LAST week, I was on a visit to Karachi where I had to participate in the Firaq Festival, organized by the Irtaqa Adabi Forum in cooperation with Wapda, a women’s organization. Glowing tributes were paid to Raghupati Sahai Firaq Gorakhpuri, who occupies a high place in the history of Urdu literature as a major poet of the 20th century, and as the father of the new Urdu ghazal.

It was a three-day seminar, well attended by scholars and writers belonging to different schools of thought. Papers read there were a study of his work from different angles. Whoever the writer and whatever the subject, it is now deemed necessary that the man or the subject under discussion should be seen and appreciated or criticized from the female point of view, too. The female angle is a newly-introduced one in our studies.

Here, Zahida Hina took upon herself to judge Firaq from this angle. Poor Firaq miserably failed in this test. How could Zahida forgive him for his behaviour with his wife. Also, his portrayal of a woman in his Rubayat can hardly win approval from the exponents of women’s liberation. The image of a woman as the embodiment of beauty does not find favour with them. They are more at home with Majaz because of his desire to turn anchal into a parcham.

So Firaq could not pass the test, neither as a husband nor as a poet. He badly failed to win approval for his poetry and his behaviour from Zahida.

There are people who, even while reading literature, cannot get rid of their prejudices, religious, ethnic or nationalistic. Such people behave in their own way. The very idea of a Firaq Festival was unpalatable to them. In fact, in this case, their prejudices got redoubled simply for the reason that Firaq was not a mere ghazal writer.

Firaq was the kind of writer who thought profoundly and talked candidly. He had deeply thought on matters of culture, language, literature and on matters of Hindu-Muslim relationship. And he had the courage to express his views on these subjects without fear of being misunderstood and maligned. With his deep awareness of the ancient tradition of Hinduism, he tried to redefine it in the modern context in a liberal way.

That brought him in conflict with the Hindu fundamentalists of his time. He stuck to his guns and took a stand against them. In the matter of language, he took a stand in favour of Urdu, as opposed to Hindi, and fought for it. But at the same time, he censured the Urdu poetic tradition for its estrangement from the old Sanskrit-Hindi one as represented by Kalidas, Tulsidas and Surdas. In fact, he was an advocate of what he calls cultural liberalism. He stood by it and fought for it.

Seen against this background, Firaq appears to be a great rebel in Urdu poetry. He achieved excellence in ghazal writing. But he was not content with it. He censured the ghazal for its exaggerated involvement with the Persian poetic tradition, and raised the question as to why it had failed to develop a relationship with that peculiar cosmic vision and sense of human life which we find in the Rig Vedas, and which we can trace in Surdas, Tulsi and Mirabai. And why, he further asked, does Urdu ghazal lack that mellowness we find in the poetry of Sur and Tulsi?

It is this awareness which informs the poetic sensibility of Firaq, and it is because of it that Firaq’s was seen as a new voice in Urdu poetry. I may refer here to his series of Rubaiyat, which carry with them a concept of feminine beauty linked with a cultural climate very different from what we find in our ghazal. But truly speaking, this sensibility has found its best expression in the two poems titled as Adhi raat ko and Dhundalkae mein.

Firaq’s rebellion did not go waste. Soon, the Urdu ghazal, under his influence, underwent a transformation, resulting in what we now call the nai ghazal. Two poets need to be mentioned here, Jamiluddin Aali and Nasir Kazmi.

While engaged in writing the ghazal, Aali made bold to experiment with a poetic form he had borrowed from the classical tradition of old Hindi. The borrowed form was the doha and Aali so excelled in this form of expression that he was acknowledged as a genuine doha writer along with his ghazal. The doha came to stay in Urdu as a valid form of expression. That opened the door in Urdu for influences from Kabir, Tulsi and Sur. Such influence can easily be traced in the ghazals of Ibn-i-Insha.

Thanks to this kind of influence, he loosened the chains of Persianized taghazzul and evolved for his ghazal an easy and simple diction. His exuberance for nature and his response to the changing seasons is more in tune with old Hindi poetry than with the Persianized ghazal. We can trace in his ghazals echoes from Mirabai and Kabir.

So Firaq’s protest did not go unheard. It brought a great change in Urdu ghazal. The kind of ghazal he wrote was trend-setting.