland of the master’s world of power, security and luxury. The Persianized vocabulary was a substitute for luxurious living. Words stood for the glamour of palaces, for dreamed-of luxury, of aristocratic food, dress, sex and leisure. The overt content was not necessarily of relevance to this escape effort. It was the inner content—the form, the sound and rhythm patterns, the associational reverberations of the words which had the real magic. There was often a contradiction between the overt motives of the writer represented by the apparent meaning and the real inner motives contained in the form. (Iqbal’s famous poem “God Addresses his Angels” is an example of this contradiction.)
Sensuous pleasure from words, images and rhythms subverts an order based on mechanical, depersonalized relationships. But when works images and rhythms evoke the achievement of that order then sensuous pleasure becomes an ally of that order. Sensuous pleasure of words then provides a human covering for the real inhumanity of relationships required by the order of the masters. By humanizing the inhumanity of the order of the masters, sensuous pleasure of words subverts rebellion. Urdu writings in Punjab thus undermined rebellion and stabilized the order of the masters. The medium of alienation was romanticized. The distance between the master and the servant was given an aesthetic character. The achievements of the order of the masters were celebrated and advertised through the form of the writings. Rebellion was reduced to a rhetorical stance, to a mockery of itself by being couched in a form that was antithetical to it. When reduced to a theatrical stance rebellion became a piece of decoration and diversion posing no real problem for the order of the masters. The rebellious Urdu poet was essentially a vendor of words, images and rhythms that secretly transported the audience to the supposed world of masters’ luxurious indulgence. Urdu poet, through his form, invested the master’s power with a beauty; the power to dominate and subject others to your will, the power to turn others into objects of use. The power to dehumanize others was celebrated as an aesthetic virtue.
Urdu literature in Punjab involved an irony constantly glossed over by the writers and their clientele. Literary creativity here was an agent of alienation from the situation of the dominated classes, from your surroundings and consequently from your own humanity. Literary creativity thus negated itself. Urdu writings in Punjab, hence, cannot strictly be describes as literature.
All literature involves magical motives. The writer and his audience fight anew and win battles lost elsewhere. Losses are made good by deeper and more lasting, though less palpable satisfactions. When the processes of living involve damage to the essential human resources of man, literature redresses the balance by repairing damage. But it is the type of repairing done, the quality of compensatory satisfaction provided on which a literature is judged. Ideally literature operates by deepening the suffering man’s critical awareness of the process of life. Literature presents a profound analysis of the contradiction between the processes of living and the essential human resources of man, upholding on the way, the primacy of the human resources. Literature thus turns the defeat of man at his own hands into a victory over himself.
Urdu literature in Punjab celebrates the defeat of man by authenticating the processes of living. When it is not openly advocating alienation it engrains and embodies alienation in its form. By its very existence — overt protestation not withstanding — this literature approves of the distance between the masters and the dominated classes and the dehumanization of the masters as well as the dominated classes inherent in this distance. The Urdu writer in Punjab and his reader fight their battle in literature but it is not a battle against the dehumanizing processes of living. It is a battle which qualifies you for success within the processes. By the act of writing in Urdu or by entering into the world of the Urdu writer you create a barrier of silence against the oppressed man. You silence the oppressed man around you and within you and become the master. The tyrannical effort at silencing the other within you is your credentials for entry into the master’s world. You as a writer or a reader identify yourself through self-repression. You are apparently making an effort at expressing yourself but you are actually engaged in evolving a rhetorical device to muzzle self-expression. The world you create is an artificial world of silence super laid on the actual world.
Urdu literature in Punjab thus actually embodies the master’s effort to communicate with his status as the master, to make a sensuous contact with his achievement in becoming a master. It is a literature in service of domination on the one hand and conformity and submission on the other.
Urdu literature in Punjab was a true successor to the Persian literature in the pre-British time. Only the extent of its influence was greater. It was far easier to switch over to Urdu both in writing and in speech, then to Persian, just as it was far easier to have some semblance of affiliation with the master’s world now than it was in the pre-British times. With the spread of colonization and trade, with the expansion of education and the media, new incentives and new persuasions were added to the cause of the master’s way of life. Rebellion in all its shapes was attacked with the various new weapons of absorption, and immunization.
