One of the many good things that Allahabad, the city of Jawaharlal Nehru, gave me when I was an undergraduate there in the late 30s and early 40s, was the chance to get to know Raghupati Sahai Firaq, the famed Urdu poet who had become a legend in his lifetime, and who was then a lecturer in the Department of English at the University. But nobody called him by that name. He was knwn only by his ‘takhallus’ (poetic name) either as “Professor Firaq” or just, endearingly as “Firaq Saheb”. He was the darling of the students, unquestionably the most popular figure in the University. I was ten reading Persian Literature, History and English Literature, but Firaq was not my teacher. I was taught by another legendary figure, Professor S C Deb – a Johnsonian presence both i n body and in mind, without, thankfully, the great doctor’s visage.
Allahabad University in those days positively glittered with the great luminaries of Indian academia – Dr [Ram Praad], Dr Tara Chand, Dr Ishwari Prasad, Dr Amar Nath Jha, Dr Sir Shafat Ahmad Khan, Dr I’jaz Husain, Harbans Rai Bachchan, Dr Beni Prasad and many others. And Firaq, although he was only a lecturer and never became even a Reader far from being a Professor (perhaps because of his non-conformist, anti-establishment libertarianism) had, however, a very special place as a shining star in this galaxy of teachers. I remember sneaking into his lectures just for the fun of it. He had a unique style, entirely his own, with his keen appreciation of English poetry, particularly the young Romantic poets and the way he juxtaposed them with the greats of Urdu poetry, was sheer joy, quoting exquisite samples from Ghalib and Mir and Anees and Iqbal and Josh [Malihabadi] and Jigar [Moradabadi] and quote often, unashamedly and justifiably from his own couplets.
Firaq’s house at 8/4 Bank Road (one of the unassuming University bungalows), was a magnet for the literati. A group of us Urdu- poetry-mad undergraduates had taken up residence just a few houses down the road. Many an evening we would descend on him unannounced. Firaq loved the company of the young. His eyes, alert and oversize, with big, black, rotating eye balls, lit up at the sight of his young admirers and he would welcome us like a long- lost friend. He would call out for his Man Friday and ask him to sprinkle water on the tiny lawn in the front enclosure, put down a few chairs and invite us to occupy them, with himself taking a suitably central position. And we were set for the evening, discussing every and any conceivable subject under the sun. It was mostly a monologue, helped along by irreverent interruptions from his audience which had learnt to challenge him, to bring out the best from that razor-sharp intellect. It was a tour de force, with Firaq plucking out the plums from Sanskrit, Persian, English and Urdu with equal facility. The evening would inevitably close with a recitation, at our request, of his own ghazal or nazm and we would go home feeling enriched and conscious of our good fortune that we had been in the presence of real genius.
Some of the most memorable evenings I spent during my three years at the University were at this very house of Firaq whenever there was an All India Mushaira [a poetic symposium] being held in the city. For then, the visiting poets would set aside an evening for a get-together at Firaq’s and the front room would be converted into a proper Eastern chamber from which all such encumbrances as chairs, tables, and sofas had been removed, and every one sat on the carpeted floor with padded cushions and gao-takias [bolster pillows] in abundant supply. It was in these intimate gatherings that I had the rare privilege of listening to the great poets of the day- Josh Malihabadi, Jigar Moradabadi, Saghar Nizami, Ravish Siddiqi, Majaz Lucknavi, Sardar Jafri, Harbans Rai Bachchan, Ehsan Danish, Khumar Barabankavi, Anand Narayan Mulla and of course Firaq himself. Apart from poetry, there was scintillating conversation. And there was the revelation that were living through momentous times. Most of these poets were also great patriots, filled with the fervour of our struggle for independence, and their poetry was suffused with the spirit of freedom and human dignity. Much more than the speeches of our leaders, was the poetry of these men, assembled in Firaq’s front parlour that was our inspiration.
Of sourse, there were petty rivalries too between the poets, and Firaq, though an excellent and caring host, enjoyed acting the devil’s advocate. He had a mischievous streak in him which was matched by the uninhibited prankishness of Josh and the sharp and subtle wit of Majaz. These three together could tear to pieces any pretentious piece of work trying to masquerade as poetry.
But then, I lost touch with my teacher when I joined the army in 1942, and did not see him again until 22 years later in 1964 when I went back to India on my journey of re-discovery to make a film (India! My India!) about the country I had left 17 years earlier as it tore itself apart i 1947 and literally drove me and millions of others out of their times. Firaq, back in early 1964, had been returned from the University for 5 years, but was still living at 8/4 Bank Road. I found him in good spirits and he had not lost any of his ebullient outspokenness. However, my hectic schedule prevented me from spending much time with Firaq.
