Juse 17th, 2001
Talking or writing about a poet who wrote in Urdu for an audience who do not use the language for their reading writing and talking in everyday life is a daunting task. Perhaps an incident from his life recounted by an eyewitness will help make the poet come alive for those who never saw or heard him.
This event occurred in the 1970s when Raghupati Sahay “Firaq” was on a visit to Delhi. Door Darshan [Indian public TV} sent a film crew to make what they call a “spot” on the poet. By the time I arrived on the scene the crew were already there. The lights were on the mike was live and recording in progress. The poet was reclining on an unmade bed of which the linen needed change. The room was littered with the debris of all the activities of eating drinking and smoking which takes place when people visit an Urdu poet to invoke the Muse.
The camera was rolling. A detailed record was being made of the mess. The dirty glasses some still half full, plates with the remains and stains of food. Cups plates and ashtrays stuffed with stubs of cigarettes and beedi were all being meticulously recorded along with the aroma of despair which can easily be mistaken for the decadence depravity attributed to the East by Europe.
The room stank with odours ranging from acrid tobacco to unwashed bodies. The youths manning the camera and other equipment were busy recording the mess they could see. It was quite spectacular. But then everything about Firaq was larger than life. His sorrows his joys his depressions and his ecstasies. The young crew were unable to put words to the visuals they had so painstakingly got on film.
Firaq, the still centre of all this disturbance and storm was his usual self. He was, at one and the same time, with the people in the room and also not with them but on his own. At a different plane. He was used to this split level existence and often talked of it in terms of the dialectic of existence.
Fortunately for everyone including the record that was made of the moments in the life of the greatest Urdu poet since Ghalib, the maqtaa or the last verse of a ghazal of Firaq came out of the recesses of memory. It seemed to verbalise the moment and the eternity that was the Life and Being of Firaq.
The verse reads
yeh udaas udaas bujhee bujhee koaee zindagee hey Firaaq kee
mugur aaj kishtey sukhanwaree hey usee kay dum sey chummun chummun.
Lacking all sparkle and burdened with grief is it at all worth living
this life of “Firaq”!
But it is also true that it is only his breath that makes roses bloom in the garden of poetry
The words ghuzzul and muqtaa need to be explained.
Ghuzzul is an Arabic word and means a lover talking amorously to his beloved. In the tradition a ghuzzul or lyric in Arabic Persian Turki or Urdu is required to have at least five verses. The muqtaa or last verse usually has the name of the poet and therefore in the verse quoted Firaq “s name appears in the first line:
yeh udaas udaas bujhee bujhee koaee zindagee hey “Firaaq” kee
The second line
Mugur aaj kishtey sukhanwuree hey usee kay dumm sey chummumchummun
renders the opposite emotion and provides the dialectic which was so important to Firaq”s philosophy of life.
Thus we see that beginning with great sorrow depression and despondency in which he points out that life appears to have lost all light and sparkle Firaq turns right round and says that despite all this lack he is still able to make the gardens of poetry come alive with his failing breath.