Doha poetry — a bright new name

KARACHI: Going through Dr Tahir Saeed Haroon’s second collection of Dohas Neela Chandrama, one feels that it has come as a fresh breeze of a form of poetry which I thought had lost its significance for us.

Doha poetry has been attempted by quite a few writers quite well. Jamiluddin Aali is so far our most well-known Doha poet. It is another issue whether Aali’s Dohas could strictly be called Dohas in view of the Persian rules of prosody which they subscribe to but so is the case with most our Doha writers excepting Khwaja Dil Muhammad and Ilyas Ishqi who have applied Hindi Chind system of metrical system. I believe what makes Dr Tahir Saeed Haroon’s Dohas fresh and exhilarating is the fact that he appears to be completely at ease with the ‘feelings’ he is expressing. He is not involved in expressing himself in prose or other forms of poetry. He is calm and quiet person. He has taken to Doha because it is his first or second love. The only demand on his time comes from his profession. He is country’s well-known dermatologist and has recently retired from King Edward Medical College, Lahore.

Ever since Dr Tahir Saeed Haroon’s first collection of Dohas, Man Moj, appeared in 2001, I was intrigued to find that he was five or six years old when Lahore lost its character as a composite Hindu-Muslim-Sikh city. There was a time when Lahore’s Reeson were talked about in the whole of sub-continent. It was called Paris of the sub-continent. Its Basant used to be a colourful festival and almost all Urs ceremonies of the Punjab’s important poets were used to be the occasions which suggested that the ‘cultural divide’ between religious groups was not possible. We thought that as in Europe, so in the sub-continent, we could have many countries beneath the Himalayas but the common festivals would continue to exhort us to rise above the political divides.

Who could love Bullhe Shah, Waris Shah, and Sultan Bahu — besides Baba Fareed — more than the people who have been fed on them. Each religious group would try to outbid the other in its manifestation of adoration for the Sufi poets who always sang songs of love and made our culture so ‘catholic’ that no colour could be distinguished from the other.

But Doha writing in Pakistan has been going on uninterruptedly since the partition. Before that, who could forget Dil Ki Geeta and Dil Ke Dohe.

Dr Haroon, let me be quite frank in affirming his genuineness as a Doha poetry is, perhaps, temperamentally suited to the genre. Yes, there are some poets who are mentally equipped to pursue a genre to its logical steps towards the elevation point while their temperaments clash with their genres. Many a Ghazal poet, as Firaq Gorakhpuri so beautifully said, have no temperament for Ghazal.

Ghazal is traditionally a genre which comes naturally to a person imbued in pessimism. Yes, it is all about love and the yearnings for the beloved. The more one would be economizing on outlandish rhetoric in praise of the beloved or in anguish of separation from her, the greater are the chances of its being true to its calling. Perhaps Firaq Gorakhpuri is a unique Ghazal poet. He has almost exhausted most of the feelings of a lover in the course of being plaintive or ecstatic about his love. He has, perhaps, exhausted the poetry of “Ma’mlat”. My goodness, one feels that even the great trio of Mir, Sauda and Mushafi has not touched hundreds of feelings which Firaq has expressed for the first time on Urdu Ghazal. A great maestro indeed whom we seem to have forgotten. It is our loss. He is one of the most original poets of our language.

Dr Haroon’s Dohas in Man Moj and Neela Chandraman are so much imbued with the spiritualizing tenor of an essentially physical urge that I believe that he is one of the most successful of Pakistani Doha writers today. Jamiluddin Aali has also accepted him to be ideally gifted in his preface in Neela Chandrama. He had said that Dr Tahir Saeed Haroon’s advent on the scene could make him (Aali) say good bye to Doha writing. I believe that this is a great tribute by someone who knows what he means. If Dr Tahir Saeed Haroon is the Doha writer of the day, and not anyone else, I believe that it is good that Aali Ji has reconciled to the fact that the Doha writer from Lahore has really got a place to be proud of.

I believe that it is immaterial whether Doha is being written on the Hindi metrical scale or on the conventional Persian scale of prosody. The fact of the matter is that it should be an authentic expression of confusing the ‘libido’ with the spirit. There was a time when the Ghazal poet considered that the theme of Ghazal-love and plaintive notes over the beloved’s indifference towards the lover — and many a poet who had never gone through the experience of love — wrote love poetry. It was more or less a bit of poetic aerobatics, testing the limits of expression about a theme one had nothing, as a matter of fact, to talk about. Riaz Khairabadi is known a poet of Kumriat who did not taste a drop of liquor — though one research scholar would like to differ on this point. Riaz Khairabadi’s poetry does not differ from Sirajuddin Zafar or Abdul Hameed Adam’s. What makes me marvel at Dr Haroon’s Dohas is the fact that he seems to have been born in or around Mathura — in the Brindra Ban area. Obviously, this is not the case. But the River Ravi also prevented the Aryans from crossing it for 1,000 years and much of Rigveda was written on one side of the river.

However, Dr Haroon’s second collection Neela Chandraman is a bit unconventional and comprises sections (themes) which could be avoided. Dr Haroon was perhaps conscious of the fact that the religious quarters could object to his invocation of Krishan and Radha, rather ecstatically, so it was a good idea to see whether some Quranic Ayas could be expressed in a form which was typically Aryan.

