by Mir Tariq Rasool
Majrooh departs from abstract systems and instead engages with time through a meta-modern frame. He bypasses Eliot’s broken structures and Rushdie’s ironic flourishes, working in a space where honesty meets absurdity, and grief exists beside estrangement.
The creation of literature is an organic transmutation of being. It distils experience into form, imprints memory upon consciousness, and evolves with time’s unyielding progression. Whether composed in Urdu, English, Kashmiri, or any other language, this creative impulse moves with the same essential rhythm, revealing what it means to exist, to endure, and, ultimately, to transcend.
Literary composition is never a solitary gesture; it emerges from a convergence of emotion, suffering, observation, and experience, shaped into beauty, truth, and human idealism. It is at once an aesthetic struggle and a sacred undertaking, where the raw elements of life are refined into lasting meaning.
Literature has been described as “organised violence committed upon ordinary speech,” as Roman Jakobson asserted, a deliberate aesthetic rupture from linguistic convention. Marxist theorists such as Terry Eagleton interpret it as an ideological mechanism, reinforcing dominant structures through cultural expression. Phenomenologists, informed by Heidegger, position literature as an ontological excavation, probing the foundational questions of being.
Traditionalist scholars, including Ibn Khaldun, regard literary works as interpretive vessels through which civilisational memory and historical awareness may be reconstructed. While diverse schools, from formalism and Marxism to phenomenology and historicism, have each examined literature through distinct theoretical lenses, Professor Majrooh Rashid resists such rigid frameworks. For him, writing is neither an ideological tool nor a hermeneutic abstraction.
It is an organic, aesthetic release, a rhythmic synthesis of emotion and experience flowing freely toward a fertile interior space, where language gives shape to lived truth.
Majrooh affirms the evolutionary nature of literature and its vital relationship with the philosophical and cultural climate of its era, what he calls Asri Kasher Shayari. This conviction finds deep expression in Snow Flames, his latest collection of English poetry. Here, tradition and modernity engage in dialogue. Each poem emerges as a product of its moment and a meditation that transcends time.
The collection moves fluidly across poetic modes. In one moment, the gravity of classical convention takes hold; in the next, the verse loosens into romantic spontaneity or sharpens into modernist fragmentation. These transitions do not fracture the work’s coherence; rather, they testify to a poetic practice that resists categorisation and thrives in its refusal to conform.
Through postmodern techniques and structural innovation, Majrooh constructs a poetic language that oscillates between metaphysical reflection and the uncertainties of post-truth. Yet, Snow Flames reaches beyond these formal experiments. The collection coheres in a meta-modern sensibility, where irony and sincerity, deconstruction and renewal, temporality and transcendence converge. Across this spectrum, the poems retain their unity. Whether fragmented or lyrical, sceptical or yearning, the voices within this work form a singular, resonant harmony.
Majrooh Rashid occupies a unique position in contemporary literature: an avant-garde poet and discerning critic who has established a distinct intellectual presence. Fluent in English, Kashmiri, and Urdu, he composes verse with equal authority in all three, blending linguistic traditions into an idiom that defies fixed classification. His poetry enacts what may be termed a polyphonic modernism, deeply embedded in regional literary forms, yet addressing universal human themes with remarkable force. His voice bears the stamp of authenticity, a rare combination of critical clarity and artistic purpose, which has secured him lasting respect in literary communities.
A close reading of selected poems from Snow Flames reveals his singular poetic imprint. His verse blends personal experience with distinctive perceptual insight, setting his work apart from other contemporary voices. He does not merely enter existing literary discourse; he constructs a phenomenological language of his own, where individual vision and shared resonance reach uncommon alignment.
The vitality and anticipatory force that animates Majrooh’s poetry arises from a rare synthesis: a rigorous engagement with literary traditions across cultures and an unyielding openness to lived experience. This dual commitment, to scholarly depth and immediate encounter, lends his work both intellectual substance and an almost prophetic urgency. He consciously distances himself from familiar poetic modes, refusing both inherited stylistic devices and the ease of emotional immediacy or sensory excess. In their place, he cultivates an atmosphere of layered ambiguity, compelling the reader into an active dialogue with the text. Meaning surfaces not through overt expression but through suggestion, making each poem a space of interpretive labour and imaginative scrutiny.
