In This Live Desolation is Baidar Bakht’s translation of Akhtarul Iman’s racy, concise, candid and largely subjective memoir published in all likelihood posthumously by the Urdu Akademi, Delhi, in 1996. For his title, Iman takes licence with the Persian compound word kharabah-abaad (kharabah—desolate, ruin, wasteland; abaad—populated, inhabited, flourishing) referring to the world, and inverts the order to suit his requirement. Iman’s title translates more or less as ‘in this populated wasteland’, or ‘in this flourishing ruin’. Bakht’s translated title imagines the world as a living place for desolation. He informs in his introduction that the memoir was first serialized in the Urdu magazine Saughat from September 1991 to March 1996. The text includes several of Iman’s diary entries as well.
Iman’s memoir is peopled with relatives, mentors, friends, acquaintances and professional associates who influenced him during his childhood and adolescence, and over his mature, literarily and professionally profitable years. Among them are many with whom he engaged over long periods of time, or those with whom he fell out, several who helped shape his personality, and still others who were part and parcel of the populated wasteland in which he lived and exerted, but who never really mattered meaningfully in the long run, either personally or professionally. As he writes about himself and his lifetime, Iman recalls several happenings that shaped or made a difference to him at a personal level, and also those that are now recognizable as part and parcel of the social, political, literary, ideological and popular framework of both British and independent India within which he learned, evolved and even exercised considerable influence. His narration of familial and educational experiences is a first-time telling—windows into his private life; those of events or happenings already in public domains accrue upon them by providing his personal perspectives or understanding of these, as one who comprehended them against the larger, existing social, political or ideological contexts, at the time of their happening.
Akhtarul Iman (1915-1996) was a distinguished Urdu poet decorated with the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1962 for his poetry anthology Yaadein (Memories, 1961). He has published more anthologies including his earliest Girdaab (Whirlpool, 1943), Bint-e Lamhaat (Daughter of Time,1969), Naya Ahang (New Melody, 1977) and Sar-o Samaan (Belongings, 1982) to mention a few. He belonged to the group of modern(ist) Urdu poets who broke away from the classical or traditional ghazal composed in tight, epigrammatic couplets, often centralizing love and related ideas or expressing philosophical ideas through motifs common to love poetry, and developed new forms of poetic expression such as the nazm in their bid to explore newer, unconventional subjects and ideas. Because nazms revolve around a single idea or subject in all its varied complexity, they were better suited to express the socio-political, psychoanalytical, existential crises and complexities that troubled contemporary society. This genre of poetry afforded greater provision to express surrealist, fragmented or alienated experiences. Unlike the ghazal which comprised couplets adhering strictly to rhythmic patterns which made them convenient to recite and even memorize, nazms were often unrhymed or in free verse, demanding greater concentration from listeners. Iman remarks of himself: ‘My style of poetry was neither common in Delhi nor in Lucknow…. Whenever I recited my work, the listeners’ eyes showed more questions than appreciation’ (p. 102); perhaps this is why his poems are less commonly quoted. Poets who affected similar change in Urdu poetry were NM Rashed, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Mohammad Sanaullah Dar Meeraji, also a close associate who lived with Iman for months together, till his last.
Akhtarul Iman was also an acclaimed screenplay and dialogue writer for Urdu-Hindi cinema. He was awarded the Filmfare awards twice, for best dialogues for the films Dharmputra (Son of Dharma) in 1963 and for Waqt (Time) in 1966—a few of his filmic dialogues are iconic, reminisced till date. He writes at length about his experiences with the film world—his years of struggle and success, and his real-world experiences—promises made; canned or incomplete projects that caused frustration; unmade payments that left him wanting; replacements in projects without any word of caution, which actually contributed to his sagacity; foreign travels; long-term associations with production houses and relationships with colleagues that afforded both happiness and motivation.
While providing a stark picture of village life across British north India, including prevalent superstitious beliefs, Iman’s truthful narration of his early childhood posits him as a lonely, dreamy-eyed child already showing a poetic bent of mind. That of his school and college-going years includes anecdotes illustrative of the ambience that prevailed in educational institutions where he lived and studied as a schoolboy and those from which he graduated, during the late colonial and early years after Independence. Iman’s narrative includes stories about basic living, meagre meals and his own loneliness in the middle of these; the intellectual stimulus and active assistance, monetary or otherwise, provided by philanthropists and educators; an atmosphere charged with academic impetus, and also student strikes he was at the centre of, or which he instigated. Iman writes about several magazines which, among other things, illustrates the dynamic Urdu literary and print culture during those days. For a reader conversant with the people and the times Iman describes, his allusions strike familiar chords.
Akhtarul Iman lived to see the rise and fall of the Taraqqi Pasand Tehreek or Progressive Writers’ Movement, one of the greatest literary movements to influence Urdu creative writers and critics—a movement which soon spread across India irrespective of linguistic and regional considerations. Iman writes in some detail about his professional or sociable associations with a few of the progressives. As regards the political or ideological stance of the writers, he remains mostly neutral though at times somewhat critical, and sometimes, ostensibly, he tilts in favour of the rubrics of the Lahore-based Halqa-e Arbab-e Zauq (circle of the men of taste) literary movement, his poetic art, language and his poetic subjects crisscrossing both. As regards the Partition which he was witness to, barring one or two brief mentions of riots, or, of acquaintances crossing over to Pakistan, Iman is taciturn. A couple of his translated poems included in the Appendix, however, refer laterally to the upshots of the Partition.
Baidar Bakht has supplemented his translation with considerable para text. A brief introduction provides biographical detail. The notes gloss his own retention of Urdu culture specifics and Iman’s references, allusions, insinuations to events, policies, and people; he also points at errors Iman has committed, a few of which can be attributed to mere forgetfulness. A detailed glossary of names introduces various people who feature in the text. Several of the notes are superfluous and details regarding the people do not necessarily pertain to the memoir. Bakht also provides a list of Iman’s published poetry anthologies. The text concludes with an appendix of Iman’s poems, a few of which have been translated by Bakht himself, and a few with either Leslie Lavigne, or with Katherine Grant Jaeger. Taken together, the translated poems add the required volume to an otherwise slim, yet engaging memoir.
Fatima Rizvi is Professor, Department of English and Modern European Languages, University of Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh. Her recent publication is the translation of A Tilt in Time: Partition & Pakistan: A Mid-century Memoir (Women Unlimited, 2026).