Rich and full-blooded use of the indigenous language continued to be a significant contribution to rebellion. It was, however, extremely difficult to prevent the subverting influences from penetrating the consciousness. You were on the side of rebellion in that you refused to write in Persian. But the subtle persuasions of the master’s system had, without your knowing, corroded your defenses and diluted your will to rebel. This was reflected in the watering down of the indigenous vocabulary in some of the Punjabi poets. Persian words were, by some of these poets, preferred to local vocabulary. There was in them an overall leaning towards Persianizing their total form. The weakening of the quality of rebellion was also reflected in attitudes and values represented by these poets. Fazal Shah writing towards the close of the 19th Century exemplifies the subverting tendencies penetrating the Punjabi poet’s sensibility. In a seemingly casual critique of Waris Shah, Fazal Shah wrote:
وارث شاہ ہسایا جگ عاماں خاصاں اساں رواوناں زار پیارے
فضل ہسدیاں نوں ہسن لوک دانے اتے روندیاں نوں کرن پیار پیارے
Waris Shah made the commoners laugh. We shall make the elite break into tears. Those who laugh are laughed at by the wise and those who cry attract their love.
This verse identifies two classes of readers. The elite are characterized by solemnity of response. The commoners are prone to relish humour. Apparently, the division does not refer to the social status of the audience.
Fazal Shah seems to be making a distinction between the seriously inclined, the genuinely involved and the superficial philistine. In a social organization which through its normal functioning, divides people among masters and servants, classes of possessors and classes of the dispossessed, such a distinction is called for. In fact, it is a function of rebellion to make such a distinction. But there is an organic co-relation between the material and culture values of philistinism which must be brought out by such a distinction. It needs to be emphasized that it is those who own the master’s way of living, who cannot respond sensitively and seriously to the words of the poet. The distinction made by Fazal Shah lacks this emphasis. The fact that the distinction is made with reference to Waris Shah, gives it completely different coloring. Humor in Waris Shah is not intended as a frivolous diversion substituting for serious involvement in life; it is not meant to generate callousness. In Waris Shah, humor is the very mode of a profound criticism of the prevalent processes of living. Also, it is the form of exploring the alternatives to the prevalent social organization and its values. Waris Shah’s humor is the form of his rebellion. Those who can laugh with Waris Shah join him in rebellion. Those who scoff at him or equate his laughter with frivolity—the wise ones of Fazal Shah—abet the master’s effort of subverting rebellion. It is obvious that Fazal Shah made a serious error of judgment in his appreciation of Waris Shah. But why did he make this error? Why should humor - and the humor of Waris Shah at that - be considered aesthetically an inferior activity? There are two kinds of laughter we meet in Waris Shah. One is the mode of multileveled exposure of the real character of the master’s organization. Here the dehumanized values are reached through stripping of a variety of pretenses. The other laughter is a expression of mutual sensuous recognition of the human, of play as love. Now both of these forms of laughter are a threat to the master’s way of living. Laughter as a mode of exposure, is the obvious enemy but laughter containing the warmth of sensuous recognition in love is a much deeper challenge — it undermines the dehumanization of relationships necessary for the master’s way of living. Laughter, therefore, was a taboo for both the old and the new classes of masters. Hence the categorization of humor as a form of vocabulary. The only form of humor the masters could afford and did allow themselves was humor at the expense of the other, humor as a stealing or snatching of pleasure through mortifying the other. A variety of this was humor as contemptuous indifference. This was humor as a mode of distancing and dehumanizing. It is this kind of humor which Fazal Shah seems to approve of in the line:
فضل ہسدیاں نوں ہسن لوک دانے اتے روندیاں نوں کرن پیار پیارے
Thus, Fazal Shah’s distinction, though apparently intended as a rebuff to the philistine, actually upholds the philistine’s values.
