While Kaifi wrote several ghazals, it is in the nazm that he felt able to say more and to say it in his own inimitable style. Being a new genre, one that the progressive poets can rightfully claim to have made their own, the nazm is capacious enough to make overtly political statements. Several of Kaifi’s poems are inspired by contemporary events such as the creation of Bangladesh, the disturbances in Telangana, a province in the erstwhile princely state of Hyderabad that was of special interest to the communist party because of its large peasant population and agrarian unrest. The breaking of the domes of the mosque in Ayodhya in December 1992 caused Kaifi to write the poignant ‘Doosra Banwas’ referring to Ram leaving Ayodhya a second time. Then there’s ‘Makaan’ (‘House’), one of his most quoted nazms with its rousing determination to arise and take collective action against oppression:

Aaj kii raat bahut garm havaa chaltii hai

Aaj kii raat naa footpath pe neend aaegii

Sab utho, main bhi uthuun, tum bhii utho, tum bhii utho

Koii khirkii isii diivaar mein khul jaaegii

Tonight a blistering wind blows

It will not let us sleep on the footpath

Come, let us get up, you, me, all of us

A window will open in this wall

Shabana talks of her father not merely with love and admiration, as a daughter would, but also with great vim and vigour.6Kaifi comes alive in her telling of incidents relating to her father’s life or poetic career. Conversations with her tend to throw light not merely on incidents from her father’s life or why and when a particular poem or film lyric was written but also on the nuts and bolts of poetry itself. For instance, she describes how two film lyricists will describe a given situation in two vastly different ways given their own world view. For the film Ek Pal, Kaifi writes ‘Aane wali hai bahaar’ on the birth of a child to an unwed mother. For the same situation, Gulzar writes, ‘Jaane kya hai ji darta hai, ro deney ko ji karta hai’. She also talks of the unfailing optimism that limned Kaifi’s view of the world, an intrinsic belief in a better future. This can possibly be attributed to Kaifi’s inherently socialist world view.

How did the son of a zamindar, born in a feudal family in rural Azamgarh, educated in a madrasa in Lucknow, acquire this sharply political world view? For this, we must briefly digress to take in the importance of a powerful literary grouping that left an enduring mark on the intellectual landscape of India.

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