Il Miglior Fabbro: On Choosing a Language and Finding Taufiq Rafat

Khwaja Shahid Hosain

21 December 1934 – 3 July 2025

In Memoriam: The Aleph Review is saddened to share that Khwaja Shahid Hosain passed away in Islamabad on 3rd July, 2025. Poet, antiquarian, bookseller and public servant (former DG of Radio Pakistan, MD NAFDEC, Federal Secretary Culture & Tourism and Pakistan’s ambassador to UNESCO), Hosain leaves behind a vibrant legacy. He edited and contributed to First Voices, the first of what became a series of anthologies of Pakistani poetry in English, published by the Oxford University Press in 1965. His verse-play, The Square Peg, was published by the American literary journal, The New Mexico Quarterly (1961-62). His poetry also appeared in Young Commonwealth Poets (1965) and Commonwealth Poems of Today (1967). We were fortunate to have him write an essay on poetry, language and Pakistani poet Taufiq Rafat for our inaugural volume (2017), which we are reprinting here in his memory. We are keeping his family and loved ones in our thoughts and send them our deepest condolences.

Khwaja Shahid Hosain at the inaugural Aleph launch (2017)

When Pakistan became independent in 1947, it had seen 90 years of direct British rule, preceded by a century or more of growing commercial and political power exercised by the East India Company. English had, quite naturally, become the language of authority and influence. The ‘heaven-born’ elite of the Indian Civil Service, the judiciary, and the great commercial houses all transacted their business in English. It was the passport to privilege.

So, it was not unexpected that even the founder of Pakistan, Mr M. A. Jinnah, acclaimed by the Muslim masses of the subcontinent as Quaid e Azam, the great leader, was comfortable and fluent only in English. I can recall being taken as a child to a vast public meeting in Lahore where hundreds of thousands listened, uncomprehending but spell-bound, as he addressed them almost entirely in English. They trusted him, and he had earned their trust. Interestingly, however, English had not become the language of imaginative discourse. The writers, the thinkers, the teachers, the radicals and the fundamentalists, the Communists and Islamists overwhelmingly chose Urdu, occasionally one of the myriad regional languages, to convey their ideas. Unsurprising, therefore, creative writing in English barely existed in 1947. I can remember reviewing an early government-sponsored anthology of writing in English and quoting, more in affectionate exasperation than contempt, Dr Johnson’s remark about a woman preaching. It was, he said,

“…like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done

well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

To compound the problem, independence was inevitably followed (in intellectual, not ruling circles) by the classic backlash against the language of the imperial powers. Creative writing in English was elitist, self-regarding, designed only to perpetuate colonial modes of thought.

Yet something had changed by 1976. The English poet Anthony Thwaite, then coeditor of Encounter, visited Pakistan early that year. “One of several revelations,” he wrote, “was the presence of a number of interesting and accomplished Pakistani poets writing in English.” Thwaite soon published many of them in his journal and reviewed their work in The Times Literary Supplement.

What Thwaite had encountered in 1976 was no ‘Indian summer’. In 1997 Pakistan celebrated the 50th anniversary of its independence. The generation which had lived and worked with the British had virtually passed away. But the trend which had surprised Thwaite continued, with undiminished strength. Oxford University Press was able to publish, as part of its 1997 Jubilee Series in Pakistan, no fewer than seven single-poet volumes or anthologies by Pakistanis writing in English. The country had in this time first left, then rejoined the Commonwealth.

Its English poets continued speaking to the larger world inhabited by the language they had chosen—or which had chosen them.

To those who love English enough not to be proprietorial and who therefore recognize that the language has moved above and beyond the island where it was born, this story should give some pleasure. What is equally interesting is the fact that this poetry sheds an unexpected light on the society from which it springs. We are very far away from the easy certainties of newspaper headlines about Pakistan.

In retrospect, 1965 was the watershed year. Oxford University Press published its first anthology of Pakistani poetry in English, First Voices; Six Poets from Pakistan. My introduction tried to establish a context, and stake a modest claim:

This is not an anthology which aggressively asserts a

Pakistani version of ‘negritude’; we assert only that we

have done justice to the language in which we write…

There is, certainly, a common identity, a uniquely Pakistani

flavour, but it lurks deep within our bones; it is (we hope)

concealed, subsumed and justified by our utterance.

The publication of First Voices was followed almost immediately by Young Commonwealth Poets ’65, published by Heinemann to mark the Commonwealth Arts Festival that year. Four poets from Pakistan were featured in the section edited by Zulfiqar Ghose, then a Pakistan-born cricket correspondent for the Observer, later a novelist, critic, poet and Professor of English at the University of Texas. He included his own poem, ‘One Chooses a Language’:

There’s England, my dictionary my ignorance brings me back

to. I give poetry readings where people ask at the end (just to

show their interest) how many Indian languages I know.

Already a separate but distinctly Pakistani rhetoric was emerging. It was ironic but involved, clear-eyed but never alienated from its Pakistani roots. Even a senior figure like Ahmed Ali, who lived through Mao’s coming to power as a British Council lecturer in Nanking, commented specifically on events in his own country while using the conventions of Chinese poetry:

I belonged neither to this warring lord nor that,

Only a poet in search of peace,

Yet the soldiers beat me all the same,

For having no hatred and being serene.

Self-confidence has grown with the passing years. It is now clear that Pakistani poetry in English is more direct, more specific to feelings and willing to confront political and social issues more frankly than the poetry of the Indo-Persian tradition inherited and practiced by poets working in Urdu and the regional languages of Pakistan.

So we find Kaleem Omar facing the traumatic events which led to the separation of East Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh:

A sense of loss, a sensible emptiness

will not do. Meditation

without a binding fact in it

and the long backward look

at someone else’s past will not do. The quick are dead

the quick are dead. This chant will not do.

Consider also the intense emotional (and political) charge with which the highly respected poet Taufiq Rafat has invested his poem Sacrifice:

As he moves the knife across the neck of the goat

I can feel its point on my throat;

And as the blood geysers from the jugular,

A hot and sticky sweat breaks out on my body…

We are not laying the foundations of a house

But another Dachau.

Taufiq Rafat is perhaps the most considerable, and certainly the most respected and loved of these poets. His transforming mind brings new perspectives to the rituals and practices of the Pakistani elite. Hunting, for instance. His poem Going after Geese celebrates in three lyrical stanzas the pleasures of an early-morning shoot.

No magnet works so well. To the armed

Bushes they come, their wings tied to our sights.

In an air heavy with low-flying geese

And cordite, what we see and smell

Is not success, but passion. The instant

Drops its death-white vertical. Beyond

The curtain of these plumaged beads the

Horizon labours to deliver the sun.

It is now half a century since Oxford University Press published First Voices and Taufiq entered our lives. My wife and I still treasure, I think more than any book presented to us, his Collected Poems, published in 1985 and inscribed simply “For Shahid and Yasmin, with Love and Gratitude”.

The silence which came upon him in his last years was a supreme irony. He was, before then, superbly witty, warm and generous with his friends and always keen to encourage younger writers. I remember his genuine pleasure on first reading the poems of Mehvash Amin, née Masud, and hoping that she would not “lapse into adjectives”. Even in his quiet years on a visit to London Taufiq would come and sit, apparently content, for long hours in our antiquarian bookshop.

We had the pleasure of meeting his son in Islamabad many years ago and sharing some highly emotional memories. Rehana, to whom he dedicated Arrival of the Monsoon, will we hope be able to meet us when next we come to Lahore.

It was a privilege to know and share time with Taufiq. Not all creative artists are great human beings. But for Taufiq we must celebrate both the singer and his songs.