The great Bard of Gujrat
Khalid Hasan
Those who only associate the city of Gujrat with Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, Chaudhry Pervez Elahi and other bandy-legged stars of Punjab’s ruling dynasty do great injustice to the city’s greatest son, Ustad Imam Din Gujrati – or to give him his full name, Naz-e-Sukhan, Baani-e-Adab. Mulkul Shoa’ara, Hazrat Ustad Imam-ud-Din, MA, BA, PhD, LLD (ASS). The three letters in parenthesis do not refer to that much maligned animal, but an honorific conferred on the Maestro by the citizens of Gujrat as far back as the 1930s. It stands for Afsar-e-Shai’r au Shai’ri.
The Ustad’s magnum opus Bang-e-Dohhal was written as a counterpoint to Allama Muhammad Iqbal’s Bang-e-Darra . This celebrated and unique collection, first printed in 1932, was reprinted in 1944 and has been in print since, but today only aficionados keep it next to their bed for inspirational reading, especially if they are feeling down or can’t go to sleep despite counting all the sheep in New Zealand. The collection, which must have given the Poet of the East a few anxious moments till he caught on, was published at the instigation of a group of literary devotees and practical jokers of Gujrat. Urdu literature and such of the Ustad’s admirers as I will forever remain in the debt of Abdul Rehman Khadim, Pleader, Gujrat City, who was behind much of Ustad’s arrival on the literary scene. He wrote the introduction to both the first and the second editions, which deserve to take their place next to Patras ke Muzameen and the best work of Mushtaq Ahmed Yusufi.
Had it not been for Abdul Rehman Khadim, who, God rest his soul, is now regaling the angels of heaven with the Ustad’s verse, the world would have remained unaware of the genius that the city of Gujrat will always be proud of. If the doyen of the House of the Chaudhrys of Gujrat wants to carve for himself a place in history, he should at once order a monument erected – at least as high as the Minar-e-Pakistan – to the Pride of Gujrat, Ustad Maam Din (affectionately so called) Gujrati. After all, wasn’t it the Ustad who described himself in one of his immortal verses thus: Gujrat di Committee da toon pava Maam Deena. The Ustad served the City Municipal Committee as its most famous octroi watchdog for thirty years. The Committee will ever live in infamy because despite the Ustad’s poetic eminence and his trans-India fame, it never promoted him. One of the Maestro’s more memorable poems – none of Ustad’s poetry is scannable or follows any of the known metric or versification laws – is devoted to this painful theme. There are some who say that the Ustad did get promoted near the end of his service but refused to do any work. A poet is a poet is a poet after all.
As I said, the true begetter of the Ustad’s poetic work was Abdul Rehman Khadim, Pleader. He it was who assured the Ustad that he was a greater poet than Iqbal. The Ustad, of course, had always known that. He reminds me of a lesser luminary of the same literary tribe, Ustad Khaki of Jammu, and later Sialkot, to whom once a couple of students went asking for an interpretation of a certain couplet. Ustad Khaki declared after the couplet had been read to him that it was utterly without any meaning and a waste of his time. When one of the students said, “But Ustad, it is Ghalib,” the Ustad shot back: “Is Ghalib my maternal uncle that I should accept everything he has written?”
But let me quote from Abdul Rehman Khadim’s classic preface to the first edition of Bang-e-Dohhal , published in Gujrat in 1932. “The world has witnessed the birth of thousands of famous personalities. Hundreds of thousands of celebrated men in all their glory and magnificence have appeared in our midst. Hundreds of poets and writers have spent their lives trying to render what they read in the book of nature into words, but the fact is that no one, but no one, can be compared to the Great and Perfect Master, the most exalted Ustad Imam Din whose titles and honours include Pride of the Arts, the Founder and Inventor of Literature, the Exalted Chieftain of all Poets, the Sweet-voiced Bird of Literature, who also happens to be an MS, BA, LLD, PhD (all honorary).” All of the Ustad’s degrees had been conferred on him by his circle of admirers, but the Ustad took them most seriously. One of the degrees given to him by Khadim and friends was USA, which stood for Ustad-e-Shai’r-au-Shai’ri. ASS and USA were conferred at an elaborate ceremony in Gujrat where the audience could not stop laughing. The Ustad looked most grave, as was to be expected of him. One ceremony to honour the Ustad was held in Sialkot under the presidentship of Sheikh Roshan Din, Pleader. That was where he got the PhD.
Ustad Maam Din began to write poetry in 1902. According to Abdul Rehman Khadim, “As soon as the Ustad would make his entry in a mushaira , the entire audience would burst into uncontrollable laughter and start jumping up and down. The very ceiling of the auditorium would appear to reverberate because of ecstatic slogans and deafening applause. Once the Ustad was on the scene, there could be no question of any other poet reciting his verse. There would be only one demand from the audience, loud and clear: Ustad, Ustad. Even the British who kept a stiff upper lip when serving in India, were part of the Ustad’s club of admirers. When the degree of BA (Banni-e-Adab) was conferred on the Ustad, Charles King, the deputy commissioner of Gujrat, was in the chair, as was Mian Ehsan-ul-Haq, Sessions Judge at Jhelum (father of cricketer and cricket writer MU Haq).
Ustad Maam Din’s poetry defies description and just simply has to be read but consider some of the titles of his poems: Ustad Imam Din in military uniform, Crush Hitler’s skull, Town Hall Gujrat and sugar, Ustad Imam Din masquerading as Government, Ustad in Churchillian attire, Advice to all the world’s wrestlers, A ravishing beauty in the form of a betel-leaf vendor, From Sargodha to Gujrat. I close this tribute by quoting a verse the Ustad wrote after he went to Lahore in 1936 to call on Allama Iqbal:
Kisi shakhz ne Imam Azam aur Hanbal ka masla chaira huva tha: Laikin aap jawab bhi dey rehay thay aur huqqa peetay thay haal naal.
Absolutely priceless and absolutely untranslatable.