It is difficult for me to write about Firaq Sahib entirely objectively. I was his student at Allahabad University even after he had officially retired. My association with him was confined not merely to the classroom – where he often spoke on a variety of subjects – but extended to his residence on Bank Road, the Coffee House in Civil Lines, seminars, social gatherings and mushairas. He once swayed us off our feet by his inspired utterances on ‘Why Poetry’; on another occasion he gave us a talk on Oscar Wilde, whose name was “wild, but whose poetry was tame” in Eldorado (a restaurant near the university campus in the early 1960s).

In the winter of 1965 I was invited by the English Association of Allahabad University to deliver a lecture on John Keats. My dear teacher, and one of Firaq Sahib’s favorite pupils, the late Mr. Rajamani, was in the chair. Hardly had I begun talking when Firaq entered, shrouded in smoke on that cold, misty winter evening, taking both the chairman and me by surprise. It was even more gratifying that he patiently sat through the lecture, smoking and listening. At the end of it all, when I went to meet him, he put his hand on my shoulder and said extremely encouraging things. I happened, then, to be on the staff of St. John’s College, Agra.

Soon after the Allahabad event, Dr. Harihar Nath Tandon, the then Head of the Department of Hindi at St. John’s, came to my room one fine morning with the message that Firaq Sahib was in town and wanted to see me immediately. We met again. I invited him to the College. He came accompanied by the late Masoom Raza Rahi. Before the formal lecture, he sat in the faculty lounge and regaled us with funny anecdotes. One of the things he recalled was the conversion to Christianity of a peon by Dr. Rice – one of the first principals of the now completely Indianized Ewing Christian College at Allahabad. The man was converted and baptized all right, but when the next Hindu bathing festival fell he went to the Principal with an application for leave. “Leave?” asked the puzzled Principal. “Whatever for?” The poor peon replied that he had to go for a dip in the Ganges. “You are a Christian now: no more dips for you”, said Dr Rice, to which the bewildered peon replied, “I am a Christian all right but I have not forsaken my religion and my faith.” Then Firaq Sahib recalled interviewing a student for a Sizarship. Asked how large his family was, the student replied unabashedly, “Seven adults and seven adulteresses!” Not forgetting himself, he recalled how he was sweating in his kurta one summer afternoon at Rama’s in Allahabad and cooling off with an iced dry gin. When the bill came he pulled out a tenner. The waiter came back saying that the currency note was wet. “So what! I have given you wet money for dry gin, eh!”

At the formal lecture, he opened his notebook and read out some couplets he had composed recently.

Aati hai aise bichre huae doston ki yaad
Jaise chiragh jalte hain raaton ko gaon mein

The memory of long lost friends glimmers
Like lamps in distant villages at night.

Aaye gunahgaraane muhabbat
Naadim, naadim, nadaan, naadan

Came, then, the culprits of love
Demurely, penitentially, very innocently

He then went on to talk about the creative process referring often to Wordsworth’s Prelude and to the whole business of the growth of the poet’s mind. He lamented the fact that India had not produced a Matthew Arnold, let alone a Dickens or a Shakespeare. When Masoom asked if the West had produced a Firaq, the poet discreetly changed the subject. An amazing quality I noticed in Firaq Sahib was his uncanny ability to switch suddenly from the funny to the serious, from levity to gravity, from laughter to tears. The striking rapidity of his change of moods, his immeasurable capacity for love combined with his hauteur, his inimitably ready wit, his defiant humanism, his ability to make you feel at home, his delightful exaggerations, his efficient bilingualism, his touching nostalgia, his tremulous eloquence, his lachrymosal susceptibilities – all these not only made him a man to look up to with awe and reverence but also an uncommonly companionable person very well worth shaking hands with. That I’ve had the privilege to do both, times out of count, fills me with pride and exultation. Not for nothing did he say:

Aane wali naslein tum per rashk kareingi humasro
Jub ye unko dhyan ayega tum ne Firaq ko dekha tha

Generations to come will envy you, my friends
When they learn that you saw Firaq in the flesh.

