The fertile contradiction: Saraiki soil, Urdu poets

ISLAMABAD, Aug 31 (APP)::There is something deeply fascinating about Pakistan’s Saraiki belt. Saraiki fills its streets, songs, jokes, memories, and everyday speech, yet this deeply Saraiki landscape has nurtured a remarkable generation of Urdu poets. Their rise reveals a fertile contradiction, a land rooted in Saraiki, continually giving Urdu new voices that make the region worth looking at anew.

The important question is not why they abandoned one language for another. Many did not. Their relationship with language is less like a border and more like a river, one current feeds another.

The region’s remarkable range of Urdu voices, include Aslam Ansari, Mohsin Naqvi, Aitbar Sajid, Athar Nasik, Ghulam Husain Sajid, Qamar Raza Shahzad, Tariq Naeem, Zahoor Chohan and Zia-ul-Mustafa Turk, alongside a younger generation now emerging from Multan, Bahawalpur, Khanewal, Dera Ghazi Khan and adjoining districts. Their styles and generations differ, but their presence makes one thing difficult to ignore, the Saraiki belt’s literary fertility does not end with Saraiki.

Among the many Urdu poets associated with this Saraiki landscape, Aslam Ansari, Mohsin Naqvi, Ghulam Hussain Sajid, and Qamar Raza Shahzad stand out. Their poetry is different in temperament and technique, but together they suggest how a regional culture can enter a larger language without announcing itself through dialect alone.

Few figures illustrate the linguistic complexity of Multan better than Aslam Ansari. Born in Multan in 1939, Ansari’s Urdu poetry possesses the refinement of a classical tradition, but its emotional centre is unmistakably human, loneliness, departure, fragility, desire and the Persistent effort to continue.

Diware Khastgi houn mujhy haath  matt  laga

mein gir parhhon ga dekh mujhya aasra na de

The image is simple, a wall weakened by fatigue, ready to collapse at the slightest touch. Yet the metaphor carries an entire psychology of vulnerability.

Elsewhere, he turns the dream into something almost organic:

Umr ke aangan mein bailain bun ke phela koi khawb

Jesay  jeenay  ke  liye kafi ho tanha koi khawb

A dream spreads through the courtyard of life like a vine. The image is particularly suggestive when read against the rural and garden culture of South Punjab, the dream is not an abstraction floating in the air; it grows, takes root and occupies space.

Mohsin Naqvi born in Dera Ghazi Khan, remains one of the most popular Urdu poets to emerge from Southern Punjab. His poetry turns love, separation, grief and spiritual longing into intensely accessible images. Again and again, his imagination moves between the city and wilderness, belonging and exile, giving his Urdu a distinctive emotional landscape.

Yeh dil yeh pagal dil mera kion bhujj gaya aawargi

Iss dashtt mein ik shehr tha woh kia huwa aawargi

The vanished city in the wilderness is pure Naqvi: intimate, melancholic and haunting. His enormous popular appeal shows how deeply a poet rooted in the Saraiki belt could speak to the wider Urdu imagination

Ghulam Hussain Sajid offers perhaps an even more direct example of the cultural layers beneath Urdu. Born in the Multan region and raised in the landscape of southern Punjab, he became a prolific Urdu poet and literary accounts of his work note that even when he wrote in Urdu, his poetry could retain the dialect, rhythms and sensibility of the land around Multan.

Thehrnay ko ha  basti  ke dar o deewar per pani

Keh abb patthar mein dhalti ja rahi mauj e hairani

The image of water gathering on the walls of a settlement is more than decorative imagery. Water, settlement, stone and movement become metaphors for a society under pressure.

Then comes an unusually telling declaration:

Meray shehroon mein behta ha samundar meray virsay ka

“My poetry carries the sea of my inheritance.”

Sajid’s poetry repeatedly returns to earth, water, dreams, villages, journeys and the instability of human existence. The regional world is not always named; it is sensed.

Then there is Qamar Raza Shahzad, closely associated with Multan and Kabirwala, began writing poetry in the 1980s and established himself through literary circles, and has been praised for his fresh diction and engagement with contemporary realities.

His poetry frequently places the individual between earth and sky, belonging and exile:

Mein kis tallab mein huwa hoon zameen se baydakhal

Fallak ke yaar mujhy konsi  si  sadda  layee

The vocabulary is classical Urdu, but the emotional geography is one of departure: the human being separated from his earth, listening for a call beyond it.

In another ghazal, Shahzad writes:

Tamam shehr meri  Jaan  ko ha aaya huwa

Mujhy to aik muhabbat ne ha bachaya huwa

The entire city seems to descend upon the individual, while love becomes the thing that saves him.

In a nutshell, it would be misleading to turn this debate into a contest between Saraiki and Urdu. The richer story is coexistence.

That is not a contradiction to be solved. It is a fertility to be understood.

Perhaps the most useful way to understand the region’s Urdu poets is therefore not as outsiders to Urdu, but as new cultivators within it.

They have taken a language shared across Pakistan and planted it in Saraiki soil.

What has grown there is recognisably Urdu.

But listen closely, and the soil is still speaking.