Majeed Amjad

Majeed Amjad (Punjabi, ) (29 June 1914 – 11 May 1974) was an Urdu poet from Pakistan. One newspaper described him as a "philosophical poet of depth and sensitivity".

Personal life

Background

Amjad was born on 29 June 1914 in Jhang, He remained as an editor of the newspaper until 1939 and regularly published his own prose and poetry. At the advent of the Second World War, a poem of his against the British Empire was printed on the front page of Arooj and the newspaper was forced to sack him. After that he found a job as a clerk in the Jhang District Board. In 1944, the government set up a civil supplies department to ration food and clothing. He passed an entrance exam and joined this department and served with the Food Department until his retirement in 1972. He lived in many small and large towns all over Punjab during his employment with the Food Department including Lyallpur (now Faisalabad), Gojra, Muzaffargarh, Rawalpindi, Arifwala, Lahore and Montgomery (now Sahiwal). In 1939 he married his cousin, a school teacher, but they had different opinions and divorced. Amjad lived the last 28 years of his life in Sahiwal, while his wife stayed in Jhang. He spent the last days of life in Farid Town Sahiwal where he died on 11 May 1974. He was buried in Loohlay Shah Graveyard, Jhang.

Literary career

Amjad's first collection of poetry, Shab-e-Rafta, was published in 1958 for which he wrote a preface in verse. This was published by Naya Idara in Lahore and was the only collection published in his lifetime even though he had written steadily throughout his life. After his death, the manuscripts of his unpublished poetry were preserved by Javaid Qureshi who was then the deputy commissioner of Sahiwal. In 1976, Javaid Qureshi and others published a second collection of his poetry titled Shab-e-Rafta Ke Baad. It was not until 1989 that the Urdu critic Khawaja Muhammad Zakariya edited and published a complete collection of Amjad's works called Kuliyat-e-Majeed Amjad. Samira Gilani has published several articles on Majid Amjad's poems at the universities of Tehran and Punjab.