LITERARY NOTES: Dr Agha Sohail's pen portraits

Dr Agha Sohail's posthumous book "Paraganda Tabar Log", published a few weeks before, is a well-produced work of pen-portraits of 38 eminent writers - poets, critics, fiction writers and research scholars along with Agha Sohail's interviews with Maulana Ghulam Rasool Mehar, Ahmed Nadeem Qasimi, Jamila Hashmi and Dr Akhtar Husain Raipur.
I am fortunate to be one of Agha Sohail's close friends and it is my honest opinion that he was one of the eminent-stylish fiction writers who fully imbibed a creative style to remind us of the best trait the Lucknow School of Prose-writing. True, it attached more importance to external details but Agha Sohail attached importance to the Batin (internal) side of the person along with the Zahir (external).
A devout pupil of Professor Ehtesham Husain; he and his friends Hasan Abid, Dr Qamar Rais, Ahmed Jamal Pasha, Mohsin Zaidi, Sharib Rudolvi, Sharib Lucknowi and Qazi Abdus Sattar etc loved and respected Professor Ehtesham Husain so much that anyone who came into contact with this circle became an Ehtesham fan. I am also one whose first work Tawazun (1976) carries an article on Ehtesham Husain as one of the students who drew upon his fountain of knowledge through his writings.
Agha Sohail's pen portraits make us feel as if we have known all of those writers - whose pen portraits fill the pages of this book quite intimately. It could serve as a great tribute to a writer who has used the skills of a fiction writer to make us feel that it is not Agha Sohail who is transferring his impressions to us. Rather he has the enabling art of making them alive for us.
The pen portraits of Ehtesham Husain, Ahmed Nadeem Qasimi, Sajjad Zaheer, Asar Lucknowi, Dr Ahsan Farooqi, Behzad Lucknawi, Aley Ahmed Suroor, Sardar Ratan Singh, Zaki Shirazi, Ahraz Naqvi, Taj Saeed, Ashfaq Ahmed, Mumtaz Husain, Qaisar Tamkeen, Intezar Husain, Shaur Schlai, Farman Fatehpuri, Qurratulain Haider, Sadat Husain Manto, Maulana Hasrat Mohani and Josh Malihabadi transport us quite successfully to the intimate world of all these luminaries.
The art of pen-portraiture is very difficult because it deals with "real characters" that have hundreds of persons to affirm with or differ from the pen-portrait writer. When I was going through these portraits - many of them read in the company of Agha Sohail himself, I feel that the death of a dear friend of yours makes you a bit sentimental about him. The day of his companionship dart on your memory and you have to relive those moments all over again which had long before vanished from your memory screen.
Agha Sohail has penned 15 books, five of them being collection of short stories in the techniques varying from pure realism to symbolic and abstract. He wrote two novel 'Ghubar-i-Kocha-i-Janan' and 'Kahani Ahde Zawal Ki.' Both of them depicting the fleeting time as well as contemporary mayhem. He has two travelogues 'Ufaq a Ufaq' and 'Iran Mein Chauda Roz.'
As regards criticism, Agha Sohail's versatile and progressive pen has given us six works of criticism including his doctoral thesis "Dabistan Lucknow Ke Dastanvi Adab Ka Irteqa". Two books on Nasir Kazmi and 'Urdu Ke Teen Mustanada Marsia Nigar' are in the pipeline.
Agha Sohail is one of those writers who truly represent a culture in its myriad of manifestations. He was one of the last chronicles of Lucknow in Urdu fiction. He came from a very distinguished family of Oudhe and also experienced difficult days after the partition when feudalism in India was abolished. The transition period is always difficult to bear and so it was for Agha Sohail as well but he bravely faced this period.
In his death the friends of Agha Sohail have last a jewel that would always remind them of the value of friendship. Changing face of short-story. The way short story writers have responded to the importance of their art as a form depicting slices of human life to fuller and deeper than their "space" suggested, has sidelined a great deal of confusion about its form.
Now it could be a monologue or a descriptive narrative of a character needing plot or no plot. What it can't avoid is that its descriptive prose should be eye-catching and transparently presentable. Munshi Premchand or Rashid-ul-Khairi's first stories to Muhammad Asim Butt's installment of novel entitled "Kabhi Khatam Na Hone Wali Kahani" published in Tasteer, Rawalpindi's latest issue it is clear that it is a story, first and foremost, and then the way the short-story writer will like to see a story even a myth bordering on a community's belief, nothing remains sacrosanct except the way the story is to be looked at. It may be a totally different narrative which doesn't need a historian's authentication regarding its authenticity; rather, it is a creative mind's version which tries to suggest an entirely different version. Coming to common people's life - keeping everything as it seconds plausible, something strange and even unbelieveable - one may call it fantasy, may spring up only to reveal the truth as writer would like to see it. So story-writing, today, confers more audacity and freedom to short-story writer only for the sake of sounding a truer "perspective" which has revealed itself to a writer.
The "perspective" on which the short-story writer builds his/her story could turn out to be his freedom or a "cage" and it is the art of the writer and the way he sees things and interprets them which will enable us to know his mindset. It is the mindset which will confer meanings on the words. A creative mind doesn't feel bound to allow words have "lexical" meaning or the meaning which over-ride the lexical. There ought to be no need to "deconstruct", it is the details and the mindset, which sets up parallel meaning of a word, or a sentence or a narrative.
It means that the theories revolving around the death of the "writer" is only a gimmick. Rather the road-map of the mind-set itself will present to us the meaning we should deem adequate. The conditions of its acceptance by the media for presenting it on the big or small screen will confer on it the degree of esteem its audience holds it.