Yagana had the will and the verve to take on all his contemporary poets and giants. He produced a huge oeuvre of poetry, some of high calibre
 

SOME CRITICS consider the remark of Dr. Abdul Rahman Bijnori hyperbolic, but most agree with the inferential spirit behind it that no poet has surpassed the magical world of implications and connotations of Ghalib’s poetry. However there were some stray voices that drew macabre pleasure from running down the great poet. Amongst them were Mohammad Abdul Malik, Abdul Samad Sarim, Dr. Kaleem-ud-Din Ahmed etc. But the greatest iconoclast of them all was Mirza Yaas Yagana Changazi Lakhnavi.

The recently published book “Kuliyat-e-yagana,” compiled by Mr. Mushfiq Khawaja, has the entire corpus of Yagana’s poetry and the prefaces he wrote for his various collections. The biographical sketch of the poet highlights the time of Yagana and his background and the relationship he had with his contemporaries. The life of Yagana presents a fascinating study in human psychology, the underlying dynamics of behaviour, unconscious motivations and their manifestations. The intent of this piece is not to evaluate the poetry of Yagana, but to analyze the mental processes of the poet that made him a critic and a denouncer per excellence.

Mirza Wajid Hussain was born in Patna, Bihar in 1884. He had his education there. In 1904 he went to Calcutta to teach the family members of Wajid Ali Shah. The climate of the city did not suit him, so he returned to Patna. This move did not have a benign effect on his health either. He decided to visit Lakhnow to seek treatment for his illness. The city, its environment and its culture turned out to be so much to his liking that he spent most of his life there.

In the initial period of his poetic excursion, he adopted the Takhalus of Yaas Azeemabadi, the latter part of which was soon changed to Lakhnavi. He married the daughter of a famous hakeem of the city, joined the literati and participated in the Mushairas in all earnestness. Thus he began to lead a life of comfort and respectability.

Initially, Ghalib was his favourite poet and many of his ghazals were composed in the former’s meters. In the beginning, he maintained cordial relations with the other poets of Lakhnow. Alas, this bonhomie could not last long. According to Yagana himself, the reasons for the dissension were twofold: the poets of Lakhnow lampooned Yagana’s poetry and secondly their misplaced and unmerited adulation of Ghalib’s poetry. He adopted Khawaja Hyder Ali Atash as his patron saint, (not a great poet by any reckoning), apparently out of spite. A war of words ensued between him and the other poets.

Yagana did not spare any one. Against a respected poet, Aziz Lakhnavi, he wrote an essay called “Shuhrat Ka Dabba” in which he ridiculed the former’s person and poetry. Soon his invectives extended to almost all the poets. The following quatrain (Rubai) is reflective of his mindset:
 

His denunciation of Ghalib started about the same time (1914). In the preface of his book “Nishtar-e-Yaas”, he remarked that the diminutive Devan-e-Ghalib is full of short comings and complexities. His tirade grew in intensity and culminated in the publication of “Ghalib shikan” in 1934. By 1920-21, he added Yagana to his Takhalus. Later, he dropped Yaas altogether, so much so that he expressed his displeasure when anyone used it. Yet another addition surfaced in 1932. It was Changazi. This appellation was adopted, he explained, to cut down Ghalib’s worshippers.

The personal life of Yagana was not particularly blessed. Barring a few exceptions, he never had a satisfactory occupation and experienced financial distress almost all his life. His insolvency acquired frightening proportion after his retirement, especially in the last days of his life. His filial ties were not very strong either. In the preface of his collection “Tarana”, (1933) he waxed eloquent about the loyalty, adoration and devotion of his wife. But that too changed in the last days of his life when she abandoned him. He was homeless, terminally ill and alone and yet she did not care for him.

His attitude towards religion too was ambivalent. Some of his Rubiyat exhibited a high degree of acrimony for religion and religious leaders. Their publication greatly antagonized the people and he was forced to flee his home.

