With the Elizabethans as much as with Ernest Hemingway, A. Sean Pue shares the notion that style – not as surface attribute, but as coherence or outward manifestation of inward clarity and intactness – is all-important. Often cryptic, Pue’s I Too Have Some Dreams: N. M. Rashed and Modernism in Urdu Poetry is nevertheless an exception to his general practice of avoiding the gull’s stare. Written with tremendous intellectual openness and flexibility, it accounts for both the fatalism of the poetry and the potentiality for significance Pue shares with Rashed, in the most mundane things.
Pue is the Director of Digital Humanities and Associate Professor at Michigan State University, and Associate Research Scholar at Columbia University. He was educated at the University of California as an undergrad, and later at Columbia University where he earned a Masters degree, M. Phil. and finally Ph. D. in Comparative Literature and Society with the dissertation titled The Desert of Continuity: N. M. Rashed, Modernism, and Urdu Poetry.
Pue caught the lingo and the massed textures of Rashed’s verse; the vitality and squalor and human depths of the Urdu language, with a combined gaiety and affection. Despite his colloquial ease, his treatise on N. M. Rashed along with articles, book reviews and conference papers, is highly sophisticated.
In the interview below, conducted in Karachi, he talks about the poetic tradition – lyrical and unpretentious yet indirect – as he encounters it in N. M. Rashed’s ‘songs’ of active engagement with world events and even faith in the constructive powers of poetry, demonstrated in the impressive edifice of free verse. Excerpts of the interview with Sean Pue:
The News on Sunday(TNS): It appears that each element, each part of the landscape that surfaces in N. M. Rashed’s verse, is a metaphor for a spiritual or a metaphysical realm.
Sean Pue(SP): That’s not how I read it necessarily. Take his first book Mavara meaning ‘The Beyond’, for example: the whole volume is actually about corporeal life and human desire. It seems that what I am reading is sort of inverting the usual; it’s more stereotypical rather than a usual reading of Sufism. For instance, I was focused on ‘the metaphysical beyond’ in place of the world, to the world itself, on desire in terms of life and death rather than painting a transcendent, metaphysical realm.
That’s kind of connected with Iqbal, as well, in that there is much in common in a lot of their perspectives. Iqbal was incredibly critical of the nation-state and yet became the national poet of Pakistan, in part because of a metaphysical sense of community. Rashed shares a lot of Iqbal’s concerns with nationalism and identity, particularly after Partition and World War II, and the rise of Iranian nationalism. There’s an anti-identitarian position. I have talked about this in a chapter called ‘Position without Identity’ which is a term I took from Gayatri Spivak’s book Other Asias. It captures well what Rashed has done in his poems set in Iran.
TNS: How did Rashed’s stay in Iran and his involvement with Radio Iran affect his career as a poet?
SP: I became really interested in Rashed when I was studying but I didn’t know what I was going to be working on. I was studying Persian very intensely at the time, and could hear a modern version within Rashed’s poetry. There was Patras Bokhari’s critique of his Iran days in the introduction that got moved to the back in the later editions. The retrospective on Bokhari, published by Anwar Dil says Rashed was basically disconnected from his native land and more focused on Iran using a language that’s too highfalutin and disconnected from the language of the people.
There’s a strange experience in reading Rashed’s poetry of Iran Mein Ajnabi because of an uncanny closeness of Persian to Urdu. What he talks about in this volume is the inability of the people of Asia to come together. I think, within that point, there’s something very special going on with the use of Persian. It’s actually about trying to capture the experience of World War II within poetry. There’s rhetoric throughout, the meaning of modernism being about capturing the experience of the moment but not limited to any particular sense of national identity.
Rather what happens in his later poetry is that it works more through abstraction. There’s still a progression that people see in his work instead of a narrative that people use for artists and poets, more often for Iqbal and Faiz. Initially, Rashed’s poems were clearly focused on colonial India. Then, they seemed focused on Asia or on Iran, in particular. I quote from one of the critics, Aftab Ahmed Khan, who says that Rashed has stepped up to the edge of the world and wound up in an indigenous self. He uses a lot of criticism of his time abroad.
