ਅਨਵਰ ਮਸਊਦਅਨਵਰ ਮਸਊਦ

Who is Anwar Masood?

Anwar Masood, born on 8 November 1935 in Gujrat, Punjab, is a Pakistani poet and teacher best known for comic poetry in Punjabi. He takes the everyday speech of homes, bazaars and classrooms and turns it into verse that makes a hall laugh out loud and then fall quiet. His lines are quoted in drawing rooms and classrooms across Punjab, often by people who have never read a book of poetry.

Masood writes in Punjabi, Urdu and Persian, but his most popular poetry is in Punjabi. His work covers humour and sentiment in equal measure, alongside literary criticism. Many of his phrases have passed into everyday speech in Punjab, repeated as figures of speech in ordinary conversation.

For more than six decades he has performed at mushairas in Pakistan and abroad, and he spent 34 years as a teacher of Persian. In 2024 Pakistan awarded him the Hilal-i-Imtiaz, one of its highest civil honours, for literature and poetry.

Early life and education

Masood was born into an Arain family in Gujrat, then in British India, on 8 November 1935. His father, Muhammad Azeem, moved the family to Lahore a few years before the Partition of 1947. The boy's early schooling was split between Gujrat and Lahore, and he attended Watan High School on Brandreth Road in Lahore. Just before Partition the family moved back to Gujrat, where he passed his matriculation examination from Public High School in 1952, with distinction.

His father wanted him to become a doctor, so he enrolled in pre-medical studies at Government Zamindar College in Gujrat. Science was not his calling, and after two years he switched to arts, earning a scholarship. He took his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1958, topping his college and winning a place on the Roll of Honor, with History, Urdu literature, Persian and English among his subjects.

Family responsibilities kept him from starting a master's degree at once, so he began teaching at Government Islamia High School in Kunjah. He completed his master's degree in Persian at Oriental College, Punjab University, in 1961, winning a gold medal and topping the university.

A teacher for 34 years

Teaching was Masood's profession from 1962 until his retirement in 1996. He served as a lecturer and professor at colleges across Punjab, and later as visiting faculty in the Department of Humanities at Government College University, Lahore. Teaching and poetry ran side by side through his working life, and the same command of language that made him a professor of Persian also made his comic verse land with audiences who had never studied literature.

He married his former classmate Qudrat Ilahi Siddiqa in 1965. She also taught Persian, at Government College on 6th Road in Rawalpindi. They had five children: three sons and two daughters, including the columnist Ammar Masood. Siddiqa died in 2020. As of 2022 Masood was living in Islamabad, and he continued to be invited as chief guest at literary events in universities and colleges.

Humour with tears underneath

Masood's best known form is the qataa, a poem of four lines, and his best known device is the ordinary phrase. He builds a poem from the words people actually use at home, then turns them until a serious point shows through the joke. He has described his own art in a single line: real laughter is the kind that sheds tears when squeezed.

That mix is clearest in his famous poems. Ambri is a tender poem about a mother and her son. Banyan takes a small boy's new vest and makes it a story about childhood and a mother's care. Aj Kee Pakaeay, or What shall we cook today, turns the daily question of every household into comedy. Chaa te Lassi, tea and lassi, uses two drinks as a metaphor for two different civilisations.

Other favourites return to the Punjab he grew up in: Anar Kali Diyan Shanan, Juma Bazaar, Jehlum Dey Pul Tey and the title poem Mela Akhian Da. The poet Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi said Punjabi had found a benefactor in Masood, a man keeping the language alive through his poems. His satire reaches beyond home as well: one much quoted couplet uses a buffalo and a stick to mock a world order in which a few countries hold the veto and the rest must listen.

Famous poems and books

His first collection of Punjabi poetry, Mela Akhiyan Da, appeared in 1974 and includes Ambri. It remains his best known book. His other Punjabi collection, Hun Ki Kariye, followed, along with Urdu collections such as Qataa Kalami and Ek Dareecha, Ek Chiragh.

His books also include Shaakh-e-Tabassum, essays on humorous poets; Darpesh and Ghuncha Phir Laga Khilnay, collections of humorous verse; Meli Meli Dhoop, poetry on the environment; Baat Se Baat, a compilation of radio talks; Bariyaab, a collection of naats in Urdu, Punjabi and Persian; and Payan Safar Neest, his Persian poetry. A volume of research, Farsi Adab Ke Chand Goshay, and a book of letters to his wife, Siddiqa Anwar ke naam, show the scholar behind the humorist.

In his later years he took on a large work of translation. Between 2006 and 2009 the Punjab government sponsored a project to translate the poetry of Sufi poets from Punjabi and Persian into Urdu. At the urging of Amjad Islam Amjad and Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi, Masood translated Mian Muhammad Bakhsh's Saif-ul-Malook, a Punjabi romance reported to run to some 10,000 verses, into Urdu prose. He told an interviewer in 2016 that he had written 14 books by then, and counted the research work Farsi Adab Ke Chand Goshay among the most important.

Honours and legacy

Pakistan honoured Masood with the Pride of Performance in 1999. In 2024 he received the Hilal-i-Imtiaz, one of Pakistan's highest civil honours, for literature and poetry, in the Pakistan Day honours. He has also won several Writers' Guild awards.

His standing rests less on prizes than on audiences. For decades, wherever he has recited, in Pakistan and abroad, from Lahore and Gujrat to Dubai, crowds have asked for the same poems again. His defence of Punjabi, at a time when the language is under pressure among young people in Pakistan, has made him a guardian of the language as much as a poet of it. The humour remains the doorway: a joke about a vest or a meal, and behind it a Punjab that his listeners recognise as their own.