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By Syed Nomanul Haq
ON the literary horizons of Urdu, Miraji is a heavenly body that is not readily visible. Let the metaphor ride: while the massive gravitational field of this luminous body is all-pervading, filling the whole poetic space around us, it is veiled both by clouds and by smoke — one formed by nature, the other generated by human hands. This Lahore-born Muhammad Sanaullah Dar, who renamed himself Miraji in the ultimate transfigurative gesture of love for a Bengali girl called Mira Sen, is not easily accessible as a poet, which is his prime identity, and so the very inherent nature of his poetry obscures him from coming into plain view. Nor does his external life emerge before us clearly due to his very peculiar — often embarrassing — physical appearance and idiosyncrasies, disregarding personal hygiene and expressly running afoul of social conventions. What happened as a result is that he was generally shunned by his cohorts, who in their rejection covered him with a thick smoke of biographical critiques, even calling him a deranged sex maniac, and his face drowned in this smoke. When in 1948 he died in a charity-run hospital in what used to be called Bombay, nobody except the medical staff was at his bedside. He was 38. And so we must now look for Miraji.
But why is it worth looking for him? Why not leave him languishing in obscurity? This question hides a painful historic irony. As we observed at the very outset, Miraji is everywhere in the contemporary world of Urdu poetry since it is he who introduced robustly and sustained poetically the genre of free verse in this ghazal-locked poetic tradition, a tradition with its hitherto hardened conventions of metre, rhyme, and form. Yes, there certainly are other claimants to the throne of the fatherhood of Urdu free verse, chiefly N.M. Rashid and Tasadduq Husain Khalid. And yet, priority claims aside, it was Miraji who raised Urdu free verse to its enduring heights. He made this genre so flowing, so attractive, so rich, so insistent, and provided such unbridled and fresh breeze for nourishment, that it began to rap at the doors of everyone who wrote Urdu verse. They all opened their door, including those progressive poets who did not like Miraji much, such as Faiz Ahmed Faiz.
And now Miraji has become part of the spirit of the age, so well-integrated that we have forgotten the source from which the new free verse radiated forth, a source that passed it on to us after an alchemical treatment that turned it pliable, supple, and — above all — so naturally suited to carry the onus of Urdu poetry’s sensibilities. How often have we walked on smooth pathways cutting through proud mountains that look invincible, not thinking about the immortal hands that tore them apart for our adventures and fun! This is what Miraji did with an unyielding western genre that looked highly incompatible with a Persianised ghazal-esque ethos. He is, then, one of the very anchors from which hangs today’s Urdu poetry. But he is not a box office success; he is neither quoted much nor did he write much quotable poetry. So the irony is that Miraji is ubiquitous, yet hidden from view; he made contemporary Urdu verse what it is, yet his own poetry places such veils before it that we seem to have given up on the task of rending them or even shredding them.
So a rediscovery of Miraji is binding upon us as an imperative. In the discourse on literary history, we must explain the journey of Urdu poetry in which he looms large. And there seem to be good reasons why his verse in its own being is found to be obscure. To begin with, he suffered the afflictions of a pioneer — he had no ready audience. His poetic soil needed to cultivate and nurture an audience. Then, Sanaullah Dar was bubbling with uncontrollable poetic energy inside, and his creative jet went all over the place. It swept across from Mirza Ghalib to Ghalib’s contemporary Charles Baudelaire, and from French, English, and Persian to Urdu, Hindi, and Sanskrit. He imbibed the fascinating and complex play of metaphor-reality-metaphor from the firm ingots of Subk-i-Hindi, and at the same time espoused the 19th-century decadent French symbolism of Stephane Mallarme. He was heartlessly critical of religious rules governing self-expression, but then dived deep into ancient Indic poetry that is irreversibly bound up with a religious cosmology of rites and goddesses and gods. On the one hand, he would declare:
What is the religious creed of nature?
