People are very keen on turning individuals into
heroes & when someone is allotted this title then for some reason, that
person can do no wrong. The human characteristics go away & some
supernatural being descends into that individual. For some twisted reason,
regular human beings are not considered capable enough to do the thinking that
is needed to develop the course of our society. This is why we don’t get to see
the giants mentioned, who were an integral part of our collective history.
K.K. Aziz did a great service in archiving the
biographies of many such individuals whose lives should be used as examples
now. The best thing about Mr. Aziz’s writing is that he does not portrays them
as saints from another world, but regular human beings who made great
contributions to our history, culture, literature & many other fields.
The book is highly recommended, especially because a
lot of us never got to hear these names anywhere else. Here is an extract of
just one of the many personalities mentioned in the book.
He was one of those remarkable men who arrived in
Lahore in 1947 as a part of the flotsam & jetsam of the partition of the
Punjab. His acute sufferings began with the ravages of the great migration
& ended with his death 12 years later. The story of his life needs to be
told in some detail.
He was born in 1905 in a rich family of Ludhiana.
His father was a wealthy military contractor who had established his business
in 1866 & then expanded it to several cantonments in northern India.
Latifi graduated from the University of the Punjab,
took his M.A. degree in English from Aligarh & received a diploma in
journalism from Oxford or London (sources differ on this point). In England an
English girl, Norah, fell in love with him & wanted to marry him, but he
refused because of his dislike of British imperialism. On the same ground he
declined the offer of a well paid job in the department of information of the
Government of India. This was in 1931. He settled down in Ludhiana &
embarked on a most unusual literary career.
He moved from his ancestral mansion in Kucha Mian
Shah Muhammad & built his own bungalow on Kamran Road, & gave it the
French name of “Chateau”. At the back of his house he established a small
printing press. He had been an ardent book buyer since his Aligarh days, &
had bought 2,000 books while in England. He went on adding to it & thus had
a well-equipped collection at his disposal.
On 15 April 1932 he started what he termed his “solo
journalism” by issuing a bilingual weekly in Urdu & English called
Mutala’a, which was entirely written by himself & contained both prose
& poetry. It lasted till 1947. He had a good command of English, Urdu,
Persian, Arabic, French, German & Italian, but his native tongue was
Punjabi. He wrote in Urdu, English & French, translated essays &
stories from French, German & Italian. He knew & corresponded with a
large number of his contemporary men of letters including Iqbal whom he had
first met in London in 1931. He was a prolific poet in Urdu & left a corpus
of several thousand verses. In poetry he was specially close to N.M. Rashed
& Akhtar Shirani. His influence on Rashed contributed a strong element of
classicism to the work of the father of modern Urdu verse. He translated some
French lyrics for Akhtar Shirani which added to the thought & vocabulary of
the founder of Urdu romantic poetry. According to some critics, Latifi is the
only major poet of the period between Iqbal & the modern poetry of the
1940s.
The Punjabi classic Hir Ranjha was a major interest
of his life. He spent 5 years in preparing a book called Hir Ranjha, for which
he visited Jhang several times & did a lot of research. It was planned in
several volumes. The first volume, entitled Glimpses of Jhang History, ran to
500 pages & contained several diagrams, maps & illustrations. It was
scheduled for publication from Jhang in June 1951, but for some unknown reason
nothing happened. A few passages from it had appeared in a Lahore daily The
Civil & Military Gazette.
He migrated to Lahore in September 1947, & the
agony of his life started. Economically he was now a penniless wretch. He did
not put in any claim for compensation or allotment of evacuee property for what
he had left behind: his ancestral mansion, his own bungalow, his printing
press, & some more houses & shops of which he had been the sole
inheritor, being the only son of his father. He had four sisters, & before
1947 he had, in the teeth of opposition from his relatives & friends, given
them their due share from his property in accordance with Islamic law. He now
believed that getting compensation for his losses vitiated the spirit of hijrat
(migration in the cause of Islam). A man from Ludhiana who had benefitted from
Latifi’s generous philanthropy in his good days, arranged a modest house in
Krishan Nagar where he lived for a few years before leaving for Rawalpindi.
Intellectually, after his rewarding & rich
literary career in Ludhiana & his other accomplishments, he felt deserted.
His real life, he realized, had come to an end & only a corroding
disillusionment lay ahead. Lahore’s culture life had been ripped apart by the
Partition. People were living in a limbo. In this vacuum what could he do but
brood & think dark thoughts? Emotionally he was a husk of a man.
