My Firaq Gorakhpuri

An essay on a poet I adore

Note: I wrote this essay in 2020 and it was published in the previous avatar of Mehfil. We used to be on Medium back then. It’s unlikely that any of our subscribers today would have come across this essay. So, I am resharing it without making any major edits. Four years is a long time. If I were to write on Firaq Gorakhpuri today, it would be a bit different from what you’ll read here. But my admiration for his poetry has not waned a bit. Hope you enjoy reading what I had to say about this poet, and on literature in general.

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शाम भी थी धुआँ धुआँ हुस्न भी था उदास उदास
दिल को कई कहानियाँ याद सी आके रह गयीं

Evening hazy and beauty forlorn —
stories aplenty just tickled
my heart’s memory

It was not until I recited this couplet on insistence of a friend, who is a self-acclaimed fan of sher-o-shayari, that I came to know that it was used in the movie Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. I had watched that movie but only in bits and pieces, and this bit of Firaq’s poetry must have easily passed unnoticed. But I can’t be entirely blamed for not being able to notice this gem of a couplet probably because of the context in which it was portrayed. Three friends vacationing in Europe and trying to find their true self was as clichéd a plot for a self-discovery movie as possible. Probably the glamour of its exotic locations and beautiful faces superseded the impact of this couplet. But (as I would come to know later) only for me. That friend of mine said ‘ZNMD!’ even before I could finish reciting the sher. I was dumbfounded. I thought that it’s his obsession with Hrithik Roshan that made him watch ZNMD with the dedication and madness it takes to retain the dialogues of a movie. But I was again proved wrong when I recited this in front of another friend who recognised this couplet immediately. Farhan Akhtar, he said. He even was under the false impression that it was written by Javed Akhtar and ‘Raghupati Sahay Firaq’ was a made-up name Farhan’s character uses in the movie to sound cool. But it was their turn to be dumbfounded when I told them that it was written by one of the most celebrated and my personal favourite Urdu poets. They had never heard of Firaq Gorakhpuri.

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I remember the first time I encountered Firaq’s poetry. A ghazal of his was a part of our Hindi syllabus in school and it was impossible for me to understand its couplets because the language in which it was written, was completely alien to me —

नौरस गुँचे पंखड़ियों की नाज़ुक गिर्हें खोले हैं
या फिर उड़ने को रंग-ओ-बू गुलशन में पर तोले हैं

तारे आँखें झपकावे हैं ज़र्रा ज़र्रा सोवे है
तुम भी सुनो ओ यारों शब में सन्नाटे कुछ बोले हैं

हम हों या क़िस्मत हो हमारी दोनों को एक ही काम मिला
कुछ क़िस्मत हमपे रोवे है कुछ हम क़िस्मत पे रो ले हैं

As a 15-year old kid, growing up in Allahabad in a Hindu family, and studying in Kendriya Vidyalaya had imbibed in me a mild disdain for anything unrhetorical, especially poetry. I was used to Ramdhari Singh Dinkar’s blazing calls for sacrifice in kalam aaj unki jai bol or Maithilisharan Gupt’s moral sermons in Bharat Bharti. Poetry, for me, was another way (a beautiful one though!) of moralising. So, naturally I held poets in high moral regard in the most conventional (North Indian Brahmanical) sense possible. Despite this notion being in absolute contrast with what I think of poets now, it made me like Firaq and left me with wanting to explore more of his poetry. It was this notion of poets being moral authority of a society that made me fall in love with the only couplet I understood in that ghazal:

जो मुझे बदनाम कर रहे हैं काश वे इतना सोच सकें
मेरा पर्दा खोले हैं या अपना पर्दा खोले हैं

This couplet had a simple moral lesson for me — you’re exposing yourself by speaking foul about me. What a line! On top of it I was told by my teacher that Mahatma Gandhi called Firaq a ‘spoiled genius’. Firaq had worked as under-secretary for Congress but later left politics for good, and resumed his academic endeavours. He taught Wordsworth in Allahabad university. Every aspect of his career, so to speak, appealed to me because of the seemingly unconventional paths Firaq had followed in his life. For me, a conscious decision to not write in English despite being a professor of this exotic and elite language (it was my perception back then about English) was in itself fascinating. This was another misconception which brought me closer to Firaq’s character. I say ‘character’ not ‘poetry’, because I became familiar with his work much later in my life when I started learning Urdu words. But Firaq’s ‘character’ remained with me and made me question the sanctity of a poet’s morality. Is it necessary for poets to be moral? Firaq was how I was introduced to the cliché of poets being somber, drunk degenerates whom the society looks down upon because nobody understands them. Because it takes a soft heart to understand the ‘feelings’ their poetry conveys. Much later in my life I would come across this sher of Mirza Ghalib that conveys this idea with absolute precision —

हुस्न-ए-फ़रोगे-शम्मा-ए-सुख़न दूर है ‘असद’
पहले दिल-ए-गुदाख़्ता पैदा करे कोई

The beauty of eloquence is still far ‘asad’
Why don’t you discover your delicate heart first?

