Ai samandar. Handwritten draft

Rashed, N. M. Ai samandar. Handwritten draft. 3 pp. 3 sheets. 8.3 x 11.6". Pencil on white paper. Handwritten draft of N. M. Rashed’s poem "Ai samandar". Pages numbered 28-30. Starting from the 2nd page, there is a difference in line breaks between draft and 1st edition, the lines "chānd kī tūtī hū’ī kashtī ke takhte/. kī bāhoñ par rawāñ" are shortened to "chānd kī tūtī hū’ī kashtī kī bāhoñ par rawāñ". Urdu. Box 2. Folder 14: Gumān kā mumkin kā likhā hū’ā aslī likhā’ī. 011. Digitized by Zahra Sabri. Catalogued by Zain Mian. Donated (2015) by Yasmin Rashed Hassan to the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, Montreal. Full item here.

Rashed's poem "Ai samandar," an address to the sea, was published in his last, posthumous collection, Gumāñ kā mumkin, a complete draft of which exists in our Archive. Gumāñ kā mumkin, which Rashed in his lifetime simply called his "nayā majmū'ah" (new collection), was published through the agency of his friend the lawyer Ijaz Hussain Batalvi in 1976 from Nayā idārah press. Rashed made Batalvi meet with him in London in 1975, not long before his death. During this meeting, Rashed gave Batalvi a brown envelope containing the typescript of the book, with some corrections in his own hand.[1]

But at least some of the poems that were published in Gumāñ kā mumkin had lives before their October 1976 publication. "Ai samandar" is one of these. The version that we have in the Archive was written by Rashed in pencil and is part of a nearly complete draft of the collection that would become Gumāñ kā mumkin. Rashed numbered the pages, although, as our researcher Zahra Sabri has noted, neither the numbering nor the order of the poems corresponds to the first edition of Gumāñ kā mumkin. In a number of subtle and not-so-subtle ways, the pencilled draft differs from the first edition.[2]

To complicate matters further, another version was published in Shamsur Rahman Faruqi's literary journal Shabkhoon in September 1969. Faruqi had sent a letter to Rashed, preserved in the Archive, on May 22nd, 1968, soliciting his poetry for the relatively new Shabkhoon, and "Ai samandar" seems to have been the first poem that Rashed sent to have published in Faruqi's journal.

These poems were given pride of place by Faruqi, and published in the opening pages of the issue. The Shabkhoon version differs significantly from the Gumāñ kā mumkin version, particularly in its very different layout, its punctuation, and orthography. In these ways it is also different from the pencil draft. But the Shabkhoon version shares many passages with this draft which are not present in the first edition of Gumāñ kā mumkin. This would appear to indicate that the pencil draft at McGill was written after 1969, but probably before Rashed handed his typewritten proofs to Batalvi in 1975.

Rashed marked stanza breaks in the drafts by drawing a short line in the spaces between the bodies of texts to be separated. The number and order of the stanzas changed from version to version. The fifth stanza in this version contains some particular differences compared to the first edition. The reconstructed second line seems to have been "dekh lekin abr ke aurāq-i kuhnah" ("But look: The cloud's ancient folios…"). But the opening "dekh lekin" is struck out, and in its place Rashed has pencilled in "āj kyonkar." If Rashed at any point meant these words to be part of the stanza, they would have linked it more strongly to the preceding stanza. Oddly, however, "dekh lekin" is neither part of the Gumāñ kā mumkin version nor the Shabkhoon version of "Ai samandar," making it appear to be either a false start or a reconsidered experiment unique to this draft.

Like the Gumāñ kā mumkin version, the fifth stanza continues "āj kyonkar abr ke aurāq-i kuhnah / bāzū-i derīnah-i ummīd par / dūr se lā'e nirālī dāstāñ [...]". However, in the fourth line Rashed has originally written "dūr se lā'e haiñ kaisī dāstāñ," only to strike out "haiñ" and insert "nirālī." This line both begins and ends with a long-short-long syllabic pattern (dūr se and dāstāñ), well-balanced with intervening syllables. Rashed seems to have preferred the assonance of "nirālī" and "dāstāñ" (both bearing the vowel ā), but to fit "nirālī" in he had to excise haiñ, which would have unbalanced the metre. In the Shabkhoon version we find that the line was still "dūr se lā'e haiñ kaisī dāstāñ." The next two lines, describing the broken ship of the moon afloat in the flooding night, are not found in the Gumāñ kā mumkin version: "chānd kī tūtī hū'ī kashtī ke takhte / shab kī tughyānī kī bāhoñ par rawāñ […]." Why these evocative lines were finally removed is a mystery.

Rashed seems to have been conservative in matters of spelling. He spelled the verb guzarnā with a zāl, reflecting its etymology, instead of increasingly current guzarnā with a ze. Similarly, in spite of living so long in Iran and reading and publishing so much modern Iranian poetry, he spells ā'indah with a hamzah, instead of āyandah with a ye. Faruqi appears to have agreed with him, as he left these spellings undisturbed in Shabkhoon, but in Gumāñ kā mumkin they have been changed.

Below is the poem as represented by the N. M. Rashed Archive draft in pencil, followed by a list of modifications occuring between the draft and the first edition of Gumāñ kā mumkin. While the changes in line breaks and punctuation may appear to be minor, it may be that Rashed saw them as altering the sound of the poem when recited.


Stanza 1:
Line 3 indented in 1st ed.
Line 5 guzarte spelled with ze in 1st ed.
Line 5 final comma omitted in 1st ed.
Line 7 pesh on suntā omitted in 1st ed.
Line 8 comma omitted in 1st ed.
Line 11 ā’indah spelled āyandah in 1st ed.

Stanza 2:
Line 7 zer omitted from kiran in 1st ed.

Stanza 3:
Line 6 zer omitted from ginūñgā in 1st ed.
Line 8 li’e spelled liye in 1st ed.
Line 10 ā’indah spelled āyandah in 1st ed.
Line 11 pesh omitted from chuntī in 1st ed.

Stanza 4:
Lines 3 and 4 combined in 1st ed.

Stanza 5:
Lines 3 and 4 combined in 1st ed.
Lines 6 and 7 replaced with a new line in 1st ed.
Line 8 ā’indah spelled āyandah in 1st ed.

Stanza 6:
Line 3 ā’indah spelled āyandah in 1st ed.
Line 7 final comma omitted in 1st ed.
Lines 8 and 9 combined in 1st ed.
Lines 10 and 11 combined in 1st ed.

Article by Pasha M. Khan
August 24, 2015