Asif Farrukhi left us. When I heard the news from my younger sister, it seemed to me that the whole realm of being had come to a grinding halt. Nothing moved. The wind, the sun, the very throb of life’s pulse — all came to a standstill. For the world of literature, a yawning black hole has now emerged, a dark emptiness that has altered the cosmology of our cultural terrain.

But for me, this is a personal devastation of massive proportions. I had known Asif practically throughout his life; he was my (younger) friend of early youth. We both grew up at the Karachi University campus; our fathers — Allama Muntakhabul Haq and Dr Aslam Farrukhi — were faculty colleagues. And more, his aunt Dr Nasima Tirmizi was our next-door neighbour; a close neighbour, since we were separated only by a stone wall that was common between our two houses.

The young Asif was found frequently on the lush grass lawns of the Tirmizis, sometimes playing with my younger siblings. Then, we shared our time at Harvard University, wallowing together in many youthful frivolities. More recently, his daughter Ghazal studied under me during her four years at Lums. Waves after waves of such images are coming before me, and they are going, and in the intervening moments I cease.

Let me speak frankly. Among the Urdu-wallahs, I have known very few people as organised, responsible, agile, disciplined and socially aware as Asif. His high literary achievements aside, in the historical function of an organiser, his work was never sloppy or perfunctory. This made him practically unique. And now that his departure has removed him from my sight, I am able to view him as a cultural phenomenon. For the first time, I have begun to identify Asif’s bearings on the landscape of Urdu literary tradition and this marks another departure — a new departure in my methodological orientation. This is a new gift that I have received from him.

What is this new methodological departure? From the realm of poetics, stylistics and the substantive contents of a creative literary work, I am now looking at the existential circumstances of the creator. So this marks a move into what may be called the sociology of Urdu literature, something to which I had paid little attention so far.

When we look at some of the major 20th-century personages of the tradition, placing Asif in the cluster, we find an eminent contrast. Great creators though they certainly were, many of these personages turned out to be disorganised, indigent, indulgent, self-destructive and, perhaps, even suicidal. They conformed to the half-true clichéd image of artists as drifters and ‘freeloaders’, needing daily care and charity.

Recall Saadat Hassan Manto and his indulgences; Miraji’s unpleasant disregard of personal hygiene; and the sufferer of multiple nervous breakdowns, the melodious Majaz, who was literally frozen to death on the roof of a tavern. And they all died young — Manto was 43, Miraji had barely seen his 38th birthday when he gasped for his last breaths in a charity-run hospital and Majaz’s pulse froze at the age of 44. Incidentally, they were all contemporaries.

We have other examples, too. Another contemporary, Abdul Hamid Adam — a glowing embodiment of ghazal’s lyricism — is called by his editor “irresponsible and unstable”; he was hardly found sober, we are told, and in poetry-reading gatherings he would forget a ghazal in the middle and start a new one in a different metre without even a pause. Then there is Jaun Elia, the poet whom we all love, but he, too, manifested a similar paradigm of social demeanour.

Manto’s financial woes are known. We also know of his legal battles, but then it was his personal indulgence that seems to have cost him his life. When he vomited blood on his deathbed, he told his witnessing nephew that this was because of chewing paan, which turned his saliva red. Dreading that the truth would unleash family demands from all around that he quit his addiction, he instructed the youngster not to report this to anybody. Yes, Manto had rendered his liver a blood-dripping sieve, yet he indulged in his addiction till the very last moment of his life, the last moment when the ambulance arrived to find a corpse.

Manto wrote a superb impressionistic profile of the shabby, unwashed loiterer Miraji, calling it ‘Teen Golay’ [Three Balls]. Recall that this dreadlock-wearing, unhygienic protagonist, who was declared by some to be a deranged maniac, used to hold three balls wrapped in silver paper in his hands. But, then, this filthy being is the same monumental Miraji who is recognised as one of the begetters of modern Urdu poetry. What is going on here?

Then, one recalls the indulgence and abject indigence of Majaz. Abject indigence indeed, for his sister Safia Akhtar — mother of Bollywood’s Javed Akhtar — once reported that Majaz had become so mentally unhinged that he had turned to begging for money. This may have been based on rumours, but it is plausible, given Majaz’s lack of solvency in general. He suffered two nervous breakdowns and continued to indulge even in the consumption of crude intoxicants. On a very cold December night during an Urdu convention, he escaped with two of his companions to the laari chhat [truck roof] of a Lucknow tavern; he was found frozen the next morning.

How do we explain all this? Of course, some of it has to do with the personal psychology of creative artists and writers, with their cynicism, discomfort with traditional morality, resistance to taboos and oppressive social conventions and injustices. But what we see in the annals of Urdu literature is darker and deeper; it also points to external issues: social relations, the status of creative individuals in the estimation of the state, their value in the polity, the strength of their community. All of this opens a chapter in the sociology of Urdu.

But despite this backdrop, Asif Farrukhi stands as a glowing counter spectacle: responsible, reliable, stable, a creative being with powerful self-control and intellectual control.

The author is Dean of the School of the Liberal Arts and the University of Management and Technology and Chair of the arts and humanities panel of the Higher Education Commission

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, June 14th, 2020