Mahjoor

The Wordsworth of Kashmir

Ghulam Ahmad Mahjoor stands with Abdul Ahad Azad as the initiator of a new epoch in Kashmiri poetry. Their poems brought a new and fresh spirit in poetry and inaugurated, what may be called, the modern and revolutionary period in it. When Tagore visited the blissful Valley of Kashmir in 1915, he felt ecstasy on hearing Mahjoor's poems, translated by Devendar Satyarthi. It is then that Tagore called Mahjoor "the Wordsworth of Kashmir" and became his life-long admirer.

Ghulam Ahmad Mahjoor (URL)

The significant feature of the new poetry of the Romantic Revival in England was a fresh and keen interest in Nature; another was a new faith in Man and of both Wordsworth was the great prophet. "With him the poetry of Nature took a new range. He not only exulted on the beauteous forms of Nature but he passed beyond sensuous presentation. Nature was to Wordsworth a revelation, an avenue of perception of the unseen and infinite". He also exalted the humble and lowly.

In order to weigh Mahjoor himself in this Wordsworthian balance, we have, to consider "the wordsworth of Kashmir" in respect of the following three different aspects:

1. The Poetry of Nature

2. The Poetry of Man in Relation to Nature.

3. The Poetry of Man in Relation to Man.

i. The Poetry of Nature

Mahjoor was born in Metragam, a picturesque village in Kashmir and after the usual schooling he joined the government service as a Patwari and refused to follow his father's priestly profession. Thus, his job took him to different villages of the Valley. In his boyhood itself were laid firm and deep the foundation of that close contact and thereby love with the world of Nature which was to distinguish this "Priest of Nature". The joy, the wonder, the awe, the delight, the reverence he was to find in the external world, of which we read in his poems, had their source in the environment of his home-village. He was rocked in the golden cradle of Nature and later on also, he was swayed in Nature's joyful swing and to Nature he showered his love and devotion in song and poetry. He loved the different aspects of Nature's beauty among mountains, gardens and lakes. The power of the beautiful objects of Nature to refresh and give joy to the soul of man was never sung so intensely by any poet in Kashmir before Mahjoor. The most outstanding apparatus of Mahjoor as a poet is his natural genius and liveliest sensibility for beauties of sight and sound and he was intensely susceptible to scenic beauties. He feels that the whole of Kashmir Valley is a lovely garden and keenly observes its beauty. Thus, he sings:

"Says the bulbul to the flowers
"Our land is a lovely garden".
Encircling are mountains white
Like a wall of white marble
Land of green emerald sight
"Our land is a lovely garden!"
Spring, stream and rivulet,
Fountain, rapid and waterfall
With tunes of spring filled get
"Our land is a lovely garden!"
Flowers are in full bloom
In gardens, woods and glens
Bulbul gazing get gay soon
"Our land is a lovely garden!"

Another poem of Mahjoor, entitled Lokchar (Youth) illustrates his keen observation of Nature and he draws similes and comparisons from different phenomena of Nature:

"My youth like a lusty summer
Tempting the world with alluring sight
The flowers bloomed, ah me, but for a day!
O my youth, my spring time!
Hot fire of pine-wood was my youth
Blazing furiously, sparkling wildly
Alas! the fire is out, cold lay the embers.
O my youth, my spring time!
Like a song-bird of the garden was my youth
Sitting on a flowery bow, singing sweetly
O Chief Hunter, do not take aim at it
O my youth, my spring time!"
(Original in Kashmiri)

Mahjoor reaps a richer harvest through the senses than Wordsworth; they invest his impressions of Nature with an extraordinary freshness and splendour and at the same time a shrewd, minute precision. In his poetry scenic beauty is blended with the feelings and poems are replete with subjective qualities.

Mahjoor's poetry is great because of the extraordinary power with which he feels the joy offered to us in Nature and in the simple primary affections and duties and with which his poetry shows us this joy and renders it so as to make us share it.

His poetry is also one of realism wherein we find love of Nature and simplicity blended with a social faith in the dignity of the humble lives his rustic subjects of familiar Nature get exalted by his reflective sensibility. The Greece Koor (The Peasant Girl) can well be compared with the "Solitary Reaper" of Wordsworth. This poem of Mahjoor is one of the most beautiful of lyrics and may be considered as a perfect product of romantic art. It is conspicuous for its simple but pathetic theme, its unmistakable note of romance, its suggestiveness and haunting melody. Minimum words produce maximum effect, each stroke tells and holds up before the reader's mind a beautiful but pathetic page of village life in Kashmir. Mahjoor says about the peasant girl:

"Bouquet from Beauty's everlasting garden,
Heemal of Heaven or Caucasion fairy-
O peasant girl, what grace, what beauty!"

To this genre belong such poems as Nundhaani Dilbare Mayani (My Beautiful Beloved), etc. Mahjoor, unlike Wordsworth, does not know that Nature can educate a man nor does he think that "One impulse from the vernal wood;/ Mad teach you more/Of moral evil and of good than all the sages can". But he feels the power of Nature to refresh and elevate the soul of man. Mahjoor did not find spiritual bond with Nature and there is no trace of pantheism in his Nature-poetry. He, of course, earnestly and keenly observed the beauty realistically and like Wordsworth joined in the Universal rejoicing. He says:

"It is morn and here in the garden
My heart is drunk with joy
While youth is in full bloom
I must enjoy with zest the spring in the flower garden".