Another 6 years passed. I went to Allahabad again in January 1970 for an important sequence in my film ‘Mother Ganges’. This time I was determined to make time for Firaq. Allahabad is at the confluence of the Ganges and the Jumna, two of the most sacred rivers of India. It was also the year of the Kumbh Mela – the great fair held at the confluence once every 12 years.
I booked in at the Prayag Rest House, near the Sangam (the confluence of the rivers Ganga, Jamuna and the invisible Saraswati) with my unit of 4 for a seven day shoot. Having settled the unit in, I set off for 8/4 Bank Road nesr the University. It was early afternoon on a crisp winter day when I drive up outside Firaq’s bungalow. The place had an unkempt look and there was no sign of life. I walked up the familiar oath on to the verandah [courtyard] and called out: “Firaq Saheb!” No answer, I went into the front room which had once echoed to the voices and the poetry of the greatest poets of the land. There was an eerie silence. I opened the door of another room off the verandah. It was bare except for a charpoy [a four legged- bed] topped with a crumpled eiderdown. I gently pulled the eiderdown to reveal my 75 year old teacher huddled up in the embryo position. He woke up to find a face from the past staring at him. He sat up rubbing his eyes. I bent down and touched his feet. He got down from the charpoy and stood up and embraced me. He said apologetically in Urdu: “Raat ko sya nahin. Naukar ko bhi chutti de dee hai.”[I could not sleep last night. I have also given my servant the day off.] ” No, you haven’t Firaq Saheb,” I said, “Your servant is right here. You are coming with me.” He perked up at the thought, quickly got dressed in his Sunday best and his favourite fur cap, and got into the car with me almost like a child coming out for a treat. Remember, this was the time Firaq had already won all the great honours that India could confer on him Apart from the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1960, the highest literary award of the time, he had, just two years earlier, been honoured with t he Padma Bhushan title, and just a few months before I collected him from his lonely abode, he had won India’s biggest literary award, the Bharatiya Gyan Peeth Award. I could not help wondering as I drove him that afternoon to our billets by the Ganges, whether he would be as forlorn as I had found him, if the country had not been partitioned, especially now in 1970, when Nehru had been dead for 6 years and his secular vision had been coming under threat from even the most unlikely quarters.
One of the greatest living poets of one of the noblest languages of India had suffered almost the same fate that his language had: become the victim of the politics of Partition. Firaq personified for me the state of the Urdu language in India at the time-recipient of token honours but denied its rightful place in the larger scheme of things, left to fend for itself against the hostility of unscrupulous politicians who were only too willing to allow one of the country’s most precious assets to go to waste just because the neighbouring protagonists had hijacked it and declared it their official language.
Firaq, during the 7 days that he spent with us on our Ganges location shooting, was to wax eloquent on the beauty and richness f Urdu and was articulately furious about the injustice being done to it in India. And he reserved his severest condemnation for the Muslims for claiming that it was their language and thus generating a reaction against it. He would point out that before the madness of Partition took hold of the country, there were more non-Muslims than Muslims claiming Urdu as their language; that there were at least as many non-Muslims who had enriched the language with their distinguished work (and he would rattle off their names- poets like Pandit Daya Shankar Kaul ‘Naseem’, Alexander Heatherley ‘Azad’, Joseph Bensley ‘Fana’, Pandit Brij Narain ‘Chakbast’, Munshi Har Gopal ‘Tufta’, Pandit Bal Mukund ‘Arsh’ Malsiyani, Maharaja Krishen Prasad ‘Shad’, writers like Munshi Prem Chand, Krishan Chandar, Balwant Singh, Amender or RAJINDER?? Singh Bedi, pioneering publishers like Munshi Naval Kishore; literary historians like Munshi Ram Babu Saxena; journalists like Dewan Chand Maftoon and Editor of Kanpur’s Urdu Zamana –
Munshi Daya Narayan Nigam – and many others1– that language had very little to do with religion and should not have to suffer by association; that he himself was living proof of Urdu’s rich idiom; that no amount of honours conferred upon him, grateful though he was to receive them, could compensate him for the sense of loss and deprivation he felt at the forced and engineered decline of Urdu.
I proudly introduced him to my crew at the Prayag Rest House, especially to my Assistant, Diana Wordsworth, a great grand niece of the poet Wordsworth. Firaq was fascinated. Wordsworth was one of his favourite poets. Unfortunately, Diana had difficulty following Firaq’s heavy Gorakhpur Indian accent. And Firaq equally had problems following Diana’s plum in the mouth English speech. It was a bizarre situation with both of them excitedly talking away without really understanding each other, and Firaq turning to me from time to time and asking: ‘Kya bole ja rahi hai? Kis zaban mein bat kar rahi hai?” [“What’s she on about? What language is she using?”] I had to act as interpreter until they got used to each other and could do without my services.