II

Raghupati Sahai, later to be known as just Firaq Gorakhpuri, was born at Gorakhpur in eastern Uttar Pradesh on Friday, 18 August, 1896. He died in New Delhi on 3 March 1982. His father, Gorakh Prasad, was a poet in his own right and wrote under the pseudonym ‘Ibrat’. Ibrat belongs to the same era as Hali and Azad. Firaq’s early education began at home. His father, who was a master of Persian and Urdu, taught these languages to the young Firaq. He entered school with a rudimentary knowledge of Hindi. In 1912, Firaq passed his School Leaving Certificate examination in the II^nd division from the Government Jubilee High School at Gorakhpur. He then proceeded to Muir Central College, Allahabad. In 1914 he was married to Kishori Devi. In 1919, the British Government nominated him for the post of Deputy Collector. However, by this time Firaq was deeply involved in the struggle for Independence. On his refusal to serve under the British Government, the Hindi weekly Swadesh commented:

For this selfless sacrifice that you have made, we, on behalf of the entire Gorakhpur zone, extend you a hearty welcome to the realm of non-cooperation.

Now Firaq was up to the hilt in the fight for freedom. In 1920 he, along with Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and others, was imprisoned for boycotting the visit of the Prince of Wales. After a summary trial in the prison itself Firaq was sentenced to one and a half year’s rigorous imprisonment and a fine of five hundred rupees. Firaq and his friends were taken to Agra jail. Prominent among his co-inmates were Khwaja Abdul Hamid of Aligarh, Mr. Joseph, editor of Independent, and Mahadev Desai, private secretary to Mahatma Gandhi. In a mushaira organized in the jail, the first lines of the poem Firaq recited were:

Ahle zindan ki yeh mehfil hai suboot iska Firaq
Ki bikhar ker ke bhi shirajah preshan na hua

This congregation of people in the prison is proof, Firaq
That though in disarray this organization is not dismayed.

When Firaq returned home from the prison, he found the parental household in shambles. During this period Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru visited Gorakhpur and was a guest of Firaq. Panditji came up with the suggestion that Firaq take up the office of the undersecretary of the All India Congress Committee. Maulana Mohammad Ali welcomed the idea. Thus Firaq started work as undersecretary at a then lucrative salary of two hundred and fifty rupees per month. He worked in this outfit from 1923 to 1927. Not finding the job very rewarding, he quit to teach English, first at Lucknow Christian College and later at Sanatan Dharam College, Kanpur. In 1930 he took his M.A. in English from Agra University and was placed in the First Division. He was subsequently appointed lecturer in English at Allahabad University. He retired on 31 December, 1958, but continued as a UGC National Research Fellow until 1966.

He was loved and admired by successive generations of students of English literature because of his alertness of feeling, his refreshingly original idiom, and his infectious enthusiasm for the literature he taught. The native and poetic hue of his imagination colored his entire perception and gave him an organic view of literature which is denied to a mere scholar. He was an archenemy of critical clichés and popular fallacies. There was a sense of battle in his lectures. He made the written word palpitate as he used it and whatever fell from his lips was starred with beauty. Firaq was a living legend at the Allahabad University of those years.

For his academic and creative achievements, Firaq was given several awards including the Jnanpith (India’s highest award for literature) in 1970. He was the first Urdu writer to receive this. But all these awards and decorations left him cold. What mattered to him most was what he called his “voice”:

Main ne is a’waz ko mar mar ke pala hai Firaq
Aaj jiski bazme lau hai shamma mahrabe hayat

I have nurtured this voice at the cost of my life, Firaq
It resides today in the flame of the arched lamp of life

To be Firaq was the be-all and end-all of his life. And he succeeded superbly in this journey into the self, untouched by the snares and temptations of this world. He was that rare thing in modern times – a totally integrated and incorruptible man and poet.

*

Excerpted from the introduction to The Selected Poetry of Firaq Gorakhpuri, translated by Noorul Hasan (Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 2008).