This was a generation that produced the likes of Shambhu Mitra, Bijon Bhattacharya, Mrinal Sen, Utpal Dutt, Balraj Sahni, Sahir Ludhianvi, Kaifi Azmi, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Shailendra, Salil Chaudhury, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Ramvilas Sharma, Kedarnath Agrawal, Nagarjun, Shamsher, Makhdoom Moh iuddin, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Ismat Chugtai, Krishen Chander and a host of other equally eminent creative talents. The many possibilities of fundamental social and economic change opened up before this generation, which remained unsatisfied with the attainment of political freedom alone. This was a Marxism that dislocated them from their comfortable aristocratic or upper middle class existen ce and compelled them to live the hard life.

This was no fashionable Marxism embraced for its intellectual attraction. He belonged to a generation that began with participatio n in the freedom struggle and gradually moved from nationalism to Marxism. He was one of its leaders, and insofar as Urdu poetry is concerned, its tallest leader in India.

So much has been written about Ali Sardar Jafri's contribution to the progressive writers' movement. Here, one was faced with a totally new aesthetics. This was a startling example of transmutation of literary symbolism. It was the poet himself and his love that became the new symbols of lovers. Majnu and L aila were no longer the measure, the yardstick. Normally, lovers fashion themselves after Majnu and their beloveds after Laila, but here was a poet who identified himself and his beloved Sultana, who later became his wife, with every lover and beloved. I knew that romantic poetry was all about self-expression, b ut this was something absolutely new. When the Sardar recited ' har aashiq hai Sardar yahan, har maashooqa Sultana hai' (Here, every lover is Sardar and every beloved is Sultana), I was struck by the boldness of expression. What struck me most was the freshness of imagery, the transparent commitment to the man-on-the-street, and the intensely felt love for this country and its composite culture. Ye t I still cherish the memory since he had made a great impression on me and other young men on account of his fiery poetry. I do not have a very vivid recollection of all he chose to recite on that evening because the dais had a galaxy of eminent Urdu poets.

IT was perhaps in the early 1970s that I first heard Ali Sardar Jafri at a mushaira (poetic soiree) in Delhi. This obituary written in 2000 is still as valuable and informative as it was at the death of this icon of modern Urdu literature:

Mera ek mashwara hai iltija nahi