In 1940, a young economist working for All India Radio published a slim book of poems that broke, deliberately and irrevocably, with everything Urdu poetry had assumed a poem should sound like. The book was Mavra (“Beyond”), and its author, Nazar Muhammad Rashid — known to history as N. M. Rashid, or Noon Meem Rashid — became, almost overnight, the first major voice of free verse in the Urdu language. Where centuries of tradition had insisted that serious poetry meant the ghazal’s fixed metre and rhyme, Rashid insisted otherwise, and Urdu poetry has never been quite the same since.

Rashid’s life was as restless and border-crossing as his poetry. An economist by training, a soldier during the Second World War, a broadcaster, a diplomat for the United Nations, and finally an exile in England, he carried the modernist unsettlement of his verse through half a dozen countries and several languages, never staying still long enough to be claimed entirely by any one of them.

Who Was N. M. Rashid?

N. M. Rashid was a Pakistani Urdu poet regarded, alongside Faiz Ahmad Faiz, as one of the great modern voices of Urdu literature — though the two took markedly different paths. While Faiz remained closely tied to the Progressive Writers’ Movement and its Marxist commitments, Rashid gravitated instead toward the rival Halqa-e-Arbab-e-Zauq (“The Circle of Aesthetes”), a literary circle that favoured aesthetic and intellectual exploration over overt political messaging in verse. He is remembered above all for a single, foundational achievement: rebelling against the ghazal’s centuries-old dominance and becoming the first major exponent of azad nazm — free verse — in the Urdu language.

Faiz himself, in an obituary written after Rashid’s death, honoured him with the title “Malik-ush-Shoara” — “King of Poets” — a striking tribute from one towering modern poet to another, and a clear signal of how seriously Rashid’s contemporaries took his formal and intellectual achievement.

A Poem About Bees, and a Rupee’s Reward

Rashid was born Nazar Muhammad on 1 August 1910 in the village of Kot Bhaaga, in Alipur Chatha, Gujranwala district, Punjab, into a Punjabi Rajput family with deep literary sympathies. His father, Fazal Ilahi Chishti, was an Islamic scholar and district school inspector devoted to Urdu poetry, particularly the work of Ghalib, and his grandfather — a civil and military surgeon by profession — was known to recite Urdu and Persian verse at home. Poetry, in other words, was simply part of the household air Rashid breathed as a child.

He is said to have written his first poem at seven or eight, a comic piece titled “Inspector Aur Makhiyan” (“The Inspector and the Flies”), describing a school inspector attacked by a swarm of bees during his visit — a poem so delightful that his father rewarded him with a rupee, even as his grandfather, oddly, urged the boy to stay away from poetry as a vocation. Rashid’s father nonetheless opened him to the great classical tradition — Hafiz, Saadi, Ghalib, and Iqbal — while his schooling introduced him to English Romantic and Victorian poets, whom he began translating and imitating in his own early sonnets.

An Economist Who Wrote Poetry

Rashid studied English literature, history, Persian, and Urdu at Government College, Lyallpur, before completing a Master’s degree in Economics at Government College Lahore — an unusual academic background for a poet who would go on to reshape an entire literary tradition. He briefly joined the anti-colonial, proto-anarchist Khaksar Movement of Allama Mashriqi, though this political association did not last.

His first published poem, “Jurrat-e-Parwaz” (“The Courage to Fly”), appeared in 1932 while he was still a student — a title that, in hindsight, reads almost as a statement of poetic intent. Eight years later, in 1940, his first full collection, Mavra (“Beyond”), announced a genuinely new voice in Urdu letters.

Mavra: Breaking the Ghazal’s Grip

Rashid’s break with tradition in Mavra was not a matter of style alone. He rejected not only the ghazal’s fixed metre and end-rhyme but also its traditional subject matter — the conventions of the beloved, the wine, the garden — reaching instead for metaphysical themes, colonial power dynamics, and an unflinching engagement with sensuality and desire that genuinely shocked much of the Urdu literary establishment of the 1940s. The book’s own preface set the defiant, faintly ironic tone that would run through much of his career: “After this meaningless preface, some meaningless poems.”

Mavra was widely recognised, even by critics who resisted its content, as technically accomplished and genuinely lyrical — proof that free verse in Urdu need not sacrifice music simply because it had abandoned metre. It remains regarded as one of the earliest and most important Urdu poetry collections to use free verse in place of the ghazal.

