Ghulam Ahmad Mehjoor was born to Peerzadah Abdullah Shah of Mitragam of the Pulwama District in 1887

Ghulam Ahmad Mehjoor was born to Peerzadah Abdullah Shah of Mitragam of the Pulwama District in 1887. His father, a well-known scholar in Persian, Arabic and Islamic education, was married to Sa’eedah Banu who had inherited the art of classical Iranian calligraphy from her maternal grandfather namely, Baba Hazoor-Allah. In keeping with the tradition in his family, Ghulam Ahmad Mehjoor received education in Arabic, Persian, Islamic thought from his parents and then from a famous scholar Abdul Ala Ganai of Tral. After getting his primary education, he was admitted to Madrasah Nasrat-al-Islam in Srinagar founded by Maulvi Rasool Shah. In the meantime, a scholar Ghulam Mohi al-Din of Amritsarvisited their family, and on his insistence Mehjoor was sent to Amitsar to acquire further education and eke out an incomewith calligraphy. At Amritsar he met a well-known Urdu poet Maulvi Abdullah Bismil who took him to Qadiyan where he got a job of doing penmanship in the magazine of historian Munshi Mohammad Din Fauq. He had also the opportunity of meeting a famous litterateur Maulana Shibli N’amani who has delighted to find poetic talent in Mehjoor. It was Shibli who suggested him the pseudonym Mehjoor, meaning “separate/displaced”. He stayed in the Punjab for two years and returned to Kashmir in 1900 AC when he was thirteen years old. He was married to MehtaabBanoo, daughter of a famous priest Peer Ghayas al-Din. His father wished him to pursue his family profession of priesthood, but Mehjoor do not show serious interest in it. In the meantime, he got appointed as ShajarKash and was sent to Laddak. His father died in 1910, and, as such, he returned to his native village. He frequently visited the Punjab until he got appointed as a land-surveyor(Patwari) He purchased a small shanty at Tankipora, Srinagar, that eventually became a meeting place of the intellectuals of the time like Sufi Ghulam Mohi al-Din (author of much celebrated history of Kashmir in English, titled Kasheer), Mohi al-Din Fauq, Balraj Sahani and Abdul Ahad Azad.

Mehjoor started his poetic career in Urdu when he was in his teensand, according to Azad, composed quite a sizeable collection of Urdu ghazals in Urdu.Allama Iqbal persuaded him to come to Lahore and write a history of Kashmiri poetry. In 1918, he developed a penchant for writing in Kashmiri when he wrote his first ghazal as a sequel to Mehmood

2. Gami’s Ghazal: “yarimyaanyomaarikanmanzpaanhoovuthtyiypazyaa” (O my friend you chose to be shining in the sky, does it behove you?) Mehjoor wrote:van tihaivesy be vafaeyiyShaiva-I dildarchhaa(Tell me O love, is disloyalty the disposition of beauty?) He wrote some more songs in imitation of the songs of Habba Khatoon, but with a freshness of diction and imagery. He attained tremendous popularity among the masses when his early compositions were rendered to music and published in booklets from Lahore and then Srinagar. The most famous singer of the time Mehmood Shahri rendered his songs into music that played a vital role in increasing Mehjoor’s popularity in the valley and across the Pantsaal mountains.

A milestone in Mehjoor’s poetic career was his lyrical poem gryiesykuur (peasant girl) that he wrote in 1931. Abdul Ahad Azad states that famous scholar DevinderSitarthi translated the poem into English and published it in a journal Modern Reviewpublished from Kolkatta. When Rabindernath Tagore read the translation, he said in exhilaration that he would certainly think that Mehjoor was under his influence if he knew Bengali. His first patriotic poem was vualoohaabaaghvaanoo nav bahaarukshaanpaidakar (Come O Gardner, make new spring glorious). The poem was published for the first time in PremnathBazaz’s weekly Hamdard; the poem was much admired by Shiekh Mohammad Abdullah who sang it as a prelude to all his political speeches.

Mehjoor’s poems were published in booklets by Ali Mohammad and Sons under the titles: payaamiMehjoor (Mehjoor’s Message), kalam-I Mejoor (Mehjoor’s verses), Salam-I Mehjoor (Mehjoor’s Salaam), and Bainaama-I Hazratbal (Resolution at Hazratbal); the booklets were so popular among the readers that the publisher had publish their successive editions.

When the first literary society, namely, Quami Cultural Mahaz was founded in 1947, Mejoor was appointed its first Vice-President, while Sadiq Ghulam Mohammad, the Education Minister of the time, was its President. Mehjoor maintained very purposeful relations with the intellectuals of the time, chiefly Abdul Ahad Azad who regarded himas his patron. Azad wrote the third volume of his Kashmiri Zabaan aur Shairi exclusively on the life and works of Mehjoor.

After a fruitful poetic career and unprecedented popularity Mehjoor died on April 9, 1952 at his native village Mitragom and was laid to rest there. It was under the orders of Bakhshi Ghulam Mohammad that his mortal remains were exhumed and re-buried with full state honoursat Athwajan, Srinagar on right side of the Jehlum River.

