03 March 2012

Tributes to Firaq Gorakhpuri

 

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Today is death anniversary of great Urdu poet of India Firaq Gorakhpuri (28 August 1896 – 3 March 1982). His real name was Raghpati Sahay.He was born in 1896, in Gorakhpur.  Firaq had a taste of Urdu poetry at very tender age. He started writing poetry in Urdu in teens and developed his own niche in an era that was marked by the likes of Sahir, Iqbal, Faiz and Kaifi Azmi.

He was selected for the Provincial Civil Service (P.C.S.) and the Indian Civil Service (I.C.S.), but he resigned to follow Mahatma Gandhi's Non-cooperation movement, for which he went to jail. Later, he joined Allahabad University as a lecturer in English literature. It was there that he wrote most of his Urdu poetry, including his magnum opus Gul-e-Naghma which earned him the highest literary award of India, the Jnanpith Award, and also the 1960 Sahitya Akademi Award in Urdu. During his life, he was given the positions of Research Professor at the University Grants Commission and Producer Emeritus by All India Radio. After a long illness, he died on March 3, 1982, in New Delhi.

As a distinguished poet, Firaq Gorakhpuri was well-versed in all traditional metrical forms such as ghazal, nazm, rubaai and qat'aa. He was a prolific writer, having written more than a dozen volumes of Urdu poetry, a half dozen of Urdu prose, several volumes on literary themes in Hindi, as well as four volumes of English prose on literary and cultural subjects.

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