Majrooh’s body of work, whether composed in English or Kashmiri, stands as a sustained revolt against linguistic and philosophical platitudes. It presses against the limits of thought, probing questions of Being, human placement within the universe, and the paradoxes of lived experience.
These concerns are not staged as an intellectual abstraction but are charged with a palpable urgency that draws the reader beyond reflection into a phenomenological encounter. His poetic dialogues, composed of existential inquiry and metaphysical tension, reveal a subtle interplay of philosophical weight and aesthetic control. Yet it is this very intricacy, its allusive texture and careful reticence, that introduces a productive difficulty. His poetry insists on a slow, recursive engagement, demanding from its reader a sustained attentiveness that turns reading into participation.
Majrooh’s poetic voice resonates as a defining instance of the meta-modern: a sensibility that reflects the flux of a world marked by digital distance and emotional intensity, ironic detachment and sincere yearning. His writing enacts the central oscillation of the meta-modern condition, unfolding as a language that questions and affirms, that fractures and mends. But what distinguishes his work within this frame? And in what ways does it absorb and render the philosophical dissonances of the present? Such questions can only be addressed through a close examination of Snow Flames.
The collection gathers elements from classical tradition, romantic fervour, modernist experiment, and postmodern critique. Yet the poetry resists absorption into any one movement. It carries instead the tonal shifts and formal ambiguities that signal a meta-modern disposition.
One poem moves between fragmentation and unity with deliberate care. A solitary flickering lamp appears beside the memory of a window, the imagined arc of a highway, and the silent expanse of a vale. These images pull in differing directions, yet Majrooh gradually collects the fragments, gathering them into a tentative structure. The speaker returns, saying, “I am once again here,” in the glow of remembered eyes and tears. The poem holds its centre in the image of the lamp and the window, binding scattered impressions within a singular emotional axis. The tension between fracture and form is never resolved but embodied. The pieces remain, each shaped by memory and loss, yet held within the larger gesture of return. The poem knows its wholeness is provisional, its clarity is always contingent.
In Frozen Dream, another poem from the collection, Majrooh returns to this fragile balance. He employs the imagery of stasis, of freezing, to explore the strain between stillness and movement, disconnection and coherence. Here, too, the poem turns away from resolution, offering instead a space where the fragment speaks within the whole, and where the stillness of the image carries the quiet gravity of thought held in suspension.
The result is a state of suspended animation, a liminal space where all elements remain distinct, yet paradoxically held together by the pervading cold. The phrase “the silhouette of the last meet” reduces a past human encounter to a faint, spectral outline, stressing its distance and insubstantiality.
Above, the “rowboat moon” is marooned in an isolated sky, its movements rendered meaningless. Though it symbolises navigation and cyclicality, it finds itself trapped in the “frozen cold black waters,” unable to row, its purpose nullified. The stars, too, lie motionless, “stuck in the ice”, not distant lights but frozen fragments, denied the connection, unable to board the boat. Their stillness implies a complete rupture in spatial and temporal coherence.
Amid this disconnection, a cold unity emerges. The “snowy backdrop” offers a singular, arresting frame that binds the elements into a frozen tableau. The pervasive presence of ice, encasing the sky, the stars, and the moon, imposes a brutal cohesion. Movement, memory, and the natural rhythms of celestial bodies are forcibly arrested. In Frozen Dream, Majrooh presents a universe where connection and change are stilled, replaced by a chilling totality.
Though the imagery is fragmented, with spectral traces of intimacy and immobilised light, the scene is held together by the imprisoning dominance of cold. The sky as “ocean” lends the scene a vast, haunting resonance, while the solitary pine tree emerges as an emblem of detached composure: a self-contained whole born of quiet endurance.
