TRUTH AS THE MIDDLE PATH

Ayaz Rasool Nazki’s novel Satisar is a reflection on today’s political and cultural life.

Kashmir has witnessed an unprecedented interest in fiction writing in the last two decades or so. This concurs with an interest in the English language as the medium of expression, partly because of the changing milieu of literacy and partly because of a desire to reach the readership outside the Valley, especially the readership that matters when it comes to being heard. It seems to stem from an urge to tell the story of truth. Perhaps, the telling of truth is of paramount importance to a Kashmiri caught in a raging conflict. And fiction confronts truth with an urgency. Poetry, on the other hand, seeks to hide truth. Even when it doesn’t, it exaggerates it or renders it worthless.

It’s against this background that we must look at the fiction emerging from the valley. In this era of untruthful media, it has given voice to a people who felt muted. Ayaz Rasool Nazki’s Satisar is an attempt to tell the truth, although in a sarcastic narrative. Several stories run parallel in the 174-page Satisar, which keeps the reader engaged at different levels and layers.

Fiction has many modes available to capture the truth of the story being told, from setting to storyline, dialogue to language, description to character. Ayaz has chosen to use the names for his story’s characters from the history of the land to create the effect of a double-edged sword of irony. Kashyap, Budshah, Mulla Tahir Gani, Lal, Nund, Yousuf Shah, Todermal, Birbal are some of the names you will readily recognise. They are not just names but transposed characters. This transposition of historical figures as characters in the story makes this work a reflection of the mockery we see in today’s political and cultural life throughout the world.

In Kashmir, where the literary qualities of a work of art are often overemphasised, perhaps because of interest in classicists such as Ghalib and Mir, and the influence of imported modernism. Removed from truth, poetry is overburdened by philosophy or metaphor. Fiction, if oversimplified as reality, tends to become literary journalism. But in Satisar, Ayaz walks the middle path. And the path he has chosen offers a rewarding journey to the reader.

On Shahnaz's latest collection of poems

Shahnaz Rashid has emerged as a grounded voice of today’s Kashmiri poetry. Considered an echo of Rafiq Raaz, he just did not crack the ascendancy of Raaz; he paved a way of supremacy for himself in a familiar yet neoteric language of signifying proportions. His stunning command of language helps him connect it to the contemporary mood and reflection in an effortless manner.His poetry apprises us of his nonpareil dexterity skills penetrating his ghazals and nazms equally. Shahnaz’s latest collection of poems, Door Pahan Dewaran Manz, his second in just ten years, is a book most of the Kashmiri poets have failed to harvest over a lifetime. I am convinced that the book will infuse a new genius into the garden variety of our literary scene.

Shahnaz’s ghazals have a unique diaphanous quality that we rarely witness in his contemporaries. We may debate about the presence of complexity of feeling, but undeniably there is no ambiguity of image or metaphor in his verse, which, however, does not exclude deeper or layered meanings from his poetry.This quality of accessibility, together with indigenous historico-cultural allusions, has allowed Shahnaz to accrue a widespread appeal.

In Shahnaz, we see an addition to the diversity of voices following tremendously successful Rahi of later years who as a prig had roughly made dogma out of his personal taste and talent. We badly needed an antidote to this esoteric tendency for art which poets like Shahnaz have provided. In poetry, being simple takes more skill and effort than being difficult. Poets often prove themselves clever but, as Shahnaz does, we mustunderstand and celebrate experience, otherwise known as life.

Shahnaz’s book contains 80 compelling ghazals and 40 persuasive nazms, laying out his 196-page journey through life’s “rainbow of loss and gain” that “frequently communicates that under the blue dome of the skywhatever we look at is a glass house of servility and ephemerality … as well as a courtyard of a towering house of awe.” A successful marriage of both perspectives is what Shahnaz’s poetry is all about.

It makes difference to have a poet’s sizeable amount of work in view to become aware of the things that occupy and obsess him, to learn to recognize his characteristic voice, his personal idiom. With a prompt second collection, Shahnaz has offered this opportunity of kosher discovery to his readers and critics for which we must be thankful.