This March marks the 24th death anniversary of the colossal poet of Pashto literature, Ghani Khan, also called the Mad Philosopher, whose poetic depth, uniqueness, individuality, diversity, and imaginative colorfulness are the matchlessness self-indulging traits only owned by him.
He was a man who attacked the fixed social symbols, stereotypes and the religious conventions beset by the influential elements of the society and the state and embodied the socio-religious abstractions.
Of all the various diversions from his poetry, the attempts of reclaiming an enlightened society and a tolerant youth outstood as matchless ones in the history of Pashto literature. He was a man from the future and a philosopher who postulated predictive rubrics for nation-building and resplendent social cleansing.
Time is a relative factor that is an indisputable fact as established by Einstein but to the extent of the science of particles. When it comes to poets, time becomes an entirely different factor behaving in an entirely different set of manner
He cannot be classified in any specific genre of poets as his poetry provides a homogenized glimpse of cohesively accomplished romance and tragedy, war and peace, struggle and revolution, allegory and satire, mysticism and Sufism in short; his poetry is a highly frequent and continuous aurora of the human excellence. His works are the testament of the infinite human faculty thus so judiciously named by nature as the paragon of animals.
Time is a relative factor that is an indisputable fact as established by Einstein but to the extent of the science of particles. When it comes to poets, time becomes an entirely different factor behaving in an entirely different set of manners.
The poets can look the future into the eyes and says out what he sees but because of time-space non-agreement, their poetics seem like a bunch of crazy hallucinations for the commoners of the society and therefore poets can be called unintelligible geniuses. Reading Ghani Khan today makes him a futuristic classic from the antiquity.
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His poetry was put in the unparalleled best ideal meters of sweet songs by the renowned singer Sardar Ali Takkar who was one of the many men mesmerized by his poetic excellence.
The religious hackneyed ideas were the lodged allegories he severely settled accounts with. The use of religion for the sake of cementing together social outreach was rampant back then as much as it is prevalent nowadays.
#nowplaying Prophet Daud's Kinnor's History by Rabbi David Louis/ SOZ by GHANI KHAN by Sardar Ali Takkar via @audiomack https://t.co/vmyQsWjOdm
— Sardar Ali Takkar (@takkar1234) October 17, 2019
He was the first modernist to separate them and debated at length in understanding the political and tribal utilization of religion further shaping a social culture that manipulated the people and the society.
The furtherance of religion unto the ends of piling up confusions in the society as regards the outreach to the creator and following the symbolic clergy deities was the center of his satire.
The link between the creator and the creature, as extrapolated by him, was in the most intimately direct manner without the need of any intermediaries and arbitrators thereby disbranching the stakeholders
His books were banned and his poetry, therefore, until today, is discarded by the right-wingers as being against the established religious norms and values whereas, through his works he created a grand awakening movement in comprehending the differences of the religion as a belief system and the multimode of its socio-cultural orientations.
The socio-religious trade-offs hyphenated by religion and culture were distinctively uncoupled to people’s expository.
Religion for him was a matter of pure personal purification which revolved around the pivot of respecting the dignity of man, giving every man the social due he deserved, and social tolerance.
The link between the creator and the creature, as extrapolated by him, was in the most intimately direct manner without the need of any intermediaries and arbitrators thereby disbranching the stakeholders who employed religion as means to a certain personal, group or other facilitations.
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The breeding backyard in which his poetry grew teemed with bloody tribal enmities, long term massacres, socio-economic stratification, the rise of modernism and the abysmal intensity of social intolerance.
At odds with these, his poetry was a rebellion against the established symbols of status quo which had engrossed the society to the roots.
This came hand in hand with the grand gist of social tolerance and openness to change with respecting the rights of every individual in the society and especially of women. The imageries employed in his poetry testify for his this reach out.
The level that a human being could culminate to garnering his utmost potential relied upon in recognizing the rights of all the creatures living in the society with equity and equality.
The providence and divine deity exploration began with searching the goodness within ourselves rather than finding for recourse in some other non-tangible realizations. The conventional ownership of society through religious controllers was bashed out severely by the Mad Philosopher.
The extremism in the society reaches to an inexcusable level where the first things which are lost to nullity are the dignity of man followed by all other negative social fallouts
The relics of Ghani Khan’s works call for a society where everyone adds his constructive part and the mutual restitution of ideas and co-existence evolves. This could further orient a society that would be basing on social respect of each other not divisive on the religious and cultural stratifications and one independent of extremist approaches, means and methods.
A society based on intolerance is pushed to intellectual suffocation where dissent of opinion is decided through bullets than ballots. The extremism in the society reaches to an inexcusable level where the first things which are lost to nullity are the dignity of man followed by all other negative social fallouts.
The messages of poets like Ghani Khan and the chest full of gems alike must be spread out in missionary fathoms and fashions.
Muhammad Jahangir Kakar is a civil servant and socio-political analyst based in Quetta works for the government of Baluchistan. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Global Village Space.