TNS: One has been insistently looking upon Rashed as a prime anti-traditionalist. How does he link up and break with tradition?
SP: I’ve already said at some point in my book that all of Rashed’s introductions are very much like modernist manifestos. If you trace the way his positions change through colonialism to the first decades of India/Pakistan, he’s very critical of tradition and also of traditional forms, primarily for two reasons. He over-reads tradition as an otherworldly focus of Urdu literature on the denial of the self as moving towards an experience of fanaa or self-annihilation; but then, he’s also critical of the classical forms of Urdu and of the changes that happened when people like Hali and Azad wanted to maintain a particular musicality of poetry in order to maintain its address.
Rashed, very much, positions himself as the first poet of the azad nazm. There are three poets associated with that, Tassaduq Hussain Khalid being one. There’ve been earlier experimentations though. The constraints of rhyme in Urdu poetry are such that they can’t allow for the expression of a modern experience. Rashed’s azad nazm is very close to the metres of classical poetry, especially in Mavara. It becomes more radical in the later period. He’s very critical of poets like Faiz, in particular, for too-easily using the common sonorous effects that he sees not as disruptive as he considers the role of poetry in art to be, as kind of providing a place for a new start and having a critical perspective.
If I go back to how he relates to tradition and yet break with it, it’s what I consider to be the allegorical technique. It means there are elements taken from classical Urdu poetry but their meanings are inverted and their original sense rearranged in order to produce something new. It’s also kind of familiar, and much about disrupting tradition, akin to opening up an argumentative space for critical thought.
TNS: Do you gauge the meaning of La = Insaan as a statement on the human condition? Does it have any existentialist connotations?
SP: It’s a question a lot of people had asked Rashed, and his answer was: La, as it’s used in algebra, represents the algebraic ‘x’. In his introduction, he says that humans are a question without an answer. Actually, it had earlier been the title of one of his poems in that volume. And, yet, at the same time, it has multiple meanings. There’s definitely the sense of existential relationship to negation, the reason why some people read it as negating the human. Shamsur Rahman Faruqi reads it differently. According to him, La = Insaan means insaan as la-masawi or as man without equal. That’s kind of idiosyncratic but then la itself is loaded with meanings.
“I became really interested in N. M. Rashed when I was studying but I didn’t know what I was going to be working on. I was studying Persian very intensely at the time, and could hear a modern version within Rashed’s poetry.”
TNS: Satyapal Anand once said that there are only four poets in Urdu language (who were each other’s contemporaries) who could be referred to as The Symbolists, namely Miraji, Majeed Amjad, Akhtar ul Iman and N. M. Rashed. Comment.
SP: I would actually disagree with reading Rashed as a symbolist; instead, I see him as an allegorist. He works on disrupting symbols and turning to allegory.
There are four chapters in my book: The first one is called ‘Embodiment’ which is about Mawara; the second one is ‘Position without Identity’ which is about Iran Mein Ajnabi; and the third is ‘Allegory and Collectivity’. In the last chapter, I have discussed the classic opposition between symbol and allegory. Many in favour of symbolism, including Urdu criticism, have disdained allegory.
Because of its lack of immediacy, I read Rashed as someone who is very critical of symbol. And it’s interesting because of the possibility of the use of symbol in its metaphysically based notions of collectivity, which he thinks of as harmful. Allegory has a sustained metaphor as opposed to symbol, which is more focused on immediacy, the reason why allegory has been condemned by the symbolists. I came along reading Dil, Meray Sehra Navard-e-Pir Dil as an opposition between the two. In the third chapter I draw on Iftikhar Dadi’s wonderful article on Shirin Neshat, in which he focuses on the credo of the postmodern impulse. Iftikhar’s work was very helpful for me to get a better grasp.
In the later two volumes by Rashed, the negative dialectic working within his poetry becomes more obvious. Iran Mein Ajnabi was very difficult for me to understand because it is so tied to the historical circumstances of World War II Iran, which, frankly, I had to do a lot of research and reading for.
That historical specificity largely disappears in his later works, which become more abstracted, and are not necessarily identified by any particular place. Some of them may seem to be situated within a landscape reminiscent of Arabia, which is also found in Hindi poetry in depiction of nature.
