Memorializing the Magus

To claim any degree of personal association with Dr. K. S. Murshid on my part would be a bit of an untenable audacity, even though he has figured in my private mythology for almost half a century now. By the time I entered the Department of English, University of Dacca (as we spelt it then), he was already a part of a halo-ed legend. Even as a high school student at a small town outside Dhaka, I heard my English teachers talk excitedly about his role in the 1961 Tagore centenary celebrations. Pakistan was as usual in the tight grip of a Martial Law regime determined to stamp out any perceived threat to the tenuous ideology which held its “two wings” together. After all, less than ten years earlier, it was badly jolted by the state language controversy. Understandably, our fascination for Tagore appeared to the state ideologues not only as a sign of dangerous dissension but also a clear index of the subversive Bengali psyche. The administrative apparatus swung into action and a media campaign in the press and radio was launched against Tagore. The official intelligentsia, considering caution to be the better part of valor, took cover, putting the Tagore centenary in jeopardy. Among the few intrepid Tagore lovers who dared to go against the official line and stood up for the poet were Dr. Sarwar Murshid and a few of his Dhaka University colleagues. They pushed the centenary program through with an understand heroism which, one feels, did never receive the accolades that were actually due.
The battle-lines had been drawn more clearly by the time we entered the university as first year B.A. Honors students in the autumn of 1966. The political idea for which our fathers’ generation had put up a bitter fight and made enormous scarifies proved to be hollow at the end. The socio-economic utopia so alluringly promised receded like a mirage to an unreachable distance. In no time at all, the evil troika of the army, the bureaucracy and self-serving politicians that usurped state power evacuated the Pakistan ideology of every bit of significance and validity.
For many, like the National Professor Abdur Razzaq, the disillusionment set in early. However, there were others who would cling to their still-born dream till the bitter end. Among them, we discovered as soon as we entered the university, was the reigning head of the English department at that period. A vastly learned man and scholar, he was, nevertheless, a staunch upholder of the concept and the spirit of Pakistan and an unabashed intellectual stalwart of the servile Monem Khan regime blindly loyal to General Ayub’s army government at the centre.
Under the stern tutelage of its Macaulay-esque head, the English department, we found, had turned into a strange bird testifying to an internal form of colonial hybridity. The class lists were a virtual roll-call of the scions (mostly female) of the bigwigs of the provincial administration, and a large number of them spoke Urdu and Punjabi and of course English in thick Urdu or Punjabi slurs. The rest were mostly self-hating locals who swore and flaunted their ignorance of anything Bengali at every available opportunity. The syllabuses contained the standard titles from the English literary canon, but literature was no longer the central focus because the department had reconfigured itself, first into a breeding farm of budding CSPs, and second, into a finishing school for their would-be spouses. Those who came to the department to study literature seemed to have come to the wrong place. The head of the department taught us Iliad, but Homer rarely featured in his lectures. The classes inevitably turned into lessons in English phonetics with endless jokes about the quirks of the Bengal enunciation of English consonants and vowels. These jokes of course never failed to elicit jeering giggles from our (mostly female) Urdu and Punjabi-speaking classmates.
Looking back, one perceives how during the Pakistan era the department had turned itself into a virtual enemy territory for literary creativity and aspiration in any form. The list of talents for whom the department failed to provide a nurturing environment and whom it exiled to alternative arenas of endeavor was long: it ranged from Munier Chowdhury, Abu Zafar Obaidullah, Shamsur Rahman, Syed Shamsul Haque and Monjur-e-Mowla down to Hayat Saif, Abul Hasan and Kashinath Roy. I also had come to the department for the craziest possible reason: I, in my infinite folly, wanted to emulate the effete aestheticism of the Swinburne-spouting heroes of Budhadev Bose’s romantic fiction! I realized right away that an incubator for hatching CSPs was definitely not a terrain where aestheticism of any variety could sprout.
