Brave are the people who in this age that has been declared non-poetic have the courage and the perseverance to continue composing good poetry. We may find poets a dime a dozen (‘takay tokri’ is the apt phrase borrowed from the vegetable market in Punjabi language that poignantly describes the situation) but a good poet is rare to come by these days when gadgets with artificial intelligence have been mistaken as substitute of human wisdom and imagination. One of the reasons for the continued existence of good poetry may be that by its very nature it resists standardisation, the dominant sociocultural phenomenon of our times, and defies conformity with the pre-existing or given. And this is what Raja Sadiqullah does with his verses.

Sadiqullah is not prolific but is legitimately counted among the prominent contemporary poets due to his distinct vision and style.

‘Dhupp Kuni’ (an unusual compound that can loosely be translated into English as Sun Drop or the Sun-Kissed Drop) is Sadiqullah’s second book of verses published by Suchet, Lahore, with introduction by retired Col Nadir Ali and blurb by late Professor Sharab. Mr Nadir Ali, for a reason best known to him, is as much thrilled by the caste of the poet as by his verses. It’s a reflection of parochial cultural practice prevalent in our towns and countryside and perhaps a mark of bonhomie.

A few themes stand out in Sadiqullah’s poems. His love for nature/physical landscape is, in fact, both a memory and desire. Memory is a wrapped in his poetic experience. When interpreted creatively, it becomes dynamic flow of life rather than a remembrance of happening rendered permanently static in the romantic debris of the irretrievable past. Memory, a joyful or painful reminder, of what we have been through is at some level an inescapable legacy of the past. The past anchors our present which is mélange of diverse strands of life force competing with one another in a constant struggle for dominance. Diffused love in its structured expression springs from the awareness of what has survived the ravages of modern life defined by its inbuilt tendency to level and bulldoze things. Flowing rivers, dry nullahs, Siberian migratory birds, Kashmir’s snow-clad mountains, pens on farmland, haunting Pothohar plateau with no pecuniary advantage and humdrum existence of decaying small towns imaginatively rearranged form the outer skyline of his poetic word. But these are not ‘things’ or inanimate entities separate from each other. They are in the poet’s imagination as they are in real life; an inextricable part of the totality of life organically linked with one another. “We seek oneness in duality and in oneness the whole world/ the flying crane, a receding star, opens up vistas of the seven heavens…,” says the poet.

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Topophilia, informed by memory, gives the poet a subdued sense of cultural identity. Thankfully, the evocation keeps clear of the nostalgic undertones.

Another significant theme that runs through his verses is a bond with human beings, the ones that are real, and the ones that are like one’s own flesh and blood. The poet seems to love human beings, not the notion of human beings as some of the poets and writers do. That’s why real characters that came the poet’s way have entered his creative world. Sadiqullah makes no effort to conceal the identity of such characters or endow them with generic or abstract features in a pseudo attempt to universalise them with deceptive trappings. That in no way implies that the local in his poems is merely parochial or non-transcendental. The universal is paradoxically always in some way rooted in the local. Of a local trade unionist who was reduced to the status of a guileless druggie by the system he fought against, the poet writes: “that wise friend of Bhullar! he became oblivious to the pulls and pushes of an entire era/ he roamed the streets distraught for his petite needs/ what was the way out for him except the drugs/ in search of a zestful moment he would die every day/ at long last he is dead today and it looks as if he has entered his comfort zone/ better to be completely dead than to live life in spurts”.

The poet in reality has in his poems an imperceptibly perceptible portrait gallery. We can glance at the artistically worded portraits of people from diverse backgrounds which include sturdy but impoverished people of the Salt Range, highly skillful but marginalised artisans, hardworking but repressed women, glib but elusive swindlers, to name a few. All have splashy ambiance of water colours about them because of fluidity of linguistic constructs employed in creating them.