Raghib Muradabadi said good bye to his family and admiring fans after a protracted illness which kept him in and out the I.C.U for the last six months. Born in 1918 in Delhi in a family from Muradabad (U.P), he lived an eventful life for the last 70 years. He may be called the last of the poets of Ustad-Shagird relationship of the good old days.
He regarded Safi Lucknow and Yas Yagana Changezi as his mentors in poetry and Maulana Zafar Ali Khan as his Ustad in journalism. This scribe has had a close relationship with him for the last 70 years and has written introductions to his travelogue of China and Khutoot-i-Josh Malihabadi and Raghib. The introduction to Josh's letters to Raghib was regarded by Zeno as one of the most notable pieces of Urdu preface-writing.
Raghib Muradabadi, while in Simla in his youthful days, worked for Muslim League. Upon his arrival in Karachi he was appointed by Liaquat Ali Khan as one of the members of the Rehabilitation Committee for Refugees in Karachi, an office he was proud of holding. It signified his organisational talent. It was evident from his life in Karachi in the Directorate of Labour and after retirement from that office, he lived an austere life. He didn't get any allotment of evacuee property or land and died in a 120-yard house behind KMDC hospital in FB Area.
What a man! He was a man of humble means but he organised evenings in honour of some writers with a cash gift to recognise their contributions to literature.
His prowess as a master of Urooz (rules of prosody) were acknowledged by all and it can be said that he initiated scores of young men in the field of poetry. Well-known 'rebel' poet Habib Jalib was one of them and even the pseudonym of 'Jalib' was adopted on Raghib Muradabadi's advice. Raghib Muradabadi once wrote that even well-known research scholar, columnist & poet Mushfiq Khwaja was his 'Shagird' in poetry. I think that some of the poets & poetesses got their collections of poetry composed by him. I know some have but it won't be a revelation to Raghib's close circle of friends.
He was a poet who could, like Rais Amrohvi, converse in verse. This made him the master of spontaneous rendition and I think that there is no other poet alive who could claim this merit.
He was the reigning master of Rubai and Qata writings. His travelogue of Saudi Arabia and quatrains in memory of his journey to China are superb. As a ghazal poet he was the last of the Ustads and his collection Rag-i-Guftar has been rated highly. His quatrains on Maut (Death) and Dahshat-Gardi (Terrorism), besides the collections of Quran's Ayats and Naats (Midhat-e-Khairul-Bashar) are worth reading.
An author of 40 books of prose and poetry, some 32 manuscripts are awaiting publications.
I hope that his family was aware of the rich treasure of rare books he possessed. I hope that this treasure will be preserved or donated to some reputable library so that posterity could benefit from this rare collection.
Mirza Ather Beg's novel "Sifar se Ek Tak" is an altogether different fair. I appreciated it for two different reasons. First it was really a 21st century novel making extensive use of the cyber-space vocabulary to express feelings look perfectly natural. The second reason which makes it interesting is that it is a story of two families - one of Salars - a scion of Salars belonging to the feudal class and the other family is that of Munshis, a family keeping Salar's record of harvest & revenue for many generations. The only difference is that the present scions of these families are modern, the feudal lord being an Aitchison educated youngman and his Munshi a computer literate who has fed century's old record in the computer system. They are Faizan and Zaki, respectively.
Khadija Khilji, daughter of a French mother married to a Pakistani, has come to Pakistan to explore the culture-shock in her father's country. She meets both Faizan and Zaki and comes closer to Zaki in order to know the family history of Salars in an informal manner because the Salar's family was feeding her with their family's tantrums as if Pakistan was what the Salars thought of it.
There is a romantic interlude between the young Salar and Zulekha. The relationship is deep and invigorating, nothing sentimental about it. Rather it appears that any sentimental touch would have debased it. The novel takes interesting turns. The unusual fare is essentially its peculiarity and one has to admire the author to respect the intelligence of his reader by not allowing his narrative to be a loud one. It is a story woven around three adult persons whose romantic equation has to end on a very unusual note. The last scene which turns out to be an adult romantic scene expressing one another's sentiment in a discreet manner. The only expected melodramatic touch appears to be the last scene.
Quite strange that this expectation doesn't materialise and the hero is kept waiting beside his computer wondering whether he could find her in the cyber space.
I particularly liked the character of Khadija, definitely an altogether different kind of person to make her mark in the Urdu fiction.
Urdu's popular fiction has been known for its sentimental effusion. The romanticists excelled in it because they took it as an easy way of expressing their feelings. The progressives, also stuck to the sentimentally of a different kind. They centred round the class-divide. The poor characters expressing themselves a bit loudly to compensate for their unfortunate social condition. Numerous stories and films have depicted the scenes of class-conflict uproar.
It is with writers like Shafiq-ur-Rahman and Quratulain Haider that we see less and less of sentimentality. It is with the modern and abstract short stories and novel that we enter a stage which has made the task of a novelist like Mirza Ather Baig easier. "Sifar se Ek Tak" is a novel which could easily be placed in a new category of Cyber-space fiction.