Wasif Ali Wasif - As A Writer

As A Writer

Wasif Ali Wasif spent most part of the day in quiet, but when he spoke there was nothing that was not quotable. He was known as a conversationalist. Ashfaq Ahmed said, “The sentences we concoct are our piece of craft, Wasif’s lines came from somewhere else.” His prose is simpler, using figures of speech less frequently and thus sounds more natural but it has distinctive qualities of fine poetry. Renowned politician and connoisseur of art and literature, Hanif Ramay is of the view “Wasif’s prose influences like the poetry of Iqbal. Another aspect of his work is that these originally appeared as columns in an Urdu daily defying the strongly held belief that journalism cannot produce pure literature which can have a long life. Siraj Muneer, a well-read scholar and critic, has written, “We took them as columns but they were another aalam (world).” He believed that a thought can never be expressed fully in words, a reader should be alive to this fact and should try comprehending the portion that was impossible to be carried in words. The critic and scholar Professor Gilani Kamran comments on his book 'Dil Darya Samundar' that Wasif Ali Wasif’s collection of essays has a pleasant rhythm of an emotionally sustained prose. The sentence moves with grace and the words have the ring of sensation. These features are only rarely found in modern Urdu prose. But whether or not one succeeds in discovering himself, or in entering the field of a higher experience, the rhythm of Wasif‘s prose certainly compensates for any loss of achievement. With this one book, it can be said with some assurance, our culture is seen to be moving out of a closed world and entering an age of self discovery where single individual becomes the object of new orientation and also the locus of a new destiny." Wasif Ali Wasif has a diverse following ranging from high judiciary to vendors. One of his followers, Government College University Chief Librarian Abdul Waheed, titled him Saadi of present times. He said, "Wasif’s writings were eye-opening but his conversations were even more deeply thought out."

The following is a rough translation of Wasif Ali Wasif’s essay called Firaq o Wisal (Separation and Union), ” As long as man was in the moolight he desired to reach the moon…there was bliss in the moonlight but the moon itself was distant. Moonlight was near but man longed for the moon…man reached the moon but there he was without the moonlight. If one reaches the moon one does not find moonlight any longer and if one is in moonlight one does not find the moon. It is a strange fact that one is only because of the other…one is a sign of the other yet both are forever separate. If the Beloved is the Moon, moonlight is His remembrance. When the Beloved is present His remembrance is not and when His remembrance is present the Beloved is not. Proximity to one is distance from the other, Union with one is separation from the other. Thus union is hidden in every separation and separation in every union."