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Ali Sardar Jafri, Indian poet,
was born on November 29, 1913. He died on July 31 aged 86 aged 86
ALI SARDAR JAFRI was one of the
outstanding Urdu poets of the 20th century. He was often taken to
task for the political nature of his muse, but he produced work
that even his opponents read and quoted. Soon after India exploded five nuclear bombs in
May 1998, the pacifist Jafri received India's leading literary
award, the Jnanpith, from the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee,
and reminded him of a poem he had written decrying atomic weapons.
A few months later, when Vajpayee
went to Lahore to meet his Pakistani counterpart, he carried
Jafri's poems with him, acknowledging not just the power of the
Urdu poet's pen but also the unique role poetry plays in the
political life of the sub-continent.
Born into a family of landlords
in Uttar Pradesh, Jafri studied at Aligarh Muslim University, but
was rusticated for anti-colonial agitation. He went to Delhi and
then to Lucknow University, but before he could take his MA he was
arrested for opposing the Second World War. In 1949 he was
arrested again, for Communist associations.
Much of his early poetry was
unabashedly anti-imperialist. Heavily influenced by the working-class
movement in Bombay, he was closely involved with the Progressive
Writers Association, which attempted to bring social concerns into
literature as a reaction against romanticism and formalism. He
wrote nine books of verse and two plays, as well as publishing
eight volumes of prose and editing compilations of medieval
poetry. He characterised the composite Indian literary tradition
particularly clearly in a critical essay on Hindi and Urdu as two
literary forms of the same language, Hindustani.
Membership of the Communist Party
was a source of strength for Jafri but also his great weakness. In 1975,
despite his personal doubts, he toed the party line on the State
of Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi, but this was traumatic for
him, since almost everything he had written or said up to then had
been designed to battle against the authoritarianism his party was
now supporting.
Over the next two decades, there
was a marked shift of sensibility. His poetry remained political, but
its themes became universal. Towards the end of his life, he was
particularly concerned about problems of war and peace, and the
religious intolerance he saw growing around him. He was an ardent
advocate of friendly relations between India and Pakistan.
He is survived by his wife, two
sons and a daughter.
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