The poem does not resolve this tension. Rather, it sustains it, suspending thought, image, and feeling as the stars remain encased in ice. The dream remains intact, but only as a brittle relic. Wholeness, here, is either enforced through stasis or achieved through retreat. Neither yields the connected fullness a dream might promise. This oscillation, between space and time, motion and inertia, yearning and resignation, marks the dynamic contradiction at the core of Majrooh’s meta-modernism.
In Blindness, Majrooh turns to the theme of wilful ignorance and its consequences, charting a metaphorical journey from denial to recognition. The subject is not blind but chooses to look away from the “brilliance of naked truth.” His aversion to clarity results in a gradual dimming of vision. The “sun,” representing truth, exerts an initial pull, yet he refuses to face it. In doing so, he begins to lose not only sight but understanding, until he ultimately becomes blind. This loss marks the endpoint of a conscious refusal to acknowledge reality.
A “long yarn” brings abrupt awareness. The image of “parched eyes” hints at a suppressed thirst for truth, while “lashes shimmering with sweat drops” signals the physical and emotional strain of confronting what was once evaded. The final image, his “brow turning into a lake,” captures his descent into shame. The lake’s “fathoms” evoke the deepening weight of regret, as the subject sinks into the consequences of denial.
In Subtlety, Majrooh addresses human folly and existential absurdity with a tone steeped in dark humour. Theatrical imagery recalls the absurdist tradition, evoking the disoriented, often meaningless settings of Beckett’s stage. Through irony and stark juxtapositions, the poem becomes a commentary on the contradictions of the human condition, marked by confusion, futility, and the performance of life as a farce.
In Pain, suffering becomes both adversary and companion. Majrooh offers paradoxical gratitude, framing pain as a constant presence that grounds and transforms. This internal conflict reflects the meta-modern impulse, a movement between sincerity and irony, presence and detachment. Pain is neither dismissed nor romanticised. Instead, it is embraced as a means of forging meaning in a fractured world, where anguish becomes not only endurable but instructive.
Snow Flames, a 288-page collection, comprises 286 poems, each offering a distinct vision shaped with measured precision. Rashid Majrooh brings together a wide range of themes, ideas, and expressions, ensuring that no two poems echo the same thought or emotion. His verse carries literary weight, layered metaphor, sharp imagery, persistent symbols, and an intentional ambiguity that leaves a lasting imprint. Deeply grounded in classical traditions, Majrooh’s work returns again and again to love, at once divine and worldly. His poems balance the ache of unfulfilled longing with the austere beauty of spiritual and emotional desire.
Within Snow Flames, he constructs a lyrical field that stretches from the personal to the philosophical, from love and the structure of Being to meditations on metaphysics and ontology, and further still to critiques of capitalism, consumerism, and colonial control. Even the celestial finds form in his poems, shaping the collection into a sustained reflection on human life and its cosmic bearings.
The idea of time has remained central to literature and philosophy, from Rumi’s mysticism and Iqbal’s existential questions to Dante’s symbolic eternities and Schopenhauer’s metaphysical doubt. Majrooh departs from abstract systems and instead engages with time through a meta-modern frame. He bypasses Eliot’s broken structures and Rushdie’s ironic flourishes, working in a space where honesty meets absurdity, and grief exists beside estrangement. His four poems on time in Snow Flames maintain a clear surface while threading older traditions into urgent, current thought.
Majrooh stands as a clear meta-modern presence in today’s literary landscape, shifting with ease between the old and the new, between gravity and self-awareness, and between the fractured and the complete.
In Snow Flames, he moves beyond fixed genres, fusing classical lyric with postmodern form, philosophical questioning with felt experience. In doing so, he captures the contradictions of the present. Through his treatment of time, memory, and Being, he builds a poetic world that feels both anchored and unfamiliar. The work does not merely offer verse, it presents a way of seeing, a deliberate method of engaging with existence through a mind attuned to both the visible world and what trembles just beneath it.
(The writer is Patron of the Kashmir Literary and Philosophical Foundation. Ideas are personal.)
