Najeeb Jung, former vice chancellor, Jamia Milia and former LG, Delhi in conversation with Mahmood Farooqui on the occasion of the launch of Jung’s translation of Qalb-e-Faiz.
So, first of all, I want to know how you grew in love with Urdu poetry. What was it in your childhood, in your upbringing, that made you fall in love with this poetry?
I got to understand poetry because of my late mother, who by the time I was four or five was reciting poetry to me. I did not understand what I was hearing, but I was learning by rote, and perhaps it was a miracle for me that by the time I was, maybe four or five, I had learned by heart maybe more than half of Galib. It was really a miracle. And I could recite it anywhere, and it just came automatically to me. When friends would be doing Twinkle Twinkle, I would recite Galib. So that just stayed with me over the years, albeit without understanding the nuances of Galib. But I got into something really, really higher without getting into the basics, and those basics I learned and read much later in life. So, even today, when I read Galib or Faiz Sabh, that is what I understand, and I’m not able to do justice really, to many words that we have seen, particularly as you know, we are all attracted to the progressive writers.
So then as a child, you had been inculcated into this poetry where you had been initiated, and
then you had a different background altogether. You went to St. Stephen’s and then you got into the Civil Service. So, did you continue your interest in it? Did you sustain it, or was it a thing that was left behind in childhood?
It is unfortunate for our generations, those who were in school and college with me that we all forgot Hindi and Urdu and got involved in learning English. And in a school like St. Columba’s, we couldn’t even learn good Hindi, let alone Urdu. I was lucky that I went to Madhya Pradesh where I learned very good Hindi. I got removed from Urdu till I joined St. Stephen’s again. And it was Faiz Ahmed Faiz that revived Urdu in me in college – 1968 was an era of revolution as such. Thanks to that I got back into Urdu poetry.
This is a totally different route from being in an Urdu atmosphere, culture at home. That Faiz is coming through you through a rebellious environment, that too, in a very elite institution.
Absolutely. But St. Stephens was at that time, was on the verge of a revolution. Later, it was a twist of faith that I went to Oxford University and there it was Farhan NazamiSabh who had started the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, and he said why don’t you work here. But the luckiest thing in life for me was to go to Jamia.
Yes, I remember when you were the vice chancellor, I think Khalid Sabh used to teach you in the morning and give you lessons and painstakingly you’ve gone through the whole learning process again.
He is a tough teacher.
So, then you did Galib, and Faiz was in your blood, so to say.
Intellectually and emotionally, I am much closer to Faiz, it just comes to me naturally. He speaks of the ideal world and of the common man.
When you came to translate Faiz. You were somebody actually who has lived Faiz, so to say, on the barricades where he is very much a poet of the barricades across South Asia. And that is a very unique privilege that Faiz enjoys. There have been a lot of other poets of protest and resistance, a lot of revolutionary poets. But I can’t think of any poet even from within that generation, forget any other language, who is so popular across the vast stretches of South Asia. So, there is such a wide spectrum of people that he touches that he’s quite exceptional in that sense. So, when you came to translate, you were obviously aware of this full range of his appeal across various segments and populations.
I was looking for nazams which reflected the true Faiz, which came from the recesses of his heart. My interpretation is completely different from what people normally interpret Faiz. My interpretation of him is that though he’s a great romantic, but in all his romantic poetry comes out the revolutionary, the man who is constantly thinking of the peasant, the man who’s constantly thinking of labour, the man who’s constantly thinking of the man in the street. And that’s why I’ve dedicated this book also to the voiceless. To the people who have no voice.
On that note, I wanted to ask you, Faiz is part of that generation of progressive poets. Before Faiz comes onto the scene, we already have a tradition of the political Gazal. So, Faiz is part of that entire generation, where are all of them, you know, writing about the common man, writing about a change in the system and evoking resistance. Many of them also suffered. And their poetry is not too dissimilar to Faiz, yet Faiz enjoys a popularity which is actually more than all of their popularity put together. And how does that or why does that happen?
I feel it is the passion in his words. For instance, Faiz Sabh is not really impacted by partition. He is a Pakistani all his life. He is born there, he lives there, he works there, but it is his greatness, that in 1948, in those difficult days, he comes to India on Gandhi’s funeral. And he says that this is not the freedom that we had asked for. Is this the India that was conceptualized in 1947, or have we gotten lost along the way?
He was faced with a political system, which almost constantly forced him to be challenging and to be resistant, to be a dissenter in the Pakistani political system. So that actually gave his life a constant pole of righteousness. And second, he himself was such a mellow, calm, non- controversial, reticent fellow, that it gave his personality an attractiveness that went even beyond his poetry. So, his life in a sense, fed into that appeal, that aura. And especially after 1970s, the kind of international figure that he became when he was living in Beirut. He wrote about the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, he wrote about African figures, he wrote about Ashgabat ki ek sham, he wrote about Tashkent. So he was, in a sense, a poet after the 1970s, especially, whose concerns were very cosmopolitan and international. His is a personality that is truly international.