Latifi’s life was completely destroyed in the
catastrophe of 1947, but something survived the ravage. That was his compassion
for the needy & the animals. Since his early youth in Ludhiana he had been
a philanthropist & a lover of animals. He paid the fees of several poor
students of the Islamia School where he had been educated. Many families in
need of help received regular grants from him. He patronized & gave
financial assistance to a large number of Urdu magazines & journals,
especially those issued by Akhtar Shirani & Hafeez Jullundheri & their
friends in Lahore in the 1930s & early 1940s.
After 1947 his personal circumstances put a stop to
these demonstrations of public service & human sympathy. There were periods
when he went hungry for days. I was too young to inquire into his sources of
income & my friends had no idea how he supported his wife & a little
daughter. It is possible that some of his friends helped discreetly. But there
is no doubt that his lifestyle was wretched.
Even in these conditions, however, his compassion
for God’s creation did not wilt. Whenever he had a little money he came to the
rescue of those whose misfortune exceeded his own. He would stand outside a
tandur (kind of a food stall for the dregs of society) & pay for the bread
& dal consumed by the beggars. Once I saw him buying 30 or 40 breads which
he carried in a makeshift bag. He roamed the streets around Anarkali,
distributing these breads among the beggars & the needy.
His sympathy knew no limits when it came to animals.
Eyewitness accounts have been recorded by Ashiq Batalavi, Bari Alig &
Intizar Husain of how Latifi fed the house sparrows & suppressed his hunger
to satisfy the needs of stray dogs. Intizar Husain says he once saw from the
top of a bus on Ferozepur Road a tall man covered in a green overall surrounded
by a flock of sparrows whom he was feeding. The birds were so intimate with him
that they were perched on his head, shoulders & stretched out arms.
One evening Latifi & I were sitting in the
Coffee House at the table on the left of the entrance & next to the window.
We were in the middle of a discussion on the literary journals of the 1930s
when suddenly, as if a telepathic message had reached him, he fell silent in
mid-sentence & his gaze shifted from my face to the piece of lawn outside
between the service road & the Mall. I too looked outside, but noticed
nothing extraordinary. Then he turned to me & said, “Can you order two
slices of bread? No butter on them.” I summoned a waiter & placed the
order. When the slices arrived he picked them up, said “I will be back in a
minute”, & walked out of the Coffee House. Nonplussed & intrigued, I
let my eyes follow him. He went to the centre of the grassy plot, stopped under
a small tree, & began to break the slices into small crumbs. Immediately a
dozen sparrows flew down from the tree & alighted on the grass near his
feet. For five or ten minutes he fed them the crumbs, smiling & talking to
them.
When he rejoined me I asked him smilingly, “What was
that? Did the birds send you a call which I didn’t hear?” In a serious tone he
replied: “The shades of evening are falling. The sun is about to set. Birds
never linger when the light begins to fail. This is the time when they have the
last morsel of the day before flying to their nests. When I came here I had
noticed a few sparrows flying around that tree. While talking to you it
suddenly occurred to me that perhaps they had not had a fill of their food
& soon they would leave for home. There are no crumbs or feed for the
asking on the Mall. I thought I must not let them retire hungry. Hence the
slices I requested you to order. I am sure they were happy to be fed. You
couldn’t hear through the thick glass, but they were chirping cheerfully.” I
could see how happy he was, but I didn’t say anything. There was nothing to
say. I felt so small in his presence.
Ashiq Batalavi tells a more moving story. He was
then living in a house on Temple Road a little short of the Safanwala Chowk,
next to Hameed Nizami’s house. He had known Latifi since before 1947 &
Latifi called at him frequently. The two had so much in common to talk about.
One day Latifi arrived a little after breakfast time. “Have you had your breakfast?”
asked Ashiq. “No”, replied Latifi. Ashiq doubted if Latifi had had his dinner
the previous night. Therefore he asked the cook to make three parathas & an
omelette for Latifi. The food was served & Latifi began to eat. After five
minutes Ashiq went to his bedroom to fetch a book which he wanted to show to
Latifi. It took him a few minutes to find the book, & when he returned he
saw that the three parathas had disappeared. He wondered how Latifi could have
polished off the entire breakfast with such speed. Poor fellow, he told
himself, perhaps he had had nothing to eat for some days & had now gobbled
down everything before him. While drinking tea he noticed a bulge in Latifi’s
jacket pocket. Oh! I see, he thought, his family must be starving & he is
taking a part of the breakfast home to feed them.