He has written many poems on various seasons of the year which are full of beauty.

ii. The Poetry of Man in Relation to Nature

The beauty of Nature, according to Mahjoor, is the result of the aesthetic expression of God. His activities and workings bring about beauty in the various objects of Nature. He says:

"You have filled buds with fragrance
Slowly untied their knots and made them bloom
The smiling stream you have set on slow wandering
In twilight you came out, attired in royal robes
In the darkness of night you slowly had a round of garden".

Like Wordsworth Mahjoor felt that Nature was alive and even the ordinary natural objects appeared to him imbued with an active conscious life. To Wordsworth "every flower enjoys the air that it breathes", and "Moon doth with delight look around". Mahjoor also addresses the moon which, he feels, is alive and conscious and, says:

"Why like me are you restless?
May be you too are aflame with love
And thus bear the wound on your breast
You Kartik Moon, hearken to my treaty
You Kartik Moon, hearken to my entreaty".

or

"Tulips light the torches of love
Bright will be heaven with that light
With dewy wine the daffodils fill the cups
The hill tops are bathed in sunlight".

Then he calls the Creator his Beloved or Friend on whom he showers all his love and has an intense longing for Him and so is in quest of Him. He says:

"I would be a Sanyasi and go out in quest of my Friend ;
Wander in town and village and relentlessly pursue Him."

Or again

"What avail was my running so fast
Shades of evening fell ere I reached my goal
My zest and zeal were in vain ; I lost my youth
Where has gone the Darling, the Consolation of my heart, oh, where."

Here too he pines for just a glimpse of God:

"The autumn wind has bereft me of my senses
The golden oriole is killed, the flowers have withered
How has the blossoming summer or the spring slipped away
Oh! where has gone the Darling of my heart, oh, where!"

These devotional ideas about God and Nature were quite common among the common folk of Kashmir and Mahjoor was not a mystic or recluse who meditated on the subtle questions of life, its transitoriness, immortality and death. He had a zest for living and his eyes simply feasted on the variegated hues and mellifluous voices of Nature. While Wordsworth's poems, dealing with love, make the reader cold in comparison with Nature poems, those of Mahjoor are full of passion. He has expressed in loving, though often in a pensive manner, his passion for his sweet and beautiful beloved. He sings of his beloved:

"The moment you entered the garden
The jessamine kissed you
The narcissus got excited
Come and fill the cups
O stone-hearted and cruel one
You are bereft of all pity
I, the beauteous one am lost
Come and make love to me".

iii. The Poetry of Man in Relation to Man

Mahjoor's poetry, later on, was closely linked to his revolutionary faith. During his tours through the villages of Kashmir, he saw the miserable plight and painful torments of the people. These experiences created in him loathing for the yoke of the sceptre, the power of big landlords and petty bourgeois philistinism. The simplicity of style in the magnificent political poems, patriotic in the best sense, suggests the profound grief of a highly sensitive soul at the misery of his disaffected countrymen. In these poems, except of course, in his war poems, the poet does not make any attempt at literary declamation or rhapsody. The ideas come straight into the heart and seem to be fashioned into poetry by the very intensity of feeling. With such force and impressiveness does the poet employ his language that it would not fail to move even the most callous heart. The language, though simple and subdued, is vigorous enough to stir human feelings to their depths. No false note of sentiment nor lapse in expression is anywhere noticeable in these poems, while the restrained pathos is positively noble and natural. Addressing the bulbul he says:

"Your nest on the flowery bough
They will bring down and burn it
So you shall have to leave your garden
And you dare not refuse".

Then came the flight for freedom and he became a perfect revolutionary and gave a clarion-call to his countrymen:

"Power, wealth and kingship
Know that all these are yours
If you can rouse this habitat of flowers
Make the earth shake
Create wind and thunder
And raise a storm".

But Mahjoor was an artist whose social views were developed through perception of the world in the spectrum of beauty and humanitarianism. His heart broke when he found that freedom, in effect, had sapped the moral standards of the society and that the toiling and exploited masses were subjected to the tyranny of lawlessness and disorder. Thus he became sad and satirical and from his pen flowed the tear-drops of anguish and pain:

"There is mourning in men's houses
When rulers like bridegrooms
Are luxuriating in the royalty of Freedom
Nabir Sheikh knows the purport of the fact
When they kidnapped his wife
He went to complain while
She elsewhere gave birth to a child".

4. Mahjoor's poetry, like Wordsworth's had, simplicity of diction, softness, beauty and form. He discarded the ornate Persian influence and threw away the old forms like pad and ravaani nazam. He did not make use of stale imagery and decadent epithets and idioms. But while much of Wordsworth is banal and puerile, each line of Mahjoor is a pearl cast in a thread of magnificent poetry. At first, Mahjoor unreasonably, thought to be just an ordinary rustic rhymer, soon got recognition as a great poet noteworthy for his sweet style, wonderful mastery of language, so simple and soft, and the exquisite music of his verse. He may also be considered as a thorough representative poet of an age seething with social and political turmoil.