Yagana’s writings are the ultimate example of self-glorification. He did not demur in calling himself:

His tendency for self-admiration transmuted intomendacity. The preface of his collection “Ayat-e-Vijdani” was written by Mirza Murad Baig Sheerazi who was no one else but Yagana himself. In this preface, Sheerazi (yagana) remarks:
 

Yet such was the magnitude of the antithetical nature of his character that he praised both Hazrat Ali and Ghalib in the following rubai:
 

True to character, he admired Iqbal in the beginning but after some time ran him down. He regarded himself superior to Iqbal. Even Mir Taqi Mir and Urfi were not impervious to his conceit. He altered, amended and corrected their printed works ostensibly improving them.

Yagana’s life was the epitome of the doctrine of psychoanalysis propounded by Alferd Adler (1870-1937), an Austrian psychologist. He, Freud and Jung together established the school of thought called psychoanalysis.

Freud was of the view that sex is the greatest motivating force in the lives of human-beings. Adler disagreed. He postulated that the primary motivation is the struggle against feelings of inferiority, be it real or imaginary physical, social or psychological. It could be conscious, but when it arises from the unconscious, it can pose serious psychological problems.

Human being are not created equal. Some of us are a cut above the others in one particular characteristic or the other. On the other hand, we are inferior to others in some other attributes. This is the predestination of all human-beings. This simple fact of life is difficult to accept for a multitude of people because of their inflated egos. Once a person refuses to accept his inferiority, a chain reaction of unconscious motivations is set in motion, which demands a compensation in the sense of an enhancement of self-esteem, mostly in devious ways.

Strange as it may appear, this inferiority complex gives rise to the superiority complex because the exaggerated and unrealistic sense a person acquires of himself is, in fact, a defence mechanism to ward off the feelings of inferiority. To put it succinctly, a superiority complex is nothing but an inferiority complex turned inside out.

Yagana, as we have already noted, ran down almost all his contemporaries and those who were held in high esteem, Ghalib being the prime example of the latter category. His behaviour thus demonstrated an archetypal example of compensatory behaviour born out of inferiority.

There are other facets of Yagana’s life which further attest our hypothesis. His sense of discomfiture, even anguish, with himself and his background is manifested in his disowning his place of birth and with it the change of his Takhalus from Azeemabadi to Lakhnavi.

This change further escalated to other parts as well. Yaas, his original Takhalus, means despair, anguish, depression, which might have represented his real state of mind. The change to “Yagana” (unique, extraordinary) depicts a jump from one extreme of the spectrum to the other. And on top of all this, he added “Changazi” to his takhalus, which was highly inappropriate and incongruous for a poet. He dedicated the second edition of his collection “Aayat-e-Vijdani” to Changaz Khan, showering him with many epithets including that of “Emperor of Men”.

There are a few example of poets changing their takhalus but in the frequency and diversity of the change Yagana beats every one. Yet another sign of a morbid mind.

We have already seen why Yagana shifted from Calcutta to Patna and finally to Lakhnow, because he did not find the climate of the two cities good for his health. The primary reason of his visit to Lakhnow was to seek treatment. All this happened when he was just 20 years of age, an age when an average person is in blooming health. We do not have any evidence available regarding the anatomy of his illness, but may be it was psychosomatic in nature.

Psychosomatic diseases are those which have their root in psychological problems, although they manifest themselves in the form of bodily diseases. The life of misery, alienation with himself and others, financial distress, friendlessness and loneliness which Yagana led was bound to give rise to psychological problems.

Notwithstanding his enormous psychological problems, Yagana did succeed in achieving what an ordinary mortal can only fantasize. He produced a huge oeurve of poetry, some of which is of high calibre. He demonstrated the will and the verve to take on almost all of his contemporary poets and giants like Ghalib.

In the process, he proved yet another element of Adlerian doctrine, that of “compensation”, briefly referred to earlier. It is an act or process of making amends or atoning for the deficiencies of character and achieving exceptional success in spite of, or perhaps because of, those deficiencies.