Jalib - Legacy that endures even after 22 years of Habib Ahmad's death
"When we said couplets, he would be in jails; he used to live for others, forgetting his own pains"
LAHORE: (Web Desk) – Many write poetry but seldom is there born a poet with such lasting impact. It was Habib Ahmed of Hoshyarpur (India), born on March 24, 1928, later migrated to Pakistan after the partition in 1947, who continues to influence the masses even after 22 years of his death . He took the pen name”Jalib” to become Habib Jalib and started taking the oppressors head on. His progressive and revolutionary poetry inspired many of his age and perhaps will continue to influence the ages that will follow.
Jalib never wanted any official titles for himself. He never tried to get high positions in the literary organizations that were surfacing like mushrooms in 1960s under the government patronage and were run by bureaucrats and the literati who served the government’s purposes. Often he was invited by these literary organizations to recite his poems at their events and he would spoil the moods of the elite class sitting there by reciting blunt satirical poems, criticizing the government and the rulers.
It was one such event during Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s regime that Jalib ruined. While everyone else was reciting funny poetry, which had never been Habib Jalib’s genre, Jalib went for his immortal “Main Nahin Maanta, Main Nahin Maanta” in what seemed to be a huge gamble in an event like that. Criticizing the 1962 constitution (Dastoor) given by Ayub Khan, Jalib bluntly said:
While everyone else on the stage was praising the government for its so-called economic progress, Jalib stuck to his defiance:
It is interesting to note here that when Jalib returned from the podium after reciting this poem, Hafeez Jalandhri said to him, ”Jalib! This wasn’t the opportune time”. And Jalib responded by saying, “Jalib is not an opportunist”.
When Iran’s former dictator Reza Shah Pahlavi once visited Pakistan and Governor of West Pakistan Nawab Kalabagh forced Pakistani film star Neelofar to dance before him, ultimately leading to Neelofar’s attempted suicide, Jalib retaliated to this inhumanity by writing this masterpiece:
The legendary poem was included as a song by Riaz Shahid in his super hit movie Zarqa (1969). In the song, Neelofar is shown chained, dancing on the orders of an Israeli general, played by Agha Taalish.
Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto failed to win Habib Jalib over to his Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). PPP was enjoying the peak of popularity at that time but when Bhutto offered Jalib to join, his response was, “Oceans don’t flow towards rivers”. Habib Jalib, in fact, contested the election on the ticket of National Awami Party (NAP), now ANP, against PPP and lost. He joined NAP in Punjab at a time when NAP used to be alleged of being Indian agent. But that was Jalib. Always swimming against the tide.
When Bhutto was hanged in 1979, in what appeared to be a judicial murder, Jalib mourned his death in these words:
His legendary “Bande ko Khuda Kya Likhna” also surfaced during General Zia-ul-Haque’s martial law. No matter what the world said, Jalib simply refused to accept Zia as a savior of Pakistan. He reacted:
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“I can’t call tyranny as light, I can’t call hot desert wind as morning breeze and I can’t call a human as God.”
The interesting thing is that he deliberately used the word “Zia”. Jalib said he couldn’t call “Zulmat”, meaning tyranny, as “Zia”, which means light.
In 1986, Habib Jalib wrote another masterpiece as Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s daughter Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan from exile. Sensing the panic in government ranks upon her return, Jalib wrote:
Zia died in 1988 and Benazir Bhutto got elected as the prime minister of Pakistan. Jalib, like many others, thought that Benazir’s rising to power would mean an end to the dark days of the nation. Shattered, he wrote a few years later:
Jalib died on this day in 1993. It was March 13. Qateel Shafaai mourned his death in these words:
His family, being the family of what Jalib was, refused to accept the government’s offer to bear his funeral expenses. How could they? As Jalib had himself told Bhutto, he was an ocean. How could he flow into a river?
Taimur Rahman’s Laal band gave tribute to Habib Jalib recently by remixing several of his poems in its 2009 album Umeed-e-Sahar.