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Firaq’s poetry has every element of cliché possible in Urdu poetry but not in a negative way. Yes, he talked about the usual stuff — raat, tanhai, andhera, udaasi etc. and thank God for that because the way he used these elements made him remarkable —

अब तो उनकी याद भी नहीं आती
कितनी तनहा हो गयीं तनहाइयाँ

or

इसी खंडर में कुछ दिए हैं टूटे हुए
इन्हीं से काम चलाओ बड़ी उदास है रात

or

कुछ कफ़स की तीलियों से छन रहा है नूर सा
कुछ फ़ज़ा कुछ हसरत-ए-परवाज़ की बातें करो

Firaq created spaces in his poetry to fit my experiences into them. I’ll explain how. We must have encountered this answer on asking how someone’s doing — ab kya batau! Of course, this is not a concrete answer but we do get to know that the person is not happy. It’s a way of expressing sadness and it encompasses the entire spectrum of sadness. A person getting poor marks and a person with a shitty job can use the same phrase to express his/her sadness. These are the kinds of expressions Firaq used in his ghazals to evoke an emotion and left it up to me to fill it with my experiences. These open-ended/ambiguous expressions were the reason I was hooked to Firaq’s poetry. They made him a poet I could ‘relate’ to despite my sufferings being nothing more than inconsequential issues of a teenager. I can still point to most of his ghazals and say — Damn! This was written for me! Very few poets in my limited knowledge are capable of invoking that intimacy (there are others of course).

Take the ZNMD couplet for example. By saying ‘kahaniyan yaad si aake reh gayi’, he has created the space for you to reminisce your own stories. He doesn’t tell you his story but he does make you feel a sense of longing by using ‘yaad si aake reh gayi’ instead of just ‘yaad aa gayin’. He elevates everyone’s individual experience of grief to a common platform where it doesn’t matter why you’re grieving. What matters is only the fact that you are grieving. I say elevate because how could one not revere the language he uses to express it.

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Here are a couple of examples where he creates space for the readers and my futile attempt at trying to explain how these couplets worked for me:

कुछ इशारे थे जिन्हें दुनिया समझ बैठे थे हम
उस निगाह-ए-आशना को क्या समझ बैठे थे हम

By using ‘kya samajh baithe the hum’ he only tells you that he misinterpreted the familiar glance (निगाह-ए-आशना) but under what circumstances, whose glance etc. he does not mention. This is where he has created the space for you. You suddenly got reminded of your misinterpretation of someone’s glance, misinterpretation of someone’s love.

कहाँ का वस्ल तन्हाई ने शायद भेस बदला है
तेरे दम भर के आ जाने को हम भी क्या समझते हैं

The first line sets the tone of this couplet. And the rhetorical way in which he says ‘kya samajhte hain’ again creates the space for you to answer this question.

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Now, as I always get to hear from friends that if poems are so open to interpretation (or ‘spacious’ if I may), then where is the art in it? This is what a friend asked me when I was boring him to death by going on and on about Firaq -

Even a normal photograph can be interpreted in some or the other way, then why read poems and why work so hard to write poems in the first place? I mean, I can write a line without following any of your stupid rules of poetry and say that it is open to interpretation. What is so special about poets like Firaq then?

Language. Firaq’s use of language, his style is such that it neither over-states nor under-states. It states enough to show you the road but not so much as to hold your hand and walk with you till you reach your destination. He doesn’t ask you to listen to his story but he does give you enough idea of how sorrow works. For the emotionless he might be just another shayar crying over the cliched themes of loneliness and sorrow, but for the ones intoxicated by him he is indeed the ‘hijr ki raat ka sitara’ (shining star of separation’s night). It might not be bright enough to light up your path but it’s enough to give the consolation of there being light somewhere far far away. It is easy to guess that his was a life filled with pain and loss but to discuss the nature of it here would be irrelevant. One could only be grateful and celebrate what he has given us. Even today, through his poetry he becomes my closest confidant. Every time I go back to Firaq I discover something new in his poetry and that is what makes me go back to him in the first place —

कहो तो अर्ज़ करें मान लो तो क्या कहना
तुम्हारे पास हम आए हैं एक ज़रूरत से।

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