Yagana Changezi, in his last days, was a lonely soul wandering in a hostile city. Lucknow was no longer accommodative towards him. Soon he breathed his last. Those few souls who cared for his burial saw to it that the public in Lucknow should not know where he is buried. So the poet seemed to have died leaving no trace behind.

Gradually and slowly there were signs of a resurrection. Far from Lucknow, in Pakistan a distinguished scholar took it upon himself to retrieve the lost writings of the condemned poet, compile them and bring out his collected work. And so he did. Mushfiq Khawaja took, as he tells us, 10 years in retrieving almost all of Changezi’s verses. The collection has been published under the title Kulliyat-i-Yagana.

Another scholar, Dr Najeeb Jamal, took this research forward. During the years when Kulliyat-i-Yagana was being compiled, Jamal had already started probing into the events of the life of the poet along with a critical study of his work. He had chosen to do his PhD on this subject. He soon realised the significance of this research work; here was a poet who was at war with the very age he was born in. The war ended on a great disaster for the desperate fighter.

Yagana was born in 1884 and died in 1956. Dr Jamal thought it fit to make a detailed survey of his life, from the time of his birth till Yagana breathed his last. The research is brimming with details which are hardly helpful in understanding the particular period Yagana lived in. However, what is admirable is his portrayal of Lucknow with its distinctive culture, which attracted Yagana to the extent that he migrated from Azimabad. It was his deep attachment to this city that when, after Partition, his family migrated to Pakistan he refused to go with them and preferred to live in Lucknow. But how ironic that the very city he loved so much turned against him. In his last days he was a helpless soul wandering like a stranger in a city which had now transformed into Kufa for him. As explained by Dr Jamal, Yagana, an ill-tempered man, was to a great extent himself responsible for so many people turning against him. He is in a way justified in this analysis of the situation. However, we should not forget that Yagana was a rebellious soul in extremity. He had zero tolerance for the ways of thinking around him. Lucknow presented a contradictory situation for him. He was in love with the city because of its cultural richness, but he could not reconcile with the traditionalism of the Lucknawi poets who were held in high esteem in the city. The conservatism of the people around also irked him.

But this rebel could not also reconcile with the other brands of rebellion. He could reconcile neither with the modernists nor with the progressives. Their tirade against the ghazal infuriated him. How could he reconcile with them when he himself emerged as a distinctive ghazal writer with a style very different from that of the traditional ghazal. He stood against them as a defender of the ghazal dismissing outright their blank verse and free verse. Yagana questioned why Ghalib and his ghazals were held in high esteem and the poet treated as an icon, so he came out branding himself as the iconoclast of Ghalib, and started a forceful tirade against him. However, in the literary circles all such campaigns were treated as a literary controversy and so his controversial writings were ignored in general.

It was left for a group in Lucknow to exploit this situation. The source of trouble was a hand-written piece of writing, which, as Dr Jamal says, was in possession of Niaz Fatehpuri. He, for reasons best known to him, handed it over to Maualana Abdul Majid Daryabadi who labelled something in it as blasphemous and started a campaign against Yagana. The sad story has been narrated in detail by Dr Jamal.

This thesis has now been published by Izhar Sons, Urdu Bazar, Lahore. It is the story of a rebel poet, who, along with Firaq, is known to have paved the way for new ghazal in Urdu.