Three distinguished Punjabis gone

Ishtiaq Ahmed

Daily News: Saturday, February 17, 2007

The last few weeks have brought bad and sad news about the Punjab as three of its very distinguished sons -- Munir Niazi, Sharif Kunjahi and O P Nayyar (Omkar Prashad Nayyar) -- left this world, one after the other. I call it a Punjabi loss for many reasons. The first and foremost is that all three belonged to a bygone era when the old Punjab was one and Punjabiyat had not been fractioned, bloodied and severed. The second main reason is that all three remained steadfast in their loyalty to Punjabi.

While Munir Niazi and Sharif Kunjahi expressed their creativity and sensitivity through the Punjabi language (Niazi was an equally accomplished poet in Urdu), O P Nayyar set tunes to immoral film songs in the best tradition of the Punjabi school of film music whose foundations were laid by Master Ghulam Haider. Munir Niazi was born on April 9, 1928, in the village Khanpur, district Hoshiarpur, but had to migrate to Pakistan at the time of partition in 1947. He died in Lahore on December 26, 2006. He expressed his feelings on the partition in the following verses:

kujh unj we raawan aukhian sann

kujh gall wicch gham da tauq vi see

kujh shehr dey louk vi zalim sann

kujh sanoun marran da shouq vi see

[Yes, there was the noose of grief around my neck

Yes, the citizenry was also so cruel

But, ultimately, we too wanted to get killed

Yes, the path I chose was hard]

His most outstanding quality was to express philosophical ideas in rather simple language. This verse of his has always haunted me. It captures the crisis most of us feel in thinking differently and perhaps ahead of time:

Waqt to aggey lungg jaan di sazaa

Aadmi kalla reh janda aye

[The punishment for being ahead of time is:

One is left all alone]

The last time I saw him was in April 2003 at the annual meeting of the World Punjab Congress. He was presiding over the session in which I read out a short paper deploring that the governments in Pakistan, the federal as well as of the Punjab, have always been hostile to the idea of promoting Punjabi as a literary and educational language.

The second man of letters to depart was Professor Muhammad Sharif Kunjahi (born 1915 in Kunjah, Gujrat). He died on January 20, 2007 at the age of 92 in Gujrat. Sharif Kunjahi was a scholar in the classical tradition – an educationist, linguist, creative thinker and poet and much more. His knowledge was truly encyclopaedic. His greatest, and one can say unique, contribution has been the translation of the Quran into Punjabi. My argument in previous articles has been that only when people can understand a religious text can one expect them to understand it intelligently. Now, such a foundation has been laid.

The problem of the Pakistani Punjab is that despite being the numerically biggest province, its people enjoying a better standard of living than any other province of Pakistan with the exception of Karachi, and the majority of the Pakistani military and civil bureaucracy hailing from it, the percentage of literacy in Punjabi of its people is scandalously low. I don't know of any other linguistic nationality anywhere in the world where there is so little interest in gaining proficiency in one's own mother tongue.

The reasons for it go back far in history, but after the creation of Pakistan such neglect makes no sense except those who have power think they can hold it better by expressing themselves in English or Urdu. Therefore scholars like Sharif Kunjahi have done a very great favour in doing serious and lasting work in Punjabi. I interviewed him in Gujarat on April 20, 2003, on the partition of the Punjab. He was of the opinion that Muslims resented the fact that Hindus were economically more advanced and some practised untouchability towards them. However, there were Hindu teachers and doctors whose selfless service to all the communities should never be forgotten. He blamed the colonial government agencies for fomenting communal conflicts.

The third outstanding Punjabi to depart recently was the famous music director, O P Nayyar. He was born in Lahore on January 16, 1926, and died in Mumbai on January 28, 2007. For years I had been trying to get into contact with him in connection with my ongoing research on the partition of the Punjab. I had read how Nayyar Sahib so fondly remembered his city of birth. In fact in one of the interviews on Zee TV he recalled his last days in Lahore with profound nostalgia. He left Lahore only in 1948, hoping to stay on if things returned to normal.

On December 10, 2006 thanks to Mr Sultan Arshad, who is a true connoisseur of music and a close friend of O P Nayyar, I could talk to the latter on the telephone. We exchanged greetings in typical Lahori Punjabi and he agreed to give me an interview if I came to Mumbai. I was planning such a trip in March but the news of his death means that the interview will remain undone. However, for those who love music and the Punjab and Lahore it would be worth noting that Nayyar's greatest and most outstanding composition, which was also his first ever recorded, was the immortal song 'Preetam aan milo, Dukhia jiya bulaye, Preetam aan milo'. It was sung by the Sindhi C. H. Atma and recorded in Lahore before partition. Nayyar composed rather soft and subdued music in his early films such as Aasman (1952), which had Dilip Kumar's younger brother, Nasir Khan, in the lead role. I remember seeing it in Regal Cinema in Lahore.

Aar Paar (1954), Mr and Mrs 55 (1955), C.I.D. (1956) were landmarks of his Punjabi vivacity in film music, but my favourite from that era remains his outstanding compositions for B R Chopra's Naya Daur (1957). B R Chopra (born 1914) is another Lahori who lives in Mumbai. He is mostly seen in a wheel chair nowadays. Chopra Sahib talked to me on January 3, 1997, in Mumbai about Government College, Lahore. That was the first time I expressed a desire to meet O P Nayyar but alas it could never materialise.

With the departure of Niazi, Kunjahi and Nayyar a golden chapter in Punjabi cultural achievements nearly closes.



The writer is an associate professor at the Department of Political Science at

Stockholm University in Sweden. Email: ishtiaq.ahmed@statsvet.su.se