Syed Khwaja Moinul Hassan : In Memoriam
Gentle yet passionate nature
Fakrul Alam Looking at Syed Khwaja Moinul Hassan, it would have been difficult to imagine the depths of passion in him. He appeared, almost always, a gentle soul, courteous and amiable. Although excitable, he was the type who seemed incapable of offending anyone. A good friend and a popular teacher, he was well liked by all those who came to know him everywhere. And yet if one takes his poems as evidence, he was a passionate man and occasionally an intemperate one too. The Collected Poems of Syed Khawja Moinul Hassan, published by Kolkata's Writers Workshop, assembled from five books of verse published in Dhaka and Kolkata, testify to someone continually disturbed by recent history, by a record of a world falling apart. 'Between Barbed Wires', the titular poem from his first volume of verse puts it thus: "The days are terrible and parlous/And the nights awful and fearful". The nightmares of subcontinental history bothered him a lot, as is evident in the poem 'Dhaka 1971', where he vented his disgust at the atrocities committed that year: "Filthy joints full of hogs,/Khaki serpents, querulous apes/ crying vultures and barking dogs/All in arson, loot and rape". The second volume of verse, Inner Edge (1987), continues to reflect the fissures created by history in his psyche in emotion-soaked verse. Consequently, Hassan's early poems can at times sound like outbursts; there was too much powerful feelings in them, and obviously not enough tranquility had gone into transforming his raw emotions into poetry. His third volume of verse, Ashes and Sparks (1990) record his indignation at America's first invasion of Iraq : "America your Armada is in the wrong Gulf/America come home your house is on fire/There is a lot of smoke in the basement/Where your children spend the night opening coffins/like crates". There were many reasons why Hassan was so moved by the nightmare of contemporary history. He was born in a distinguished family that had moved to Dhaka because of the political impasse that led to the partition of India. He was the son of Pirzada Syed Khajaj Borhanuddin, and the great-grandson of Wazir Ali Naqhsbad, Zamindar of Beleghata, Kolkata. In his university years he was witness to the savage scenes of 1971. In the USA he saw that country get stuck in the quagmire of history because of the jingoistic policies of the two Bushes. An outstanding student, Hassan was placed First Class First in his B A (Hons.) examination and got another first in his MA. Subsequently, he became a lecturer in English at Dhaka University. He left Bangladesh in 1983 and studied at Purdue University, where he was awarded a PhD in 1994. Later, he settled down as Associate Professor in the English department of Claflin University, South Carolina. Since this university has a link program with Dhaka's Stamford University, he came to Dhaka for successive summer sessions of teaching in recent years.. Hassan died of a heart attack in the USA on the 3rd of April 2009. His burial took place in Long Island, New York on the 5th. He will be much missed by his friends, students and dear ones in Bangladesh as well as all those who will remember him for his gentle yet passionate nature, his sincerity as well as intensity, and his abundant love for his people.Fakrul Alam is professor of English. He is the general editor of the Dictionary of Literary Biography: South Asian Writers in English in the well-known Thomson-Gale series.
Zindagi ka Safar
Khademul Islam Khwaja Moinul Hassan and I were fellow students - he was a little senior to me - at Dhaka University in the early to mid 1970s. At that time I used to write for 'Holiday' weekly. When his first book of poems, Barbed Wires, came out Khwaja gave me a copy to review. I was not gentle with it. To me it seemed mawkish, 'poetic' stuff, prose lines stitched together with end rhymes. A couple of weeks later I saw him at Pedro's, a rare appearance, sipping tea and staring at the gurdwara. I said hi. He said hi back. He then added that he had read my review - in an impeccably courteous tone. Pomp may have vanished from his nawab family, but pedigree remained in the bone! On an impulse I sat down beside him and did something I'd never done before or since - I tried to explain why I had written what I did. He may not have agreed with everything I said, but at least he understood where I was coming from. Then, I don't recollect how, we suddenly went on to Urdu poetry. Perhaps because of a stray remark about my Karachi school days. He was astonished at how many ghazals I had in my memory bank - all gone now! Khwaja too startled me - any amateur can toss off a little Bahadur Shah Zafar or Ghalib, but it took a pro to know Allama Iqbal the way he did; he knew his Ghalib, sure, but what got me was that he knew Daagh Dehlvi too: Zeest say tang ho ai Daagh to jeetay kyon hoJaan pyaree bhee naheen jaan say jaatay bhee nahin (If you're bored of life, Daagh, why carry on this long?
If you aren't enjoying it, why keep on with it?) I, however, bested him on Akbar Allahabadi and Firaq Gorakhpuri. Ai Shaikh gar asar hai duan may
To masjid hila kay dikha
Gar nahin to do ghoont pee
Aur masjid to hiltay dekh (O Sheikh, if there be force in your prayer
Make the walls of the mosque shake
If you can't, down a peg or two
And see how the mosque shakes.) We never had a repeat adda. But I felt I knew where his English poetry came from: Urdu poetry, ghazals, couplets, nazms. Perhaps Khwaja couldn't quite (in my eyes solely!) manage the impossibly difficult task of transmuting that noble, profound feeling for and inspiration from it into the English language. We lost touch when later we both left for the USA. After I came back to Dhaka, in 2005, while on a visit to Dhaka, he called me to touch bases. The conversation was brief; too many years had gone by. We promised to meet, but never did. Late on the night I got word he had died, I thought of a tea shack and an animated adda over Urdu poetry and poets. And Ghalib's Zindagi ka Safar couplet came to mind, which Khwaja would undoubtedly have known: Rau may hain raksh-e-umr kahaan dekhiyay thamey
Naee haath baag par hai na paa hai rakaab main (Life goes by at a gallop, I don't know where it'll end
The reins are not in my hands, nor my feet in stirrups).
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