Lamps Still Burning On Zain Saleem’s Gujrat ke Darakhshan Sitare (Volume One)

We say a lamp is valued in the dark. In practice we do something odder. While the lamp burns, we sit in its light and forget to say thank you. When it goes out, we notice the dark, and only then do we get busy: condolence meetings, memorial issues, anniversary essays, all of it written in a voice we never used while the person could still hear us. Our culture has given recognition a single season, and it is the season of departure.
So when a young writer picks up his pen and asks, quietly, why we shouldn’t look at the lamps while they are still lit, the question deserves an answer. The answer is a book. It is called Gujrat ke Darakhshan Sitare, “The Shining Stars of Gujrat.”
I should say plainly that I have known this soil all my life. This is the country where the Chenab carries the story of Sohni on its current and where the shrines still hum with the old mystic’s call. History speaks here, and so does folk memory. But memory does not look after itself. Someone has to hold it close, or it slips away into the dust without a sound. Zain Saleem has taken up that task at a time when most writers are circling their own reflections, and I count it as something more than literary work. It is a small act of decency.
Biographical dictionaries are among the oldest things we have in Urdu prose. Mir wrote his Nikat-ush-Shuara, and Muhammad Husain Azad later gave us Ab-e-Hayat, and between them they taught us how to keep a person in words. Yet most of those books are albums of the dead. The photographs have yellowed and the faces have gone faint. What Zain Saleem has done is turn the mirror around. His subjects are people who will have tea with you this afternoon, who will answer your greeting in the lane and walk down the same streets you do. That is a modest change of direction, and a real one.
It is also a dangerous one. A person who writes about the living is read by his subjects. They may weigh him and judge him, and some will be displeased. On one side lies flattery and on the other lies caution, and the writer has to walk the thin line between them. I will not pretend Volume One is free of every stumble on that line. But it keeps walking, and that takes nerve.
The range of the book surprised me. It begins with the keepers of history, the researchers and chroniclers: Arif Ali Mir, Rai Fasih Jaral, Siddique Mujahid, Sikandar Riaz Chauhan, Nadeemullah Mir. These are people who spend their days gathering torn pages. Shahid Hameed Warraich’s name stays with me longest, because he went into the records and came back with voices that time had pressed down. A historian is an advocate for people who cannot argue their own case. Zain Saleem has done the same service for the advocates and introduced them to the public.
Then come the poets and critics. Dr. Shaheen Mufti writes with a quiet authority that the state itself acknowledged with the Tamgha-e-Imtiaz.Prof. Kaleem Ehsan Butt and Akram Kunjahi stand for criticism and creation at their steadiest. Alongside them are Munir Sabri Kunjahi, Liaqat Gadgor, Munir Chishti Kunjahi, Bashir Malang, Saeed Akhtar and Noman Ahmed, whose verse carries the grief and the scent of this particular ground. The storytellers include Ehsan Faisal Kunjahi, Bilal Hasan Jhakar and Nomi Chaudhry, and Rubeen Nawaz writes novels. The Punjabi voice comes through Chaudhry Ismail Chechi, Dr. Azhar Mehmood Chaudhry and Iftikhar Warraich Kalrvi. The book is not a village of one trade. It is a whole town, with the historian’s sitting room, the poet’s guest-house and the storyteller’s window all in view.
The streets of that town are the profiles of Shahbaz Ali Qadri, Farooq Riaz, Yawar Abbas, Razzaq Ahmed Ghaffari, Haji Aslam Javed and Shah Jahan. Some of these people would never be found on the official map of literature, but they are firmly on the map of the community. I think this is the book’s quiet democracy. Greatness here is not measured by how many titles trail after a name. It is measured by whether a lamp burns in someone’s courtyard.
I want to say a word about the publisher, because books like this do not appear on their own. For Arif Ali Mir of the Al-Mir Trust Library, a book is not merchandise. It is a vocation. Out of his own taste and patronage he has made the library a place where rare books and manuscripts reach readers free of charge. In an age that puts a price on everything, giving knowledge away is a kind of gentle rebellion. The chapter on him in this volume is a fair acknowledgment of that work. Without a publisher like him, I suspect this book would not have been printed. Had it been printed, I suspect it would have scattered.
Now, the prose, because that is where the book’s real secret lies. Zain Saleem writes like still water, which makes little noise and runs deep. The standard biography tends to hand us the usual inventory: born here, schooled there, published this and that. It exhausts the reader. He folds those facts into narrative, so they read less like entries and more like a life being told. His words do not show off. They serve the thought, and the sentence moves forward the way a person walks when they are unhurried and sure of the way. That is rarer among today’s writers than it ought to be.
But what moved me most is the door through which the author enters his own book. Early on he tells us about his home, where a long and hard struggle against cancer was fought, and where books were part of what carried the family through. Something clicks into place when you read this. A person who has stood in the dark understands what a lamp is worth. I believe Zain Saleem went looking for these luminous figures because he knows from experience how much a little light can matter. That personal truth lifts the book out of research and makes it testimony. We do not find that often.
A reviewer owes the reader some honesty, and I would be failing in my duty if I offered only praise. No book is without flaws, and praise earns trust only when it is willing to sit beside criticism. I find the presence of women writers thin. Shaheen Mufti and Rubeen Nawaz stand out, but the daughters of Gujrat have lit more windows than these two. I hope Volume Two widens the circle. I would also ask the author for a short note on how the names were chosen, and for an order in the arrangement that a reader can follow, which would help anyone who comes back to the book for reference. These are not complaints. They are expectations, and one only expects things of those one has hopes for.
One more thing needs saying, and I would rather say it than have it said for me. I am mentioned in this book. My word about it therefore comes with a shadow of personal connection, and you should weigh it with that in mind. For that reason I have tried to keep my eyes on the book’s direction rather than on my own place in it. Weigh my opinion with care. But do not read the book carefully. Read it wholeheartedly.
To me, the book’s greatest achievement is the revival of a simple rule: recognition belongs to today. Waiting until tomorrow often leaves us with nothing but the vocabulary of mourning. Zain Saleem reminds us that we need not wait for a historian’s funeral to say we are grateful to him, nor for a poet’s anniversary to applaud the poem. When a scholar of some later day sits down to write the literary history of Gujrat, he will find in this volume something precious: a record whose subjects were still breathing when it was written. History is seldom given a gift like that, witnesses who are alive.
And now a few words to the author. My dear Zain, the lamps you lit for others have, in their glow, brought your own into clearer view. Keep going. This volume is a beginning, and we are waiting for the next.
To everyone gathered here, one request. Please do not let this book become an ornament on the shelf. Open it. Read it. And carry word to the people named inside it that someone saw them, knew them and wrote them down. To tell a person their work has not gone unnoticed is among the better things we can do for one another.
The lamps that burn today deserve our thanks today. Let us give it.