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SANA ALLOHA
SANI DAAR MEERAJI
(1912-1949) |
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Meeraji was born at Lahore on May 25, 1912, and died in Bombay on November 4, 1949. Though he lived for only thirty seven years, his poetic output is astonishing, both in terms of quality and quantity. His complete works Kulliaat published in 1988 by Dr Jameel Jaalibi from Urdu Centre, London, contains a rich variety of verse, representing geet, ghazal, and nazm, both of the rhyming and the free-verse type, in addition to translations from foreign languages including English, French, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Persian, Sanskrit, etc. his favourite topics are love, beauty and death, and his signal contribution lies in giving a new direction to Urdu poetry and poetics. Along with N.M. Rashid, he is a leading poet of the progressive movement in Urdu poetry, which breaks with the convention of radif and qafia, explores the rich resources of blank verse and free-verse, comes out of the confines of the socially "acceptable" and "respectable" themes, rejects the stranglehold of Persianised "poetical" diction, and explores, with sensitivity and skill, the hitherto forbidden terrritories of sexual and psychological states.
A son of respectable parents (his father, Munshi Mohammed Mahtab-ul-din, was an affluent and affectionate circumstances, Meeraji left his home and family for certain inexplicable reasons, and spent a greater part of his life as a homeless wanderer, staying with his friends, and making his living by writing songs, and by doing editorial work for several urdu magazines: "Adbi Duniya"(Lahore), "Saqi" (Delhi) and "Khayaal" (Bombay). As can be made out from the portrait of the poet prefixed to this selection, the poet had adopted a deliberately outlandish style in his looks habiliments. Supporting long, floating hair (which would come and go according to his whims), a dagger-like moustache, over-size earrings, a colourful headgear, an amulet and a string of beads arround his neck, Meeraji fits into Coleridge's description of a poet-an inspired being with "flashing eyes and floating hair", who "on honey-dew hath fed/And drunk the milk of Paradise." But beneath this outward appearance of an unworldy ascetic lay a men, sensitive and intelligent, a jilted lover, sad at heart and sick in body, always perplexed, always questing, and turning to poetry for emotional release. As a poet, Meeraji was fully aware of the strength and weakness of Urdu poetry, and fully armed with the requisite energy of thought and style to bring about a transformation in the poetic field.
Both the poems included in this volume-"Mujhe Ghar Yaad Aata Hai" and "Samundar ka Bulawa"-show how this romantic runaway was torn between the two worlds-the cosy world of childhood, when, sitting in the family circle, he would laugh and play with his brothers and sisters, and the outside world of childhood, when, sitting in the family circle, he would laugh and play with his brothers and sisters, and the outside world of uninhibited freedom, which, however, turned out to be hollow and hypocritical, and in which he floated like a rudderless bark with no shore in sight. And yet this exile from home, who harboured no ill-well against his parents, brothers or sisters, never returned home, not even when he fell seriously ill. Akhtar-ul Iman, the poet's friend, with whom he spent the last days of his life in Poona and Bombay, describes how lonely and miserable was his existence in the end. Excessive drinking, cigarette-smoking, and sexual dissipation had drained away his strength and damaged his liver. Then there came the additional agony of the psychic ailment, for which he had to be admitted to the hospital where he was given electric shocks to cure him of his insanity-a treatment which he dreaded. The end came at 4 p.m. on November 4, in King Edward Memorial Hospital in Bombay. The call had come, the call of the sea, from which, in the poet's own words, "we all spring,/ And to which we all must return."
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