By the end of our shoot, Firaq had convinced Diana, who was herself not greatly into Wordsworth, that she was the inheritor of the best that England had to offer and that knowing my weakness for poetry her Wordsworthian connection was the real reason why I had selected her as my Assistant. In fact, the reality was rather different. Diana was one of those hardy, tough as nails, tall and big-boned Englishwomen who go out to the corners of the earth in search of adventure. She spoke not a word of Urdu or Hindi but she deeply, truly, and unpatronisingly loved India. She had seen my film India! My India! and put her services and her Land Rover, which she had single-handedly driven from London to Delhi, at my disposal. She proved to be the most practical, methodical and dedicated research and production Assistant I ever had. Diana incidentally had developed quite a thirst for Indian “bia” which suited Firaq admirably, and every evening as the sun went down the Ganges, we would assemble in the open, round a blazing fire kept going by the combined efforts of the Rest House staff and the camera crew, and consumed, after a hard day’s work, suitable quantities of excellent Indian beer. We had also acquired a good supply of the best scotch for Firaq which he appreciated greatly. Firaq was in great form. He was enjoying himself. He seemed a different man from the one I found only a couple of days ago huddled up inside an eiderdown in the middle of the day. He was cracking jokes, quoting from the classics, and holding forth in the characteristic Firaq manner, eyeballs rotating in synchronisation with his neck. It was like old times again, except that the monologue was occasionally interrupted not by his youthful admirers from the University, but by a middle aged woman from England who insisted on calling him “Dr Feeraq”. I tried to put the record right by telling her gently that Firaq was not a doctor of anything, but she brushed me aside with the convincing rejoinder that that was my problem, not hers. These animated evenings would go on until it was time for dinner, after which Diana and the crew would retire to prepare for the next day’s shoot, and Firaq and I would sit up talking about old times.
He would unburden himself and lament how he missed the company of his peers and comment ruefully on the decline of Urdu which he said was one of the saddest legacies of Partition. He never forgave Josh Malihabadi for leaving India and settling in Pakistan. Urdu, he maintained was the most eloquent symbol of Hindu-Muslim unity. In fact, as he said, not just Hindu-Muslim, but also Sikh, Jain, Christian and Parsis and others, who had all made notable contribution towards the enrichment of this uniquely Indian possession, Urdu, he said, can only really thrive in India, its natural home., and he looked forward to the day, notwithstanding the possibility that he may not live to see it, when the barriers would come down and when the estranged brothers across an artificial divide, would reclaim each other in friendship and infuse new life into his beloved Urdu, which he together with people like Dr Gopi Chand Narang, Krishan Chandar, Balwant Singh, Jagannath Azad, Mahinder (LMJ_should this be Rajinder???) Singh Bedi, not to mention a few Muslims as well, he added mischievously, were trying to keep alive with their writings and lobbying.
In the mean time, Urdu will survive, he assured me, in films, in mushairas, in songs and ghazals, and in civilised and sophisticated conversation (of which he was a master), until the Indian government grew up and realised that Urdu deserved at least the same support and encouragement as any other Indian language. India, he said, could ill afford to do without Urdu for whenever you had something beautiful to say, Urdu had the most beautiful form in which to present it. And then he would quote one of his favourite couplets of Ghalib:
Whenever you talk of the search for Truth
You cannot but talk of the cup and the wine
And the cup of Urdu, he said is full of that intoxicating wine, for which my cue was to pour him another glass and request him for his kalaam, his own poetry, with me setting the tone with one of my favourite Firaq couplets
This nostalgia-filled evening
Let us talk of those coquettish eyes
Ah! The rapture and the ecstasy
Let us talk of secretive things.
It is difficult for me to put into words my feelings at the time, here was this great poet whom I had all to myself, reciting his own exquisite couplets and enjoying himself, secure in the thought that he probably never had a more attentive and appreciative audience. As for me, I felt both like a humble chela, a disciple, sitting at the feet of a master, and also a bit like Emperor Akbar being entertained by Abul Fazl, Faizi and Birbal all rolled into one.
Our idyllic stay at the Prayag Rest House came to an end with the completion of our shooting schedule. After breaking camp, we deposited Firaq at 8/4 Bank Road in the safe hands of his faithful servant. As we bade goodbye that evening, a gentle rain had begun to fall. I could see him through a curtain of rain disappearing into his front room and could imagine him sinking into a sofa, overwhelmed by a feeling of loneliness which inspired some of his most captivating poetry, and which produced the kind of couplets which keep me company to this day.
I often sit with a glass in my hand, at evening time, and think of my beautiful teacher who wrote such tender lines:
A crude translation would be:
It was an evening of mellow mists
Beauty was tinged with sadness
And many a half-remembered tryst
Drove me close to madness.
-Yavar Abbas
Date: Friday 22nd August, 1997