3. Ghulam Ahmad Mehjoor, is among the few epoch-making and trend setting poets of Kashmir. His popularity, both in the literary circles and masses, makes him a symbol ofKashmiriyat, with all its cultural and historical nuances. In spite of his representing all thedistinctive features of romantic poetry, with complete distancing from his self,Mehjoor demands ceaseless comment as his themes and conscious choice of subject matter encompass one of the most significant epochs that have left far-reaching consequences on the social,political and cultural life of the Kashmiri People.Popularity of Mehjoor is unabating and it can be safely conjectured that it shall not peter out in future as well. Apart from the elements of lyrical poetry, viz., nostalgia, intensity of desire,love for life, mythopoeia, making nature the mouthpiece of the poet’s self, and vibrant imagery, his poetry possesses irreplaceable referential value in terms of the momentous events in the social, cultural and political life of the Kashmiri people in first half the twentieth century.

In terms of pure literary point of view, the most outstanding feature of Mehjoor’s poetry is that he liberated the poetic idiom from repetitive, aggregative and participatory folk-singing and hackneyed expressions that were considered mandatory by traditional institutions of Sufi thought and practice; making poetry sensitive to thecontingent reality was no less than a poetic revolution. In order to evade the hazards of superficiality, and perils of political repression,Mehjoor usedtwo poetic types of poetic figures: ‘kenning’, a formulaic phrase that describes one thing in terms of another, and ‘litotes’, that is a dramatic understatement employed for producing ironic effect.He employed kennings and litotes, ramzwakinaya in Iranian aesthetic, mainly to attain oblique expression so that he had not to face political vendetta,in the autocratic times as well as the post-independence era; he was critical of both.

Mehjoorchose a poetic idiom, already in vogue for centuries, but loaded it with new significance that was social and cultural in terms of reference rather than love and mystic moorings. This new vehicle, although lyrical in essence, was at variance with that of the time-honoured Sufi and love poetry generally dictated and ordered by a set of poetic rules and norms. He created kaleidoscopic beauty out of the finite sets of binary complements, like gul ti bulbul (flower and bulbul), baghtibaagvaan(the garden and the gardener), vaavtituufaan (wind and tempest), shabnamtiaaftaab(dew andthe sun), mas and saqi(wine and cup bearer), zeelyvaankiand shumaar(kinky curls and counting), bomburtiyimbirzal (the bumble-bee and narcissus), so on and so forth. His generative poetic mind uses the same finite sets repeatedly, but jabs the reader/listener to think afresh, and not have oblivious transport. Here is an extract from his lyrical poem vuzmal (lightning) to illustrate how he gives substance and form, mainly feminine, to the natural phenomenon:

Clad in clouds you come out in gloaming,

You step out from your in-laws house and return;

To your maternal house you come time and again.

Lifting the veil you show us a glimpse,

In one kemp you behold the entire world;

You go to hiding in the shortest span.

Who taught you the secret of life

that things of beauty do not belong in the world?

Knowing this you withdraw, O narcissus.

Of no avail is the world you know it well,

Why then your look back time and again?

What desire tows you towards us?

Clad cap-a-pie in clothes red!

What does it mean? What does it suggest?’

or you too are drenched in the blood of the innocent?

The wayfarers get lost in the dark night,

You appear flashing to show them the way;

The light of your torch is free to all.

O you the flame of the zenith!

Who is the one you are looking for?

Or you do it just to delight in hide and seek?

Mehjoor, alas is duped by destiny,

surrounded by an ignorant lot he is,

his pearls they consider pieces of ash.

5. In such of his verses as represent the aesthete’s urge to express admiration for things of beauty by portraying common things charged with inherent beauty of form, seen as if forthe first time, or creating new arrays of observable things and release the hidden preternatural energy in them, Mehjoor’sunderlying motive is to awaken social consciousness. The power of suggestion in the images and situations makes us conscious of the permanence of beauty, stirs ardent passion to have it, but at the same timereminds us ofthe transience of individual life; all the three effects work together through his sense of music and myth.

 Morning breeze waits in wee hours,

fervently looking for someone it loves,

 the flowers jeer it at every step.

When she straights her kinky curls,

 light takesto hiding in shining pearls;

 redolent gusts suffuse the garden.

she chose dwelling in elfin lands.

I look around from a vantage point,

 seeing the garden, I get despaired;

 the caravan of flowers I behold leaving.

6. Appreciating Mehjoor depends upon reader’s understanding of the period of transition from unquestioned authority of ideas, and institutions and arbitrary ruleto inexorable transformation under the impact of modern knowledge and culture. It was a time of great revolutions, advances in science, and simultaneous presence of great thinkers. The euphoria of change cannot be appreciated by those who are interested in usurping all the material benefits of the change, secure safe niche in society, and thus become the vanguards of exclusionism and opponents of future. Mehjoor was the first poet to representa futurist concept of man and the notion that man is maker of himself and always in making. His shift from time honoured notion of man as a finished product to man as a process made him the most popular poet of his time.

Here is a short lyric that heralds the brave new age:

 O Saqi, throw open the doors of tavern,

be informed and keep pace with the times; remove the rust from the glasses and the goblets. The wine is vended at all the shops, all cheer with their glasses full;

what is now the value of Saqi’s tavern?

 The world rejoices its freedom won.

 Why should we be servile to the bonds of loyalty?

 Free man obeys no restricted faith.

 The morning oriole bears the blame:

 it wakes up to awaken myriad flowers, 

but alas, made captive in a cage of a closet.

 The days are few, use your accoutrements,

 you have to brave the tempest in the offing;

 people shall otherwise occupy your house.

 Mehjoor narrates his tale of love,

 engrossed he is in his lucid songs;