Fazal Shah’s verse is significant also because it contains a theory of the poet’s method and function. The job of the poet according to Fazal Shah is to create an emotional effect on the audience. Waris Shah made his audience laugh, Fazal Shah will move his to tears. The poet sells a certain effect. For this he acquires a special verbal equipment and finds a suitable clientele. Or the poet may calculate the needs of a particular audience and equip himself to sell the effect that would work. The poet by catering to his audience finds favor with them and acquires a certain station within their social organization. The poet uses his gift to attain personal rehabilitation. He is not at one with his gift. He is the user of his gift. The gift is the poet’s capital. This distance between the poet and his gift or between the man and the poet is a product of the master’s social organization where distancing is the essential principle of work. Now if you have a user’s relation with your gift then you are not humanly connected with it. You have no real knowledge of your potentialities of feeling and thinking. You are not really in touch with your resources of life. Living is not real but merely formal, although you are not fully aware of this. This is the situation when you are ready to submit to the will of the other. Who is the other for you? The one who seems to have a will of his own. The one placed socially higher than you, who expresses his will in terms of his power over you.
One characteristic of Fazal Shah’s two lines is their naivete. He is naively self-righteous in his estimation of his own function as a poet. This is not accidental. This is a product of the inner disintegration, of the distancing between the man and his gift. The disintegrated consciousness cannot comprehend the complex relatedness of phenomena: it can only form simplistic uncritical attitudes. Fazal Shah asserts that his job is to move people to tears. Then he indicates that being moved to tears has its reward in the shape of public sympathy. The word he uses for public sympathy is “love” which gives rise to the apprehension that he finds little difference between the two sentiments. And if public sympathy is an expression of genuine love, then why is it that the poet wants to be loved for his tearful solemnity? One suspects that this tearful solemnity is no real profundity of response; it is an attitude which the poet thinks he can induce in order to ensure the reward of love. In a system organized on individual disintegration, this is the only form of “love” one could aspire for. Fazal Shah’s tearful solemnity is not an organic state, growing from within. It is something which exists with the poet as a stock-in-trade and can be worn as an ornament. The homage of love which the poet ensures for his tearful solemnity is in fact a kind of adoration elicited by ornaments. In the master’s world, external ornament passes for inner virtue. The inorganic and external character of the ornament is simplistically ignored. The master’s way of living ensures that organic working of the processes of life is suspended and no real virtue can grow from within. The master, therefore, has to substitute ornament for reality and believe the ornament to be real. Fazal Shah’s theory of poet’s method and function contains these values of the master’s world. That is why he can speak to groups habituated to certain uses of poetry. The poetry of rebellion is not for an exclusive audience; it fights against exclusiveness, being relevant both for the rebel and his dehumanized adversary. Fazal Shah’s belief that the poet existed as a seller of certain effects influences his own practice extensively. Words become objects. They are dressed up with external ornamentation. Puns and alliteration bedeck the words for display. It is external ornamentation which gives value to a thing and the word is a thing. The word is not the organic part of a living whole: it can also be used as waste material for padding a line.
