Firaq Gorakhpuri: A resourceful Indianness

Firaq Gorakhpuri (1896-1982), who would have been 130 on August 28 this year, is widely regarded as being one of the best four or five poets ever to write in Urdu, along with Mir, Ghalib, Iqbal (whom he did not much care for), and Faiz. He was probably the most innovative of them all, for in the deeply conflicted context of Urdu in the decades on either side of Partition, he consciously strove to make Urdu poetry less anchored in “Medina and Shiraz”, that is, in Arabia and Persia, and located it instead on Indian cultural ground. Two recent books, Firaq Gorakhpuri: The Poet of Indianness by Surinder Deol, and Firaq Gorakhpuri: The Man behind the Genius by Alka Pathak, discuss his contribution.Firaq was born Raghupati Sahaiy in Gorakhpur as the son of a wealthy lawyer, Gorakh Prasad, who himself wrote poetry in Urdu. He did so well in his B.A. examination at the University of Allahabad that he was nominated straightaway to be a Deputy Collector. Firaq chose instead to court arrest along with Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru in December 1920, and served a sentence of a year and a half in jail. On release, Jawaharlal as General Secretary of the All India Congress Committee appointed Firaq as his under-secretary and they worked together until 1927.Firaq Gorakhpuri: The Man behind the GeniusBy Alka PathakOm BooksPages: 302Price: Rs.395In 1930, Firaq returned to teach in the English Department of Allahabad University, serving there until his retirement, and continuing to occupy his university bungalow until his death a quarter of a century later, in jolly defiance of all the rules. With his grand manner and overbearing conduct, he was larger than life: he was highly temperamental but also a delightful conversationalist, and a compelling qissago or narrator of lively tales, some of which he made up on the spot. His boldness and originality as a poet were part of this package.Firaq Gorakhpuri: The Poet of IndiannessBy Surinder DeolRupaPages: 393Price: Rs.495Urdu poets are granted the privilege of saying the vainest things about themselves in the maqta or the concluding couplet of each ghazal, and Firaq wrote an especially witty self-encomium. “Generations to come will envy you,” he told his contemporaries, “when they find out you’d seen Firaq.”The authors of both the books referred to earlier discussed here had seen Firaq. So had I, for that matter, first as a student and then as a lecturer in the 1960s in the same English Department of Allahabad University where Firaq had lately taught. He would come round now and then to chat with old colleagues, to give an occasional public lecture, or to attend tea parties on the department lawns.Flamboyantly desi and carefreeThere was another way of knowing Firaq which Alka Pathak, author of Firaq Gorakhpuri: The Man behind the Genius, enjoyed. She is the daughter of Firaq’s youngest brother, Yadupati Sahai, who also taught English at Allahabad University and lived only three bungalows away from Firaq. As a child, she would flit in and out of Firaq’s house.

Firaq Gorakhpuri is seated in the midst of Allahabad literati. At the extreme right is Urdu poet, critic, and theoretician Shamsur Rahman Faruqi. | Photo Credit: From the X handle of Mehr Farooqi But her chapter on “My Parents and Firaq” is subtitled “Close Neighbours, Distant Relatives.” Her father (whom I remember fondly as an excellent teacher) was 19 years younger than Firaq and distinctly more anglicised, erudite, and elegant than the flamboyantly desi and carefree Firaq. Pathak praises her father and castigates Firaq on several comparative counts: “[Firaq] never had to prepare his lectures. He never read the latest English books…. He never guided research.” But somehow, this pedantic mud does not seem to stick to the towering poet.Apparently, Yadupati had many family grievances, old and new, to nurse against his famous sibling. When Firaq won the Jnanpith Award in 1969 and with it, the then fabulous sum of one lakh rupees, Yadupati walked across to congratulate him and then asked, “So what are you going to give me, Bhai Saheb?” Firaq pretended to think hard and then replied, “Well, you can have a whole chicken!” (This is not in Pathak’s book but was narrated to me by Yadupati, laughing at his brother’s mean repartee.)Pathak is mainly concerned with narrating episodes of Firaq’s personal life. These include his dealings with his wife, who was not the girl shown to Firaq’s female relatives before marriage but someone not at all pretty and distinctly uncouth, for which he never forgave her. Nevertheless, they lived together for over forty 40 years until Firaq decided, when he was about 60, to banish her for good to her parents’ home back in Gorakhpur.Pathak writes with sympathetic understanding also about a young admirer of Firaq’s, Ramesh Chandra Dwivedi, who took it upon himself to be Firaq’s Boswell, producing after the poet’s death several volumes full of invaluable personal and literary information. Dwivedi gradually became Firaq’s all-purpose personal secretary, rather as Mahadev Desai was to Gandhi. Then, in Firaq’s ailment-afflicted old age, Dwivedi also served as his devoted personal attendant and unflinching nurse.Bigger truthThe gossip in Allahabad had it that Dwivedi was also Firaq’s homosexual lover—and Firaq’s reputed proclivity in this regard was the subject of many merry jokes in the campus. But Pathak, as an observer at close quarters, scotches these rumours, citing among other things the hard facts that Firaq fathered five children with his wife, and when Dwivedi lived for a period in Firaq’s house, it was together with his wife and four children. Pathak’s book is not tittle-tattle, though it remains personal and anecdotal in ways not always complimentary to her great uncle. As Pathak is hardly into his poetry, the “Man Behind” and the “Genius” barely get to meet in her pages.Firaq Gorakhpuri: The Man behind the Genius by Alka Pathak is personal and anecdotal.   | Photo Credit: By special arrangement Surinder Deol, on the other hand, engages mainly with Firaq the poet and his literary life in Firaq Gorakhpuri: The Poet of Indianness. Firaq had two dear friends among fellow Urdu poets, “Josh” Malihabadi and “Majnun” Gorakhpuri, and he was deeply upset by both of them leaving for Pakistan. To make it worse, they did so not during the first jubilant flush of Partition but many years later. Josh left in 1956, when he had already received a Padma Bhushan, and Majnun even later, in 1967.Deol cites the following vital extract from a letter Firaq wrote during the mid-1950s to Mohammad Tufail, editor of the journal Nuqoosh (Traces, or Signs), published from Lahore. Firaq said:“Our consciousness is still troubled by the collective pain.... The ideas of Unity and Oneness bring tears to our eyes.… Life is a much bigger truth than our political differences. Literature transcends the two-nation theory.” (From Man Aanam, the collection of letters exchanged between Firaq and Muhammad Tufail.)In consonance with the title of his book, Deol has a section titled “Firaq and Hindustaniyat (Indianness).” He points out that unlike other Urdu poets, “Firaq didn’t avoid drawing on…India’s philosophical and mythological traditions,” but he goes a little too far in his rhetorical assertion that Firaq “carried the soul of India in every line”. More specifically, Deol cites Firaq’s evocation in his poetry of Radha-Krishna as the archetypal lovers, and of “Indian seasons and flowers” rather than Persian ones.

