The traditional images of the “river” and “sea” have been re-introduced recently in serious writings by Wasif Ali Wasif in his latest collection of essays called Heart as A River and The Sea (Dil Darya Samandar). He is basically interested and involved in the situation of the human heart in the changing environment of our society. He feels that the heart of human individual has become insensitive to all those attractions which used to keep it alive in the good old days. Thus, the heart which usually throbs somewhere in everybody’s anatomy has failed to respond to sensations, and had simply become an organ for the pumping of blood in the veins and arteries of the human animal and can, whenever it likes, bring about the sudden collapse of man by refusing to cooperate with him in his tension-ridden world. But it is not just the human heart which is largely covered by the Urdu word “Dil”, in WASIF SAHIB’s contemplated treatment, it also answers to the human soul which is generally the source of consciousness in a human being. It is however good to read about in the serious piece of reading and Wasif Sahib has quite genuinely added something valuable to Urdu prose writing by making the inner drama of human soul the subject of literary treatment.
The book “Dil Darya Samandar” is carefully and beautifully written and it may serve as a companion in the solitude of colourless times. Wasif Ali Wasif, at last, assumed the role of a “friend” in a world which has lost its contact with the emotional life of our traditional culture. This collection of essays offers an unfamiliar perspective which has long been forgotten by the modern Urdu writers. It has an extended Muslim religious perspective. Its realism covers the total human situation of our cultural predicament and it does not stop short within the outlines of a socio-economic parameter, like the popular writings of our time. In this sense, and quite exceptionally, Wasif Ali Wasif’s world pre-supposes a people who believe in God, are Muslims by faith and practice and have a deep anxiety for the saving of their soul in the hereafter. This world which is too familiar to be noticed forms that landscape for the inner drama of being. In Wasif’s thinking, this world has been displaced by things which place an opaque curtain between man and his Creator, and make the human heart indifferent and insensitive to the nobler values of higher knowledge. And since this sad event has almost taken place, the world in which we live, observes Wasif Ali Wasif, has become a dark land of ignorance, and men have been torn apart under the strain of divisive human nature. It has its sources in the achievement of western man, and it has, thus deprived our human being of confidence and of psycho-intellectual reliance on its own history and tradition. This has brought about the alienation of modern Muslims in much cherished world.
Thus what makes Waif Ali Wasif’s book worth reading is the theme of the alienation within our culture. Perhaps no other writer has approached it with such compassion and pathos with which he was attempted to treat it. He has portrayed this malady in its multi-dimensional forms and with every new topic and with the shifting perspective of every other essay, the theme of the alienation is projected for a positive response of the reader. The author makes alienation the most distressing complaint of our time, and attempts to resolve it by his own suggestive methodology. He, however, works on the assumption that man still stands in need of a value based vocabulary which he has inherited from his cultural past. But probably Wasif Sahib has overlooked the changed habit of mind which has out focused the vocabulary of traditional value-system, and has made the necessity of new mode of communication inevitable in our time. But, whatever the degree of loss of communications, the fact remains that we are very much located and rooted in the vocabulary of our culture. We probably belong to a world which is inhabited by LOVE, FEAR, THE MAN OF MYSTIC STATE, INNER SATISFACTION, CONTRADICTION AND CONTRARIES, THOU AND I, THE CARVAN ON BEING, and such other lovely memory words from a Sufi’s upward journey. In fact, it is love which forms the essence of human fulfilment in Wasif Sahib’s literary world. He says that love, when it enters the heart, makes it a River of love and when it comes into contact with others, the river grows into a sea. When reveals itself, it transforms every thing. But its visitation is not volitional, it is a divine favour. Only love can make men see through time; it can change the destiny of nation; it can also bring about a change within the human soul. The spring season in the world of nature can appear in the soul of man, too, if he is blessed by God with love. But how can it all be? God is not a human attribute; only those favoured by the Creator have the blessing of love. This makes the human situation rather awful and a thing of extreme anxiety.
In these essays, Wasif Ali Wasif has offered a positive view of human situation by suggesting the hollowness of inner life which can be redeemed by resorting to thou and I relation, and by entering the field of love in our psychological conduct. But when, “love itself is inaccessible, and one cannot get rid by simply asking for it then the entire scheme of human reclamation becomes meaningless. Perhaps the positive attitude towards the conditions of human soul has a negative valuation. Probably this book seems to point out that since “love is in non-existent in our sad and unhappy state of being, we are alienated from the Most Merciful for some error in our own judgement. Wasif Sahib has only obliquely and indirectly revealed the crises of our spirit in the unkind circumstances of our time. Perhaps the matter has killed the spirit in the gnosis of the absolute. Wasif Ali Wasif’s collection of essays has a pleasant rhythm of an emotionally sustained prose. The sentence moves with grace and the words have the ring of sensation. These features are only rarely found in modern Urdu prose. But whether or not one succeeds in discovering himself, or in entering the field of a higher experience, the rhythm of Wasif‘s prose certainly compensates for any loss of achievement. With this one book, it can be said with some assurance, our culture is seen to be moving out of a closed world and entering an age of self discovery where single individual becomes the object of new orientation and also the locus of a new destiny.
by
Gilani Kamran
