IN MEMORIAM: THE GHAZAL WORDSMITH.

PositionObituary

Pity, it is loss that tells us the worth of things. Indubitably, the loss procreated by death reveals, though dreadfully, unto us the truest worth of things. His eminence as a poet rested not just on a single ghazal - the matla [opening verse] of which reads Wo hamsafar tha, magar uss se hamnawaayi na thi [he was a fellow traveller, yet lacked amity] and used as the soundtrack for the television drama serial Hamsafar - but on practising consistently a sort of neo-classicism all along his literary career in his own way.

This is something that might be taken as part of a serious effort to pin down the real worth of Naseer Turabi's works of poetry, on poetics and lexicography in the moment we mourn him.

Tradition seems to have played a decisive role throughout Turabi's literary dispensations since 1962, the year he began composing poetry. In one of his ghazals, written around 1969, he uses 'Mir bhi hum bhi' (Mir Taqi Mir and me too) as the radeef [refrain] in a bid to identify his poetic self - and also the cultural contours of his age - with one of the archetypal representatives of the classical tradition of Urdu poetry. Turabi continued drawing on selective - yet apposite to his poetic intention - nuances of Mir's poetics.

In his father, Allama Rasheed Turabi (1908-1973), there was a confluence of Islamic theology, khitaabat or rhetoric, and poetry - a classical tradition followed by an entire lot of leaders that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in colonial India. Born on June 15, 1945 in Hyderabad Deccan, Naseer Turabi imbibed the major ingredients of the classical tradition he inherited from, and through, his father. However, in him there was an element of divergence. He didn't become a khateeb and religious public speaker like his father (a part of the family tradition followed by his two brothers). He earned a masters degree in journalism from the University of Karachi and served as a public relations officer at Eastern Federal Union Insurance Company.

In postcolonial Pakistan, the word 'tradition' came to acquire a special meaning. For a great number of the literati, it designated not just a set of cultural practices, literary forms and values of the classical period - chiefly 17th to 19th centuries of precolonial India - but was taken as a bulwark against the modernity conceived essentially as a Western phenomenon, which shared least with 'our' tradition.

For more than six decades, Turabi kept writing poetry only in...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT