Zafar Iqbal is a well-known Urdu poet but a few know that he has also been writing poetry in Punjabi language since long. Sadly, he is an underrated Punjabi poet. Any creative writer who refuses to walk in the rut and dares innovate must be ready to be taken at best as a literary nuisance and at worst a cultural aberration. Anonymity is usually the fate of those who defy the so-called norms.

Way back in the 1960s, Zafar Iqbal was part of a new literary movement in Urdu spearheaded by the late Iftikhar Jalib that defied the conventional poetics with a view to exploring the new linguistic avenues conducive to the expression of the layered contemporary experience in the changed socio-cultural conditions. Iftikhar Jalib’s Lisaani Tashkilaat (Linguistic Constructs) encapsulated the agenda of the movement with its theoretical framework.

Iftikhar Jalib and Zafar Iqbal came to be conceived as a vanguard of unsettling modernity which not only exposed how unpoetic the given poetics was but also ridiculed the use of traditionally relished language and saccharine diction as banal and hollow, bereft of intrinsic dynamics and thus unable to express anything worthwhile and fresh. As a result of new conceptual framework that underpinned their expression, the former experimented with the genre of poem and the latter with ghazal, a genre borrowed from Persian, which had borrowed it from Arabic.

Iftikhar Jalib, immensely creative and highly imaginative, fell victim to the charms of his own theoretical analyses: he composed poetry as dictated by the theoretical parameters of his insights with the result that it, despite being intriguing and stimulating, somehow failed to communicate his best to his readers. Occasionally, he could write such haunting lines in Urdu and Punjabi as, “Agle waqton main jab chaand uga tha, wirane ki dhol nikhar kar phool hoi thi, mujh se kaisi bhool hoi thi” and “Dain dain way babala os ghare, jithe chann banerion dur howay”. Unfortunately, such a talented poet and writer got lost in the labyrinths of his own “linguistic constructs” which was an irreparable literary loss. Brainy poets sometimes forget that poetry defies formulae, original and borrowed.

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Zafar Iqbal experimented with vigour but fortunately has survived the ravages of new “poetic theory” and thrived. One of the reasons could be his choice of the genre. He chose ghazal for his creative expression. The structure of this genre is such that you can’t qualitatively change it without fully dismantling it. It comprises any number of units. Strictly structured units are rhymed two lines of equal length.

What Zafar Iqbal did with gusto was, firstly, to jettison the typically trite themes of ghazal laced with cheap sentiments and glittery crap in the garb of philosophic ideas. He, in fact, subverted such stuff with a flourish by scratching its hollowed veneer and showing the readers what it actually was; a rehash of specious notions. He brought in some of the unusually prosaic experiences in his verses which offended the cultivated but decadent literary taste of the traditionalists. Secondly, he refused to reprise the role of a traditional poet by shunning the seemingly chiseled idiom of the genre which was bookish and boring, repeated ad nauseam. He took liberty with the so-called poetic language with no holds barred approach. The result was that in addition to creating refreshingly vigorous verses, he demolished the traditional ghazal with the mock seriousness it deserved. He did it nonchalantly in a manner that made you smile, even laugh.

Zafar Iqbal’s collection of Punjabi under the title, Pandokri, his oeuvre, has been published by the Punjab Institute of Language, Art and Culture. The book contains three separately published collections, Haray Haneray, Kukkar Kheh and Bukkal. The book passes to us the pleasure of nuanced Punjabi over which the poet seems to have an impeachable mastery.

Zafar’s Punjabi poetry carries an innovative streak that is a hallmark of his Urdu poetry but with a marked difference. His poetry titillates as well as jolts us but there is nothing unusual about it because the literary tradition of the Punjabi language can rightly boast of its rich repertoire created by diverse creative expressions, ranging from prosaic to sublime and realistic to mystical. His constant concern with the prosaic or subverting the boring sublime has yielded rich dividends. His deceptively simple Punjabi poetry invariable emits subliminal themes which, though complex, are never lost on the native speakers.

According to Zafar’s own statement, he began composing poetry in Punjabi to prove that one could write a ghazal in Punjabi which was an alien genre. No doubt he proves his point but doesn’t stop there. We come across in his collection, Bukkal, a number of poems as well which is only natural for anyone writing in Punjabi. Some of his verses and poems that flout conventions at times sound non-poetry to the readers inured to an anachronistic notion of poetry.

Zafar Iqbal loves spoofing and nobody is better at it than him when it comes to poetry.

“Who had the time to listen to what you had got to say? / the rooster raised the dust only for its head to gather it”. He upends the given and subverts the revered. The literary devices he employs include irony, satire and expose. He has the courage to expose almost everything, including his own self which creates visible angst and invisible sense of absurdity of life. His poetic landscape tells brief tales of derring-do where things appear ridiculously sublime and sublimely ridiculous. Zafar comfortably composes poetry surrounded by his creative chaos. And that’s no mean achievement in a culture which values its belief that lulls it into smugness and abhors its doubt that challenges its false sense of security.