Azmi (Azmul Haq) has made his debut as a poet with his book of verses Dubday Dubday tarr gia published by Sange-e-Meel Publications. He belongs to a business family of Lahore. He came into limelight when he started acting in PTV’s plays in the mid 1980s. Muhammad Nisar Hussain, one of the celebrated PTV’s drama directors, introduced him. He wears many hats; He is an engineer, a restaurateur, television actor and a Punjabi language poet. He is settled in Canada and calls himself a resident of Toronto, London, Columbia and Brazil. Last month, writer and playwright Asghar Nadeem Syed shared some of his poems with me which delighted me as much as they surprised me. The poems sounded fresh laced with sensitivity. Most well-heeled Punjabis, even ones from the middle classes, are so alienated from their roots as a result of colonial conditioning and ideological drubbing they get at the hands of the state that they have nothing but contempt for their language and culture. They only realise the significance of their cultural assets when they become part of the diaspora. Should all Punjabis from Pakistan be exiled to restore the prestige of their language and culture?
Azmi’s collection of poems has been divided into five segments, each segment is called a book. The first segment is inspired by the 18th century poet and mystic Bulleh Shah who with his iconoclastic vision challenged all that was given and doubted everything religious and secular. Like Marx, he doubted even his doubts. Azmi displays a measure of consciousness, not frequently found among poets, as he is moved by Bulleh Shah’s social and humanist worldview rather than the so-called spiritual mumbo jumbo wrongly attributed to him. It sets the tone of what is to follow, a prelude to a poetically experienced and critically explored world, chaotic and full of paradoxes. “I enquire and enquire, and get exasperated by enquiring / I see and see, and get tired of seeing / I could start off if there was one thing / There are hundreds of questions. What should I do?” These hundreds of questions are like the conundrum Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’ faces; “In a minute there is time / for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”
One of the defining features of Punjabi poetic tradition has been to ask questions, to challenge the prevalent and debunk the social and cultural myths popularised by the hierarchical power structure based on human inequality. And those ensconced in the power structure are nothing less than predators. “The kings are tigers and the officials are dogs,” says Baba Guru Nanak, the sage. Why? Because they maul the people and want their pound of flesh though they owe them nothing.
Azmi’s poems inherit the vital elements of this dynamic tradition by keeping his focus on the mundane which is life lived concretely. Life thus lived when imaginatively recreated emerges as mundanely sublime or sublimely mundane.
Mundane sublimity, in the words of Bulleh Shah, underpins authentic human existence: “Whether you worship God or not is not the point/ The point is to be true to the situation you are in.”
Azmi’s poetry lays bare the paradoxes, conflicts and contradictions of our contemporary life cloyed by the detritus of the past which is lived as present in a society in transition from the old to the new. An existential and social crisis caused by such a dilemma puts a squeeze on us. Another aspect of his poetry is spontaneity that seems natural and disarming. It may surprise many that Azmi, while being a member of a family with roots in the Lahore’s Walled City, has such a firm grasp on Punjabi language. The fact may surprise many that residents of the Walled City are culturally much more rooted that those living in the new colonies and suburbs.
Azmi’s poems offer insightful poetic experience and imaginative vision carrying the anguish of the present and potential of the future. “Call the blacksmiths, the workers, the potters, the confectioners, the barbers, the butchers / We shall go there accompanied by yogis? We must build a new city / Bring the beams from the wood stall / Eject the past thoughts out of your present / We must set ablaze whatever stands there / We must build a new city…”
Azmi perhaps knows what Brecht said: “What’s the point of cities, built without people’s wisdom?” People’s wisdom carries dreams. Azmi introduces us to our dreams, unrealised and realisable. His poems are a melange of diverse poetic expressions.
“Abyat of Hazrat Sultan Bahu: Punjabi Text with English Translation” has been published by Suchet Kitab Ghar. J. R. Puri and Kirpal Singh Khak did the English translations and wrote a biographical sketch of the poet. Sadly, there is no note on the translators. The translators, like most of non-Muslim Punjabis, being not aware of the ethnographic background of Muslims, confuse the Awan clan which Bahu belonged to, with the Syed clan that claims rightly or wrongly Arab origins. Bahu, we all know, was a prolific writer and a polyglot. He composed, it’s claimed, about 140 books in Persian and Arabic. None of them seems to have contemporary relevance. “It is said that he wrote a number of works in Punjabi but none except his collection of Abyat has survived. His Arabic writings have been forgotten, but his Punjabi poetry lives on and is extremely popular,” the translators rightly point out. The book contains 200 hundred Abyat (self-contained stanzas). Sultan Bahu’s view of life veers between orthodox and unorthodox. He is no doubt a great craftsman and his mastery of the language is unparalleled, and eloquence unmatched. Some of his psychological insights clearly introduce us to what Freud and others discovered much later. “The heart is deeper than the ocean / who can fathom its mysteries / Storms come and go on the surface while fleets sail through it, their crews wielding their oars / Inside the heart are the fourteenth realms stretched like canvas tents / Only one who knows these deeper secrets of the heart can know the Creator, O Bahu!.” The book is very useful; it can facilitate the understanding of the poetic world of the great master, especially among the people who cannot access the original text. — soofi01@hotmail.com
Published in Dawn, July 21st, 2025
