“I am a Playwriter in Tune with Times”

___ Amjad Islam Amjad

Shirin Daud

Amjad Islam Amjad carries his signature into the room honest, upright and unafraid, his words and actions in perfect order. It is a total antithesis of what one could expect in a man moving under dictation from a least half a dozen genres of creativity.

He paints verse at the call of the muse any time of day or night: he writes drama three months a year with compulsive discipline that makes him go into social hibernation of sorts: he translates Negroid and Palestinian poetry under the conviction that it is the pain of their misery and experiences that he can identity with. He gets translated in Canada and delivers four columns a month to an Urdu paper and calls it not big deal. In between, there are critical essays, travelogues … Twenty-six printed books with the distinction of selling like the proverbial hot cakes from the stalls.

Then there are awards, accolades and lucrative offers of officialdom. Pretty confusing, if you set out to interview the man!

The awards he takes in stride, but officialdom on platters. “For me teaching in college” … he instills the joy of reading Urdu at MAO College, “is what I value most. As a matter of fact my students are my main clientele. It is they who egg on my creativity, specially poetry. I would not give up this part of my life for anything.”

Teaching is obviously close to his heart; for he refused a principalship because that meant distancing himself from “class work”.

So, one comes to terms with the chosen vocation of a man with the intellectual calibre to have opted for something more elitist… the civil services for example. Amjad is totally honest in admitting. “I did not make it in the interview the first attempt; but that two hour long dialogue with the selectors also made me realize that teaching was what I was really made for.”

Right now he is a happy man, free to lavish attention on the creative djinn. A poet, first and foremost, he would rather be identified by the genre. “I would like to end up as a poet, because that is where I find my catharsis. That is what gives me any strength and my widest audience. Poetry needs no preparation, because it is so spontaneous, so natural, finding its way like a mountain stream. It needs not stage setting, no time slot.”

And yet Amjad claims to be unhappy too. “Let me put it like this. I am more unhappy than other people in my situation, because in spite of having the power to say it all I have to work within constraints. I am not complaining of a lack of social sanctions, because freedom for that matter is a Utopian ideal not available in even the most advance societies.”

Hitting the charts as one of television’s most popular dramatists, Amjad set a new record of sorts by his Waris, a play that ran into twenty three episodes at a time when the medium had not set pattern of presentation. The journey to the stage way by no mean short or swift. “I had to prove myself and because I started early – I sent in my first script which still at university – and finally made it mainly because I believed in myself and what I wanted to say”

What does an Amjad Islam tele serial spell?

The feudal ethos, urban confusion, the new genre of violence, the shift in values, a vast panorama of human actions and thought … gripping themes with the power to glue audiences. Yet at the end of the day he is invariably placed in the dock because close on the heels of the accolades follow allegations with deliberate design to uncrown the hero. Does Amjad himself need a line of defence. No.

“I am a playwriter in tune with the times. I lay claim to realism, then I have to write that I see. One, I see no reason to defend myself against the allegation that I write accordingly to a pattern. I have moved from the rural to the urban, from student politics to romance. If people criticize then it is more for the sake of doing so. This has become a sort of social tradition. The feudal element, the verbosity, the violence, yet it is all there but I never created these things. I have only unlocked the door so that people could talk about them. This openness is a sort of new emerging social ethos under which the whole world is coming.”

Perhaps Amjad has the right to fight free: in any case it is the masses, the people in the street and on the bus stops whose opinions he values because speaking in their language, talking in their dialect, exploring their mindsets, he gets the satisfaction any person of his calibre would…

Currently having just canned his forthcoming serials for NTM and PTV Amjad Islam Amjad can now relax for the next two years, for that is as much he allows himself away from the mini screen. He talks of Agr with the conviction of creative pride, something he declares will once again fit the signature he has crafted for himself. Based on the progression and the spillovers created by the merger of the rural and urban societies … something which is happening today all around us … Agr promises an entertaining package, a mix of the turmoils in a developing society, the clash of values, the problems of class and status and community. “Of course,” he is quick to add, “there will be a lot of entertainment too.” So, one waits for July and then October when NTM and PTV begin the serials … Without doubt they promise high billings for that is essentially what an Amjad Islam presentation has come to be expected as.

And as the interview draws to a close one thing becomes crystal clear; it is but the forte of the man alone that he manages to live by the standard of justice to everyone of the creative genres he indulges in. Poetry or drama, criticism or column writing, teaching or translating, he manages a balance which few others can claim to have arranged and with such obvious craftsmanship. The recipe then …? Being in tune with the times of course.