Surinder Deol engages mainly with Firaq the poet and his literary life in Firaq Gorakhpuri: The Poet of Indianness. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement One could here add two even more radical infusions by Firaq of Indianness into Urdu. In a long series of rubais, Firaq brought the Perso-Arabic-Urdu mashooqa or beloved out of her haughty, heartless, and ever-virginal seclusion to have her meet the longing lover, to have them actually married, and then for her to become a mother, lovingly rocking her baby in a cradle—rather like Yashoda with Krishna!Besides, Firaq said that “husno-ishq” (beauty and love) were all “dhoka” (deception) but one must carry on “phir bhi” (nevertheless). For the world is real enough (ain-e haqeeqat) and at the same time “maya”. Firaq would here seem to be blurring many old certainties and binaries of Urdu/Persian poetry, as if looking at them from a great philosophical height.The bulk of Deol’s book comprises translations of Firaq’s poetry. These nicely complement two earlier volumes of translations of Firaq, by K.C. Kanda (Sterling, 2000), and by Noorul Hasan (Sahitya Akademi, 2008). The latter was a student at Allahabad University in the 1960s and knew Firaq well.Firaq’s HindustaniyatIn these translations and in his brief discussions of each ghazal, Deol compensates with his easy confidence and fluency for what he seems to lack in rigour, fidelity, and felicity. Firaq’s “Indian” rubais include one in which a sister is tying raakhi to her brother, and another, set at a panghat, where young women merrily congregate to fill their shining metal pots with water. And there is one in which a young woman steps out during the rainy season:Listen to the soundof someone walking tenderly.Listen to the hummingof singing feet.The waves of the rainy monthAnd the beauty sunk in rapture.Listen to the roarOf sweet-smelling drops.This sounds fine at first sight. But that “someone” is, in Firaq’s original version, “komala pada-gaamini,” the “rainy month” is “Saawan” (aka Shravana), and the “sweet-smelling” drops are drops of “rasa.” But what can Firaq’s resourceful Indianness do against the nuance-effacing bludgeon of Deol’s English! Anyhow, as Deol gives each couplet in Roman and Nagari transcriptions beside his translations, most readers may find at least one version they can respond to.Finally, a necessary context may be added to Deol’s laudable endeavour to underline Firaq’s Indianness. Already in the introduction to his very first collection of poems, Shabnamistan (1947), Firaq had stipulated that Hindustaniyat needs to be “packed tight” into Urdu Literature just as “Germaniyat” is in German literature, “Roosiyat” in Russian literature, and “Hajaziyat” (holy Arabianness) in Arabic literature. In contrast to this position, Firaq had noted the stance of a Pakistani writer, Mohammad Ahsan Faruqi, who had laid down that only those Hindu writers can be adjudged to be successful in Urdu literature who “adorn their writings with Islamic traditions, Islamic names, and Islamic subject-matter” (Man Aanam). Firaq’s Hindustaniyat exists in this polarised, Partition-riven context.Further, one needs to remember that Firaq was notorious for denouncing all writing in modern Hindi as being rustic and infinitely inferior artistically to writing in Urdu. Dharamvir Bharati, the Hindi novelist and playwright who had been a student of Firaq at Allahabad, remonstrated in a letter to him dated September 11, 1970, that even on the celebratory occasion of his winning the Jnanpith Award, Firaq in an interview had once again “spewed venom” against Hindi and the best of modern Hindi writers.In his own eyes, Firaq was probably rendering a double service to Urdu. Firstly, he was packing it with Hindustaniyat and thus rooting it more viably in India, and secondly, he was denouncing Hindi roundly in direct comparison with Urdu. With all his Hindustaniyat, he remained a pucca Urdu-wallah.Harish Trivedi taught English at Delhi University.Also Read | R. Parthasarathy (1934-2026): His tongue in English chains no longerAlso Read | A hundred years of Clarissa