War, Radio, and a Widening World

Rashid’s working life carried him through an unusually varied set of institutions. Starting in 1942, he worked with All India Radio in New Delhi and Lucknow, and served for a period in the Royal Indian Army during the Second World War, rising to the rank of captain. After the partition and independence of Pakistan in 1947, he was transferred to Peshawar, where he continued in radio work until 1953.

From there his career turned genuinely international: he worked for the Voice of America, which took him to New York, and later joined the United Nations, serving across a range of postings in both the East and West. A significant stretch of this period was spent in Iran, where he studied the work of more than eighty modern Persian poets in depth, compiling his findings into a book, Jadid Farsi Shayari (“Modern Persian Poetry”), and editing an anthology of modern Iranian verse complete with his own translations and a substantial introductory essay.

Iran Mein Ajnabi: A Stranger Everywhere

That Iranian sojourn produced Rashid’s second major collection, Iran Mein Ajnabi (“A Stranger in Iran,” 1955) — a title that could, without much exaggeration, describe Rashid’s entire adult life. The book explores loneliness, loss, and a persistent sense of estrangement, themes that only deepened as his career carried him from Lahore to Delhi, Peshawar, Iraq, Iran, New York, and eventually England, never settling long enough in any one place to stop feeling, in some essential way, a stranger.

La = Insan and Guman Ka Mumkin: The Late Philosopher

Rashid’s third collection, La = Insan (“Nothingness = Human,” 1969), pushed his work further into philosophical territory. In its preface, Rashid explained the deliberately algebraic-sounding title: in the equation of life, he wrote, a human being often appears lost, his true value impossible to determine except as an absence — a “la,” a “nothingness” — yet the search for that value may itself be life’s real reward. The collection opens with what is often considered his single most celebrated poem, “Hasan Koozagar” (“Hasan the Potter”), the strange, four-part story of an Iraqi potter driven to years of madness by his obsessive love for a mysterious beauty, and the fragile hope of a creative return once that love might finally be answered.

His fourth and final collection, Guman Ka Mumkin (“The Possibility of Doubt”), was published posthumously in 1977, closing with the poet’s own summation of his life’s central uncertainty: “Guman ka mumkin, jo tu hai, main hoon” — “The possibility of doubt, that is you, and I.”

Controversy, Distance, and a Difficult Reputation

Rashid never achieved the wide popular readership of contemporaries like Faiz or Majaz — his poetry, dense with philosophical ambition and unconventional form, demands sustained effort rather than immediate emotional appeal. He was also, throughout his life, attacked for his unconventional views and lifestyle; his friend, the broadcaster Zia Mohyeddin, once observed that at a time when everyone around him was single-mindedly pursuing English for a respectable career, Rashid was, instead, absorbed in painting or poetry.

His personal life carried its own sorrows and controversies. His first wife, Safia, with whom he had five children, died in 1961 in Karachi after an incorrectly administered injection; he remarried in 1964, to Sheila Angelini, an Italian, with whom he had another child. After retiring to England in 1973, he died in a London hospital on 9 October 1975. His body was cremated — a decision that, whether or not it reflected his own explicit wishes, provoked considerable outcry in conservative circles in Pakistan, with some critics going so far as to brand him an apostate. It was a controversial final chapter for a poet whose entire career had, in one way or another, always unsettled convention.

Legacy: The Freedom That Followed Him

N. M. Rashid’s most durable legacy is structural: he proved, decisively, that Urdu poetry could abandon the ghazal’s ancient scaffolding of metre and rhyme without losing its music or its seriousness, opening a path that later modernist and experimental Urdu poets would continue to walk. His engagement with philosophy, colonialism, sensuality, and Persian literary tradition gave Urdu verse an intellectual range it had rarely attempted at such length and ambition before him.

Decades after his death, his poem “Zindagi Se Darte Ho” found an unexpected second life when it was set to music by the Indian band Indian Ocean for the 2010 Bollywood film Peepli Live, earning praise as a track that “everyone is meant to sing, and mean, at some point in life” — proof that even a poet as demanding and difficult as Rashid could, on occasion, speak directly and unmistakably to a mass audience. It is a fitting footnote for a poet who spent his whole life moving between worlds, and who, even now, keeps finding new ones to reach.

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