The example of Fazal Shah shows how Punjabi poetry which was by itself a mode of rebellion was being subverted by the master’s values. Modes of rebellion continued to be subverted progressively by the values of the masters. The new movements towards national independence or communal self-determination were essentially subversive of rebellion. The nationalist movements were directed against the foreign overlord. There was nothing substantial in them against the master/servant system of social organization. There could not be. The nationalist movements sought to replace the foreign overlord. But the change was thought of as a change of persons. The mechanics of power were to remain the same. The wielders of power had to be replaced. The nationalist movements thus were an effort to attain power within the master’s organization. Those who joined the nationalist movements were hence looking forward to the status of the overlord/master. The work in the movement itself was turned into a mode of attaining the status of the master. The hierarchy of the party was a replica of the hierarchies prevalent in socio-economic organization of the master. The relationships and attitudes prevalent in life were re-created in political struggle. Politics became a substitute field for attaining the goals established by the master’s education i.e. status, fame and power of manipulating others. The goal of good living was at times abandoned because it was amply compensated by the other satisfactions. The party flag, the party office, the party membership, the dress and the slogans associated with the movement became new sources of old satisfactions. Public meeting was the main medium of organization and struggle. In the public meeting the speaker turned the people into objects of his power of manipulation. He utilized his audience for distancing and distinguishing himself from them through his educational attainment represented by the command of verbal effects. To the audience the man on the stage, the man possessing unlimited verbal resources, represented the master. They enshrined the distance between them-selves and the leader in the deification of the leader. The movements for communal self-determination identified the other community as the perpetuator of ills the real source of which was the master’s socio-economic organization. Here again politics became a substitute for the normal goals of prevalent education. What was sought to be removed was the competition from the other community. The nationalist and communal movements did not hold forth any alternative to the master’s way of living. They only opened new and alternative channels of finding a place in the master’s world. The master’s system, method and values were upheld and sought to be strengthened by being given the covering of national or communal freedom. Only the masters of lower category wanted to replace the masters of higher category or at least share places with them. To mobilize the largest possible number of people, the political movements promised that the fruit of freedom will be the opening of the master’s world for everybody. The entire people would become masters. The message for each individual was clear. It implied that each individual would become a potential master and view the other as a potential servant. Each individual then became a potential possessor of material goods, social status and public acclaim at the expense of his neighbor. The desire for freedom became in essence the desire to distance the other, freedom held the potential of expanding and deepening personal and social disintegration. Freedom fore-bode further dissipation of rebellion and further strengthening of conformity. Freedom and self-determination are deceptive terms. They seek to classify the total population as a homogenous unit a country, a nation, a community or a region. Unless the struggle for freedom or self-determination incorporated as an essential, the total transformation of the internal socio-economic organization, it was bound to result in newer and subtler form of external enslavement. For there is an integral relation between the internal socio-economic structure and external relations. Freedom from external bondage depends on real internal integration which in turn is dependent on complete demolition of the master’s socio-economic organization. Unless the factors which necessitate conformity, alienation and submission are totally eradicated, freedom cannot exist as an internal need.
As the values of the master’s world were ingrained in the movement for independence, they were naturally reflected in life and culture after independence. Independence had implied that the immediate supervision of the foreign overlord was abolished. The local masters filled the places of the foreign overlord. The master’s system of socio-economic organization was strengthened by opening vast new opportunities for private acquisition and possession. Increasingly larger number of people were turned into servants. The values of the master were disseminated and owned to a proportionately increasing extent. Rebellion is inherent in a servant’s situation only potentially. But owning the values of the master is a necessary part of his equipment while he remains a servant. His survival as a servant depends on his capacity for accepting the alienation imposed upon him. And conformity has a premium on it. Only if the servant really believes in the morality of the master’s system can he entertain the hope of becoming a master himself. Status of the servant includes the promise for advancement towards the master’s status. For this promise to be fulfilled the servant must decide to repel the potential for rebellion. Conversely the servant can rebel only if he renounces the promise of advancement towards the master’s status. This renunciation implies that you have to rebuild yourself as a rebel. You have to uproot the values of the master and inculcate the values of rebellion. For this you must have the awareness of how the two sets of values have evolved historically, how in history they have manifested themselves. Often rebellion is proclaimed to have been owned but the rebel does not consciously re-build himself. He cannot because he does not fully know what he has to renounce and what he has to cultivate. Groups of political workers with revolutionary ideologies have existed in the Punjab for a long time. The revolutionary worker of today nominally represents rebellion. At times, in spite of his professions and in spite of his being engaged in active work the revolutionary worker of today often ends up by strengthening the master’s organization. In his relation with his work and with those he works, he manifests the attitudes and values of the master’s world. He treats his position of a revolutionary worker as a comparative acquisition. He gains by this position the opportunity to control and manipulate others. His belief in his own being depends on denying being to others who come into contact with him. He draws others near himself in order to achieve distinguishing distance from them. Unless the revolutionary worker purges himself of the values of the master and reshapes his consciousness as a rebel, he will remain a revolutionary worker in name only. His work will be an indirect contribution towards stabilizing the master’s organization. And even if the present shape of the master’s organization is dissolved, the values of the master will take a new birth in the new set-up. A change which is brought about by men working through submission, alienation and conformity is actually a re-hashing of the old order which gives a new, albeit a short-lived credibility to the old order. The master uses the trappings of rebellion to extend his lease of life.
