The state of in-betweeness and much divulging silence slips the net of communication and day to day parlance. Conversation augmented by the media gets the better of listeners giving them no chance to ponder on what is being dished out. Contrarily, art produces a narrative of scintillating whispering intersperse with gap and interlude. Its lays off more than what it reveals. It invests its leaving off with new possibilities of meaning. To transform the malleability of ordinary language into a catalyst of both the agony and ecstasy of life is a gruelling task but this is also a unifying thread that runs through the creative outpouring of Majeed Amjad, an equally accomplished contemporary of Faiz, and Firaq Gorakhpuri but his awe- inspiring poetry remained more or less a uncharted territory. This has been aptly delineated in a biography by eminent critic and scholar Dr. Nasir Abbas Nayyar that appeared recently.
The sweep of the book titled “Majeed Amjad: Hayat, Sheriyat and Jamaliyat” (“Majeed Amjad: Life, Poetics and Aesthetics”) makes it certainly much more than a biography produced by a single author. It is perhaps the example of “bricolage” in Urdu as Nayyar, with his remarkable grounding in both the eastern and western literary canons and ever-increasing acquaintance with post-modern theories, took pains to find answers to the possible questions that might crop up in the reader’s mind about the poet .The book essentially reveals an existential search for a treasured person whose creative dexterity remains unexplored. By sifting through all the material related to the poet, Nayyar produced a counter narrative to hagiography in vogue in Urdu literary circles. The author writing separate full length chapters titles as external and internal life of Amjad, the distinctive features of poetics employed by the poet, Amjad’s poetics in the backdrop of culture and nature, the study of loss and hopelessness rammed in his poetry, the death in last poems of Amjad and lyrical poetry of Amjad, has tried to ponder what essentially drive his poetry along.
He does rely on deciphering rhetorical tropes, especially metaphors that frequently produce moments of catharsis in his long and laconic poems in equal measure and he takes pains in analyzing the central metaphors of Amjad’s poetry. Nayyar rightly points out that Amjad through judicious blending of metaphors with other literary devices despises the thematic and stylistic mannerism of the contemporary Urdu poetry.
Amjad’s disposition towards metaphors may make one jittery as metaphors usually mislead. In this context it looks pertinent to refer to Susan Sontag's seminal essay on style in which she says, “To speak of style is one way of speaking about totality of life. Like all discourses about totalities, talk of a style must rely on metaphors and metaphors mislead”. Nayyar’s critical acumen, deeply mired in the dominant literary discourse, seems to be at best when he pays no heed to the source of inspiration and biographical details in exploring the creative word of Amjad. For him Amjad’s personality lacks gravitational attraction that surrounds Faiz (elitist life style and recognition at international level) or inverted charisma encompassing Meeraji (continuous sneering at the elitist culture). His conspicuous privation on this count casts a spell on the author and he tried to fill the void by emphasizing on aspects that are grisly but unspecified and the author seems quite eager to place Amjad in the category of futurist poets. Fear and a deep sense of humility are dove tailed into the poet's personality and his many poems bear testimony to the fact and his subversion of all values what we hold dear is also judiciously discussed. Here, the points Nayyar raised seem to be a stand-in for the ideas of Barthes, Gaytri Spivak , Harold Bloom and Foucault.
Making the widely known poems of Amjad the object of close study, Nayyar also picks up some holes and explain the inherent weakness and artistic decline of the poet while analyzing some of his poems.
With this sort of book under his belt, Nasir Abbas Nayyar, seems to be well on his way towards the position held by Gopi Chand Narang and Shamsur Rehman Farooqui in Urdu criticism.