TNS: How would you compare Rashed with T. S. Eliot?
SP: So many people see Eliot as an influence partly because of Rashed’s use of initials. When I was taking my Masters exam, one of the people in my committee brought that up and Hamid Dabashi who was one of my readers, listed 25 Iranian poets who had used initials before him. But I think Eliot is a bit of a red herring for understanding Rashed’s poetry. M. A. R. Habib is an Eliot scholar related to Mughanni Tabassum who is a fabulous critic in India. He was originally going to write a dissertation on Eliot and Rashed. He’s done a volume of translations called The Dissident Voice: Poems of N. M. Rashed. You can see so many intertextual references in Rashed and you just wish there were footnotes like in The Waste Land.
I found some of them were quotes from Iqbal. What I also found were references from the Constitutional Poetry in Iran as well. I don’t think that had been noticed by critics before and I luckily stumbled upon them. He talks about a poet named Ishqi. In the poem called Mann o Salwa, he’s quoting from another Iranian poet who talks about the occupation of Iran. Rashed responds to the position as an Indian soldier occupying Iran which is referred to, negatively or positively, as the motherland of Persian culture.
TNS: How do you read the notions of Zahir and Batin or Appearance and Reality in Rashed’s verse?
SP: It’s an important aspect of Urdu criticism. Within the Urdu exegesis, there’s the idea of Zahir, the manifest form, and Batin, which is the inner meaning. You have descriptions of lust, etc., that might have an inner meaning as well. What seems to happen within progressive criticism is that instead of focusing on Batin, the writer should be engaged with society in depicting reality and not lost in too much individualism. Individualism becomes a problem thus for certain progressive readings of Rashed’s writings. I also take Aamir Mufti’s term ‘auratic critics’ — critics who are critical of his poetry for focusing too much on individualism, and not on more impersonal experience of a metaphysical beyond. One of the most important critics in this regard is Muhammad Hasan Askari who Mufti discusses. They’re both very much influenced by the Perennialist Movement that is associated with René Guénon and Martin Lings and Ananda Coomaraswamy, hence the idea that there’s an underlying metaphysical tradition that is disrupted by modernity because there is too much focus on individualism. So Rashed is being criticised from both sides: for being not enough focused on society and for being too focused on individualism. What Rashed seems to be doing is really stressing the importance of experience as part of modernist’s art, and of the poet as reacting through experience. What people misread is his use of characters as his own psychological deviance in some of his poems in Mavara, and so on. I see there’s also a very strong engagement with aspects of Bergson and of Norman Brown. In some of his poems, he actually takes part of Brown’s text and translates it into Urdu. He does this also with a reading of Ghalib’s, called Ghalib, Hamarey Zamaney Mein.
TNS: How did you get interested in N. M. Rashed?
SP: I started studying Hindi when I was in the undergraduate school at U C Berkeley. They had an amazing professor and a brilliant scholar there, Aditya Behl, who passed away at a very young age. It’s because of him that I became interested in Urdu and also in academia. He’d just come from the University of Chicago, and was teaching a class on Religious Identities in South Asia, so people recommended me that I should take that class with him. It thinned out from forty students to two or three within a week.
I majored in Religious Studies and South East Asian Studies from UC Berkeley, and then got a full scholarship to go to Columbia. I spent a year in Lahore and Islamabad on a Short Term Lecturing and Research Fellowship. I was also very interested in critical theory and history, and was thinking of doing an historical project. But poetry also spoke to me as a young man. It was an amazing experience. My advisor at Columbia was Frances Pritchett. I was fumbling a little bit when I chose to take a class on modern Urdu poetry in which we read Faiz, Miraji and N. M. Rashed. At the time I was thinking of working on Urdu masnawi but I was also studying Persian, and Hamid Dabashi was sitting down with me every week reading Rumi’s masnawi with a group.
I had a very strong aesthetic reaction while reading Rashed particularly towards his Desert Poetry. I could see the resonances of the critical theory and the opposition to imperialism. I was much attracted to his work. One of the models that people have – a difficult one – is not necessarily the one that I would recommend, very much comes out of the Chicago South Asian Studies scene that you pick a text and then write about it.
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