In active political work as well as in culture, form and content cannot be separated. The revolutionary intention is the content. How this intention is reflected in the relation of the revolutionary worker with himself and with others is the form. One cannot judge a revolutionary worker merely on the basis of his intentions. In literature and arts too, declaration of rebelliousness does not prove anything. Nor does what is called “the meaning”. The meaning is significant only if it is supported by the form. Form is the real — as distinct from the overt — intention of the artist. In judging form we have to see the historical significance of all its elements. In poetry it is images and rhythms and the way they are organized in relation to each other. Also, in poetry we have to see for whom it is written, who makes use of the poetry and to what purpose. And here the pious intentions of the poet do not matter. What matters is the kind of feelings different groups of people reserve for the language in which a poet chooses to write. With the expansion and stabilization of the master’s organization and wider proliferation of the master’s values during the British occupation and since independence, it has become increasingly difficult for rebellion to resist subversion and stay as rebellion. Consequently, the need has become more acute for rebellion to have a clearer understanding of its own historical roots as well as of the multifarious modes of subversion.
Mian Mohd Bukhsh wrote in the 2nd half of the Nineteenth Century. We hear him complain of the common attitudes to literature. In the prologue to his epic “Saiful Maluk”, Mian Mohammad identifies the deliberately negative fault finding which passes under the name of criticism. The poet is bitterly aware that genuine audience of poetry is shrinking fast. People do not come to poetry for genuine reasons. A poem for them is an excuse for wanton doing down of a poet or for comparative bickering. There is in such people a callous disregard of the creative process itself. They have no use for a poet except for building or destroying reputations. Reputation has a market. Creative process is not relevant to the needs of the market. Mian Mohammad is deeply perturbed by this audience which is indifferent and hostile to poetry and whose interest in poetry is for some ulterior purpose. The poet feels so hedged in by this audience that he is apprehensive of the future survival of his creation. It appears that this audience is in fact the society in which the poet lives. It is not a minority group or for that matter any specific group which is in question. It is the operative values of the world around the poet which are the cause for his deep concern. Mian Mohammad points out the inhuman attitude towards poetry. This attitude implies that you do not really come close to the poet’s words. In fact, you prevent yourself from coming close to the poet’s words. You treat the poet’s creation as a thing outside you and then you proceed to reject it. Mian Mohammad wants the audience to relate themselves to him personally. A criticism emanating from such a relationship would be welcome to him. He wants those around him to participate in his creation. In fact, he wants to do away with the distinction between the poet and audience. The warmth of the audience’s vicinity is the life blood for him. But he is denied this life blood. That is why he feels he is standing in a garden whose sap has dried up. Saif ul Maluk was created in the world of the railways, the telegraph, the printing press, the irrigation projects, the fixed land revenue rates, the penetration of even remote areas by the Imperialist administration. This was the world of increasing monetization of market and commercialization of agriculture. Money the old god was making newer and deeper inroads into the hearts and minds of men. More and more of his world, he was personally related to, was falling into an impersonal distance. Mechanical depersonalization was being accepted as the valid mode of human organization at an un-precedented scale. There was an increasingly willing acceptance of mechanical depersonalization because it was effective in terms of visible economic gains. The gains themselves were more illusory than actual for the working classes. The actual result was a greater and more wide-spread impoverishment. Yet the illusion was a tremendous lure. The fact that you could possess and spend some money, however trifling, gave you a sense of power and purpose. With the crumbling of personally related environment an ever-larger number of people clung to this illusory power as a substitute filler of vacuum. The failure of money to fill the vacuum was attributed to its shortage. Money does not fulfill you because you don’t have enough of it. And you don’t have enough of it because you don’t try hard enough. This was the new ethics being propounded by the new education. This ethics was being absorbed and dished out also by the religious schools who had worked as ideologues of the master’s organization since ancient times. And this ethics was surreptitiously seeping into the extant modes of rebellion.
