Poetic conventions

The Shankar-Shad Mushaira holds out hope for Urdu shayari.

Corporations sponsoring cultural events are dime a dozen today, but few of them boast of the tradition and respect accorded the annual Shankar-Shad Mushaira, the 47th edition of which is to be held this year on March 5.

A large part of this respect, says Javed Akhtar, well-known Urdu poet, Bollywood scriptwriter, lyricist and a regular at the mushaira for the last 15 years, “comes from the fact that Shankar and Shad [Sir Shankar Lall and Murli Dhar, respectively, after whom the mushaira is named] were well-respected shayars themselves and were friends with the leading shayars of their time. There are mushairas galore these days, but this is one that has preserved the dignity of shayari and maintained a certain literary and aesthetic standard”. There isn’t any important 20th century Urdu poet, Akhtar adds, who hasn’t taken part at the mushaira — everyone from Faiz Ahmed Faiz, to Josh Mahilabadi, Kaifi Azmi, Ali Sardar Jafri, Sahir Ludhianvi, Jigar Moradabadi and Firaq Gorakhpuri.

For Rakshananda Jalil, scholar and translator of Urdu poetry, what distinguishes the Shankar Shad Mushaira is its syncretism — a family of Hindu industrialists organising an event that had become associated with the Islamic community.

The USP of the mushaira is that it brings together poets from India and Pakistan. “In fact, it’s called the Indo-Pak mushaira,” says Madhav Shriram, director of DCM Shriram Industries, who led the efforts to revive the event in 2006. The mushaira had then not been held for 10 years or so, because the company was doing badly.

The Pakistan connection goes back to the festival’s inception, to 1944 when Shad had organised an annual all-India mushaira in Lyallpur (Faisalabad today), where DCM had set up a 60,000-spindle cotton mill. In fact, the Shrirams had close connections with Pakistan and it was on his way back from one such trip that he died in a plane crash in the early years of independent India.

The six-member Pakistan brigade this year is led by Zehra Nigah, one of the foremost female shayars in Urdu today. Nigah, 75, is a regular at the mushaira — she says it is her “shagun”, the one event that she believes brings her luck all year round. She first participated in 1953, then barely 17 year old. Over the years, she says, she has read her poetry to a distinguished audience comprising Jawaharlal Nehru, S Radhakrishnan, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, who have lit the shama (lamp) traditionally placed before the shayar when he recites. “It used to be held at Sir Shriram’s house on Curzon Road, in the huge lawns which could accomodate more than a thousand people,” she remembers. “It used to begin around 10.30 pm and when it ended at 4 am, people didn’t want to get up.” Today she finds that while there are many who have the shauq (desire), there are very few who have the zauq (aesthetic taste) to appreciate Urdu shayari.

Of the Indians this year, there are Akhtar, Akhlaq Khan Shahryar (Jnanpith award winner and lyricist for films like Umrao Jaan and Gaman), and Waseem Barelvi, to name a few. Malikzada Manoor Ahmad, a prominent shayar who is another regular, remembers how in 1961, only the second year he had been reading at the mushaira, the organisers had arranged to have him driven from Gorakhpur, where he lived, to Lucknow so he could catch a plane to come to Delhi to take part. “I had my final MA exams and had said I couldn’t come. On Sunday, after the mushaira was over, I was put on a flight and driven down from Lucknow to Gorakhpur so I could write my paper on Monday. That was the level of involvement.”