The woman behind Kashmir’s Mehjoor

           

By: Dr. Rajesh Bhat

Mehjoor has been accorded the title “Poet of Kashmir”. Undoubtedly, as he was a man of acute awareness. The poetry he composed, made him the poet of revolution as well as romance.   While a postal stamp, a feature film and a lot of other material exists regarding his life and the corpus of work left behind by him and the fact that he has been put on a pedestal to be accorded a place in history, very little is known about the woman behind the poet, in this case the revered Mehtab Begum!

  It is no easy task to maintain the household of a poet who as his livelihood dictated and took him to far off places, mountaintops, remote and barren as well as bountiful but isolated villages and towns. Since Mehjoor, the great poet could in no way

subsist only on a poet’s earnings that is why he like all Kashmiris, inherited a trait to seek secure employment with the government. However, a Patwari’s job being helter skelter, Mehjoor never had the luxury of a fixed abode. As is evident from a series of letters he wrote to friends and well-wishers and his poetry fans all over India, he lamented that he had to sleep without food and water many a time he was on duty.

Mehtab Begum—Mehjoor’s better half

The poet’s cathartic as well as ecstatic expression continued to flow like a fully-grown Chinar tree but the hidden roots, which accorded strength and held him firm, have hardly been mentioned. The matriarchal energy behind the Mehjoor household was his better half Mehtab Begum, the woman of his house. She is the unsung hero and the engine of Mehjoor’s life, home as well as hearth.

During the long periods of absence to which she had become used to, she not only held firm, but ensured a totally worry free atmosphere for the poet to proceed on his creative journey to pour out his experiences and vision statements. These very vision statements were incorporated as elements of revolution as well as renaissance for ‘Naya Kashmir’.   So while the poet rightly has his due in history, his Shakti equally should be accorded a rightful place alongside him. Without her, perhaps the poet Mehjoor could not become what the world knows him to be.

  Only Radio Kashmir Srinagar, now rechristened as Akashvani Srinagar, had the privilege to honour and record this unsung hero for the posterity, when it produced a special feature on Mehjoor’s 28th death anniversary. Written by noted broadcaster Bashir Aarif, this special feature was broadcast on 19^th April 1980.  The writer had specially recorded the conversation with Mehtab Begum for this audio feature at her residence and it is through this that her aspect of Mehjoor’s anchor was revealed before the people of Kashmir.  The Writer of the programme, when contacted, however, expressed his inability to confirm whether this precious recording still exists in the archives of Akashvani.