Obituary: Akhtar Payami

By Mohammad Sajjad

The news of sad demise of Akhtar Payami on 8 April 2013 in Karachi brought a different kind of memory to the people of Bihar. Karachi people remembered this Bihari muhajir as a towering journalist associated with the Morning News and Dawn. His protégé and colleagues in these newspapers remember him as their mentor with expertise in toning down the stories to avert the state repression as Payami had worked during the days of strict censorship under the Bhutto regime. Payami’s colleagues admire him for his vast knowledge about the ideologies of different political parties and their ways of promoting those ideologies.

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But people of Bihar as also the historians having interest in the travails of partition, violence, migration, dislocation, uprooted-ness, alienation, and other human tragedies associated with that bloody politics of India’s partition have a different reason to look at the lives of the likes of Akhtar Payami. Unlike other provinces, the Muslims of Bihar, who migrated to Dhaka after India’s partition in 1947, had to undergo yet another colossal human tragedy in 1971. The preponderance of the Punjabi elites (West Pakistan) as also of the Urdu speaking migrants in the structures and processes of Pakistan, and their strongly chauvinistic cultural arrogance against the Bengalis took a different turn by 1971; it repudiated the religious basis of nationalism, and the geographically segregated eastern wing of Pakistan became an independent state of Bangladesh. The Urdu speaking ‘Biharis’, who escaped from being slaughtered had to go to Kathmandu from where they flied to Karachi, in the “Khuda Ki Basti-God’s own land”. This tribulation is depicted in Abdus Samad’s Urdu novel, Do Gaz Zameen (1988), as also in a short story, “A Grave Turned Inside-out” of Ibrahim Jalees (1923-77). For long, such themes remained relatively less attended by the historians. Papiya Ghosh (1953-2006) of the Patna University however worked on it and brought out (posthumously) a good work, Partition and South Asian Diaspora: Extending the Subcontinent (Delhi: Routledge, 2007).

Such an issue, i.e., the enormously tragic dislocation of the Urdu speaking migrants from Dhaka, remained a strong concern in the Bihar politics around 1971; Ghulam Sarwar (1926-2004) and Taqi Raheem (1921-99) were few activists raising this issue in Bihar politics.
Akhtar Payami was not as hapless and unfortunate as many other “Biharis” who still remain stranded- people, abandoned by both Bangladesh and Pakistan, and therefore, without citizenship of any state.

Syed Sayeed Akhtar ‘Payami’ was born in February 1931 at Rajgir (Nalanda, Bihar), a place famous for Lord Mahavir, and some eminent Sufis. He did his BA in Economics from Patna University, where he was a student activist associated with the Left movement, and was known as a progressive revolutionary poet, with creative oeuvres on the plight of downtrodden. He published a collection of Urdu poems, “Aaina Khana” (House of Mirrors). He migrated to East Pakistan in the 1950s (not in 1946-7) and he joined as a journalist in the Morning News in Dhaka (where he was closely known to Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman, the Awami League leader of what became Bangladesh). In 1972 he migrated from Dhaka via Kathmandu to Karachi and continued with the Morning News; later he shifted to Dawn, and continued with it till 2007.

He is survived by his four sons, Prof. Sikandar Mehdi, Aziz Akhtar, Dr. Arzoo Mehdi, and Yawar Mehdi; and a daughter, Yasmin Bano.

Payami’s younger brother Prof. Jabir Husain (b. 1945) taught English literature in Munger and Patna; was active in the Socialist movements during his student days in the LS College, Muzaffarpur (Bihar), and with the Total Revolution (1974) of Jaya Prakash Narayan in the 1970s. He was elected from Munger for Bihar legislative Assembly, and became Health Minister of Bihar (1977-79), later he served as the Chairman (1996-2006), Bihar Legislative Council, and subsequently became Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha). Jabir Husain has also got Sahitya Academy Award (2005) for his Urdu diary, Ret par Khema, besides other Hindi-Urdu books, and newspaper essays. Payami’s another brother Sheen Akhtar taught Urdu literature in Ranchi University, and was also its Pro-Vice Chancellor.

Akhtar Payami had composed a long poem (tamseeli nazm), “Tareekh”, which was called by Akhtar Orainwi as a monumental creation. It was first tamseeli nazm of Urdu, preceding Saahir Ludhiyanwi’s “Parchhaiyan”, and Ali Sardar Jafri’s “Nayee Duniya Ko Salaam”. Composed in 1951, it remained unpublished for long; August 1963 onwards it came to be serialized in Morcha, Urdu weekly of Gaya, by Kalaam Hyderi. In 1996, Jabir Husain published it in a booklet form from the Urdu Markaz, Patna.

This poem has characters like Khuda, Adam, Hauwa, Jibrael, Iblees, Khet, Karkhana, Bijli, Zindagi.

Few lines/portions of this poem became more popular memorized by the literary people.

Aur jo waqt ke mai’maar hain, fitrat ke amen
Un ki qismat mein andherey ke siwa kuchh bhi nahin
Un ko taareekh pilayegi kabhi zehr ke jam
Un ko taareekh charhaayegi kabhi sooli par
Aur kabhi neezah wa shamseer-o-senaan-o-khanjar
Zeest ki shamma bujha daalengey
Noor ko maut ki chaadar mein chhupa daalengey

This poem is basically a short history of humanity passing through crests and troughs of progresses and declines across the civilizations as observed by Adam and Eve on their tour coming from heaven down to the earth across times and spaces. On their worldly trip, they come across so many good and bad things:

Is jahaan-e-rang-o-boo ke yeh tilism bhi ajeeb hain
Chalo chalo guzar chalen yeh pur khatar muqam hai

Yet, the poem ends with an optimistic note:

Agar hai yeh jahaan to aye Khuda-e-do jahaan
Ham is zameen pe apni fikr ke diye jalaayengey,