I, however, survived, and I loved my survival, though I doubt if he was even aware of it, to Dr. K. S. Murshid. The presence of Dr. Murshid in the Department provided the much-needed psychological assurance that the English Department was not, after all, a univocal world. To begin with, radiant in his white silk punjabi, he provided a glowing visual contrast to the pucca sahib department head who insisted on wearing dark suits even in the sweltering heat of a Dhaka summer. We found out, to our immense relief, that outside the classrooms we were allowed to speak to him in Bengali: in fact, he himself would break into Bengali (characteristically chaste and crisp) when he found us struggling with the mock-British intonation we had learned elsewhere. Also, we heard with relish the rumors of how he subtly but tellingly put down those among us who seemed to resent, even deny, their Bengali roots.
Dr. Murshid taught us John Donne. The name of the poet was not unknown: he was the same “Don” whom Tagore’s Amit Ray admired. However, Tagore’s lyrical rendition of the opening lines of ‘The Canonization’ had hardly prepared us for the reeling pyrotechnics of wit and logic that John Donne was all about. The forbidding label of a “Metaphysical Poet” did not help either. The feedback from the senior students of the department scripted Donne as a sadistic quiz-master and Dr. Murshid as an inscrutable magus.
For the young men and women of our group, some of whom were already dabbling in the endless inscrutabilities of Modernist poetry, Dr. Murshid’s Donne worked like magic. No over-simplification or watering down of the mysteries of metaphysical poetry formed part of Dr. Murshid’s pedagogic strategy. He equipped us right and then forced us to meet Donne and his formidable cohorts up front: the encounter proved to be not only exhilarating but also transformative. His own elegance, dash, and arched wit seemed to find a perfect match in Donne’s. We were not exactly amused, however, when we came to learn, after the course was over, that some of our beautiful young female classmates had already formed a secret admirers’ club for Dr. Murshid!
He was, as can be guessed, in his true elements when he took up W.B. Yeats with us in the M.A modern literature course. Many of us were familiar with the work he had done on the Irish writer, who counted among the greatest poetic voices of the twentieth century. Consequently, we came to his lecture with high expectations, and he never let us down. His lectures exemplified what profound scholarship combined with a genuine passion for an author could bring to the experience of reading poetry. A part of his work focused on Yeats’ women, and inspired by the poet’s hopeless adoration of Ms. Maud Gonne, many of us embarked on a desperate search for our own femmes fatale. Indeed, W.B. Yeats, read under Dr. Murshid’s guidance, seemed a revelation.
It was, of course, a revelation untainted by politics or history. In this part of the globe, the texts were still ensconced in their inviolable auto telic heaven, revealing their secrets only to the New Critical votaries chanting mantras of paradox and irony and so on. As the decade wore on, it was growing increasingly difficult to shelter the sacred realms of poetry and literature from the various local and global political impingements. Spectres of unsavoury socio-political philosophies came crowding in to haunt adulatory readings of Yeats, Pound and Eliot. It was no longer possible to read Yeats without referring to the Boiler, the Irish Black shirts and Conor Cruise O’Brien. All the symphony of Pound’s Cantos could not synchronize the bizarre notes of II Duce’s unholy exhortations.  Naturally, when, later, I took up Yeats and Eliot for my own doctoral work, I could not read them in the same way as my mentors had.
Obviously, my portrait of Professor Murshid as predominantly an academician is a severely truncated representation of a personality noted for its infinite variety. In his long and distinguished professional life, he left his mark as an administrator of superior capabilities, a diplomat with dazzling fitness, an editor of impeccable taste and judgment, and an insightful interpreter of cultural maladies past and present. These are, however, tales of other narrators to tell. But then, any representation of such a man tends, at the end of the day, to be reductive.
Let me revert to the personal note in the conclusion. I could never muster enough courage to approach Dr. Murshid with a sheaf of my unpublished poems. Both my friends Abul Hasan and I were convinced that our poems were not yet ready for his keenly discriminating taste. However, I distinctly remember, in the viva voce for our B.A Honors final, he introduced me to Professor Zillur Rahman Siddiqi, the external examiner, as “an upcoming young poet,” He knew! It excited, and confused, me so much that I ended up bungling the crucial interview!

Professor Selim Sarwar, poet and critic, is a leading voice in studies of English literature in Bangladesh