Not that Suhrawardy
Shahid Alam draws attention to an ignored aesthete
Mention the name Suhrawardy at any mixed gathering in Bangladesh, and the chances are that almost all will identify him with Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, bar-at-law and politician, who was Chief Minister of Bengal during the British raj, and later Prime Minister of Pakistan, and the founder (along with Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani) of the Awami League. The chances are even higher that a miniscule few at best would have heard of his elder brother, Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy, who was a poet, bon vivant, man-about-town, art critic, theatre producer, professor, civil servant, and diplomat (having been Pakistan's ambassador to Spain during which tenure his younger brother was the country's prime minister for a period of just over a year). Scion of an illustrious family of South Asia which traces its descent directly from both Hazrat Abu Bakr Siddique and Hazrat Ali, the elder Suhrawardy seems to have led a far more colourful life than his younger sibling. And the younger sibling had led quite a colourful life in his own right! The Collected Poems of Shahid Suhrawardy, edited with an introduction by Kaiser Haq, will transcend all his other attributes in being remembered for at least an extended period of time by a section of present and future generations of South Asians as well as some outside the region. That is because Suhrawardy wrote in English, thereby, for the foreseeable future, restricting the number of readers, and he also wrote with a degree of sophistication that would not lend itself to popular readership, even if it was made up of people conversant in the English language coming from a region where almost everyone is a proverbial poet! I most firmly do not belong to this last category, which has made life rather difficult for me in undertaking this review. Kaiser Haq most certainly is, and he has eased my difficulty by providing a fairly lengthy, informative, quite comprehensive, and analytical introduction. The man Suhrawardy fascinates as much as the poet. Haq calls the West Bengal-born man of varied talents “the Indian subcontinent's first modern poet.†He thinks that Suhrawardy has stayed in the shadows for too long: “…he is a fugitive presence in the frayed margins of cultural history…and hopefully, a reappraisal will lead to a lasting enshrinement.†The book being discussed contains the poet's three published collections of his poems: Faded Leaves (1910), Essays in Verse (1937), and the collaborative translations in Poems of Lee Hu-chu. A few scattered essays remain to be put together in a volume to represent the majority of his literary output. A number of early critics were averse to labeling his works as having any great merit. However, as times passed and they were reevaluated, Suhrawardy gained in esteem and estimation. Haq refers to these lines as the first example of modern Indian English poetry: “Whilst I sit darkling in my room,
Beating against the prison-bar,
You come and fling into the gloom
A bright inconsequential star.†('When Thunderclouds About Me Break', “Early Poemsâ€, Essays in Verse) Suhrawardy's early life was fascinating. He came into contact with a number of famous people from various walks of life. When he was studying law at Oxford University he experienced condescending English attitudes towards the Indians, as he relates in an essay: “Till then we Indians were being looked upon as the degenerate descendants of those who had composed the Vedic hymns (in Max Muller's translations), or as snake-charmers or theosophists or, at least, terrorists from the banks of the Ganges.†Till then? What went before, and, what changed? By 1912, they had “become a force in University politics, and Oxford Indians of the time were very conscious of their position as they sauntered down…and exchanged uncomplimentary remarks and often blows with English students, who would reply to their anti-British slogans by asking them to go back to their black country.†Suhrawardy's involvement with the Oxford Majlis is an account of irreverent treatment of Indian celebrities and a memorable first encounter with Rabindranath Tagore. There was trepidation whether the poet would accept an invitation from the Majlis to meet its members. There was good reason why, as Suhrawardy's reminiscence will attest to: “…it was a loved game of ours to get hold of a well-known Indian political leader, cajole and flatter him, lavish hospitality upon him, invite him to the Majlis meeting and then skin him alive, proving to him that he was a worthless worm, who, in spite of his nationalistic pretensions, had done nothing else all his life but lick the boots of British imperialism…. Naturally Indian public men in England used to dislike us…yet they always came, almost afraid of annoying us by refusing our invitation, which would usually be entrusted to me…only one person tamed us, that was Sarojini Naidu, another was consistently obdurate, and that was Jinnah.†Suhrawardy's first impression of Tagore, who accepted the invitation, contains this memorable line: “Such men one may come to know very well and yet never be familiar with.†The Nobel laureate, to the Oxford don's great satisfaction, was “a great connoisseur of the fine things of life, and also understood good food.†After all, he was a man-about-town, a discerning gourmand, and an accomplished cook to boot (he used to cook for parties even when was an ambassador)! Tagore also had a thin voice, which Suhrawardy wrote about in delicate words (“possessed fine timbre, but lacked in tonalityâ€) in an essay, but was afraid that “the newly-baked fanatics of the Poet†would accuse him of disrespect. His fears were realized. Fast forward to the present day. Nothing has changed in the mindset of the average South Asian (especially the Bengalis) in this respect. Suhrawardy was as good a Renaissance man as they come. He was closely associated for a long time with Konstantin Stanislavski, the originator of Method acting, and the famed Moscow Art Theatre, and, for a shorter period, with Igor Stravinsky, a man who set Western classical music free. He was equally at home with classical Indian music, being able to comment authoritatively on such icons as Ustad Abdul Karim and Ustad Faiyaz Khan. However, he was discerning to a fault in his artistic taste. He never thought of the painter Chughtai as great, and once refused to sponsor a Chughtai show in Madrid where he was Pakistan's ambassador. “There was no point,†he explained, “in holding an exhibition of his paintings in a place which housed the Prado Museum.†Neither, apparently, did he think highly of Allama Iqbal's poetry, once preferring to leave it to the embassy's first secretary to deliver the inaugural address at the 80th birth anniversary of the poet-philosopher at the University of Madrid. Haq advocates for a better understanding of Suhrawardy's works: “A wider recognition of Suhrawardy's position in South Asian letters as a whole, and not only in any national context, will, one hopes, be a step towards undoing the partitioning of the South Asian mind that has been an unhealthy fallout of independence.†You might have noticed that I have not really touched on Suhrawardy's poetry per se. That is because, as I have explained, I am one of those rare Bengalis who is not smitten by the Muse. The reader will just have to go through the volume and make his/her own decisions on the merits of, and/or preferences for, the poems. As for myself, I will just lay out before you some of those that struck me. Only parts of two of the selected poems are being reproduced: I
“I am sick of life, its griefs, my Love,
My youthful eyes are spent with tears,
Sad human faces in me move
The aching thoughts of bygone years.â€
('Come', Faded Leaves) II
“Out of the wreckage of my years
What offering shall I make
To the proud destiny of your youth;
What gifts lay at your feet?
Passion drowned on the high seas?
Love thrown to the winds?
An old May's heart full of tears?
What else, sweet,
But memories?â€
('I', “An Old Man's Songsâ€, Essays in Verse) III
“When you arise
And go your way,
As you will one day,
And the gay tenderness of your eyes
Will change to hate,
I shall bend low
Nor utter any word,
But abating my sense
With that vile wisdom life has taught
Pretend indifference.â€
('When You Arise', “New Poemsâ€, Essays in Verse)
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