I believe that Man Moj and Neela Chandraman have a far better reason than straining ourselves to prove that they could be ‘tolerated’ by appealing to a good section of our compatriots who cancel out 90 per cent of our Naat poetry for its overstepping the limits of propriety and belief.

So Doha should continue to remain a Doha and its characters — or the aesthetic motifs — may remain typically Ganga Jumni in order to mystify us.

Bangladesh Cricket Board must turn searchlight on itself

THERE is a familiar ring to the review carried out to find out the reasons for Bangladesh’s dismal performance in the World Cup 2003. A postmortem may increase our knowledge of medicine but it has never done the corpse any good.

A review is generally either a whitewash or a cover up. But I was very sorry to read that ex-coach Mohsin Kamal had been made a target. Mohsin had worked very hard but a coach is not expected to work miracles. He has to work with the material made available to him. He cannot transmute lead into gold.

The Bangladesh Cricket Board must turn the searchlight on itself. First of all it should decide whether it did the right thing in seeking Test status. Merely because there is a great deal of enthusiasm for the game and the public is cricket-mad is not qualification enough.

I had welcomed Bangladesh in the ranks of the cricket Test-playing nations because I felt that it would provide an incentive to organise cricket at a grassroots level. Acquiring costly foreign coaches was putting the cart before the horse.

Bangladesh had a chance to get its domestic cricket structure right because, in a sense, it was starting from the beginning. Pakistan’s own domestic structure has come for a good deal of criticism but Pakistan had, had a reasonably sound base of high quality club cricket and many of the founding players had played in the Ranji Trophy and Inter-varsity cricket and two or three of them had played Test cricket for India.

Pakistan were also lucky too that it had a captain like A.H. Kardar and administrators like Chief Justice A.R. Cornelius who had the vision to form the Eaglet’s Society that toured England every year and became a nursery for cricket.

I remember the club cricket that used to be played in Karachi and I would go on Sunday to watch it at the Jahangir and Patel parks and at the Polo ground and which reminded me so much of Bombay’s maidan cricket. I myself played cricket on the maidans for my club Young Men’s Muslim Association (YMMA) and our team included Alimuddin and Anwar Hussain who became Pakistan’s vice-captain on their inaugural tour of India.

At club level we played against players like Vinoo Mankad, Polly Umrigar, ‘Dattu’ Phadkar, Madhu Mantri as well as Sunil Gavaskar’s father. Similarly many famous names played club cricket in Karachi regularly, including Hanif Mohammad, Mahmood Hussain, Ikram Elahi, Mohammad Munaf.

This has, of course, vanished and the parks have disappeared but while it lasted, club cricket threw up first-class cricketers on a regular basis. That’s the route that Bangladesh should have taken.

Now, it is Zimbabwe that is under the cosh. And the facile manner that England won the two Tests had raised questions about its eligibility as a Test-playing nation. Zimbabwe cricket has gone through its share of hell. Because countries like Britain want to send Mugabe packing, it tried to torpedo Zimbabwe as a venue for the World Cup and England did not play there and did its best to persuade others not to do so.

We even had the England captain, Nasser Hussain denouncing Mugabe and making statements about democracy. I have never met Nasser Hussain so I don’t know whether he is a political person or was simply a ventriloquist’s dummy.

Andy Flower, the team’s best player helped to destabilise his own team by wearing a black arm-band and took along the unsuspecting Henry Olonga with him. It is a near-miracle that Zimbabwe was able to put together a team.

England feels no qualms of conscience in hosting Zimbabwe while it had refused to play there. Robert Mugabe is still there and nothing has changed in that country. We have not been told how England has been able to reconcile two contradictory positions though the ECB did make mention of a loss of revenue if the Zimbabwe tour had been called off.

The Caribbean islands have seen some of the most enthralling cricket in recent memory, both versions of the game. There was first of all Australia’s tour and though Australia won both the series, it lost a Test match and lost three consecutive One-day Internationals.

Now Sri Lanka is touring and has already won the one-day series in two terrific matches, played back-to-back on the same pitch in Barbados. In the first, Sri Lanka managed only 201 but it proved substantially enough with the fast bowlers blowing the top order and Muttiah Muralitharan weaving his special yarn to tie up the other batsmen.

The second match was even more remarkable. This time West Indies batted first an amassed a seemingly unassailable 312. Brian Lara was unstoppable and he received great support from Chris Gayle and Marlon Samuels. It was a magnificent display of batting.

But, in a very, very tight finish, 312 were not enough and it was Sanath Jayasuriya who led the victory charge but Upul Chandana who was brought into the team to bolster the spin department. He batted like a man possessed. He did not throw his bat at everything, He played proper cricket shots. He gave support to his ‘betters’ and when they left, he took charge. He had his share of luck as the West Indies fielders felt the pressure and dropped catches.

The match played to a full house and when the West Indies were on top, the ground wore the look of a carnival and the noise was deafening. But the final overs were played in deathly silence, the crowd too stunned by the remarkable turnaround in fortunes.

Sri Lanka has obviously got its act together. It has had a change of captaincy and coach and much turbulence at the cricket board level. I look forward to the rest of the tour.