Imagine a world without Homer, Hafiz, Shakespeare, Milton, Ghalib, Eliot and others of their class. It may be a world of vegetative euphoria but certainly it won’t be a beautiful world to live in. The primary task of literature is thus to beautify world and this beautification comes not merely by lyrical subtleties and musical notes intrinsic to literature but by the incorporation and exploration of beautiful ideas that literature sets before itself. One may disagree with the primacy of beauty for literature – aestheticism as it is called, but one can’t wholly do away from such a perennial notion. In the river of time art and beauty have existed like twins quite inseparable from one another and literature has been a primary vernacular for expressing this artistic beauty. The structural beauty, rhythmic flow and metric notion that is so essential to almost all sacred texts derives its essence from the same notion of aesthetics. But beauty is not that literature is all about and also given the fact that aesthetics is an aspect of subjectivity, the proposition of aestheticism is susceptible to criticism from various camps. The assumption that literature thrives on beauty and beauty only may not be a concept of so much importance in modern parlance, particularly at a time when borders between sacred and profane, beauty and ugliness are being redrawn at every instant.
Thus the task of literature is not only to throw man in trajectories of abstraction and to let his mind wander in Infinity of imagination but importantly literature has to concern itself with man and his life here on earth too. True literature discovers and defines ideals that have been hitherto unheard of, but these ideals shall not be so far removed from human pragmatism that they turn out to be untenable in totality. Thus a literary work has to strike a balance between literary ideals and living ideals. By demanding from literature the discovery of ideals tenable to human efforts I don’t imply nor do I favour that literature shall be used as handmaid to an ideology, as has been done time and again. What I intend from such a statement is the precarious ability of literature to transform mundane into sublime and vice versa. This statement holds much value in contemporary literary landscape where one can no longer work with mythological narrations but has rather to center his work around human aspirations. Being the product of human individual psyche shaped by a matrix of socio cultural factors a literary work is expected to preserve the ideals of spacetime in which it is conceived. This assigns a sublime historical to literature. If history is the chronology of events and individuals, then literature is the chronology of ideas and ideals. Historian captures human evolution like a photographer but a writer captures it like a painter. The works of Ghalib do not only inform us about Ghalib as an individual but rather give us a bird’s eye view of milieu in which Ghalib conceived his works of art. Despite this individualist and subjective aspect literature posses a unique feature of transcendence in terms of transpersonalism and transhistoricity. Thus a literary work is of equal importance at all instants of time and in all frames of space, though the nature of importance may vary. Literature along with religion and spirituality remain means of transcending human finitude. It is by means of literature that has expressed his yearnings, aspirations, ideals and objectives. When hearts turned heavy by the pain of separation mankind scribed love pangs, odes of togetherness, elegies of separation and prayers of communion. When oppression reigned high mankind resisted it by both arm and pen and as a result came down to us a rich legacy of resistance literature spanning over contours of space and time stretching from Dostoevsky, Faiz, Darvesh to Agha Shahid Ali and others. The resistance of Man gave birth to literature of resistance, which proved valuable not only in venting human sentiments but in also shaping the course of historic evolution. The beautiful experiments have been conducted by many poets in romanticising the resistance and what resulted is like beautiful odes of Ahmed Faraz or equally subtle poems and odes of our vernacular poet Shahnaz Rasheed. This idea of resistance via literature despite its own issues has helped in hatching some of the best literary works in contemporary times.
Our times which are also witnessing a growing trend alienation from the tradition have witnessed a quasi-mystical genre of poetry, the typical representatives of which are Amrita Pritam, Nida Fazili and possibly Khalil Gibran too. This genre of literature has done a great service in humanising the divine and thereby enabling all of us to maintain our loyalty to tradition, sacred and religious in the face of growing challenges from unchecked scientism with its repercussions on all aspects of human existence. Rudolf Panwitz while deliberating upon the role of literature remarked that the function of literature is to envision future while one is still in the womb of present. This literature has often been paralleled to the Holy task of prophet hood by many scholars of art and sacred. We may not expect all works of art to stand loyal to Panwitz’s criteria and for that matter to any of the statements made in this column but one we can genuinely aspire for is that literature may continue its functional and aesthetic utility and may stand as a predominant matrix element in shaping human lives. Writers and poets are well aware of the times we are all living in and the nature of the milieu makes it mandatory for them to make their fellow humans like us understand the times we are living in and at least help us envision at least theoretically the direction we are heading in, the destination may lie fogged in time.
Amir Suhail Wani is a freelance columnist with bachelors in Electrical Engineering and a student of comparative studies with special interests in Iqbaliyat & mystic thought.