“Saiful Maluk” is an act of revolt against the threatening new environment.
The poem records Mian Mohammad’s total break with this environment.
Saiful Maluk is a hero who does not exist in this world. He is a seeker whose field of search is located outside the pale of human civilization. Saiful Maluk is himself human but Badiul Jamal, his beloved is not. The choice of locale itself is an act of withdrawal. The poet dissociates from the form of the actual world which is encroaching upon him. He distances the world which seeks to distance him. This strategy protects the post’s human consciousness and keeps his creativity alive. But at the same time this strategy enervates the creativity and damages the human consciousness itself. The poet survives but at a cost. The search of Saiful Maluk is for beauty – beauty which is not present in his own world. The hero’s only asset is his passion which is indifferent to any obstacle. Badiul Jamal’s coming to the world of Saiful Maluk implies permeation of this world with beauty. The allegory is clear enough in outline. But in the poem itself, in the detailed account of Saiful Maluk’s struggle, the allegorical meanings do not come to life. These meaning remain anaesthetized by the picturesque affluence of descriptive detail. The aim behind the descriptive detail is to make the characters and incidents look real. But actual effect is that of making the characters and incidents look less real. The details are not charged enough by the meaning.
It appears that the poet relaxes his grip on his central allegorical concern for indulging in distractive sallies of realistic detail. The ornament which distracts from, rather than add to the meaning, is an item of display. On display is the poet’s virtuosity. The poetic gift does not serve the poet’s passion. It advertises his competence. The poet’s relation to his gift is thus that of a user. The user in the poet is the master. Although the poet has withdrawn from the world of the master because he wants to keep his humanity alive, the shadow of the master’s world tracks the poet in his retreat and subverts his withdrawal. Mian Mohammad consciously wants the reader to concentrate on the meaning and repeatedly reminds the reader of his intention. But these reminders become necessary because of the poet’s own feeling of failing to concentrate on the meaning. There is an internal debility to be passionately, dramatically involved with the declared meaning and its implications. The descriptive indulgence and the explanatory dilation of the obvious is an effort to compensate for that debility.
The search of Saiful Maluk is Mian Mohammad’s revolt against the master’s world. This search marks his intention for finding an alternative to the threatening pervading values of the master’s world. But the mode of Mian Mohammad’s search is withdrawal. And in the face of the aggressive expansion of the master’s world rebellion could not live in withdrawal. The master’s world had penetrated deeply your internal and external landscape.
When you tried to withdraw from it, you succeeded only in withdrawing into it. Rebellion could only live now in fighting the master’s world within and outside. Alternative to the master’s vales now lay in the complete destruction of the master’s organization. Withdrawing from the master’s world now implied withdrawing from the possibilities of destroying it. Mian Mohammad’s fear about his poetic survival are both the cause and the effect of his withdrawal. His inability to really come to grips with the master’s values is at the center of his misgivings about himself. It is not accidental that he at times speaks of his verse in terms of jewels which may or may not convince the expert eye of the connoisseurs. The image reveals areas within the consciousness where the values of the masters have not been challenged. The process which turns human imagination into a commodity is not being rejected totally and effectively.
Maulvi Ghulam Rasul the author of “Amir Hamza” and “Yusaf Zulaikhan” is a contemporary of Mian Mohammad Bakhsh. The two long poems are two attempts at countering the present reality. Yusaf is virtue as beauty. He is absolute good expressing itself as absolute beauty. No one knows him. He is misunderstood, loved and hated for wrong reasons. Finally, he comes to attain political power and there should be no difficulty in the world being transformed. But the world is not transformed.
The transformation can come about only if the world knows Yusaf for what he is and loves him for that. Absolute good as beauty remains an abstraction unless it permeates the human consciousness.
جھوکاں تِھیسن آباد ول
(عام پڑھت وِچ خواجہ غُلام فرید دے ناں لائی سطر)
(Verse commonly attributed to
Hamlets Will Hum Again
Khawajah Ghulam Farid)